Graceling (Graceling Realm #1)(67)

“Did he never want to use you as a fighter?”

“Certainly, and I’ve helped him. Not as you’ve helped Randa – my father isn’t the bully Randa is. But it was my mind that my mother feared him using. She wanted my mind to be my own, and not his.”

It didn’t seem right to Katsa that a mother should have to protect her child from its father. But she didn’t know much of mothers and fathers. She hadn’t had a mother or a father to protect her from Randa’s use. Perhaps rather than fathers, it was kings that were the danger.

“Your grandfather agreed that no one should know the truth of your Grace?”

“My grandfather agreed.”

“Would your father be very angry, if he learned the truth now?”

“He’d be furious, with me, my mother, and my grandfather. They’d all be furious. And rightfully so; it’s a huge deception we’ve pulled off, Katsa.”

“You had to.”

“Nonetheless. It would not be easily forgiven.”

Katsa pulled herself onto a jumble of stones and stopped to look around. They seemed no closer to the tops of the peaks that rose before them. It was only by looking back, to the forest far below, that she knew they’d climbed; that, and the drop in temperature. She shifted her bags and stepped back onto the trail.

And then the thought of queens protecting children from kings registered more deeply in her mind.

Po. Leck has a daughter.

“Yes, Bitterblue. She’s ten.”

Bitterblue could have a role in this strange affair. IfLeck was trying to hurt her, it would explain Queen Ashen hiding away with her.

Po stopped in his tracks and turned to look at her anxiously. “If he cuts up animals for pleasure, I hate to think what he would want with his own daughter.”

The question hung in the air between them, eerie and horrible. Katsa thought suddenly of the two dead little girls.

“Let’s hope you’re wrong,” Po said, his hand to his stomach as if he felt ill.

“Let’s move faster,” Katsa said, “just in case I’m right.”

They set off almost at a run. They followed the path upward, through the mountains that separated them from Monsea and whatever truth it contained.

———

They woke the next morning on the floor of a dusty hut to a dead fire and a winter cold that seeped through the crack under the door. The frozen stars melted as Katsa and Po climbed, and light spread across the horizon. The path grew steeper and more rocky. The pace of their climb pushed away the chill and the stiffness that Katsa didn’t feel but that Po complained of.

“I’ve been thinking about how we should approach Leck’s court,” Po said. He climbed from one rock to another and jumped to a third.

“What were you thinking?”

“Well, I’d like to be more certain of our suspicions before meeting him.”

“Should we find an inn outside the court, and stay there our first night?”

“That’s my thought.”

“But we shouldn’t waste any time.”

“No. If we can’t learn anything helpful in one night, then perhaps we should go ahead and present ourselves to the court.” They climbed, and Katsa wondered what that would be like – whether they would pose as friends to the court and infiltrate it gradually, or whether they would enter on the offensive and instigate an enormous fight. She pictured Leck as a smirking, insincere man standing at the end of a velvet carpet, his single eye narrowed and clever. She imagined herself shooting an arrow into his heart, so that he crumpled to his knees, bled all over his carpet, and died at the feet of his stewards. At Po’s command, her strike. It would have to be at Po’s command, for until they knew the truth of his Grace, she couldn’t trust her own judgment. Po? That’s true, isn’t it?

He took a moment to gather her thoughts. “I’ve some ideas about that as well,” he said. “Once we’re in Monsea, would you consent to do what I say, and only what I say? Just until I have a sense of Leck’s power? Would you ever consent to that?”

“Of course I would, Po, in this case.”

“And you must expect me to behave strangely. I’ll have to pretend I’m Graced with fighting, no more, and that I believe every word he says.”

“And I’ll practice my archery, and my knife throwing,” Katsa said. “For I’ve a feeling that when all is asked and revealed, King Leck will find himself on the end of my blade.”

Po shook his head and did not smile. “I’ve a feeling it’s not going to be that easy.”

———

The third day of their crossing was the windiest, and the coldest. The mountain pass led them between two peaks that were hidden, sometimes, behind cyclones of snow. Their boots crunched through patches of snow; and flakes drifted onto their shoulders from the thin blue sky and melted into Katsa’s hair.

“I like winter in the mountains,” she said, but Po laughed.

“This isn’t winter in the mountains. This is autumn in the mountains, and a mild autumn at that. Winter is ferocious.”

“I think I should like that, too,” she said, and Po laughed again.

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. You’d thrive on the challenge of it.”