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murderous dog might be useful to a king, but he didn’t want it sleeping at his feet.
there’s anyone I wish to stun at dinner, I’ll hit him in the face.”
He would have noticed. She doubted there was much those eyes didn’t notice.
😍
“What can be so funny,” Katsa said, “to a prince who’s turned his hair blue?” “You look like you’ve been in a fight,” he said, “for the first time in your life.”
HE WAS a marvelous opponent.
Po turned to her then, and a torch on the wall caught the gleam of his eyes. She focused on breathing. “I have a weakness for beautiful sights,” he said. “My brothers tease me.” “Your brothers are the foolish ones,” Tealiff said, “for not seeing the strength in beautiful things. Come here, child,” he said to Katsa. “Let me see your eyes, for they make me stronger.”
“How will you answer Giddon when he asks you to marry him?” Po asked. “Will you accept?” Katsa sat up, and stared at him. “That’s an absurd question.”
“You’re not in love with me, are you?” He stared at her for a moment, speechless. Then he burst into laughter.
His eyes came back into focus then and looked into hers. And then something mischievous in his eyes, and a grin. Almost as if he knew exactly what she was thinking, exactly what she’d decided about his claims to vanity. Katsa’s face closed, and she glowered at him.
“But you do have choice. He’s not the one who makes you savage. You make yourself savage, when you bend yourself to his will.”
“Po . . .” He looked at her, and sighed. “I told you before, Katsa. I won’t fight when you’re angry. I won’t solve a disagreement between us with blows.” He lifted the ice and fingered his jaw. He moaned, and held the ice to his face again. “What we do in the practice rooms—that’s to help each other. We don’t use it against each other. We’re friends, Katsa.”
He looked at her then. The smallest of smiles flickered across his face, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Don’t feel too kindly toward me, Katsa. Neither of us is blameless as a friend.” He left her then, to find Raffin. She stood and stared at the place where he’d just been. And tried to shake off the eerie sense that he had just answered something she’d thought, rather than something she’d said.
When you’re a monster, she thought, you are thanked and praised for not behaving like a monster. She would like to restrain from cruelty and receive no admiration for it.
My range for you is . . . broader than most.”
“Very well, let’s see. I’m very sympathetic about your having left Raffin. I think you’re brave to have defied Randa as you did with that Ellis fellow; I don’t know if I could’ve gone through with it. I think you have more energy than anyone I’ve ever encountered, though I wonder if you aren’t a bit hard on your horse. I find myself wondering why you haven’t wanted to marry Giddon, and if it’s because you’ve intended to marry Raffin, and if so, whether you’re even more unhappy to have left him than I realized. I’m very pleased you’ve come with me. I’d like to see you defend yourself for real,
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and she fought against the gold and silver lights that shone in his eyes, and lost.
“how it is you don’t realize your eyes ensnare me, just as mine do you. I can’t explain it, Katsa, but you shouldn’t let it embarrass you. For we’re both overtaken by the same—foolishness.”
“Your eyes are beautiful,”
He was so clear with his thoughts, while hers were a constant storm that she could never make sense of and never control.
She glanced up at him, and in that moment he pulled his wet shirt over his head. She forced her mind blank. Blank as a new sheet of paper, blank as a starless sky.
She stared at the goose and sliced his drumstick carefully and thought of the blankest expression on the blankest face she could possibly imagine.
It was like his eyes. Unless they were fighting, Po’s body had the same effect on her as his eyes.
“My sense of them is faint, Katsa. I cannot sense everyone down to the ends of their hair, as I do you.”
Po looked at her, but he didn’t see her. His eyes snapped, silver ice and gold fire.
His eyes were beautiful. His face was beautiful to her in every way, and his shoulders and hands. And his arms that hung over his knees, and his
chest that was not moving, because he held his breath as he watched her. And the heart in his chest. This friend. How had she not seen this before? How had she not seen him? She was blind. And then tears choked her eyes, for she had not asked for this. She had not asked for this beautiful man before her, with something hopeful in his eyes that she did not want.
“Katsa. I hadn’t planned for it either.”
“You . . . you have a way of upending my plans,”
and she unable to look at him, because he glowed, and he was beautiful, and she couldn’t stand it.
and when he raised his face to her again she felt that his eyes were naked, that she could see right through them into the lights of his soul.
“I love you,” he said. “You’re more dear to my heart than I ever knew anyone could be. And I’ve made you cry; and there I’ll stop.”
She cried like a person whose heart is broken and wondered how, when two people loved each other, there could be such a broken heart.
She loved Po. She wanted Po. And she could never be anyone’s but her own.
Could she be his lover and still belong to herself?
It struck her that this should feel strange, to be lying here, watching him, teasing him. To have done what they’d done, and be what they’d become. But instead it felt natural and comfortable. Inevitable. And only the smallest bit terrifying.
“You’re beautiful.”
Her Grace was not killing. Her Grace was survival.
But it was my mind that my mother feared him using. She wanted my mind to be my own, and not his.”
“Wonderful,” Po said. “It’s quite boring really, the way you beat me to death with your hands and feet, Katsa. It’ll be refreshing to have you coming at me with a knife.”
He pulled Katsa close and held her against him.
She wore a ring on a string around her neck, a ring that Po had given her before he’d climbed onto the back of his horse and clattered across the cliff path.
my Katsa.”
He just stood beside the horse, his arm clutching the animal’s back, waiting for someone to help him; and tears rose to her eyes at the sight of Po’s helplessness. She went back to him. Forgive me, Po.
“Sleep for a bit, love.”
Katsa didn’t look back as they rode away. But she gripped Bitterblue tightly; and she called out to him, his name bursting inside her so painfully that for a long while, she could feel nothing else.
Bitterblue wrapped her arms around Katsa. She kissed Katsa’s cheek and held on to her tightly.
and it didn’t surprise her that Po should come from a place that shone.
Or a land so dramatically beautiful.
In the end, Leck should have stuck to his lies. For it was the truth he almost told that killed him.
“I’m perfectly well now that he’s dead,” Bitterblue said, her voice growing stronger and her hand steadying. “And I’m not a princess. I’m the Queen of Monsea.
