Graceling (Graceling Realm #1)(87)
Between two mountain peaks on Katsa’s map was a path that seemed likely to be the least complicated route into Sunder. Grella’s Pass, according to the scrawled words, and presumably the only route through the peaks that had been traveled by another.
Katsa rolled up her maps and slipped them into a saddlebag. She hoisted the girl back up into the saddle. “Who is Grella?” she asked.
Bitterblue snorted and said nothing. Katsa swung onto the horse behind the child. They rode for a number of minutes before Bitterblue spoke.
“Grella was a famous Monsean mountain explorer,” she said. “He died in the pass that bears his name.”
“Was he Graced?”
“No. He wasn’t Graced like you. But he was mad like you.”
The sting of the remark didn’t touch Katsa. There was no reason for Bitterblue to believe that a who’d only recently seen her first mountain could guide them through Grella’s Pass. Katsa herself wasn’t sure of it. She knew only that when she weighed the danger of the King of Monsea against the danger of bears, wolves, blizzards, and ice, she found with utter certainty her Grace to be better equipped to face the mountains.
So Katsa said nothing, and she didn’t change her mind. When the wind picked up and Katsa felt Bitterblue shivering, she drew the child close, and covered her hands with her own. The horse stumbled its way upward, and Katsa thought about their saddle. If she took it apart and soaked it and beat it, its leather would soften. It would make a rough coat for Bitterblue, or perhaps trousers. There was no reason to waste it, if it could be made to provide warmth; and very soon the horse would need it no longer.
———
They climbed blindly, even during the day, never knowing what they might encounter next, for the hills and trees rose before them and hid the higher terrain from their view. Katsa caught squirrels and fish and mice for their meals, and rabbits, if they were lucky. Beside their fire every night, she stretched and dried the pelts of their dinners. She rubbed fish oils and fat into the hides. She pieced together the pelts, experimenting with them and persisting until she’d made the child a rough fur hood, with ends that wrapped around her neck like a scarf.
“It smells funny,” Bitterblue said, “but it’s warm.”
That was all Katsa needed to hear.
The terrain grew rougher, and the brush wilder and more desperate looking. At night as the fire burned and Bitterblue slept, Katsa heard rustles around their camp that she hadn’t heard before. Rustles that made the horse nervous; and howls sometimes, not so far away, that woke the child and brought her, shivering, to Katsa’s side, admitting to nightmares. About strange howling monsters and sometimes her mother, she said, not seeming to want to elaborate. Katsa didn’t prod.
It was on one of these nights when the sound of the wolves drove the child to Katsa that Katsa set down the stick she was whittling into an arrow and put her arm around the girl. She rubbed warmth into Bitterblue’s chapped hands.
And then she told the child, because it was on her own mind, about Katsa’s cousin Raffin, who loved the art of medicine and would be ten times the king his father was; and about Helda, who had befriended Katsa when no one else would and thought of nothing but marrying her off to some lord; and about the Council, and the night Katsa and Oll and Giddon had rescued Bitterblue’s grandfather and Katsa had scuffled with a stranger in Murgon’s gardens and left him lying unconscious on the ground – a stranger who’d turned out to be Po.
Bitterblue laughed at that, and Katsa told her how she and Po had become friends, and how Raffin had nursed Bitterblue’s grandfather back to health; and how Katsa and Po had gone to Sunder to unravel the truth behind the kidnapping and followed the clues into Monsea and to the mountains, the forest, and the girl.
“You aren’t really like the person in the stories,” Bitterblue said. “The stories I heard before I met you.”
Katsa braced herself against the flood of memories that never seemed to lose their freshness and always made her ashamed. “The stories are true,” she said. “I am that person.”
“But how can you be? You wouldn’t break an innocent man’s arm, or cut off his fingers.”
“I did those things for my uncle,” Katsa said, “at a time when he had power over me.”
And Katsa felt certain again that they were doing the right thing, to climb toward Grella’s Pass, to the only place Leck wouldn’t follow. Because Katsa couldn’t protect Bitterblue unless her power remained her own. Her arm tightened around the girl. “You should know that my Grace isn’t just fighting, child. My Grace is survival. I’ll bring you through these mountains.”
The child didn’t answer, but she put her head on Katsa’s lap, curled her arm onto Katsa’s leg, and burrowed against her. She fell asleep like that, to the howl of the wolves, and Katsa decided not to pick up her whittling again. They dozed together before the fire; and then Katsa woke and lifted the girl onto the horse. She took the reins and led the beast upward through the Monsean night.
———
The day came when the terrain grew impossible for the horse. Katsa didn’t want to kill the animal, but she forced herself to consider it. There was leather to be gotten from him. And if he were left alive, he would wander the hills and give the soldiers who found him a clue to the fugitives’ location. On the other hand, if Katsa killed the horse, she couldn’t possibly dispose of his entire body. They would have to leave the carcass on the mountainside for the scavengers; and if soldiers found it, its bones picked clean, it would serve as a much more definite marker of their location and direction than a horse wandering free. Katsa decided with some relief that the horse must live. They removed his bags, his saddle, and his bridle. They wished him well and sent him on his way.