'My mother had a servant named Ara who disappeared,' whispered Bitterblue. 'I remember.'
'Lady Queen?'
'She embroidered in cipher, Helda! Mama did. She must have been trying to create a record she could read to remember what was real. It must have taken her hours to write a single small passage! Here, help me. My name is the keyword.
'He is, Lady Queen. What in the world are you going on about?'
'Tell no one else,' Bitterblue said. 'Helda. Until we know what it means, tell no one, and help me arrange them.'
They pulled the sheets out of her closets and off her bed and took an inventory: 228 sheets with embroidery lining the edges; 89 pillow-casings. Ashen seemed not to have dated anything; there was no way to determine the order to place them in, so Bitterblue and Helda arranged them in neat, arithmetically divided piles on her bedroom floor. And Bitterblue read and read and read.
Certain words and phrases recurred often, sometimes filling up an entire sheet. He lies. He lies. Blood. I can't remember. I must remember. I must kill him. I must get Bitterblue away.
IN HER OFFICES, Bitterblue's advisers, as requested, had begun to educate her about the lords and ladies of her kingdom. They began with those who lived the farthest away: their names, their property, families, tax paid, their particular personalities and skills. None of them were introduced to her as 'the lord with a predilection for murdering truthseekers'—none, in fact, were remarkable at all—and Bitterblue knew she would get nowhere this way. She wondered if she could ever ask Teddy and Saf for a list of the lords and ladies who'd stolen most grievously from their people. Could she ever ask Teddy and Saf for anything again?
Then, as the days led to October, there was an explosion of urgent paperwork in the offices. 'What on earth is going on?' she asked Thiel as she signed work orders blearily, pushed charters about, and fought with piles of paper that grew faster than she could keep up with them.
'It's always like this in October, Lady Queen,' Thiel reminded her sympathetically, 'as everyone across the kingdom tries to wrap up their business and prepare for the freeze of winter.'
'Is it?' Bitterblue couldn't remember an October like this one. Then again, particular months were so hard to isolate in her memory; every month was the same. Or, every month had been, until the night she'd stepped into the city and changed a hundred facets of her life.
She tried again one day to broach the topic of truthseekers being killed. 'That trial I went to,' she said, 'with the Lienid-Monsean who turned out to have been framed—the one who was friends with Prince Po—'
'The trial you went to without informing us, Lady Queen, then invited the accused to your rooms afterwards,' Runnemood said in an oily voice.
'I invited him because my court had wronged him and he was a friend of my cousin's,' Bitterblue said calmly. 'And I went because it's my right to go wherever I like. His trial has gotten me thinking. In my High Court, I want witnesses to the witnesses from now on. In my prisons, I want everyone retried. Everyone, you understand? If this Lienid-Monsean was nearly convicted of a murder he didn't commit, so could everyone else in my prisons have been. Couldn't they?'
'Oh, of course not, Lady Queen,' said Runnemood with a weariness and an exasperation that Bitterblue had no sympathy for. She was also weary and exasperated, her mind returning too often to bright little pictures on sheets that revealed too little that was helpful, and too much pain.
I wish I'd given my child a kind father. I wish I'd been unfaithful then. Such choices don't occur to a girl of eighteen when Leck has chosen her. Choice vanishes in his fog. How can I protect her in this fog?
One day at her desk, Bitterblue lost her breath. The room was tilting, she was falling; she could not get the air she needed into her throat and lungs. Then Thiel was kneeling beside her, holding tight to her hands, instructing her to take one slow breath after another.
'Lorassim tea,' he said firmly to Darby, who'd just climbed the stairs with a stack of correspondence, his footsteps pounding like the hammer blows that would bring her tower down.
'Lady Queen,' Thiel said after Darby had gone. His distress was clear in his voice. 'Something is wrong in recent days; I can tell that you're suffering. Has someone hurt you? Are you injured, or ill? I beg you to tell me what I can do to help you. Give me a task, Lady Queen, or tell me what to say.'
'Did you ever give comfort to my mother?' she whispered. 'I remember you were there sometimes, Thiel, but I can't remember much beyond that.'
A moment passed. 'When I was lucid,' he said, his voice a deep well of sadness, 'I tried to give comfort to your mother.'
'Are you going to disappear from your eyes now?' she asked accusingly, glaring into those eyes.
'Lady Queen,' he said, 'it's no use if we both disappear. I'm still here with you. Please tell me what's going on, Lady Queen. Is it to do with that fellow who was wrongly tried? Have you become friends with him?'
Rood came into the office then, carrying a cup of tea, which he brought to her, kneeling as well. 'Tell us what we can do, Lady Queen,' he said to her, wrapping her hands around the cup with his own.
Runnemood came in next. 'What's all this?' he demanded at the sight of Thiel and Rood on their knees beside Bitterblue's chair.
'Just tell me,' Bitterblue whispered.
'Tell you what?' snapped Runnemood.
'What you saw,' said Bitterblue. 'Stop torturing me and just tell me. I know you were healers. What did he do? Just tell me!'
Rood backed away from her and found a chair.
'Lady Queen,' said Runnemood grimly, squaring his feet. 'Do not ask us to call those things to mind. It was years ago and we have made our peace.'
'Peace!' Bitterblue cried. 'You have not made your peace!'
'He cut them,' Runnemood said through gritted teeth, 'often until they were dying. Then he brought them to us to mend. He thought himself a medical genius. He thought he was turning Monsea into a land of medical marvels, but all he was doing was hurting people until they died. He was a madman. Are you happy? Is this information worth forcing us to remember? Worth risking our sanity and even our lives?'
Runnemood went to his brother, who was shaking and crying now. Runnemood helped Rood up, then practically carried him out the door. And then she was alone with Thiel, who had turned into a shell after all, still kneeling beside her, cold, stiff, and empty. It was her fault. They'd been talking of something real and she'd ruined it with questions she'd never meant to ask. 'I'm sorry,' she whispered to him. 'Thiel. I'm sorry.'
'Lady Queen,' he said after a moment. 'These are dangerous topics to speak aloud. I beg you to be more careful in what you say.'
TWO WEEKS PASSED and she did not go to see Saf. There was too much, with the embroidery, with her mountains of work, with Po ill. Also, she was ashamed.
'I've been having the most wonderful dreams,' Po told her when she visited him in the infirmary. 'But not the kind that are depressing to wake from when you realize they're not true. You know what I mean?'
He lay on sheets soaked with sweat, the covers thrown back, fanning himself with his own open shirt. As Madlen had instructed her to do, Bitterblue dipped a cloth in cold water, wiped his sticky face, and tried not to shiver, for the fire was kept low in this room. 'Yes,' she said, lying, because she didn't want to burden her sick cousin with the terrible dreams she'd been having, dreams of Ashen being shot in the back by Leck's arrow. 'Tell me your dreams.'
'I'm myself,' Po said, 'and I'm as myself, with all the same powers and limitations and secrets. But there's no guilt about my lies, no doubt, because I've made a choice, and it's the best choice available to me. When I wake, everything feels a bit lighter, you know?'
