Bitterblue (Graceling Realm, #3)

by Kristin Cashore

They touch my memory and build a story, for fifty is Father’s age and thirty-two is Mama’s. They’ve been married for fourteen years and I am nine and a half. Mama was a Lienid princess. Father visited the island kingdom of Lienid and chose her when she was only eighteen. He brought her here and she’s never been back. She misses home, her father, her brothers and sisters, her brother Ror the king.

Father is the King of Monsea. No one knows he has the two different colored eyes of a Graceling; no one wonders, for his is a terrible Grace hidden beneath his eye patch: When he speaks, his words fog people’s minds so that they’ll believe everything he says. Usually, he lies. This is why, as I sit here now, the numbers are clear but other things in my mind are muddled. Father has just been lying.

The boggy ground on the opposite shore was undeveloped, untraveled except by those who lived in Monsea’s far north, but still, for some unaccountable reason, her father had built the three bridges, each higher and more magnificent than any bridge needed to be. Winged Bridge, the closest, had a floor of white and blue marble, like clouds. Monster Bridge, the highest, had a walkway that rose as high as its highest arch. Winter Bridge, made of mirrors, was eerily hard to distinguish from the sky during the day, and sparkled with the light of the stars, the water, the city at night. They were purple and crimson shapes now in the sunset, the bridges, unreal and almost animal. Huge, slender creatures that stretched north across flashing water to useless land.

Both were ciphered and both written in hands she knew instantly, the messy scrawl belonging to Lady Katsa of the Middluns, the careful, strong markings belonging to Prince Po of Lienid, who was Skye’s younger brother, and, with Skye, one of the two unmarried sons of Ror who would make Bitterblue dreadful husbands.

It was the story—true—of how her own father had come to the Monsean court as a boy. He’d come begging, wearing an eye patch, saying nothing of who he was or where he was from. He’d charmed the king and queen with tall tales he’d invented, tales about a land where the animals were violently colored, and the buildings were wide and tall as mountains, and glorious armies rose out of rock. No one had known who his parents were, or why he wore an eye patch, or why he’d told such stories, but he’d been loved. The king and queen, childless, had adopted him as their own son. When Leck had turned sixteen, the king, having no living family, had named Leck his heir.

Days later, the king and queen were dead from a mysterious illness that no one at court felt the need to question. The old king’s advisers threw themselves into the river, for Leck could make people do things like that—or could push them into the river himself, then tell the witnesses that they’d seen something other than what they’d seen. Suicide, rather than murder. Leck’s thirty-five-year reign of mental devastation had begun.

He hadn’t been a person who cackled and leered and rubbed his hands together villainously like the storyteller said. He’d been simpler than that. He’d spoken simply, reacted simply, and performed acts of violence with a simple, expressionless precision. He’d calmly done whatever he’d needed to do to make things the way he wanted them.

It was one of the horrible true stories from Katsa’s childhood, when Katsa’s uncle Randa, king of the seven kingdoms’ most central kingdom, the Middluns, had used her for her fighting skill, forcing her to kill and maim his enemies on his behalf.

They were the pleasant brown-haired fellow, Teddy, and his Graceling friend, Saf.

Leck’s death at the end of Katsa’s dagger.

You’re in King Leck’s maze. It’s all corridors leading nowhere, with his rooms in the middle.”

she’d wondered why Leck had built a maze around his rooms,

Leck had arranged for the shrubberies in the great courtyard to be cut into fantastical shapes: proud, posing people with flowers for eyes and hair; fierce, monstrous flowering animals. Bears and mountain lions, enormous birds. A fountain in one corner poured noisy water into a deep pool. Balconies stretched up the courtyard walls, all five stories. Gargoyles, more gargoyles, perched on high ledges, scaled walls, leering, poking heads out shyly. The glass ceiling reflected the courtyard lanterns back at Bitterblue, like large muddy stars. Why had Leck cared so much about his shrubberies? Why had he fitted glass ceilings to the courtyards and to so many of the castle’s roofs?

She listened hard, hoping that this man would say something new, a missing image or word, a key that would turn in a lock and open a door behind which all her memories and all she’d been told would make sense.

“I was raised on a Lienid ship by Lienid sailors,” he admitted finally. “I’m about as likely to steal from a sailor as I am to put a nail in my head. My true family is Monsean, and a few months ago I came here to spend some time with my sister. I met Teddy, who offered me a job in his printing shop, which is good work, until I get the urge for leaving again. There. You’ve had my story.”

Only six people in the world knew that Po had no eyesight and that his Grace was not hand-fighting, as he claimed; that it was a kind of mind reading instead, that allowed him to sense people and the physicality of things. In the eight years since the fall that had lost him his sight, he’d perfected the technique of pretending he could see, and tended to make it his habit even with the six who knew he couldn’t. The deceit was a necessity. People didn’t like mind readers, and kings exploited them; Po had been pretending not to be one all his life. It was a bit too late to stop pretending now.

GRANTING CHARTERS OF independence to towns like Danzhol’s had been the idea of Bitterblue’s advisers, and King Ror had agreed. During Leck’s time, more than a few lords and ladies of Monsea had behaved badly. It was hard to know which had acted under Leck’s influence, and which had acted out of pure clear-headedness, seeing how much they stood to gain from calculated exploitation while the rest of the kingdom was distracted. But it was apparent, when King Ror visited a few nearby estates, that there were lords and ladies who had set themselves up as kings, taxing and legislating their people unwisely, often cruelly.

“He said, ‘I suppose the little queen is safe without you today, for her first men can do what you would. Once you learn cutting and stitching, do you ever forget it, whatever comes between? Even if Leck comes between? I worry for her. It’s my dream that the queen be a truthseeker, but not if it makes her someone’s prey.’”

LIST OF PUZZLE PIECES Teddy’s words. Who are my “first men”? What did he mean by cutting and stitching? Am I in danger? Whose prey am I? Danzhol’s words. What did he SEE? Was he complicit with Leck in some way? What was he trying to say? Teddy and Saf’s actions. Why did they steal a gargoyle, and other things too? What does it mean to steal what’s already been stolen? Darby’s records. Was he lying to me about the gargoyles never having been there? General mysteries. Who attacked Teddy? Things I’ve seen with my own eyes. Why is the east city falling apart but decorated anyway? Why was Leck so peculiar about decorating the castle? What did Leck DO?

“Many people in Monsea do burn the dead, Lady Queen,” he went on, “but it is not the Monsean way, as I’m sure your advisers know. It was King Leck’s way. It’s his tradition we honor when we burn our dead. Monseans before King Leck wrapped the body in a cloth infused with herbs and buried it in the ground at midnight. They’ve done so for as long as records have been kept. Those who know as much still do.”

“I’m not avoiding it. I’m just trying to come up with an answer that doesn’t incriminate others. Leck stole,” he said, startling her with the randomness of it. “Anything he wanted—knives, clothing, horses, paper—he took. He stole people’s children. He destroyed people’s property. He also hired people to build the bridges and never paid them. He hired artists to decorate his castle—never paid them either.”

And that wasn’t all this paper told her, not by a far shot, for Bitterblue recognized the handwriting. The paper, even, and the ink. One remembered such particulars when one had killed a lord with a knife; one remembered accusing the lord, before killing him, of stealing his people’s books and farm animals. She drew the list to her nose, knowing how the paper would smell: just like the charter of the people from the town of Danzhol.

One lonely puzzle piece clicked into place. “This is an inventory of items Leck stole?” asked Bitterblue shakily. “In this case, someone else stole them, but it’s clear that it was on Leck’s behalf. Those are the types of things Leck liked to collect, and the little girls clinch it, wouldn’t you say?”

But—why hadn’t Danzhol simply told her that he’d stolen from his townspeople on Leck’s behalf? That his ruin had begun with Leck’s greed? Why hide behind hints when he could have defended himself with that truth? She would have listened to that defense, no matter how mad or disgusting he was. And why had the people of Danz...

“The trouble lies with the blanket pardons, Lady Queen. The blanket pardons, and the impossibility of ever proving, beyond doubt, that those who stole, stole for Leck and not for themselves.”

Well, it’s the same answer for both questions. It’s the crown’s ninety-eight percent employment rate.”

“Are you saying that the ninety-eight percent employment rate is real?”

“For the most part, yes. And some of the new work has to do with repairing structures that were neglected during Leck’s reign. Each part of the city has a different team of builders and engineers assigned to the job, and, Lucky, the engineer leading the team in the east city is an absolute nutpot. So is his immediate underling and a few of his workers. They’re just hopeless.”

“The Council is an organization of lawbreakers, Bitterblue, and you are the law to these Monseans. They’ve all snuck here tonight, then come face-to-face with their queen. It’ll take them a little while to adjust to you.”

“Let’s start with the basics,” Giddon began without preamble. “Whereas the overthrow of Drowden in Nander began with the dissatisfaction of the nobility, in Estill, what we’re looking at is a popular revolution. The people are starving. They’re the world’s most overtaxed, by King Thigpen and by their lords. Lucky for the rebels, our success with army deserters in Nander has frightened Thigpen. He’s tightened the screws on his own soldiers, severely, and an unhappy army is something rebels can work with. I believe, and Po agrees, that there are enough desperate people in Estill—and enough thoughtful, meticulous people—for something to come of this.” “What frightens me is that they don’t know what they want,” said Katsa. “In Nander, we essentially kidnapped the king for them, then a coalition of nobles that they’d chosen beforehand slipped into place—”

The Council will involve itself in the Estillan people’s overthrow of their king.”

A monarch was responsible for the welfare of the people he ruled. If he hurt them deliberately, he should lose the privilege of sovereignty.

“My estate is at Monsea’s northwesternmost point. The tunnel begins on my land. We used it to smuggle Gracelings out of Monsea during King Leck’s reign, and now we use it to smuggle Estillan Gracelings in.”

That dream was more than a dream: It was a memory. Bitterblue had thrown her father’s strange scribbles into the fire once.

The stories in the book included the usual nonsense: colorful, flying monsters that tore each other apart. Colorful caged monsters that screamed for blood. But he’d written true stories too. He’d written down stories of Katsa! Of broken necks, broken arms, chopped-off fingers; of the cousin Katsa had killed by accident when she was a child. He’d written them with transparent awe for what Katsa could do. It made Bitterblue shudder to feel his reverence for things Katsa was so ashamed of.

One of his stories was about a woman with impossible red, gold, and pink hair who controlled people with her venomous mind, living her life forever alone because her power was so hateful. Bitterblue knew this could only be the woman in the hanging in the library, the woman in white. But that woman had no venom in her eyes; that woman wasn’t hateful. It calmed Bitterblue to stand before the hanging and...

“Then why are you writing them in a book?” “To catch them between the pages,” said Teddy, “and trap them before they disappear.”

“If they’re dangerous, why not let them disappear?” “Because when truths disappear, they leave behind blank spaces, and that is also dangerous.”

“May I assume then, Lady Queen, that you are unaware that forty-some years ago, before Leck came to power, your advisers Thiel, Darby, Runnemood, and Rood were brilliant young healers?”

“Then Leck murdered the old king and queen,” Death went on, “crowned himself, and made the healers part of his advising team—perhaps ‘coming between’ the men and their medical profession, if you will, Lady Queen. These words seem to suggest that a healer some forty years ago is still a healer today, rendering you safe in the company of your ‘first men,’ your advisers, Lady Queen, even when your official healers are unavailable.”

“I’ve learned that Danzhol had family and connections in Estill, Beetle,” said Po, rocking on his heels and also eating a peppermint. “What do you think of that?”

“If he was thinking of selling you to someone in Estill, it means you have enemies in Estill, and that matters.”

“There are people in the kingdom who are truthseekers,” he finally said. “Not many people, but a few. People like Teddy and Tilda and Bren—people whose families were in the resistance and who place the highest value on knowing the truth of things. Leck is dead now, but there’s still so much truth to uncover. That’s their business, you understand, Sparks? They’re trying to help people figure out what happened, sometimes reassemble memories. Return what Leck stole, and, when they can, undo what Leck did, through thievery, through education—however they can.”

“There’s a force in the kingdom working against us, Sparks,” said Saf quietly. “The truth is that I can’t answer your question, because we don’t know who it is. But someone knows what we’re doing. There’s someone out there who hates us and will go to any length to stop us and people like us. Remember the new grave I found you standing in front of that night in the graveyard? That was our colleague, stabbed to death in broad daylight by a hired killer who’s in no state to tell us who hired him. Our people are murdered. Or sometimes they’re framed for crimes they didn’t commit and get thrown into prison, where we’ll never see them again.”

Why would he try to ruin something so beautiful? What is the world he was trying, and failing, to create? What is the world Runnemood is trying to create? And why must they both create their worlds by destroying?

The door to Leck’s stairway, hidden behind the blue horse in her sitting room. The secret entrance to the library, hidden behind the wild-haired woman in the hanging. The strange, colorful insects on the tiles of Katsa’s bath; and now, a door in the wall behind this horrible scene.

His secrets will tell me what he did to leave my kingdom so broken.

“You have a mind for ciphers,” Bitterblue repeated vaguely, talking more to herself than to him. “You have a gift for looking at letters and words and seeing patterns and meaning. That is how your Grace works.”

“Darby’s Grace prevents him from sleeping the way we do, Lady Queen,” he said quietly. “Sometimes, the only way for him to switch his mind off is to make himself blind drunk.”

“It’s a dictionary for translating our language into an entire other language, and vice versa, Lady Queen.”