Bitterblue

we promise to be honest with each other from now on? I shall make you into the most luminous queen.'

'You can't make me hurt Mama,' I say.

Father raises a hand and cracks me across the face. I'm blind and gasping and would fall if he weren't holding me up. 'I can make anyone do anything,' he says with perfect calm.

'You can't make me hurt Mama,' I yell through my face that is stinging and running with tears and snot. 'One day I'm going to be big enough to kill you.'

Father is laughing again. 'Sweetheart,' he says, forcing me back into his embrace. 'Oh, see how perfect you are. You will be my masterpiece.'

When Mama and Thiel come through the hidden door, Father is murmuring to me and I'm resting my cheek on his nice shoulder, safe in his arms, wondering why the room smells like smoke and why my nose hurts so much. 'Bitterblue?' Mama says, sounding scared. I raise my face to her. Her eyes go wide and she comes to me and pulls me away from Father. 'What did you do?' she hisses at Father. 'You struck her. You animal. I'll kill you.'

'Darling, don't be silly,' Father says, standing, looming over us. Mama and I are so small, so small wound together, and I'm confused because Mama is angry at Father. Father says to Mama, 'I didn't strike her. You did.'

'I know that I did not,' Mama says.

'I tried to stop you,' Father says, 'but I couldn't, and you struck her.'

'You will never convince me of that,' Mama says, her words clear, her voice beautiful inside her chest, where I'm pressing my ear.

'Interesting,' Father says. He studies us for a moment, head tilted, then says to Mama, 'She is a lovely age. It's time she and I became better acquainted. Bitterblue and I will start having private lessons.'

Mama turns her body so that she's between me and Father. Her arms around me are like iron bars. 'You will not,' she says to Father. 'Get out. Get out of these rooms.'

'This really could not be more fascinating,' Father says. 'What if I were to tell you that Thiel struck her?'

'You struck her,' Mama says, 'and now you'll leave.'

'Brilliant!' Father says. He walks up to Mama. His fist comes out of nowhere, he punches her in the face and Mama plummets to the floor, and I'm falling again, but for real this time, falling down with Mama. 'Take some time to clean up, if you like,' Father suggests as he stands over us, nudging us with his toe. 'I have some thinking to do. We'll continue this discussion later.'

Father is gone. Thiel is kneeling, leaning over us, dripping bloody tears onto us from the fresh cuts he seems to have acquired on either cheek. 'Ashen,' he says. 'Ashen, I'm sorry. Princess Bitterblue, forgive me.'

'You didn't strike her, Thiel,' my mother says thickly, pushing herself up, pulling me into her lap and rocking me, whispering words of love to me. I cling to her, crying. There is blood everywhere. 'Help her, Thiel, won't you?' Mama says.

Thiel's firm, gentle hands are touching my nose, my cheeks, my jaw; his watery eyes are inspecting my face. 'Nothing is broken,' he says. 'Let me look at you now, Ashen. Oh, how I beg you to forgive me.'

We are all three huddled on the floor together, joined, crying. The words Mama murmurs to me are everything. When Mama speaks to Thiel again, her voice is so tired. 'You've done nothing you could help, Thiel, and you did not strike her. All of this is Leck's doing. Bitterblue,' Mama says to me. 'Is your mind clear?'

'Yes, Mama,' I whisper. 'Father hit me, and then he hit you. He wants to mold me into the perfect queen.'

'I need you to be strong, Bitterblue,' Mama says. 'Stronger than ever, for things are going to get worse.'

PART ONE Stories and Lies

(Nearly nine years later, August)

1

QUEEN BITTERBLUE NEVER meant to tell so many people so many lies.

IT ALL BEGAN with the High Court case about the madman and the watermelons. The man in question, named Ivan, lived along the River Dell in an eastern section of the city near the merchant docks. To one side of his house resided a cutter and engraver of gravestones, and to the other side was a neighbor's watermelon patch. Ivan had contrived somehow in the dark of night to replace every watermelon in the watermelon patch with a gravestone, and every gravestone in the engraver's lot with a watermelon. He'd then shoved cryptic instructions under each neighbor's door with the intention of setting each on a scavenger hunt to find his missing items, a move useless in one case and unnecessary in the other, as the watermelon-grower could not read and the gravestone- carver could see her gravestones from her doorstep quite plainly, planted in the watermelon patch two lots down. Both had guessed the culprit immediately, for Ivan's antics were not uncommon. Only a month ago, Ivan had stolen a neighbor's cow and perched her atop yet another neighbor's candle shop, where she mooed mournfully until someone climbed the roof to milk her, and where she was compelled to live for several days, the kingdom's most elevated and probably most mystified cow, while the few literate neighbors on the street worked through Ivan's cryptic clues for how to build the rope and pulley device to bring her down. Ivan was an engineer by trade.

Ivan was, in fact, the engineer who'd designed, during Leck's reign, the three city bridges.

Sitting at the high table of the High Court, Bitterblue was a trifle annoyed with her advisers, whose job it was to decide what court cases were worth the queen's time. It seemed to her that they were always doing this, sending her to preside over the kingdom's silliest business, then whisking her back to her office the moment something juicy cropped up. 'This seems like a straightforward nuisance complaint, doesn't it?' she said to the four men to her left and the four to her right, the eight judges who supported her when she was present at this table and handled the proceedings themselves when she was not. 'If so, I'll leave it to you.'

'Bones,' said Judge Quall at her right elbow.

'What?'

Judge Quall glared at Bitterblue, then glared at the parties on the floor awaiting trial. 'Anyone who mentions bones in the course of this trial will be fined,' he said sternly. 'I don't even want to hear mention of the word. Understood?'

'Lord Quall,' said Bitterblue, scrutinizing him through narrowed eyes. 'What on earth are you talking about?'

'In a recent divorce trial, Lady Queen,' said Quall, 'the defendant kept mumbling about bones for no reason, like a man off his head, and I will not sit through that again! It was distressing!'

'But you often judge murder trials. Surely you're accustomed to talk of bones.'

'This is a trial about watermelons! Watermelons are invertebrate creatures!' cried Quall.

'Yes, all right,' said Bitterblue, rubbing her face, trying to rub away her incredulous expression. 'No talk of —'

Quall flinched.

Bones, finished Bitterblue in her own mind. Everyone is mad. 'In addition to the findings of my associates,' she said, standing to go, 'the people on Ivan's street near the merchant docks who cannot read shall be taught to do so at the court's expense. Is that understood?'

Her words were met with a silence so profound that it startled her; her judges peered at her in alarm. She ran through her words again: The people shall be taught to read. Surely there was nothing so strange in that?

'It is in your power to make such a declaration,' said Quall, 'Lady Queen.' He spoke with an implication in