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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.
Katsa picked up her knife and fork, cut into her mutton, and thought about that. She knew her nature. She would recognize it if she came face-to-face with it. It would be a blue-eyed, green-eyed monster, wolflike and snarling. A vicious beast that struck out at friends in uncontrollable anger, a killer that offered itself as the vessel of the king’s fury. But then, it was a strange monster, for beneath its exterior it was frightened and sickened by its own violence. It chastised itself for its savagery. And sometimes it had no heart for violence and rebelled against it utterly.
When a monster stopped behaving like a monster, did it stop being a monster? Did it become something else?
“True. But you’re better than I am, Katsa. And it doesn’t humiliate me.” He fed a branch to the fire. “It humbles me. But it doesn’t humiliate me.”
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 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.
“You know I’d never expect you to change who you are, if you were my wife,” he finally said. “It would change me to be your wife,” she said. He watched her eyes. “Yes. I understand you.” A log fell into the fire. They sat quietly. His voice, when he spoke, was hesitant. “It strikes me that heartbreak isn’t the only alternative to marriage,” he said. “What do you mean?” He ducked his head for a moment. He raised his eyes to her again. “I’ll give myself to you however you’ll take me,” he said, so simply that Katsa found she wasn’t embarrassed.
He offered himself to her. He trusted her. As she trusted him. She hadn’t considered this possibility, when she’d sat alone in the forest crying. She hadn’t even thought of it. And his offer hung suspended before her now, for her to reach out and claim; and that which had seemed clear and simple and heartbreaking was confused and complicated again. But also touched with hope. Could she be his lover and still belong to herself?
It was by thinking of Po, and not of the notion of a lover, that Katsa became comfortable enough to consider what it would mean to lie in his bed but not be his wife.
“How will you feel if I’m forever leaving? If one day I give myself to you and the next I take myself away—with no promises to return?” “Katsa, a man would be a fool to try to keep you in a cage.” “But that doesn’t tell me how you’ll feel, always to be subject to my whim.” “It isn’t your whim. It’s the need of your heart. You forget that I’m in a unique position to understand you, Katsa. Whenever you pull away from me I’ll know it’s not for lack of love. Or if it is, I’ll know that, too; and I’ll know it’s right for you to go.”
THEY HAD entire conversations in which she didn’t say a word. For Po could sense when Katsa desired to talk to him, and if there was a thing she wanted him to know, his Grace could capture that thing.
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.
In the end, Leck should have stuck to his lies. For it was the truth he almost told that killed him.
