Seasparrow (Graceling Realm, #5)

by Kristin Cashore

Not that Giddon lacks good qualities. He would tear off the head of anyone who hurt my sister.

He’s not interfering with my mind. He just knows what I like to eat.

Maybe it’s a conflict of interest for the queen’s lover to travel the world dismantling monarchies? Could such a person really be a queen’s consort?

“That requires slowing down.” That earned me another tiny smile. “Not something that comes naturally to you?” she said.

One day he killed her, because he was too weak to coexist with things he couldn’t control.

“Sculpt my daughter, Princess Bitterblue,” the king said. My mother sculpted an untouchable girl. You understand why her sculptures always made him angry?

In another—my favorite—my fingers are sharp and curved and my arms are thick with feathers, outstretched like wings. I’m turning into a bird. It’s my favorite, because a bird can fly right off the earth. She can be alone, touching nothing, preyed upon by no one; if she likes, she can never come back.

I flickered, once, into a stone sculpture of myself. I do that sometimes, accidentally, when I most wish I could be invisible.

How could I explain it to her? In my childhood, only one person knew I existed. And the only thing she ever taught me to do was disappear.

“What do you need to think about?” he asked. “Plans to take over the world.”

He grinned, surprising me with dimples. He looked like a giant, harmless, pink baby. “I heard you’re Queen Bitterblue’s spy,” he said. “Is it true?” “Would I tell you if it was?”

Whatever. What I like is that Linta was giving herself headaches and lying to her employer. I hope her employer got a headache too.

comrade linta

I’m ever that fawningly devoted to someone, I hope someone will put me out of my misery.

I hate this part. I don’t have Giddon’s superhuman patience, maybe because I’ve spent most of my life watching my sister suffer. I’m done with it. It makes me want to yell and break things.

I found a lifeboat and lay down inside it, thinking about how I was a jerk. It wasn’t a new revelation, but it was new in relation to Linny, who keeps drawing me into conversations where I’m not sure of my footing.

But I knew she existed; oh, how I knew. I lived on the outskirts of her life, watching her mother try to protect her from our father just as my mother tried to protect me from him too, but differently, because Bitterblue was allowed to exist and I was not.

I’m porous. Her feelings invade mine and I disappear. Does this happen to other people? Is it because she’s a queen, and the most important woman in the world? Maybe everyone around her experiences this?

Bitterblue and Giddon make themselves stupid, the way they adore each other.

How can people trust each other that much, and have that much abandon? I’ve never been able to fathom it.

Whenever I remember the smell of mint, that moment comes back to me, and with it, the anxiety I felt for them then, that they would be discovered. That someone would intrude, and stop them, and ruin their happiness. I wanted them to be happy.

“Take care up there, Hava,” he said. “We would be lost without you.”

While she was fumbling with the key, I came up behind her. When she turned, I let her see me, just as I am. Tall, straight, ugly-eyed. Full of fury.

Remember the impossible mountain pass, where the Monsean climber Grella wrote journals while he was freezing to death? Bitterblue has crossed that pass. She was only ten. Our father, the king, had chased her into the mountains; he chased her halfway across the world. She’d had no choice but to face Grella’s Pass. She’d lived through the crossing only because Katsa, who’s Graced with survival skills, had kept her alive. Now, in our ship in the middle of a horrible storm, it was the funniest thing that’d ever happened to either of us.

“Were you on the king’s staff, Froggatt?” I asked. “Before he died?” Froggatt stared at me with a new expression, one that scared me, for he seemed muted and blank suddenly, very far away. My words had pulled him into a bad place inside himself. I shouldn’t have asked. “Yes,” he said quietly. I swallowed, remembering how I’d yelled at him before. I forget sometimes that there are different kinds of resilience. “Then you’re a survivor,” I said. “You’ve survived things far worse than a long walk, or a little bit of cold.”

“Why are you kind to me,” I said, “over and over, when I’m mean and jealous?” He pursed his lips in thought. Then he shrugged. “Maybe to see what happens.” A bubble of surprised laughter rose into my throat. “Like an experiment?”

“Who needs toes anyway?” he said, shrugging.

so true bestie

Every blow cracks me apart. Is there something wrong with me, if I wish I could hide them away as my own? Like my mother did with me. Like Kera did with Hope?

I don’t know what to say to her, because I don’t know how to tell someone how marvelous they are.

Bitterblue reached any normal person’s limit for the pain of others long ago, but the Queen of Monsea doesn’t get breaks from things like that.

Then I took Hope from Linny and carried her for a while, holding her tightly. Trying to share with her all my love and fury for the dimmed parts of her soul.

me. He was looking for a small girl with red and copper eyes and lank hair the color of dirty water, a girl he could see. He should have been looking for a subtle change in the air around him. An invisible blade of anguish and fury.