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They would all say, when they woke to their headaches and their shame, that the culprit had been a Graceling boy, Graced with fighting, acting alone. They would assume she was a boy, because in her plain trousers and hood she looked like one, and because when people were attacked it never occurred to anyone that it might have been a girl.
She wouldn’t kill, not if she didn’t have to. A killing couldn’t be undone, and she’d killed enough. Mostly for her uncle. King Randa thought her useful.
So hard and so fast that she’d pushed the bones of his nose into his brain.
oh my
“I’ll tell you my reasons if you’ll tell me yours.” “I’ll tell you nothing, and you must let me pass.” “Must I?” “If you don’t, I’ll have to force you.” “Do you think you can?”
The Lienid people didn’t have enemies. They shipped their gold to whoever had the goods to trade for it; they grew their own fruit and bred their own game; they kept to themselves on their island, an ocean removed from the other six kingdoms. They were different. They had a distinctive dark-haired look and distinctive customs, and they liked their isolation.
Thigpen,
“Does it make it easier?” She squinted at his form hunched in the saddle. “I don’t understand you.” “To have beautiful eyes. Does it lighten the burden of your Grace, to know you have beautiful eyes?” She laughed. “No, Lord Prince. I’d happily do without both.”
There was no way around what he wanted. The more Katsa did it, the better she got at it. And Randa got what he wished, for her reputation spread like a cancer.
It felt like play, too wonderful, Katsa thought sometimes, to be real. Except that it was real. They didn’t just talk about subversion; they planned it and carried it out.
Normal. She wasn’t normal. A girl Graced with killing, a royal thug? A girl who didn’t want the husbands Randa pushed on her, perfectly handsome and thoughtful men, a girl who panicked at the thought of a baby at her breast, or clinging to her ankles. She wasn’t natural.
But if a king sent a Graceling home to the family of an innkeeper or a storekeeper in a town with more than one inn or store to choose from, business was bound to suffer. It made no difference what the child’s Grace was. People avoided a place if they could, if they were likely to encounter a person with eyes that were two different colors.
It didn’t matter. She didn’t have the strength today to torture a person who didn’t deserve it.
How like him. It was just like him, to turn a kind gesture into one of his criticisms of her character. He loved nothing more than to point out her flaws. And he knew nothing of her, if he thought she desired friends. Katsa attacked her meal and ignored their conversation.
“What a stroke of luck for the thieves.” Giddon grinned. “Indeed.”
She’d never felt grief, or if she had, she didn’t remember. Her mother, Randa’s sister, had died of a fever before Katsa’s eyes had settled,
“Ror’s heir?” “Great hills, no. He has six older brothers. His name is the silliest I’ve heard for the seventh heir to a throne. Prince Greening Grandemalion.”
“I’ve been told to make myself pretty for dinner.” He grinned. “Well, in that case, you’ll be ages.”
His eyes. Katsa had never seen such eyes. One was silver, and the other, gold. They glowed in his sun-darkened face, uneven, and strange.
“The first man you killed, My Lady,” Helda said. “That cousin. Did you mean to kill him?” It was a question no one had ever actually asked her.
“If there’s anyone I wish to stun at dinner, I’ll hit him in the face.”
Dear Helda. She saw what Katsa was and what she did, and Helda didn’t deny that Katsa was that person. But she couldn’t fathom a lady who didn’t want to be beautiful, who didn’t want a legion of admirers. And so she believed Katsa was both people, though Katsa couldn’t imagine how she reconciled them in her mind.
He loved to brag of her, as if her great ability were his doing. As if she were the arrow, and he the archer whose skill drove her home. No, not an arrow—that didn’t quite capture it. A dog. To Randa she was a savage dog he’d broken and trained.
His hand dropped, returning to his side, and he looked at her calmly, as if this were normal, as if friends she’d only just made always touched her face with their fingertips. As if she ever made friends.
“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.”
“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.”
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.
“I’ll kill the king,” she said. “I’ll kill the king, unless you both agree not to support me. This is my rebellion, and mine alone, and if you don’t agree, I swear to you on my Grace I will murder the king.”
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.
When a monster stopped behaving like a monster, did it stop being a monster? Did it become something else?
“Marry me,” he said, “and our marriage will protect you.” Well then, he had said it, as Po had predicted, and it hit her like one of Po’s punches to the stomach.
“You’re not an unnatural woman, Katsa. You can fight as other women can’t, but you’re not so different from other women. You’ll want babies. I’m certain of it.”
wow, fuck you Giddon
She froze. She stared at Giddon and didn’t even see his finger jabbing in the air, his puffed-up face. Instead she saw Po, sitting on the floor of the practice room, using the exact words Giddon had just used. Before Giddon had used them.
“We are not friends.” She whispered it into the glass of the window. “If you’re not my friend, then I have no friends.”
You’d stay far away from me, always.” “Ah, but I wouldn’t.” “You would,” she said, “if I wished to kill you.” “I wouldn’t.” On that senseless note she threw her arms into the air. “Enough. Enough of this.”
Tears came to her eyes. Mercy was more frightening than murder, because it was harder, and Randa didn’t deserve it. And even though she wanted what the voice wanted, she didn’t think she had the courage for it.
I’m no longer yours to command.”
And when the boy was sixteen and the king and queen still didn’t have a child of their own, the king did something extraordinary. He named the boy his heir.”
“Are we supposed to conclude that Leck kidnapped my grandfather, but for some innocent reason? It simply cannot be.”
She hadn’t asked for a person whose company she wished. Katsa couldn’t bear her own inanity.
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.
“I know you don’t want this, Katsa. But I can’t help myself. The moment you came barreling into my life I was lost.
“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 could not steal herself back from Randa only to give herself away again—belong to another person, be answerable to another person, build her very being around another person.
She loved Po. She wanted Po. And she could never be anyone’s but her own.
He pressed nothing upon her, even conversation, even his gaze.
He was willing to risk unhappiness. And there was the crux of the matter. She couldn’t know where this would lead, and to proceed was to risk all kinds of unhappiness. The fire gasped and died. She was frightened. For as their camp turned to darkness, she also found herself choosing risk.
He made her drunk, this man made her drunk; and every time his eyes flashed into hers she could not breathe.
“Why do you suppose it happens that way? Why does a woman feel that pain?” She had no answer to that. Women felt it, that was all she knew.
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.
