queen's perusal, would you?'
'A recent street map. Indeed,' Darby said, spinning around and taking off again.
'We're procuring a map, Lady Queen,' reported Thiel, turning back to Bitterblue.
'Yes,' said Bitterblue sarcastically, rubbing her head. 'I was here when it happened, Thiel.'
'Is everything all right, Lady Queen? You seem a bit—ruffled.'
'She's tired,' Runnemood announced, perched in a window with his arms crossed. 'Her Majesty is tired of charters and judgments and reports. If she wishes a map, she shall have one.'
It annoyed Bitterblue that Runnemood understood. 'I want to have more say in where I go on my tours from now on,' she snapped.
'And so you shall,' said Runnemood grandly. Honestly, she did not know how Thiel could stand him. Thiel was so plain and Runnemood so affected, yet the two of them worked together so comfortably, always capable of becoming a united front the moment Bitterblue stepped over the line of which only they knew the position. She decided to keep her mouth shut until the map arrived, to prevent herself from betraying the stratospheric heights of her irritability.
When it did arrive, it brought with it the royal librarian and a member of the Queen's Guard, Holt, for the librarian delivered so much more than she'd asked for that he couldn't carry it up the stairs without Holt's help. 'Lady Queen,' the librarian said. 'As Your Majesty's request was disobligingly unspecific, I thought it best to deliver a range of maps, to increase the odds that one pleases you. It's my fervent wish to return to my work uninterrupted by your little people.'
Bitterblue's librarian was Graced with the ability to read inhumanly fast and remember every word forever— or so he said, and certainly he seemed to have this skill. But Bitterblue wondered sometimes if he mightn't also be Graced with unpleasantness. His name was Death. It was pronounced to rhyme with 'teeth,' but Bitterblue liked to mispronounce it by accident on occasion.
'If that will be all, Lady Queen,' said Death, dumping an armload of scrolls onto the edge of her desk, 'I'll be going.'
Half of the scrolls rolled away and hit the floor with hollow thuds. 'Really,' said Thiel crossly, bending to collect them, 'I was quite clear to Darby that we wished a single, recent map. Take these away, Death. They're unnecessary.'
'All paper maps are recent,' said Death with a sniff, 'when one considers the vastness of geological time.'
'Her Majesty merely wishes to see the city as it is today,' said Thiel.
'A city is a living organism, always changing—'
'Her Majesty wishes—'
'I wish you would all go away,' said Bitterblue desolately, more to herself than to anyone else. Both men continued arguing. Runnemood joined in. And then Holt, the Queen's Guard, placed his maps on the desk, neatly so they would not fall, tipped Thiel over one shoulder, tipped Death over the other, and stood under his load. In the astonished silence that followed, Holt lumbered toward Runnemood, who, understanding, let out a snort and stalked from the room of his own accord. Then Holt carried his outraged burdens away on either shoulder, just as they got their voices back. Bitterblue could hear them screaming their indignation all the way down the stairs.
Holt was a guard in his forties with lovely eyes of gray and silver. A large, broad man with a friendly, open face, he was Graced with strength.
'That was odd,' Bitterblue mused aloud. But it was nice to be alone. Opening a scroll randomly, she saw that it was an astronomical map of the constellations above the city. Cursing Death, she pushed it aside. The next one was a map of the castle before Leck's renovations, when the courtyards had numbered four instead of seven, and the roofs of her tower, the courtyards, and the upper corridors had contained no glass. The next was, amazingly, a street map of the city, but a strange map with words obliterated here and there and no bridges at all. The fourth, finally, was a modern-day map, for the bridges were shown. Yes, it was quite clearly present-day, for it was titled 'Bitterblue City,' not 'Leck City' or the name of any previous king.
Bitterblue shifted the stacks of paper on her desk so that they held down the corners of her map, spitefully pleased to find a use for them that didn't involve her having to read them. Then she settled in to study the map, determined, at least, to have a better sense of geography the next time she snuck out.
EVERYONE REALLY IS
'For someone who doesn't like to talk about bones, Quall,' Bitterblue had said without prologue, 'you bring them up an awful lot.'
His eyes had passed over her, empty; then sharpening and momentarily confused. 'Indeed, I do, Lady Queen,' he'd said, seeming to pull himself together. 'Forgive me. Sometimes I get lost in thought and lose track of the moment.'
Later, at dinner in her sitting room, Bitterblue asked Helda, 'Do you notice any peculiar behavior at this court?'
'Peculiar behavior, Lady Queen?'
'Like, for example, today Holt picked up Thiel and Death and carried them out of my office on his shoulders because they were annoying me,' said Bitterblue. 'Isn't that a bit odd?'
'Very odd,' declared Helda. 'I'd like to see him try that with me. We've a couple of new gowns for you, Lady Queen. Would you like to try them this evening?'
Bitterblue was indifferent to her gowns, but she always agreed to a fitting, for she found it soothing to be fussed over by Helda—Helda's soft, quick touches and her mutterings through a mouthful of pins. Her careful eyes and hands that considered Bitterblue's body and made the right decisions. Fox helped tonight too, holding fabric aside or smoothing it as Helda asked her to. It was centering to be touched. 'I admire Fox's skirts that are divided into trousers,' said Bitterblue to Helda. 'Might I try some?'
Later, after Fox had gone and Helda had retired to bed, Bitterblue unearthed her trousers and Fox's hood from the floor of the dressing room. Bitterblue wore a knife in her boot during the day and slept with knives in sheathes on each arm at night. It was what Katsa had taught her to do. That night, Bitterblue strapped on all three knives, as security against the unpredictable.
Just before leaving, she rummaged through Ashen's chest, where she kept not only Ashen's jewelry but some of her own. She had so many useless things—pretty, she supposed, but it wasn't in her nature to wear jewelry. Finding a plain gold choker that her uncle had sent from Lienid, she tucked it into the shirt inside her hood. There were such things as pawnshops under the bridges. She'd noticed them last night, and one or two had been open.
'I ONLY WORK with people I know,' said the man at the first pawnshop.
At the second pawnshop, the woman behind the counter said exactly the same thing. Still standing in the doorway, Bitterblue pulled the choker out and held it up for her to see. 'Hm,' the woman said. 'Let me take a look at that.'
Half a minute later, Bitterblue had traded the choker for an enormous pile of coins and a terse 'Just don't tell me where you got it, boy.' It was so many more coins than Bitterblue had reckoned for that her pockets sagged and jingled in the streets, until she thought to jam some of them into her boots. Not comfortable, but far less conspicuous.
She saw a street fight she didn't understand, nasty, abrupt, and bloody, for barely had two groups of men started pushing and shoving each other than knives came out flashing and thrusting. She ran on, ashamed but not wanting to see how it ended. Katsa and Po could have broken them up. Bitterblue should have, as the queen, but she wasn't the queen right now, and she would've been mad to try.
The story under Monster Bridge that night was told by a tiny woman with a huge voice who stood stock-still on the bar, grasping her skirts in her hands. She wasn't Graced, but Bitterblue was mesmerized anyway, and nettled with the sense that she'd heard this story before. It was about a man who'd fallen into a boiling hot spring in the eastern mountains, then been rescued by an enormous golden fish. It was a dramatic story involving a bizarrely colored animal, just like the tales Leck had told. Was that how she knew it? Had Leck told her it? Or had she read it in a book when she was little? If she'd read it in a book, was it a true story? If Leck had told it, was it false? How could anyone know, eight years later, what was which?
