She spent a lot of time sitting at the fireplace, watching people come and go, listening to the northern accent of Nev’s family wash around her, remembering that she’d used to sit by the fire in the dormitory foyer, keeping tabs on everyone’s business. It felt like a lifetime ago. It was literally last week. And she couldn’t get a handle on any of these people; Lovisa had lost the clever person she’d used to be. She was hollow and dry, like a shell made of powder. If anyone touched her, she would collapse into dust.
The morning after their arrival, she sat by the fireplace watching Nev, who was talking with her grandfather. They were having the most extraordinary conversation, in the presence of everyone, for Nev had told her grandfather about Nori Orfa, then asked him if he’d ever felt sexual jealousy. Her grandfather! She’d asked him that! Lovisa had whipped her head up at the question, unable to pretend she wasn’t startled.
“Of course I have,” he said.
“You have?” said Nev. “Why?”
“Your grandmother had many lovers before me,” Saiet said, at which point, Lovisa had to get up and go to her bedroom in the barn, because she didn’t want to hear another word. The barn was a huge, empty space, cold, full of creepy shadows and noises at night, like the attic at home. When she entered, the cow looked up from her pen, staring at Lovisa with big brown eyes, chewing. Beyond the cow, the chickens’ throaty noises were actually almost soothing.
This is how things have devolved, Lovisa thought, going to sit on some hay near the animals. I socialize with cows and chickens. Light caught floating motes of dust in the air. She sat and wrapped her arms around herself, shaking. Nev’s life was small. Wasn’t it? It was animals and dark, tiny houses; it was no one ever knowing her name. Why did the look on Nev’s face while she was talking with her grandfather make Lovisa feel like Nev’s life contained everything, everything?
* * *
—
Later, back in the house, Lovisa watched Giddon and Bitterblue working on the plan at the table. Everyone was obsessed with the plan.
Suddenly Giddon caught up Bitterblue’s hands and examined her rings. “Bitterblue,” he said in a voice of dismay. “Where’s your mother’s ring?”
The queen told Giddon about the ring falling into the sea. But first, she let him touch her hands with his own big, gentle, white hands, an expression on her face that instantly informed Lovisa that Giddon and the queen were sleeping together.
Two more normal people having sex for normal reasons. She hated them.
“Lovisa?” Bitterblue said then. “Will you help us?”
“With what?” she snapped.
“Well, with our plan,” said Bitterblue. “You know the plan?”
Yes, Lovisa knew that everyone was planning to invade the house, her house, to find the answer to why her parents had drowned the Monsean envoy and a royal adviser. Because yes, apparently, on top of everything else they’d done, her parents—her father—had done that too.
This is why I’m so numb and stupid, Lovisa thought, struck through with an aching beam of clarity. Because the only route to a place of intelligence passes through the land where I have to believe such things of my father.
When will I? How will I? Am I a coward who refuses to believe what’s plainly true? Didn’t I see some of it with my own eyes?
She went to sit with Bitterblue and Giddon at the table, answering their questions woodenly. Yes, she could draw a floor plan of the northern house and a map of the grounds. Yes, there would be caretakers at the house, and probably guards too, who might or might not recognize Lovisa. Yes, they’d probably heard her kidnapping accusations, because signal messages always generated rumors. Yes, she knew that someone with the initials LM had written a letter to her father about the Monsean envoy overhearing something in the storehouse, but she didn’t know who LM was.
All the time, she ran an image through her head. Over and over, she forced herself to watch her father carrying Pari’s body across the attic to the roof.
* * *
—
The next day, Saturday, Ledra’s head magistrate arrived at the Magistry in Torla’s Neck. Queen Bitterblue went to meet him and present her evidence. Hava and Giddon went too, because they were known Monsean delegates who could confirm that the queen was who she said she was.
Lovisa stayed behind. “I don’t want the Ledra Magistry anywhere near you,” Bitterblue said, “until I’ve made it clear to them that everything you did, you did to save my life.”
To Lovisa, it felt like the beginning of the end. She’d burned two houses down. She’d attacked her mother. The Ledra Magistry wasn’t going to brush that off.
She was sitting on the hay again, watching the moon move across the sky, when they returned. She heard their voices, the cheerful back-and-forth of three people still surprised to be returned to one another. How tired Lovisa was of their happy ending.
A few minutes later, Bitterblue came into the barn by herself and stood there before Lovisa, her hands folded over the handle of a lamp. It was funny, because even though she still wore Ferla’s coat, Lovisa had come to think of those sleek furs as belonging to the queen.
“How’d it go?” Lovisa asked, not caring.
“You won’t be charged with a crime,” said Bitterblue.
Lovisa was stunned. “Are you sure?”
“The Magistry understands now what your parents did to me, Lovisa, and why you had to act.”
“Thank you,” she said weakly, surprised at how much lighter it made her feel.
“No need to thank me. My own court is forever in your debt.” Then the queen was quiet, for longer than was normal. She stood there looking serious.
“What is it?” said Lovisa, suddenly understanding that there was more, and that it was bad. “Aren’t they charging my parents?”
“When the head magistrate gets back to Ledra tomorrow, he’ll charge your father.”
“My father,” Lovisa repeated, mystified. “Isn’t my mother at least an accessory to his crimes?”
The queen took a small breath. “Your mother met with an accident Thursday night, Lovisa. She fell down a flight of stairs. They think she dropped a lamp and slipped on the oil, then hurt her neck and suffocated.”
Lovisa was electric with disbelief. “Are you saying my mother is dead?”
“Yes.”
“And she died in an accident?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe it,” Lovisa said. “I don’t believe it. How did she suffocate?”
“If you break a certain part of your neck,” said Bitterblue, “you lose the ability to breathe. They think that’s what happened.”
“It can’t be,” said Lovisa.
“Apparently it’s true. I’m so sorry, Lovisa.”
Lovisa was grasping around with her hands but she couldn’t find anything to hold, just pieces of straw. “Don’t be silly. There’s nothing to be sorry about. She didn’t love me.”
The queen said, “Lovisa—”
“Don’t you tell me that she did,” said Lovisa, her voice rising. “That was not love.”
“I would never, ever tell you that,” said the queen. “I believe you. But you are worthy of love.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Lovisa cried, then pushed herself up and stumbled to her bedroom. Her mother had tried to pull her away from the burning house. Lovisa had hit her with a shovel, as hard as she could. That was the last exchange Lovisa would ever have with her mother.
She crawled under her covers and stopped thinking.
* * *
—
Dinner was late because of the queen’s visit to the Magistry. Lovisa ate hers in a chair by the fire because there wasn’t enough room around the table and because she didn’t like the careful, sympathetic looks people kept shooting at her, as if something terrible had hap
pened to her and there was something she should be crushed about.
Suddenly, to her humiliation, tears began to roll down her face. Then she was sobbing, gasping for breath. She spilled hot tea in her lap and shouted as it scalded her skin.
The people in the room moved calmly and swiftly, as if her outburst were the most routine way for a person to behave. Someone—Nev—brought her into Nev’s tiny room, checked her legs to make sure she wasn’t burned, applied a salve. Someone else—Nev’s grandfather, Saiet—tucked her into bed, pulling a soft, Nev-smelling blanket up to her chin. Someone else—Nev again—brought her unfinished dinner and a drink into the room and left them on the bedside table, in case she wanted them.
“Can my mother come to you later, Lovisa?” Nev asked. “She’s a healer, you remember?”
“I’m not sick,” Lovisa said.
“Can she come?” Nev said again, firm as always, but gentle too. Worried.
Oh, who cares? Lovisa thought. More useless mothers. “Fine,” she said.
Sometime later, Nola came into the room, carrying a candle. A wind was moaning steadily outside. It made Lovisa feel like Torla’s Neck was the end of the world.
“Lovisa?” she said.
Lovisa grunted, pretending to be more asleep than she was.
“How are you feeling?” said Nola. “Do any of your muscles feel tight?”
It was a hilarious question. Lovisa couldn’t find a muscle in her body that didn’t feel tight. The muscles of her shoulders, neck, and skull were trying to pop her head right off her body. “A little,” she said.
A hand touched her shoulder. “May I?”
“I don’t care,” she said. “Do what you like.”
“I need a yes or a no, Lovisa.”
“Fine. Yes.”
So Nev’s mother massaged her back, shoulders, and neck with skilled strokes, finding the lines of tension, smoothing them. How unexpected, to be soothed by a stranger. Lovisa began to cry from the intensity of the comfort it gave her. When Nola found a necklace on Lovisa’s neck, she moved carefully around it, because Lovisa wouldn’t remove it. It was the cord that held the attic room key. The attic room no longer existed, but Lovisa couldn’t let the key go. It was the only thing she had left that she understood.
The candle hissed. Puffs of wind pushed at the walls. Lovisa imagined that this was her home, her life. But this is my life, she realized; then, before she could get too confused about that, she fell asleep.
* * *
—
In the middle of the night, Bitterblue woke her with a soft “Lovisa?”
“Huh?” she said, coming awake to a pounding headache. She was still in Nev’s bed. The queen stood beside her, wearing Ferla’s furs and holding a glowing lamp. “What?”
“We’re leaving for your house.”
“Now? What time is it?”
“About four o’clock,” Bitterblue said. “You don’t have to come, but we didn’t want to leave without giving you the choice.”
“Can you do the plan without me?”
“We’ll manage,” said Bitterblue diplomatically.
In the dark blankness of her half-awake state, Lovisa’s biggest truths arranged themselves starkly for her consideration. Her mother was dead. Her father was probably already in jail. Her brothers. Who was taking care of her brothers?
“Bitterblue?” she said in a breaking voice. “Is there some hope, do you think, for a better life for my brothers?”
“Oh, of course,” said the queen. “I’m sure of it, Lovisa.”
The queen’s certainty annoyed her, and woke her up.
“There’s hope for you too,” the queen added. “Lovisa—”
“Oh, stop,” said Lovisa. “I don’t need any more inspiring slogans.” The queen saw everything as flowers and sunshine, because she was in love.
“All right,” said Bitterblue quietly. “I have to go, because the others are waiting. Nola and Saiet are staying behind if you need anything today.”
How would her brothers ever be able to understand what was happening to their lives right now? Who could explain it, really, besides her? Who could ever understand what they were going through, besides her? And how could she understand it herself, if she was too afraid to look at the truth?
“Wait,” she said. “It’s my house. I’m coming.”
Chapter Thirty-six
Divide and distract. That was the plan: Get as many of their team onto the Cavenda property as possible, then create distractions. Locate the storehouse. Find out how many people are on the grounds, how many are armed, and where they’re situated. Convey that information, probably via Hava, to the people still waiting outside—Lovisa, Giddon, and the Queen of Monsea, the three of the party unlikely to be able to show up at the gate pretending to be someone else. Then, decide what to do next.
It was a flexible plan, adaptable. Giddon spent his life throwing himself into loose, open plans, then sorting out the details as he went along. This would be no different.
The walking path to the water at four in the morning went past a glacier, but all Giddon saw was a stretch of darkness that blotted out the stars.
The fastest and most discreet route to the Cavenda house was by boat. A friend of Nev’s family, Saba, had a boat with black sails and knew how to navigate the route up the coast in the dark. Remembering that the route eventually led to Kamassar, Giddon tactfully asked no questions about Saba, who he guessed was a smuggler. “You can trust her discretion,” Saiet said, which Giddon believed.
Saba would sail them to a cove with a cavern she knew. From the cavern, they could climb to a forest and walk to a road and head north. When a stone wall appeared on the left, that was the sign they’d reached the Cavenda property.
Hava would go over that wall, because Hava had the Grace to hide herself from anyone on the other side. Then, sometime later, Nev would arrive at the property gate, offering her services as a traveling animal doctor.
“I could poison the animals,” Hava had offered, “so they’re more likely to invite you in.”
“No,” Nev had said firmly.
“All right, well, at least I’ll break some of the furniture,” she’d said, since the next part of the plan involved Davvi appearing at the gate to offer his services as a traveling builder. Davvi had laughed at Hava’s joke, but Giddon had been pretty sure she wasn’t joking.
* * *
—
As they neared the water, Bitterblue turned and touched her hand to Giddon’s chest. In the darkness, she traced a path all the way to his face and touched his beard gently, flushing him with heat, happiness, and that unshakable sense of disbelief that it was happening.
“Do you have the flask?” she said. “I think it’s time.”
“Yes,” he said, then softly called to the group to wait. “Bitterblue’s drinking her tea.” For Bitterblue was going to drink some rauha, carefully brewed and flasked by Saiet, in preparation for a boat trip north that would otherwise make her sick. The right amount, Saiet had said, to help someone of her size just enough, then wear off in time in case she had to play a role in the sleuthing operation. He’d included enough for the trip back as well.
The group waited in darkness while Bitterblue drank. Nearby, a sharp crack, followed by a rumble, broke the silence: the glacier calving an iceberg into the sea.
“Did you hear it?” Giddon whispered, not wanting Bitterblue to miss anything beautiful.
Her hand found him again. “Yes.” Then she turned him around, felt for the pack he was wearing, and slipped the flask back into it.
“Here’s Saba,” Nev called out quietly. “Is everyone ready?”
* * *
—
It was a frigid trip north through a relentless wind, made somewhat warmer by the need to enclose Bitterblue in his arms to keep her from standing up in th
e boat and making announcements. They were very unpredictable announcements. One was about wanting to split her Ministry of Education into two parts, half for the education of children and half for adults. Another was a general inquiry about whether anyone had brought any pie. One time she just stood up and yelled, “Kittens!”
It wasn’t the announcements that needed to stop, but the standing, because of the very real danger that in her rauha-induced state of silliness, she would fall out. It was intensely comforting, actually, to be in a boat with her, holding her tight in his arms so she wouldn’t fall out. It felt like a redo from the last time. And she seemed to like it too, nestling against him, certainly the warmest person in the boat. He missed the announcements, though.
“Can I eat your nose?” she asked him, which would certainly have given their secret away if she hadn’t already asked Hava, Lovisa, and Davvi if she could eat their noses.
“What’s wrong with my nose?” Nev asked, a joke that sent Bitterblue into a peal of giggles that kept quieting, then resurfacing again.
Sometime later, they made land.
“Do you think you can walk?” Giddon asked Bitterblue as he and Hava helped her onto a pebbly beach. The stars were so thick and low here that he wanted to reach up and brush his fingers against them, then touch his starry hand to Bitterblue’s face.
“She fell when we landed in the airship,” Lovisa said, in her dull, faraway voice that made Giddon worry about the wisdom of including her in this mission.
“It’s my land legs,” Bitterblue said, then clung to Hava. “You remind me of Katsa.”
“That’s quite a compliment,” Hava said. “I’ve got her,” she added quietly to Giddon, who moved away, letting Hava help Bitterblue up the path to the trees. He was conscious of having monopolized Bitterblue since the miracle of her reappearance. And maybe Hava needed a redo too.
* * *
—
Sitting on the floor of Saba’s cavern, surrounded by walls of stone that reached up to the sky, the group shivered in companionable silence until the sun rose. They snacked on bread, dried fruit, and cheese.
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