Bitterblue

Her uncle had given her a necklace with a stone of that purplish blue hue. In daylight or firelight the gem was alive with a brilliance that shifted and changed. It was a Lienid sapphire.

'You were given your name after your eyes settled,' she said, 'and by the Lienid.'

'Yes,' he said, simply. 'I've a Monsean name too, of course, given to me by my true family when I was born. But Sapphire is the name I've always known.'

His eyes were rather too pretty, she thought, his entire freckled, innocent aspect was too pretty, for a person she wouldn't trust to safekeep anything she ever hoped to see again. He was not like his eyes. 'Saf, what is your Grace?'

He grinned. 'It's taken you a good week to come out and ask, Sparks.'

'I'm a patient person.'

'Not to mention that you only believe what you've worked out for yourself.'

She snorted. 'Which is as it should be, where you're concerned.'

'I don't know what my Grace is.'

This earned him a skeptical look. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

'Just what I said. I don't know.'

'Balls. Don't Graces become plain during childhood?'

He shrugged. 'Whatever it is, it must be a thing I've never had any use for. Like, oh, I don't know, eating a cake the size of a barrel without getting indigested, except that's not it, because I've tried that one. Trust me,' he said, with a roll of his eyes and an apathetic, long-suffering wave. 'I've tried everything.'

'Right,' said Bitterblue. 'At least I know it's not telling lies people believe, because I don't believe you.'

'I don't lie to you, Sparks,' said Saf, not sounding particularly offended.

Subsiding into silence, Bitterblue began walking again. She'd never seen the east city lit by the sun. A dirty stone flower shop leaned perilously to one side, buttressed with wooden beams and slapped over in some places with bright white paint. Elsewhere, sloppy wooden planks covered a hole in a tin roof, the planks painted silver to match. A bit farther on, broken wooden shutters had been mended with strips of canvas, the wood and canvas alike painted blue like the sky.

Why would anyone go to the trouble of painting shutters—or a house, or anything—without repairing them properly first?

WHEN BITTERBLUE SHOWED her ring to the Lienid Guard at the gatehouse and entered the castle, it was full light. When, hood pulled low, she showed the ring again and whispered yesterday's cipher key, 'maple tart,' to the guards outside her rooms, they cracked the big doors open for her, their own heads bowed.

Inside her entrance foyer, she took stock. Far down the hallway to the left, the door to Helda's apartments was closed. To the right, Bitterblue heard no one moving about in the sitting room. Turning left and entering her bedroom, she pulled her cloak over her head. When her eyes emerged from the garment, she jumped, almost screamed, for Po sat on the chest against the wall, gold gleaming in his ears and on his fingers, arms crossed, appraising her evenly.

6

'COUSIN,' BITTERBLUE SAID, taking hold of herself. 'Would it kill you to be announced, like a normal guest?'

Po raised an eyebrow. 'I've known since I arrived last night that you weren't where everyone supposed you to be. As the night wore on, that state of affairs did not change. At what point would you have liked me to rustle up a clerk and demand to be announced?'

'All right, but you've no right to sneak into my bedroom.'

'I didn't sneak in. Helda sent me in. I told her you wanted me to wake you with breakfast.'

'If you lied your way in, then you snuck your way in.' Then she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a breakfast tray piled high with dirty dishes and used cutlery. 'You've eaten everything!' she said indignantly.

'It's hungry work,' he said blandly, 'sitting up in my rooms all night, waiting and worrying.'

A long moment of silence stretched out between them. Her conversation to this point had mostly been an attempt to distract him while she gathered her feelings: gathered them and ejected them, so that she could face him with a mind that was blank and smooth, with no thoughts for him to read. She was fairly good at this. Even bleary-headed and shaky with fatigue, she was good at emptying her mind.

Head tilted now, he seemed to be watching her. Only six people in the world knew that Po had no eyesight and that his Grace was not hand-fighting, as he claimed; that it was a kind of mind reading instead, that allowed him to sense people and the physicality of things. In the eight years since the fall that had lost him his sight, he'd perfected the technique of pretending he could see, and tended to make it his habit even with the six who knew he couldn't. The deceit was a necessity. People didn't like mind readers, and kings exploited them; Po had been pretending not to be one all his life. It was a bit too late to stop pretending now.

She thought she knew what Po was doing, sitting there, his silver-gold eyes glimmering at her softly. He very much wanted to know where she'd been all night and why she was disguised—but Po didn't like to steal the thoughts of his friends. His mind reading had limits: He could only ever read thoughts that bore some relation to himself; but, after all, most of a person's thoughts during an interrogation bore some relation to the interrogator. And so right now, he was trying to come up with a nonaggressive way to ask her for an explanation: vague and non-leading words that would allow her to answer as she wished, and not force an emotional reaction that he would be able to read.

She went to inspect the breakfast tray and, scavenging, found half a piece of toast he'd spared. Famished, she bit into it. 'I must order you a breakfast now,' she said, 'and eat it as heartlessly as you ate mine.'

'Bitterblue,' he began. 'That Graceling you parted ways with outside the castle. That splendid fellow with the muscles and the Lienid gold—'

She spun back to face him, understanding quite well what he was implying, appalled at the range of his Grace, and furious, because this was not a nonaggressive question. 'Po,' she snapped, 'I advise you to abandon that tack and try a different approach altogether. Why don't you tell me the news from Nander?'

He set his mouth, not pleased. 'King Drowden is deposed,' he said.

'What?' squawked Bitterblue. 'Deposed?'

'There was a siege,' Po said. 'He lives in the dungeons now, with the rats. There's going to be a trial.'

'But why have I received no messenger?'

'Because I'm your messenger. Giddon and I came straight to you the moment things stabilized. We rode eighteen hours every day and changed horses more often than we ate. Just imagine my gratification when we rode in, on the verge of collapse, and then I got to stay up all night, wondering where the seas you'd gotten to and whether I should be raising the alarm and how I was going to explain your disappearance to Katsa.'

'What's happening in Nander? Who's ruling?'

'A committee of Council members.'

The Council was the name for the undercover association of Katsa and Po, Giddon and Prince Raffin, and all their secret friends devoted to organized mayhem. Katsa had started it years ago, to stop the world's worst kings from bullying their own people. 'The Council is ruling Nander?'

'Everyone on the committee is a Nanderan lord or lady who played some role in Drowden's overthrow. When we left, the committee was electing its leaders. Oll is keeping a close watch on things, but it seems to me—and Giddon agrees—that for the moment, this committee is the least disastrous option while all of Nander sorts out how to proceed. There was some talk of plopping Drowden's closest relative straight onto the throne—Drowden has no heir, but his younger half brother is a sensible man and a long standing Council ally—but there's a lot of outrage among the lords who want Drowden back—emotions are high, as I'm sure you can imagine. On the morning of our departure, Giddon and I broke up a fistfight, ate breakfast, broke up a swordfight, and got on our horses.' He rubbed his eyes. 'No one is safe as King of Nander right now.'

'Seas, Po. You must be tired.'