Winterkeep

by Kristin Cashore

  His door clicked open and closed. Light footsteps crossed the floor.

  Startled, Giddon propped himself on an elbow, watching Bitterblue approach. The face she presented to him, gold in the brazier’s light, was full of so many things. Fear. Uncertainty. Determination. “Giddon?” she whispered.

  She sounded so frightened as she said his name that he held out his hand, confused. “Yes?”

  She put her hand into his. It was small and cold.

  “Bitterblue?” he said.

  “I’ve been obtuse,” she said.

  “Obtuse?”

  “Yes,” she said. “For a very long time.”

  Giddon understood what was happening. He couldn’t help understanding what was happening. But that didn’t mean he could believe it. “I’ve been a coward,” he said.

  “Giddon,” she said, “you’re never a coward. I’m the coward!”

  “I’ve been a coward for a very long time,” he said, dropping every defense, pulling her closer. Showing her his tears, and bringing her hand to his lips.

  She let out one small breath. Then she knelt by his bed and reached her hand to his face, turned her own face up to his, and he could not believe their lips were touching, that he was actually kissing her perfect, soft lips. “I may be about to faint again,” he said.

  “Well, I like your scratchy beard on my face,” she said, then climbed into the bed with him and began nuzzling his throat. The blood was most definitely rushing away from Giddon’s head. When he told her this, she said, “Where do you suppose it’s rushing to?” which almost made him shout with laughter.

  “Sh!” she said, giggling. “We have to be quiet! I don’t want Hava to hate us in the morning.”

  “No, I don’t want that either,” he said, still laughing, kissing her. “I can be quiet. But, Bitterblue, slow down, just a little. We have all the time in the world.” And really, truly, he was dizzy, and completely overwhelmed. A miracle was happening and he felt like he was missing it.

  Out of nowhere, she burst into tears. Her tears turned to sobs and she clung to him, gasping. Instantly he sprang into action, holding her, soothing her, almost a little relieved, because this made sense to him.

  “I love you,” she said. “I’m scared of losing you.”

  “I know,” he said. “You won’t.”

  “You can’t know what’s going to happen! You can’t know what I’m going to do!”

  “Yes I can,” he said. “You’re going to be the friend to me that you’ve always been, and I’m going to show you that you’re safe now. We are not going to lose each other. You’re not alone with your fears, Bitterblue. We’re a team now, you see?”

  “Hold me very tight,” she said, “please?”

  That was easy. He wrapped his arms around her firmly. As her tears quieted, he kissed her hair, and thought a few things through.

  “I think I’m a little shy of touching you,” he finally said. “I mean, sex-touching. You know? You’re my favorite person in the world, Bitterblue, and we’ve been friends for years. It’s a lot all at once. Until a few hours ago, I didn’t even know you were alive.”

  “I can understand that,” she said, still sniffling a little, but calmer. “It’s different for me, because I’ve been fantasizing about you for days.”

  “You have?” said Giddon, who found this very interesting.

  “I have,” she said, the corner of her mouth turning up. “I’ve got a lot of questions. For your body, I mean.”

  “Do you?” he said. “I have answers.”

  Bitterblue laughed, then hugged him in the familiar way. She smiled into his neck. “Do you know about kittens?”

  She’d spoken the word in Keepish. “Kittens? As in, baby cats?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “No, not really. Not at all.” She began to trace her hand down his neck and over his shoulder, down his arm, his hip, his thigh, creating pleasurable shivers all along his side. She did it again, as if she was petting him.

  “When you do that,” said Giddon, “I begin to feel less shy.”

  She did it again. “Do you?”

  “Does this have something to do with kittens?”

  “That depends,” she said, beginning to add little kisses while she petted him, to his ear, his throat, the inside of his elbow. The inside of his thigh.

  “What does it depend on?” he asked.

  “On where you’d like me to touch you.”

  With the next little kiss, Giddon found himself reaching for her. Tugging gently at her pajama top, which kept slipping down her shoulder, revealing a soft place on the inside of her arm that he wanted to kiss.

  “Tell me about kittens,” he said roughly.

  “I will.”

  “And tell me what you want.”

  “I will,” she said, beginning to smile. “Still shy?”

  “I’ve recovered,” he said, which was almost entirely true. “And don’t think I didn’t notice it was your doing.”

  “I believe what you said before.”

  Giddon was having trouble remembering anything he’d said before, which was also her doing. “What did I say?”

  She touched his face. Showed him her eyes, which contained some shyness of her own. He kissed the side of her nose, the place under her ear. He wanted to kiss the part of her neck that was hidden by her hair. He moved her hair aside, touched his mouth to her skin. The small noises she was making in response banished the last of his shyness.

  “We’re a team, Giddon,” she whispered. “You and I.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The fox who was bonded to Ferla Cavenda was pretending to be dead.

  The Cavenda family was now living in the guest apartments at the top of a steep staircase in the Devret house, and the fox was too. He concealed himself under beds and inside walls. He collected tools for modifying grates and stored them in the Devrets’ heat ducts. You could be bonded to Quona too, his siblings had said to him that time, if you faked your own death, and then the house had caught fire. The fox had seen his chance. Not to bond to Quona Varana, though: to hide.

  He’d made his “death” dramatic too, concealing himself in the trees and sending Ferla agonizing death throes. He’d pretended to be trapped in the kitchen, where the fire had found so many oils and the flames were blazing so furiously that he thought it would make for a tragic and convincing death scene.

  What he’d never imagined was that Ferla would try to rescue him—and unfortunately, she’d set out in the direction that intersected with Lovisa and the queen’s escape. So the fox had run over Lovisa’s feet to warn her and he’d yelled up at the queen to keep still, then he’d hidden again, and waited. He hadn’t gotten to send Ferla the final gasp of his departing life, because Lovisa had clubbed Ferla on the head with a shovel and knocked her out.

  But he’d done enough. When Ferla woke the next morning, headachy and sick, she assumed her fox was gone. She was bitter about it too. She believed herself to have lost a tool that might have helped to carry her through the rough times she guessed were coming.

  For Lovisa was alive somewhere, hiding, and Ferla knew it. Benni did too. Benni, who’d searched the burning house for Lovisa, was sick now from smoke inhalation; and though he cried with relief when Ferla told him Lovisa had survived, he wasn’t happy not to know where she was. He needed her back. Especially since no human remains had been found in the ashes. The fire inspectors had made the assumption that the airship explosion—not to mention that other explosion Benni and Ferla were carefully not bringing to their attention—had been so destructive that Lovisa’s body had been obliterated. But the fire inspectors didn’t know about the queen. What if the queen had gotten away too?

  The day after the fire, Monday, very late, Ferla crept down the stairs of the guest apartments, through the rest of the house, and outside, passing mon
ey to the Devrets’ guards at the door.

  “I just want to stretch my legs,” she said to them. “No one needs to know.”

  Then, headachy and ill, she set off down the road, the fur wrap Mara Devret had lent her pulled tight around her small shoulders, Mara’s shoes on her feet. Mara was a tall woman, so the wrap was far too big and the shoes almost comical. Ferla looked like a tiny, unbalanced clown.

  The fox had a way to exit the house through a crack between rotting stones in the cellar. He snuck out after Ferla, intensely curious. He had a sense of what she was up to, but her thoughts had been a little jumbled since her head injury, harder to read.

  First she went to a faraway amble near the harbor that the fox had never heard of or visited, where the smells were wondrous, fish of every kind, breaded, fried, grilled, stewed, raw, rotting. It was a paradise! In a narrow, smelly street, Ferla tapped on a door until a pale woman opened it. Ferla spoke to the woman urgently. The woman, who had a closed mind with no cracks, like a heavy steel ball—like a Monsean—seemed offended, indignant. Ferla handed her money. The woman hesitated. Then she went inside, coming out again with her coat, which was the color of the moon, swinging around her shoulders like a cape.

  Ferla led her all the way back to Flag Hill, then to the gate that stood before her own burnt and decimated house. She brought the woman right up to the edge of the house’s stone foundations, then gestured across the pile of scorched rubble.

  “Careful,” Ferla said. “There’s glass, nails, who knows what else.”

  “This is as close as I’m getting,” said the woman. “You might’ve brought a lamp.”

  “The streetlamps will pick up anything sharp,” said Ferla impatiently. “Now, will you look?”

  “I need more details about what you’re trying to find.”

  “Human remains,” said Ferla. “No matter how small.”

  “Whose remains?” said the woman. “Keepish? Some other nationality? Male? Female? Young? Old? Where in the house are they most likely to be?”

  “Can’t you look everywhere?”

  “Certainly, for more money.”

  “You’re a vulture,” said Ferla, sharp and disgusted. “You know perfectly well my own daughter is believed to have died in this fire.”

  “Am I looking for your daughter’s remains, then? Knowing so will help my work.”

  “Why does it matter?” said Ferla. “Why must you make me talk about it? Is it necessary to be so heartless?”

  “Given your reluctance to answer my simple question,” said the woman, “I’m beginning to think you want me to look for the remains of someone other than your daughter.”

  It was interesting to watch Ferla make a mess of something. She had a painful and nauseating headache, which was obscuring her judgment and her ability to pretend to be heartbroken over a daughter she knew wasn’t actually dead. Also, she was used to people doing what she told them to do. This foreign woman in the pale yellow coat was different. She wasn’t scared of Ferla.

  She spoke into Ferla’s cold silence. “Well? Am I looking for someone else’s remains?”

  “Whose remains do you imagine you’d find here?” asked Ferla, her voice rising with outrage.

  “I would vastly prefer to find no one’s,” said the woman in distaste.

  “Listen,” said Ferla. “I want to be sure no one was hurt. What if one of my children or a staff member had a visitor I was unaware of? My daughter was always sneaking around the house with lovers. I intend to pay you handsomely for your time.” Then she stood with her palm to her throbbing head, sick and slightly swaying, while the woman, hard-mouthed, closed her eyes and raised her hands. She looked like she was trying to feel the parts of the air. She looked quite silly, actually, and Ferla lost patience with her long before she was done. Ferla also lost her dinner, staggering away and vomiting onto the base of a tree. Then she gave her own vomit a wide berth and timidly sat herself upon the ground. She put her head in her hands, because it hurt and because she couldn’t bear the sight of the ravaged house. This too was a whole new Ferla, emotional, unwell.

  The woman dropped her hands and turned. “I’ve found no remains,” she said.

  Inside her heart, Ferla cursed this news. “You’re certain?”

  The woman let out a short sigh. “Why don’t you tell me whose body I’m looking for, President Cavenda? Then I could really help you.”

  Ferla raised her chin and looked into the woman’s face. “Tell me,” she said. “Is it true what they say, that you’re the escaped property of the government of Estill?”

  The woman cocked her head and studied Ferla. Her face was tired, her shoulders slumped, but her voice came out hard. “Why did you bring me here in the dead of the night to search for a body,” she said, “and why are you disappointed I didn’t find one?”

  Ferla reached into her pockets, pulled out some money, and threw it on the ground between them. “I trust you’ll find that satisfactory,” she said. It was her chilliest voice. The fox, who recognized that voice, shivered.

  The woman did something amazing. She picked a path carefully away from the house, walked toward Ferla, then stopped. For a moment, the woman’s feelings were bright and visible to the fox: Anger. Discouragement. Shame.

  Then, not even touching the money, she turned and walked out through the gate.

  The fox badly wished the woman hadn’t done that. Now he was afraid for her life.

  * * *

  —

  Ferla and Benni worried constantly, but they did so in their own separate worlds. Each was trying to find a way out of the mess certain to ensue should Lovisa or the queen emerge somewhere and make accusations. Benni was trying to find a way out for the entire family, which, like most of his plans, was unrealistic. Benni was a romantic. He imagined success and glory for the Cavenda name. The fox tapped on his mind sometimes, puzzled by how someone with so much ambition could be so immature.

  He was searching for Lovisa as discreetly as he could, but it was hard without his airship. To his friends who owned airships, he pretended to cling to the hope that since Lovisa’s body hadn’t been found, maybe she’d escaped the fire. Maybe she was out in the world somewhere, injured, muddled, confused. Would anyone be willing to lend an airship to Benni, so that he might have a look around for his child?

  Benni went out in a borrowed airship most days, sad and apprehensive, unwell, then came back with nothing, slowly climbing the stairs. He took that guard with him when he flew, the young one with the dead eyes. The fox suspected that if that guard saw Lovisa or the queen from the airship, she might keep quiet about it. The fox suspected that Benni’s chances of success were very low indeed. Still, the fox worried, anxiously waiting.

  Ferla, in contrast, was trying to find a way out for herself. She didn’t like that this essentially meant pinning everything on Benni, but she had little choice. And she couldn’t figure out what to do should Lovisa show up alive. Ferla had tried to pull the girl away from the burning house and Lovisa, her own daughter, had attacked her with a shovel. Ferla wondered what her father would have done, a train of thought that was no comfort to the fox, since Ferla’s father had basically been a sadist.

  And Katu? Her baby brother, Katu, was where Ferla reached her rational limit. Ferla chose to stop seeing the truth about Katu, because it was too much. In their childhood, Katu had often been her charge, and always her ally. Her father had sent her into the cave alone for her punishments, until Katu had been old enough to understand; and then he’d sent them in together. And Ferla’s terror had vanished. She’d had something to do in the cave, someone to comfort.

  In her not-seeing, Ferla chose to exonerate herself from any part of Katu’s fate. She talked to her dead father about it. You understand, Father, don’t you? she said. Benni made me. And you understand that sometimes people need to be punished, don’t you? You punished Ka
tu many times. Remember? It was interesting, the way humans could decide not to see the truth when it made them too uncomfortable.

  Sometimes Ferla took to flying into rages and breaking things. In the upstairs apartments, lifting ceramic statues, glass candle holders, or entire vases full of water and flowers from the tables, she slammed them against the stones of the hearth. Benni would stand there while she screamed, looking wary and far away in his thoughts. When members of the Devret family came to investigate the noise, he would rouse himself to say that he was terribly sorry, there’d been an accident.

  “We dropped it,” Benni would say, or “It slipped” or “It fell.” One of these times, Mara crossed the room with a look of the deepest misgiving, took a portrait of her son, Mari, down from the wall, then carried the portrait away.

  The Devrets believed, of course, that the Cavendas were mourning the death of a child. The fox liked to watch Mara and Arni Devret through the grate in their bedroom, where they spent a lot of time talking. Mara knitted in a chair, something pale and soft and blue that grew bigger in her lap every day, and he liked to steal loose pieces of the yarn. The Devrets had a warmth and an affection for each other, even in the midst of stressful houseguests, that the fox had never witnessed before, ever. They talked often about the little boys, who were trapped in grief. In fact, the boys’ anguish for their sister was so uncontrolled, their confusion so inundating, that the fox had taken to avoiding them. Their pain set every hair of his body on edge and made him feel terribly helpless. The Devrets tried to comfort the boys, but the Devrets didn’t understand what their lives had been. And anyway, what comfort was there for a sister gone?

  Sometimes the fox watched Mara in her knitting chair when she was alone, tracking her feelings, her thoughts. She cried about her son, Mari, who was grieving Lovisa. Mara would hurt because Mari hurt, trying to think of some way to make him feel better. Deciding that there wasn’t a way to make him feel better, and crying a little about that too. Then heaving a sigh and pushing her mind back to work. Mara was a politician, and her husband a banker. She was clever and cynical and sometimes she was hard. But she contained kindness too, in her thoughts, and toward the people around her. Whenever the fox touched upon her kindness, he poked at it, sniffed it, with something like hunger.