Bitterblue

He pulled a gold disc from his coat pocket and held it under a guttering streetlamp. When he flicked the disc open, she took the edge of his hand, adjusting the angle so that she could see what she thought she saw: a large pocket watch with a face that had not twelve, but fifteen hours, and not sixty, but fifty minutes.

'Feel like explaining this to me?'

'Oh,' he said, 'it was one of Leck's games. He had an artist who was brilliant with small mechanics and liked to tinker with timepieces. Leck got her to make pocket watches that divided the half day into fifteen hours, but ran through them more quickly to make up the difference. Apparently, he liked to have all the people around him talking gibberish about the time, and believing their own gibberish. 'It's half past fourteen, Lord King. Would you like your lunch?' That sort of thing.'

How creepy that this should sound familiar as he said it. Not a memory, not anything specific, just a feeling that she'd always known pocket watches like these but hadn't thought them worth considering for the past eight years. 'He had a perverted sense of humor,' she said.

'They're popular now, in certain circles. Worth a small fortune,' Saf said quietly, 'but considered to be stolen property. Leck compelled the woman to build them without compensating her. Then, presumably, he murdered her, as he did most of his artists, and hoarded the watches for himself. They made their way to the black market once he died. I'm recovering them for the woman's family.'

'Do they keep good time?'

'Yes, but you need to work through some tricky arithmetic to figure out the real time.'

'Yes,' Bitterblue said. 'I suppose you could convert everything into minutes. Twelve times sixty is seven hundred twenty, and fifteen times fifty is seven hundred fifty. So our seven-hundred-twenty-minute half day equals its seven-hundred-fifty-minute half day. Let's see . . . Right now, the watch reads a time of nearly twenty-five past two. That's one hundred twenty-five total minutes, which, divided by seven hundred fifty, should equal our time in minutes divided by seven hundred twenty . . . so, seven hundred twenty times one hundred twenty-five is . . . give me a moment . . . ninety thousand . . . divided by seven hundred fifty . . . is one hundred twenty . . . which means . . . well! The numbers are quite neat, aren't they? It's just about two o'clock. I should go home.'

Saf had begun to chuckle partway through this litany. When, right on cue, a distant clock tower chimed twice, he burst into laughter.

'I, for one, would find it simpler to memorize which time signifies what,' Bitterblue added.

'Naturally,' Saf said, still chuckling.

'What's so funny?'

'I should know by now not to be surprised by anything you say or do, shouldn't I, Sparks?'

His voice had gone gentle somehow. Teasing. They stood close, heads bent together over the watch, her fingers still holding his hand. She understood something suddenly, not with her mind, but in the air that touched her throat and made her shiver when she looked up into his bruised face.

'Ah,' she said. 'Good night, Saf,' then she slipped away.

11

NOTHING HAD HAPPENED. Still, the next day, she couldn't stop thinking about it. Astonishing, how much thought could be generated about nothing. Heat came upon her at the most inconvenient moments, so that she was certain everyone who looked into her eyes knew exactly what she was thinking about. It was a good thing, really, that the Council meeting was planned for that night. She needed to cool down before she went out again.

Katsa burst into her rooms far too early. 'Po tells me you need sword practice,' she said, then committed an outrage by pulling Bitterblue's sheets away.

'I don't even have a sword yet,' Bitterblue moaned, trying to burrow back under. 'They're making it.'

'As if we'd be starting with anything but wooden swords. Come on! Get up! Think how satisfying it'll be to attack me with a sword.'

Katsa rushed out again. For a moment, Bitterblue lay there, bemoaning all existence. Then she rolled up and out of bed, the plush red softness of the carpet swallowing her toes. Bitterblue's bedroom walls were upholstered with a fabric woven in exquisite patterns of scarlet, russet, silver, and gold. The ceiling was high, deep, and dark blue like in her sitting room, scattered with gold and scarlet stars. The tile of the bathing room shone gold through a doorway across from her. It was a room like a sunrise.

As she pulled off her shift, she caught her own reflection in the tall mirror. It stopped her. She stared at herself, suddenly thinking of two incongruous people: Danzhol, who had kissed her, and Saf.

I do not suit this dazzling room, she thought. My eyes are big and dull. My hair is heavy and my chin pointy. I'm so small that my husband won't be able to find me in the bed. And when he does, he'll discover that my breasts are uneven and I'm shaped like an eggplant.

She snorted, laughing at herself; then was suddenly close to tears, kneeling on the floor before the mirror, naked. My mother was so pretty.

Is an eggplant ever pretty?

Nothing came through the pith of her mind to answer that question.

She remembered every part of her body Danzhol had touched. How far removed his kiss had been from how she'd imagined kissing. She knew that wasn't how it was supposed to feel. She had seen Katsa and Po kissing, she'd stumbled upon them once in her own stables, one of them pushing the other against a tower of hay, and once at the end of a corridor late at night, where they'd been little more than dark shapes and glimmers of gold, making small noises, barely moving, oblivious. Plainly, they enjoyed it.

But Po and Katsa are so beautiful, Bitterblue thought. Of course they know the right way to do it.

She had an imagination, and she wasn't shy of her own body; she'd made discoveries. And she knew the mechanics of two people. Helda had explained it to her, and she was pretty sure her mother had too, a long time ago. But understanding want and understanding mechanics did not go far toward elucidating how you could invite someone else to see you, to touch you in that way.

She hoped that all the kisses of her life, and all the things beyond, would not be with lords who only wanted her money. How simple it would be if she really were a baker girl. Baker girls met kitchen boys, and no one was a lord after a queen's money, and maybe it didn't matter so much if you were plain.

She hugged herself.

Then she stood, ashamed of herself for dwelling on these things when there was so much else to worry about.

PRINCE RAFFIN, KING Randa's son and the heir to the Middluns throne, and his companion Bann were also at sword practice, not looking entirely awake.

'Lady Queen,' Raffin said, bending down from great heights to place a kiss on Bitterblue's hand. 'How are you?'

'I'm so glad you came,' said Bitterblue. 'Both of you.'

'We are too,' said Raffin. 'Though I'm afraid we had no choice, Lady Queen. We were attacked by Nanderan enemies of the Council. Katsa convinced us we'd be safer joining her wherever she went.' The yellow-haired prince then beamed down upon Bitterblue as if he hadn't a trouble in the world.

Bann, who took Bitterblue's other hand, was, like Raffin, a Council leader and medicine maker who radiated calm—a broad mountain of a man, with eyes like the gray sea. 'Lady Queen,' he said. 'It's lovely to see you. I'm afraid they pulverized our workrooms.'

'We'd spent almost a year on that nausea infusion,' said Raffin grumpily. 'Months of us heaving our guts up, all lost.'

'I don't know, it sounds to me as if you were quite successful,' said Katsa.

'It was meant to be an infusion for reducing nausea!' Raffin said. 'Not inducing it. We were close, I'm sure of it.'

'That last batch barely caused you to vomit at all,' Bann said.

'Wait,' Katsa said suspiciously. 'Is this why you both vomited on me while I was rescuing you? You'd been