Graceling

by Kristin Cashore

  She found herself laughing, though nothing was funny. If she couldn't even keep herself alive, there was no hope for the child. She shouldn't have let this happen; she'd been mad to bring them into Sunder this way. She thought of her hands and held them up to her face. She opened her fingers, forced them to open, and cursed herself when she saw her white fingertips. She shoved her fists into her armpits. She willed her mind to think clearly, lucidly. She was cold, too cold. She must get them to the place where the trees started, so that they could have firewood, and protection from the wind. She must start a fire. Get to that place, and start a fire. And keep the child alive. Those were her needs, those were her ends, and she would keep those thoughts in her head as she ran.

  BY THE TIME they reached the trees, Bitterblue was whimpering from numbness and cold. But when Katsa collapsed to her knees, the girl unwound herself from the halter. She fumbled to remove the wolf furs from her own back and wrapped them around Katsa's body. Then she knelt before Katsa and tugged at the straps of the snowshoes with her chapped, bleeding fingers. Katsa roused herself and helped with the straps. She crawled out of the snowshoes and flung off the bags, the quiver, the halter, and the bow.

  "Firewood," Katsa said. "Firewood."

  The girl sniffled and nodded and stumbled around under the trees, collecting what she could find. The wood she brought back to Katsa was damp with snow. Katsa's fingers were slow and clumsy with her dagger, unsteady with the shivering that racked her body. She had never in her life had difficulty starting a fire before, never once in her life. She concentrated fiercely, and on her tenth or eleventh try, a flame sparked and caught a dry corner of wood. Katsa fed pine needles to the flame and nursed it, directed it, and willed it not to die, until it licked at the edges of the branches she'd assembled. It grew and smoked and crackled. They had fire.

  Katsa crouched, shivering, and watched the flames, ignoring fiercely the stabbings of pain they brought to her fingers and the throbbing in her feet. "No," she whispered, when Bitterblue stood and moved away to find more firewood. "Warm yourself first. Stay here and warm yourself first."

  Katsa built up the fire, slowly, and as she leaned over it, and as it grew, her shivering quieted. She looked at the girl, who sat on the ground, her arms wrapped around her legs. Her eyes closed, her face resting on her knees. Her cheeks streaked with tears. Alive.

  "What a fool I am," Katsa whispered. "What a fool I am." She forced herself to her feet and pushed herself from tree to tree to collect more wood. Her bones ached, her hands and feet screamed with pain. Maybe it was for the best that she'd been so foolish, for if she'd known how hard this would be, perhaps she wouldn't have done it.

  She returned to their campsite and built the fire up more. Tonight the fire would be enormous; tonight they would have a fire all of Sunder could see. She shuffled over to the child and took her hands. She inspected the girl's fingers. "You can feel them?" she asked. "You can move them?"

  Bitterblue nodded. Katsa yanked at the bags, and groped inside them until she found the medicines. She massaged Raffin's healing ointment into the girl's cracked, bleeding hands. "Let me see your feet now, Princess." She rubbed warmth into the girl's toes and buttoned her back into her boots.

  "You've made it across Grella's Pass," she said to Bitterblue, "all in one piece. You're a strong girl."

  Bitterblue wrapped her arms around Katsa. She kissed Katsa's cheek and held on to her tightly. If Katsa had had enough energy for astonishment, she would have been astonished. Instead, she hugged the girl back numbly.

  Katsa and Bitterblue held on to each other, and their bodies crawled their ways back to warmth. When Katsa lay down that night before the roaring fire, the child curled in her arms, not even the pain in her hands and feet could have kept her awake.

  PART THREE

  The Shifting World

  Chapter Thirty-one

  THE INN SAT in what passed for a clearing here in the south of Sunder, but would have been called a forest anywhere else. There was space between oaks and maples for the inn, a stable, a barn, and a patch of garden; and enough open sky to allow sunlight to flicker down and reflect the surrounding trees in the windows of the buildings.

  The inn wasn't busy, though neither was it empty. Traffic through Sunder was always steady, even at winter's outset, even at the edge of the mountains. Cart horses labored northward pulling barrels of Monsean cider, or the wood of Sunder's fine forests, or the ice of Sunder's eastern mountains. Merchants bore Lienid tomatoes, grapes, apricots; Lienid jewelry and ornaments; and fish found only in Lienid's seas, north from the Sunderan port cities, up into the Middluns, to Wester, Nander, and Estill. And southward from those same kingdoms came freshwater fish, grains and hay, corn, potatoes, carrots—all the things a people who live in the forests want—and herbs and apples and pears, and horses, to be loaded onto ships and transported to Lienid and Monsea.

  A merchant stood now in the yard of the inn, beside a cart stacked high with barrels. He stamped his feet and blew into his hands. The barrels were unmarked and the merchant nondescript, his coat and boots plain, none of his six horses bearing a brand or ornamentation indicating from which kingdom they came. The innkeeper burst into the yard with his sons, gesturing to them and to the horses. He yelled something to the merchant and his breath froze in the air. The merchant called back, but not loudly enough to carry to the thick stand of trees outside the clearing, where Katsa and Bitterblue crouched, watching.

  "He's likely to be Monsean," Bitterblue whispered, "come up from the ports and making his way through Sunder. His cart is very full. If he'd come from one of the other kingdoms, wouldn't he have sold more of whatever he's carrying by now? Excepting Lienid, of course—but he doesn't have the look of a Lienid, does he?"

  Katsa rifled through her maps. "It hardly matters. Even if we determine he's from Nander or Wester, we don't know who else is at the inn, or who else is likely to arrive. We can't risk it, not until we know whether one of your father's stories has spread into Sunder. We were weeks in the mountains, child. We've no idea what these people have heard."

  "The story may not have reached this far. We're some distance from the ports and the mountain pass, and this place is isolated."

  "True," Katsa said, "but we don't want to provide them with a story, either, to spread up to the mountain pass or down to the ports. The less Leck knows about where we've been, the better."

  "But in that case, no inn will be safe. We'll have to get ourselves from here to Lienid without anyone seeing us."

  Katsa examined her maps and didn't answer.

  "Unless you're planning to kill everyone we see," Bitterblue grumbled. "Oh, Katsa, look—that girl is carrying eggs. Oh, I would kill for an egg."

  Katsa glanced up to see the girl, bareheaded and shivering, scuttling from barn to inn with a basket of eggs hung over one arm. The innkeeper gestured to her and called out. The girl set the basket at the base of an enormous tree and hurried over to him. He and the merchant handed her bag after bag, and she slung them over her back and shoulders, until Katsa could barely see her anymore for the bags that covered her. She staggered into the inn. She came out again, and they loaded her down again.

  Katsa counted the scattered trees that stood between their hiding place and the basket of eggs. She glanced at the frozen remains of the vegetable garden. Then she shuffled through the maps again and grabbed hold of the list of Council contacts in Sunder. She flattened the page onto her lap.

  "I know where we are," Katsa said. "There's a town not far from here, perhaps two days' walk. According to Raffin, a storekeeper there is friendly to the Council. I think we might go there safely."

  "Just because he's friendly to the Council doesn't mean he'll be able to see through whatever story Leck's spreading."

  "True," Katsa said. "But we need clothing and information. And you need a hot bath. If we could get to Lienid without encountering anyone, we would; but it's impossible. If we must trust someone, I'd prefer it to be
a Council sympathizer."

  Bitterblue scowled. "You need a hot bath as much as I do." Katsa grinned. "I need a bath as much as you do. Mine doesn't have to be hot. I'm not going to stick you into some half-frozen pond, to sicken and die, after all you've survived. Now, child," Katsa said, as the merchant and the innkeeper shouldered bags of their own and headed for the inn's entrance, "don't move until I get back."

  "Where..." Bitterblue began, but Katsa was already flying from tree to tree, hiding behind one massive trunk and then another, peeking out to watch the windows and doors of the inn. When moments later Katsa and Bitterblue resumed their trek through the Sunderan forest, Katsa had four eggs inside her sleeve and a frozen pumpkin on her shoulder. Their dinner that night had the air of a celebration.

  THERE WASN'T MUCH Katsa could do about her appearance or Bitterblue's when it came time to knock on the storekeeper's door, other than clean the dirt and grime as best she could from their faces, manhandle Bitterblue's tangle of hair into some semblance of a braid, and wait until darkness fell. It was too cold to expect Bitterblue to remove her patchwork of furs, and Katsa's wolf hides, no matter how alarming, were less appalling than the stained, tattered coat they hid.

  The storekeeper was easily identified, his building the largest and busiest in the town save the inn. He was a man of average height and average build, had a sturdy, no-nonsense wife and an inordinate number of children who seemed to run the gamut from infancy to Katsa's age and older. Or so Katsa gathered, as she and Bitterblue passed their time among the trees at the edge of the town waiting for night to fall. His store was sizable, and the brown house that rose above and behind it enormous. As it would have to be, Katsa thought, to contain so many children. Katsa wished, as the day progressed and more and more children issued from the building to feed the chickens, to help the merchants unload their goods, to play and fight, and squabble in the yard, that this Council contact had not taken his duty to procreate quite so seriously. They would have to wait not only until the town quieted, but until most of these children slept, if Katsa wished their appearance on the doorstep to cause less than an uproar.

  When most of the houses were dark, and when light shone from only one of the windows in the storekeeper's home, Katsa and Bitterblue crept from the trees. They passed through the yard and snuck to the back door. Katsa wrapped her fist in her sleeve and thumped on the solid Sunderan wood as quietly as she could and still hope to be heard. After a moment the light in the window shifted. After another moment the door was pushed open a crack, and the storekeeper peered out at them, a candle in his hand. He looked them up and down, two slight, furry figures on his doorstep, and kept a firm grip on the door handle.

  "If it's food you want, or beds," he said gruffly, "you'll find the inn at the head of the road."

  Katsa's first question was the most risky, and she steeled herself against the answer. "It's information we seek. Have you heard any news of Monsea?"

  "Nothing for months. We hear little of Monsea in this corner of the woods."

  Katsa released her breath. "Hold your light to my face, storekeeper."

  The man grunted. He extended his arm through the crack in the door and held the candle to Katsa's face. His eyes narrowed, then widened, and his entire manner changed. In an instant he'd opened the door, shuffled them through, and thrown the latch behind them.

  "Forgive me, My Lady." He gestured to a table and began to pull out chairs. "Please, please sit down. Marta!" he called into an adjacent room. "Food," he said to the confused woman who appeared in the doorway, "and more light. And wake the—"

  "No," Katsa said sharply. "No. Please, wake no one. No one must know we're here."

  "Of course, My Lady," the man said. "You must forgive my ... my..."

  "You weren't expecting us," Katsa said. "We understand."

  "Indeed," the man said. "We'd heard what happened at King Randa's court, My Lady, and we knew you'd passed through Sunder with the Lienid prince. But somewhere along the way the rumors lost track of you."

  The woman came bustling back into the room and set a platter of bread and cheese on the table. A girl about Katsa's age followed with mugs and a pitcher. A boy, a young man taller even than Raffin, brought up the rear, and lit the torches in the walls around the table. Katsa heard a soft sigh and glanced at Bitterblue. The child stared, wide-eyed and mouth watering, at the bread and cheese on the table before her. She caught Katsa's eye. "Bread," she whispered, and Katsa couldn't help smiling.

  "Eat, child," Katsa said.

  "By all means, young miss," the woman said. "Eat as much as you like."

  Katsa waited until everyone was seated, and until Bitterblue was contentedly stuffing her mouth with bread. Then she spoke.

  "We need information," she said. "We need counsel. We need baths and any clothing—preferably boy's clothing—you might be able to spare. Above all, we need utter secrecy regarding our presence in this town."

  "We're at your service, My Lady," the storekeeper said.

  "We've enough clothing in this house to dress an army," his wife said. "And any supplies you'll need in the store. And a horse, I warrant, if you're wanting one. You can be sure we'll keep quiet, My Lady. We know what you've done with your Council and we'll do for you whatever we can."

  "We thank you."

  "What information do you seek, My Lady?" the storekeeper asked. "We've heard very little from any of the kingdoms."

  Katsa's eyes rested on Bitterblue, who tore into the bread and cheese like a wild thing. "Slowly, child," she said, absently. She rubbed her head and considered how much to tell this Sunderan family. Some things they needed to know, and certainly the one thing most likely to combat the influence of whatever deception Leck spread next was the truth.

  "We come from Monsea," Katsa said. "We crossed the mountains through Grella's Pass."

  This was met with silence, and a widening of eyes. Katsa sighed.

  "If that's hard for you to believe," she said, "you'll find the rest of our story no less than incredible. Truly, I'm unsure where to start."

  "Start with Leck's Grace," Bitterblue said around her mouthful of bread.

  Katsa watched the child lick crumbs from her fingers. Bitterblue looked as if she were approaching a state of rapture that even the story of her father's treachery couldn't disturb. "Very well," Katsa said. "We'll start with Leck's Grace."

  KATSA TOOK not one bath that night, but two. The first to loosen the dirt and peel off the top layer of grime, the second to become truly clean. Bitterblue did the same. The storekeeper, his wife, and his two eldest children moved quietly and efficiently, drawing water, heating water, emptying the tub, and burning their old, tattered garments. Producing new clothing, boy's clothing, and fitting it to their guests. Gathering hats, coats, scarves, and gloves from their own cabinets and from the store. Cutting Bitterblue's hair to the length of a boy's, and trimming Katsa's so it lay close to her scalp again.

  The sensation of cleanliness was astonishing. Katsa couldn't count the number of times she heard Bitterblue's quiet sigh. A sigh at being warm and clean, at washing oneself with soap; and at the taste of bread in one's mouth, and the feeling of bread in one's stomach.

  "I'm afraid we won't get much sleep tonight, child," Katsa said. "We must leave this house before the rest of the family wakes in the morning."

  "And you think that bothers me? This evening has been bliss. The lack of sleep will be nothing."

  Nonetheless, when Katsa and Bitterblue lay down in a bed for the first time in a very long time—the bed of the storekeeper and his wife, though Katsa had protested their sacrifice—Bitterblue dropped into an exhausted sleep. Katsa lay on her back and tried not to let the calm breath of her bed companion, the softness of mattress and pillow delude her into believing they were safe. She thought of the gaps she'd left in the story she'd told that night.

  The family of the storekeeper now understood the horror that was King Leck's Grace. They understood Ashen's murder and the events
surrounding the kidnapping of Grandfather Tealiff. They'd surmised, though Katsa had never told them explicitly, that the child eating bread and cheese as if she'd never seen it before was the Monsean princess who fled her father. They even understood that if Leck chose to spread a false story through Sunder, their minds might lose the truth of everything she'd told them. All of this the family marveled at, accepted, and understood.

  Katsa had omitted one truth, and she had told one lie. The truth omitted was their destination. Leck might be able to confuse this family into admitting the lady and the princess had knocked on their door and slept under their roof. But he'd never be able to talk them into revealing a destination they didn't know.

  The lie told was that the Lienid prince was dead, killed by Leck's guards when he'd tried to murder the Monsean king. Katsa supposed this lie was a waste of her breath. The opportunity for the family to speak of it would never arise. But when she could, she would make Po out to be dead. The more people who thought him dead, the fewer people would think to seek him out and do him harm.

  To the Sunderan port cities they must now go. Ride south to sail west. But her thoughts as she lay beside the sleeping princess tended east, to a cabin beside a waterfall; and north, to a workroom in a castle and a figure bent over a book, a beaker, or a fire.

  How she wished she could take Bitterblue north to Randa City and hide her there as they'd hidden her grandfather. North to Raffin's comfort, Raffin's patience and care. But even ignoring the complications of her own status at Randa's court, it was impossible. Unthinkable to hide the child in such an obvious place, and so close to Leck's dominion; unthinkable to take this crisis to those Katsa held most dear. She would not entangle Raffin with a man who took away all reason, and warped intention. She would not lead Leck to her friends. She would not involve her friends at all.