Winterkeep

by Kristin Cashore

  “We’ll find out for you, Lovisa,” said Davvi. “I promise. For now, you can let yourself sleep. We’ll help you figure out the rest tomorrow.”

  She believed him. Did that mean she’d given up, if she trusted him? Was it safe?

  Carried in the strong arms of Nev’s father, Lovisa surrendered herself to sleep.

  Chapter Forty-one

  In early morning, Lovisa woke in Nev’s bed.

  It was all done now. The mystery of the banker’s box solved. Katu found. The criminals captured. The Monseans could go home; it was over.

  But for Lovisa, there would never be an end.

  Cautiously, she reached up, felt her face, her hair, her neck. She had a small bandage on her forehead, and a split lip. Everything hurt. Her body screamed with tender places when she moved, but when she tried, she was able to stand.

  When she stepped into the house’s tiny, main room, there was already a distinct sense of something new: departure. Giddon and Hava sat at the table, filling their mouths with stew and talking to Saiet. Hava didn’t look like she should be sitting up. Purple bruises ringed her copper-colored eye, shocking against her pale skin. She also had a bandaged forehead, a plaster cast on her lower leg and foot, and she gasped whenever she moved. But she seemed cheerful.

  “We’ll go back to Ledra soon,” Giddon was saying to Saiet. “Everyone’s waiting for Bitterblue.”

  Saiet, noticing Lovisa, held out a hand to welcome her. “Lovisa,” he said, and she braced herself against the questions she knew were coming. What about you? When are you leaving? What are you going to do now, with the ruin of your life?

  “Where are my brothers?” she said.

  “Our magistrate has sent a message to the Magistry in Torla’s Neck, asking that question on your behalf,” said Saiet. “We should know sometime today.”

  “Oh.”

  “Lovisa,” said Saiet gently, studying her face. “Can I offer you something to eat?”

  Lovisa didn’t think her stomach could accept any food. Then Davvi bustled out of the other bedroom, Bitterblue came in from outside, and the room was far too crowded with people who had questions in their eyes.

  “Is there somewhere I could go?” she said. “And sit, and be alone?”

  “Yes, certainly,” said Saiet. “I have cows to visit to the north. Would you like to come along? I’ll deposit you in a nice, quiet place with a pretty view. Then I’ll pick you up again on the way back.”

  So Lovisa set out with Saiet, wondering what had become of her life that she was a person setting out to sit and stare at nothing, while her companion, an old, creaky man who made no sense to her, visited cows.

  She was terrified he would ask her questions as they walked. Or start talking about something ridiculous she didn’t want to think about, like jealousy, or his wife’s many lovers. Or Nev. Lovisa wouldn’t be able to bear it if Saiet started talking about Nev, who had a life Lovisa could never have.

  But he walked beside her quietly, then showed her to a hill with a rock shaped like a bench. Hidden from the path, she could see across rolling hills to the wrinkles of a glacier tucked between rises of land. Far, far away, so far it might be Kamassar, she saw mountains with white peaks. It was freezing on her bench. She pulled her fur coat more tightly against her neck.

  “Now,” he said. “I won’t be long, but if you get too cold, do you remember the way home?”

  “I’ll wait for you,” she said. She watched his tall, narrow form wind its way back to the path until he disappeared, then gazed across the hills to the glacier, the mountains. Nev had said once that in Ledra, everything was stuck, spinning in place. That in the north, she could breathe.

  Lovisa stood, walking to a place where she could see the water. Where do I belong? she asked the ocean. What do I do now? Go back to school? How do I do that? She waited for the answers to come, but nothing came.

  A movement out at sea caught her eye. Though they were very far away, she recognized the round, sleek, purplish forms of silbercows. With a small, unhappy thud, she remembered a part of the story she’d pushed aside. Her parents had hurt silbercows too. Hadn’t they? Nev had talked of injured silbercows, coming to shore with cuts and burns.

  She watched the silbercows turning in the sun. She’d never succeeded in talking to a silbercow before, and she knew she was too far away. But she cried out anyway, because it was part of the reckoning. I’m sorry, she cried to them. I’m sorry.

  * * *

  —

  Later that day, Nev found her, curled up in Nev’s bed.

  “Lovisa?” she said gently.

  “Yes?” said Lovisa, not moving.

  “Your brothers are safe,” said Nev. “They’re with the Devrets. The Devrets want to give them a home and take care of them. Even adopt them, if it comes to that.”

  So they can grow up like Mari, thought Lovisa, instantly, unexpectedly bereft.

  “Lovisa?” said Nev. “Are you okay?”

  Lovisa felt her brothers stretching away from her, to a place where she couldn’t follow. “I’m fine,” she said. She was the sister who’d burned their house down and left them. She’d ruined their family. They didn’t need her and probably wouldn’t want her.

  Nola bustled into the tiny, cramped room. “Lovisa?” she said. “I finally have some time. How are your muscles?”

  Lovisa didn’t deserve a massage from Nola. She began to cry again, tears seeping quietly down her face.

  “Let me help,” Nola said.

  “You’re just pitying me,” Lovisa said, trying to sound harsh and unfeeling, but knowing she only sounded pitiable.

  “Pitying is definitely the wrong word,” said Nola, sitting on the bed beside Lovisa, shooing Nev away, then finding the sore place where Lovisa’s shoulders met her neck. “You don’t have the sort of spirit that lends itself to pity.”

  Because I’m hard, like my mother, Lovisa thought. “Everyone is leaving,” she said.

  “Yes, everyone is leaving,” said Nola, in a smooth, measured tone, fitting words into the rhythms of her strokes, reaching deep, to the places where Lovisa’s sore muscles met bone. Had Nev grown up with this blessing too? Being touched, healed, by a mother? “Not right away,” Nola said. “But everyone seems to have places to go. You may stay as long as you like, Lovisa,” she added, “if you’re not ready.”

  Lovisa swallowed. “Is Nev leaving?”

  “Yes. Nev needs to get back to school.”

  Lovisa grieved those words. School had used to be her kingdom. The chair in the dorm foyer was her throne. Nev and Mari were her neighbors. They were her friends, weren’t they? Could Lovisa have friends?

  “What is your scholarly discipline, Lovisa?” asked Nola.

  “Politics and government.”

  “What a great deal you could do with that,” she said, “given everything you know and all you’ve seen.”

  “No one can do anything with politics and government,” Lovisa said scornfully. “It’s just two bickering sides who’re exactly the same, pretending to fight about good sense and ideals when really it’s all about money.”

  “Hm,” said Nola. “Imagine if someone came along with intelligence, and passion, and experience. And deep insight into how our government works, and how it affects the land. Someone who actually did have good sense and ideals.”

  Lovisa didn’t know what Nola was talking about, and saw no point in imagining it. No one would ever want to work that hard, while standing in opposition to such a force.

  “Someone who was good at taking old power structures down,” said Nola. “I wonder what someone like that could achieve.”

  * * *

  —

  The next day, she walked with Saiet again as he went on another farm visit.

  “Have you ever visited a pig, Lovisa?” he asked.

  “W
hat do you think?” said Lovisa snappishly. “When would I ever have had occasion to visit a pig?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “This could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  “What is this? Do you want me to come with you?”

  “Not if you’re afraid of pigs.”

  “Oh, please. Why would anyone be afraid of pigs?”

  “Then you’re coming?”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “I dare you,” said Saiet. “I dare you to come visit this pig.”

  “How old are you, nine?”

  “Nine is quite mature,” he said, “for a pig.”

  “Oh, kittens,” Lovisa said, borrowing the queen’s favorite expletive. Then, unable to hold it back, she laughed, a quick, exasperated breath. “What’s wrong with this pig?”

  * * *

  —

  The problem with the pig was that an endless stream of piglets was popping out of it.

  “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen,” Lovisa said, watching Saiet wipe bloody sacs away from the mouths and noses of the little piglets, rub them with towels, tie off their umbilical cords. She couldn’t believe she was here watching this, and she couldn’t stop talking. How could he touch those things? “They look like slugs. They look like pink poops!”

  “What, have you never seen a piglet before?” said the farmer who owned the pig, resting her heavy boot on a bucket, chewing on a piece of straw. “City people.”

  “Here, warm this one up,” Saiet said, holding a teeny-tiny piglet out to Lovisa, then actually looking rather angry and stern when she cringed away. “Warm it!”

  “All right,” she said, “all right!”

  She took the tiny thing in her hands, suddenly petrified she’d hurt it, drop it, squeeze it too hard. The piglet was wrapped in a soft towel. It wasn’t very warm, so she brought it to her chest and tried to cradle it in her arms. Its eyes and mouth were tiny wrinkles and its miniature nose was the funniest, strangest thing she’d ever seen.

  “Why do people like babies?” she demanded.

  No one answered her, for Saiet and the farmer were busy with the other piglets, of which there were impossibly many. They just kept popping out, as if any pig had business being so pregnant. What if this one, out of all of them, was the one that didn’t survive? What would it mean about the kind of person she was? She found a bench nearby and opened her coat, so the piglet could nestle into her body heat. She imagined a shield around this piglet. A shield made of her arms, and her iron will.

  “All right,” she whispered to it, very quietly, so no one else could hear. “It’s you and me, piglet. Okay? You need to survive. Okay? Survive. You are worthy.”

  * * *

  —

  That afternoon, when Lovisa stepped back into Nev’s house with a piglet in her arms, she fended off the curious looks, and especially the amused looks, with a chilly kind of hauteur.

  “It’s the runt,” she said. “The farmer didn’t want it.”

  “I see,” said Giddon unperturbedly, for Giddon was the person she’d happened to be glaring at when she’d made her announcement. He was sitting at the table with Nev and the queen. Probably planning their departures.

  “It’s cute,” said Nev.

  Lovisa glanced at the fox kit Nev held in one arm and said caustically, “Yes. I like that it can’t read my mind.”

  “Have you named it?” asked Bitterblue.

  She had named it. In fact, she’d named it after the queen. “His name is Worthy,” she said, then, before she started to cry again, went out to the barn.

  Nev came looking for her later, without her fox.

  “Lovisa?” she said, finding Lovisa in the semi-dark, where she was sitting on the hay beside the cow again. She was teaching Worthy to suckle on a milk-soaked cloth from Saiet that she twisted like a nipple.

  I cannot believe this is my life, Lovisa thought as Nev approached her. “What?”

  “An airship’s coming tomorrow from Ledra,” Nev said. “We’re leaving the day after that.”

  Lovisa grunted. It was so soon. Too soon.

  “Will you come with us?” Nev asked.

  How confusing it was to hear Nev say that. “I—don’t think I have anywhere to go,” she said.

  “The Devrets want you, if you like,” Nev said. “You could live with your brothers. The academy also wants you back.”

  Lovisa snorted at that. “Says who?”

  “Says every message coming through the signal stations.”

  “The people at the academy just want to be able to look at me and gossip,” said Lovisa. “I can’t go to Ledra. You know how it is there.”

  “Yes,” Nev admitted. “I do.”

  “Anyway, how could I?” Lovisa said. “Everyone’ll know who I am. They’ll know what I did, and what my parents did.”

  Nev seemed to think about that for a minute. She stroked the cow’s neck and the cow took on a blissful expression. Lovisa watched carefully while pretending not to. She’d wondered the safe way to touch that cow.

  “It’s true that I can’t imagine what this is like for you, Lovisa,” Nev finally said. “You’ve had to make harder choices than I ever have, harder than most people ever do. But I don’t want you to think that you’re alone.” She paused. “I understand you might not consider me a friend.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Lovisa through rising tears.

  “If you come back to school,” said Nev, “you won’t be alone.” She paused again. “Okay? Just think about it.”

  She left for the house. Then, while Lovisa was thinking about it, Nev came out again, poked her head into the barn.

  “Lovisa? Your uncle is here.”

  * * *

  —

  When Lovisa entered the house with Worthy in her arms, Katu was sitting in a chair by the fire. He was clean, his hair newly cut, but he was so small, so thin.

  His eyes touched the piglet and he began to laugh, coming to Lovisa, embracing her. They’d never really had an embracing sort of relationship, but something had changed. She hugged him back hard with her free arm.

  “You look better,” he said.

  “You too.”

  “I’m all right,” he said. “It’s going to take me a while. I’m lucky I have brawny friends.” He flashed a smile at Giddon that was rueful, and that included Bitterblue, who sat in a chair beside Giddon. There was something odd about the smile, something stiff, that made Lovisa watch Katu closely.

  “Katu has some news, Lovisa,” said Giddon.

  Katu shot Giddon another stiff, sideways smile. “Yes. The guards got away.”

  “The guards?” said Lovisa, mystified. “At the house?”

  “Yes. We were keeping them locked in a bedroom upstairs, but it was too much for the staff to watch them all the time, you understand? Not with caring for me, and dealing with the cleanup and all. Apparently one of them got out of his ties and freed the others. They hurt the girl Ella on their way out. Knocked her into a glass door. She’ll be okay, but she’s bruised up.”

  “Oh,” said Lovisa, not really caring about the lost guards. “Oh, well.”

  “They might’ve served as witnesses,” he said. “But I expect they’re long gone now.”

  “Oh, well,” she said again. There were going to be plenty of witnesses. The Queen of Monsea herself was a witness.

  “Before the guards got away,” Katu said, “one of them told the local magistrate something about Linta Massera yelling that her notebooks had gone missing, right before the explosion. If any of you know anything about that, be aware that the Magistry will probably want to know.”

  Giddon cleared his throat. “Noted. And the cleanup?”

  “Yes. We’re collecting the explosives,” said Katu. “Very, very carefully.”

&nbs
p; “Who is?” said Giddon. “The cave was full of them!”

  “The Magistry has climbers. And actual ropes,” Katu said, with another smile directed vaguely at Giddon.

  “Fancy,” said Giddon, grinning back.

  “But what will they do with them?” said Lovisa.

  “For the moment, they’re storing them in a locked box,” said Katu. “And keeping them as evidence.”

  “Against my father?”

  “Or your mother,” said Katu.

  “But is it safe to keep them?” said Lovisa. “Couldn’t they explode them somewhere, so they’re not dangerous anymore?”

  “Where?” said Nev.

  “I don’t know,” said Lovisa. “Underground? Underwater?”

  “What?” cried Nev, glaring at her. “Don’t you understand how many silbercows have already been hurt? People have tossed those eggs into the water to test how they explode! And they’ve murdered silbercows too, to get rid of witnesses!”

  “But of course I meant not near silbercows! In some part of the water where nothing is!”

  “And where’s that?” cried Nev, still indignant. “What part of the ocean’s ecosystem is expendable?”

  “Well, I don’t know!” said Lovisa, taking a few steps back, turning away. “I don’t know anything about the ocean.” And now Nev was angry with her and she couldn’t bear it.

  “Lovisa,” said Nev quietly. “I’m sorry. I misunderstood. Of course you meant well.”

  But Lovisa didn’t want Nev’s apologies. She found a hard chair in a dark corner of the room and sat there, bending over Worthy, pretending he needed her attention.

  “Katu,” said Bitterblue. “What will you do now?”

  Katu’s neck, if possible, was even more stiff when he was talking to Bitterblue than to Giddon. “My doctor’s told me to rest,” he said, “for an absurdly long time. She says I’ve endured an extreme ordeal. But I feel fine, really. I just need to eat, and build some muscle.”