Graceling

  "As fast as we could," Katsa said, biting her lip, confused. "And now I've a ring to return to you. Your castle is a gorgeous place, just as you said."

  The pain that broke across his face, the misery, was so acute that she gasped. It vanished as quickly as it had come but she'd seen it this time, she knew she'd seen it, and she could no longer mask her alarm. She shot up from her seat and reached out to him, not certain what she was going to do or say.

  Po rose, too—did he check his balance? She wasn't sure, but she thought he might have. He took her hand and smiled. "Come out hunting with me, Katsa," he said. "You can try the bow I made."

  His voice was light, and Skye and Bitterblue were smiling. Katsa felt that she was the only person in the world with any idea that something was wrong. She forced a smile. "Of course," she said. "I'd love to."

  "WHAT'S WRONG?" she asked, the instant they'd left the cabin behind.

  He smiled slightly. "Nothing's wrong."

  Katsa climbed hard and bit back her feeling. They tromped through a path in the snow she supposed Po had broken. They passed the pool. The waterfall was a mass of ice, with only the slightest living trickle in its middle.

  "Did my fish trap work for you?"

  "It worked beautifully. I still use it."

  "Did his soldiers search the cabin?"

  "They did."

  "You made it to the cave all right, despite your injury?"

  "I was feeling much better by then. I made it easily."

  "But you would have been cold and wet."

  "They didn't stay long, Katsa. I returned to the cabin soon after and built up the fire."

  Katsa climbed a rocky rise. She grasped a thin tree trunk and pulled herself onto a hillock. A long, flat rock jutted up from the untouched snow. She plowed over to it and sat down. He followed and sat beside her. She considered him. He didn't look at her.

  "I want to know what's wrong," she said.

  He pursed his lips, and still he didn't look at her. His voice was carefully matter-of-fact. "I wouldn't force your feelings from you, if you didn't want to share them."

  She stared at him, eyes wide. "True. But I wouldn't lie to you, as you're lying now when you say nothing's wrong."

  A strange expression came over his face. Open, vulnerable, as if he were a child of ten years, trying to keep from crying. Her throat ached to see that look in his face. Po—

  He winced, and the expression vanished. "Don't, please," he said. "It makes me dizzy, when you talk to me in my mind. It hurts my head."

  She swallowed, and tried to think of what to say. "Your head still hurts, from your fall?"

  "Occasionally."

  "Is that what's wrong?"

  "I've told you, nothing's wrong."

  She touched his arm. "Po, please—"

  "It's nothing worth your worry," he said, and he brushed her hand away.

  And now she was shocked and hurt, and tears stung her eyes. The Po she remembered didn't flick away her concern, he didn't flinch from her touch. This wasn't Po; this was a stranger; and there was something missing here that had been there before. She reached into the neck of her coat and pulled the cord over her head. She held the ring out to him.

  "This is yours," she said.

  He didn't even look at it; his eyes were glued to his hands. "I don't want it."

  "What in the Middluns are you talking about? It's your ring."

  "You should keep it."

  She stared at him, disbelieving. "Po, what makes you think I would ever keep your ring? I don't know why you gave it to me in the first place. I wish you hadn't."

  His mouth was tight with unhappiness, and still he stared into his hands. "At the time I gave it to you, I did so because I knew I might die. I knew Leck's men might kill me and that you didn't have a home. If I died I wanted you to have my home. My home suits you," he said, with a bitterness that stung her, and that she couldn't understand.

  She found that she was crying. She wiped tears from her face, furiously, and turned away from him, because she couldn't stand the sight of him staring stone-faced into his hands. "Po, I beg you to tell me what's the matter."

  "Is it so wrong that you should keep the ring? My castle is isolated, in a wild corner of the world. You'd be happy there. My family would respect your privacy."

  "Have you gone raving mad? What are you going to do, once I've taken your home and your possessions? Where are you going to live?"

  His voice was very quiet. "I don't want to go back to my home. I've been thinking of staying here, where it's peaceful, and far away from everyone. I—I want to be alone."

  She gaped at him, her mouth open.

  "You should go on with your life, Katsa. Keep the ring. I've said I don't want it."

  She couldn't speak. She shook her head, woodenly, then reached out and dropped the ring into his hands.

  He stared at it, then sighed. "I'll give it to Skye," he said, "to take back to my father. He can decide what to do with it."

  He stood, and this time she was certain he checked his balance. He trudged away from her, his bow in hand. He caught hold of the root of a shrubbery and pulled himself onto a ledge of rock. She watched as he climbed into the mountains, and away from her.

  DURING THE NIGHT, the sound of breathing all around her, Katsa tried to work it out. She sat against the wall and watched Po lying in a blanket on the floor beside his brother and the Monsean guards. He slept, and his face was peaceful. His beautiful face.

  When he'd come back to the cabin after their conversation, with his bow in one hand and an armload of rabbits in the other, he'd unloaded his quarry contentedly on his brother and shrugged himself out of his coat. Then he'd come to her, where she sat brooding against the wall. He'd crouched before her, taken her hands in his and kissed them, and rubbed his cold face against them. "I'm sorry," he'd said; and she'd felt suddenly that everything was normal, and Po was himself, and they'd start again, fresh and new. Then over dinner, as the others bantered and Bitterblue teased her guards, Katsa watched Po withdraw. He ate little. He sank into silence, unhappiness in the lines of his face. And her heart ached so much to look at him that she walked out of the cabin and stumped around for ages alone in the dark.

  At moments he seemed happy. But something was clearly wrong. If he would just ... if he would only just look at her. If he would only look into her face.

  And of course, if alone was what he needed, alone was what she would give. But—and she thought this might be unfair, but still she decided it—she was going to require proof. He was going to have to convince her, convince her utterly, that solitude was his need. Only then would she leave him to his strange anguish.

  IN THE MORNING Po seemed cheerful enough; but Katsa, who was beginning to feel like a henpecking mother, registered his lack of interest in the food, even the Lienid food, spread across the table. He ate practically nothing, and then made some vague, unlikely remark about checking on the lame horse. He wandered outside.

  "What's wrong with him?" Bitterblue asked.

  Katsa's eyes slid to the child's face, and held her steady gray gaze. There was no point pretending she didn't know what Bitterblue meant. Bitterblue had never been stupid.

  "I don't know," Katsa said. "He won't tell me."

  "Sometimes he seems himself," Skye said, "and other times he sinks into a mood." He cleared his throat. "But I thought it might be a lovers' quarrel."

  Katsa looked at him levelly. She ate a piece of bread. "It's possible, but I don't think so."

  Skye raised an eyebrow and grinned. "Seems to me you'd know if it were."

  "If only things were that simple," Katsa said, drily.

  "There's something strange about his eyes," Bitterblue said.

  "Yes," Katsa said, "well, it's likely he has the strangest eyes in all seven kingdoms. But I'd have expected you to notice that before now."

  "No," Bitterblue said. "I mean there's something different about his eyes."

  Something different about
his eyes.

  Yes, there was a difference. The difference was that he wouldn't look at her, or at any of them. Almost as if it pained his heart to raise his eyes and focus on another person. Almost as if—

  An image flashed into her mind then, out of nowhere. Po falling through the light, a horse's enormous body falling above him. Po, slamming into the water face-first, the horse crashing in after him.

  And more images. Po, sick and gray before the fire, the skin of his face bruised black. Po squinting at her and rubbing his eyes.

  Katsa choked on her bread. She shot to her feet and knocked over her chair.

  Skye thumped her back. "Great seas, Katsa. Are you all right?"

  Katsa coughed, and gasped something about checking on the lame horse. She ran out of the cabin.

  PO WASN'T with the horses, but when Katsa asked after him, one of the guards pointed in the direction of the pool. Katsa ran behind the cabin and over the hill.

  He was standing, his back to her, staring into the frozen pond. His shoulders slumped and his hands in his pockets.

  "I know you're invincible, Katsa," he said without turning around. "But even you should put on a coat when you come outside."

  "Po," she said. "Turn around and look at me."

  He dropped his head. His shoulders rose and fell with one deep breath. He didn't turn around.

  "Po," she said. "Look at me."

  He turned then, slowly. He looked into her face. His eyes seemed to focus on hers, for just an instant; and then his eyes dropped. They emptied. She saw it happen; she saw his eyes empty.

  She whispered. "Po. Are you blind?"

  At that, something in him seemed to break. He fell to his knees. A tear made an icy track down his face. When Katsa went to him and dropped down before him, he let her come; the fight had gone out of him and he let her in. Katsa's arms came around him. He pulled Katsa against him, practically smothered her with his grip, and cried into her neck. She held him, simply held him, and touched him, and kissed his cold face.

  "Oh, Katsa," he cried. "Katsa."

  They knelt like that for a very long time.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  THAT MORNING a squall kicked up. By afternoon the squall had turned into a gentle but soggy storm. "I can't bear the thought of more winter-weather travel," Bitterblue said, half asleep before the fire. "Now that we're here with Po, can't we stay here, Katsa, until it stops snowing?"

  But on the heels of that storm came another, and after that storm another, as if winter had torn up the schedule and decided it wasn't going to end after all. Bitterblue sent two guards with a letter for Ror. Ror wrote back from Bitterblue's court that the weather was just as well; the more time Bitterblue gave him to sort out the stories Leck had left behind, the smoother and the safer her transition to the throne would be. He would plan the coronation for true spring, and she could wait out the storms for as long as she wished.

  Katsa knew the cabin's close quarters were trying to Po, burdened as he was with his unhappy secret. But if everyone was staying, then at least he didn't have to justify quite yet his own intention not to leave. He kept his discomfort to himself and helped the guards lead the horses to a nearby rock shelter he claimed to have found during his recovery.

  His story came out slowly, whenever he and Katsa were able to contrive ways to be alone.

  The day of Katsa and Bitterblue's departure had not been easy for Po. He'd still had his sight, but it hadn't felt quite right to him; it had changed in some way his head was too muddled to quantify, some way that gave him a deep sense of misgiving.

  "You didn't tell me," Katsa said. "You let me leave you like that."

  "If I'd told you, you never would have gone. You had to go."

  Po had stumbled his way to the cabin's bed. He'd spent most of that day lying on his unhurt side with his eyes closed, waiting for Leck's soldiers and for his dizziness to pass. He'd tried to convince himself that when his head cleared, his sight would, too. But waking the next morning, he'd opened his eyes to blackness.

  "I was angry," he told her. "And unsteady on my feet. And I was out of food, which meant that I had to find my way to the fish trap. I couldn't be bothered. I didn't eat, that day or the next."

  What had driven him finally to the pool was not his hunger. It was Leck's soldiers. He'd sensed them climbing the rocks toward the cabin. "I was up and stumbling," he told her, "before I even realized what I was doing. I was barreling around the cabin collecting my things; and then I was outside, finding a crack in a rock to hide them. I wasn't at my most lucid. I'm sure I must have fallen down, over and over. But I knew where the pool was, and I got myself to it. The water was awful, so cold, but it woke me, and it was less dizzying, somehow, to be swimming, rather than walking. I made it to the cave somehow, and somehow I pulled myself onto the rocks. And then, in the cave, with the soldiers shouting outside and my body so cold I thought I would bite off my own tongue with my chattering teeth—I found it, Katsa."

  He stopped talking, and he was quiet for so long that she wondered if he'd forgotten what he'd been saying.

  "What did you find?"

  He turned his head to her, surprised. "Clarity," he said. "My thoughts cleared. There was no light in the cave; there was nothing to see. And yet I sensed the cave with my Grace, so vividly. And I realized what I was doing. Sitting in the cabin, feeling sorry for myself, when Leck was out there somewhere and people were in danger. In the cave it struck me how despicable that was."

  The thought of Leck had brought Po back into the water, out of the cave and to the fish trap. Back to the cabin to fumble, numb from cold, with the lighting of the fire. The next few days were grim. "I was weak and dizzy and sick. I walked, at first, never farther than the fish trap. Then with Leck in my mind I pushed a bit farther. My balance was passable, if I was sitting still. I made the bow. With Leck in my mind, I began to practice shooting it."

  His head dropped. Silence settled over him. And Katsa thought she understood the rest. Po had held the notion of Leck close to himself; Leck had given him a reason to reach for his strength. He'd driven himself toward health and balance. And then they'd returned to him with the happy news that Leck was dead. Po was left without a reason. Unhappiness had choked him once again.

  The very fact of his unhappiness made him unhappy.

  "I've no right to feel sorry for myself," he said to her one day, when they'd gone out into a quiet snowfall to fetch water. "I see everything. I see things I shouldn't see. I'm wallowing in self-pity, when I've lost nothing."

  Katsa crouched with him before the pool. "That's the first truly idiotic thing you've ever said to me."

  His mouth tightened. He picked up one of the rocks they used to bash through the ice. He lifted the rock above his head and drove it, hard, into the frozen surface of the pool; and finally she was rewarded with a low rumble of something that almost passed for a laugh. "Your brand of comfort bears some similarity to your tactical offense."

  "You've lost something," she said, "and you've every right to feel sorrow for what you've lost. They're not the same, sight and your Grace. Your Grace shows you the form of things, but it doesn't show you beauty. You've lost beauty."

  His mouth tightened again, and he looked away from her. When he looked back she thought he might be about to cry. But he spoke tearlessly, stonily. "I won't go back to Lienid. I won't go to my castle, if I'm not able to see it. It's hard enough to be with you. It's why I didn't tell you the truth. I wanted you to go away, because it hurts to be with you when I can't see you."

  She tilted her head back and considered his stormy expression. "This is very good," she said. "This is some excellent self-pity."

  And then the rumble of his laughter again, and a kind of helpless heartache in his face that caused her to reach for him, take him into her arms, and kiss his neck, his snow-covered shoulder, his finger not wearing its ring, and every place that she could find. He touched her face gently. He touched her lips and kissed her. He rested
his forehead against hers.

  "I would never hold you here," he said. "But if you can bear this—if you can bear me behaving like this—I don't really want you to leave."

  "I'll not go," Katsa said, "for a long time. I'll not go until you want me to; or until you're ready to go yourself."

  HE HAD QUITE a talent for playing a part. Katsa saw this now, because she saw the transformation now, whenever they were alone and he stopped pretending. To his brother and his cousin he presented strength, steadiness, health. His shoulders were straight, his stride even. When he couldn't hide his unhappiness, he played it as moodiness. When he couldn't find the energy to direct his eyes to their faces and pretend to see them, he played it as inattention. He was strong, cheerful—strangely distracted, perhaps, but healing well from grave injury. It was an impressive act—and for the most part, it seemed to satisfy them. Enough, at least, that they never had reason to suspect the truth of his Grace, which was ultimately all he was trying to hide.

  When he and Katsa were alone, hunting, collecting water, or sitting together in the cabin, the disguise quietly fell from him. Weariness pulled at his face, his body, his voice. He put his hand out occasionally, to a tree or a rock, to steady himself. His eyes focused, or pretended to focus, on nothing, ever. And Katsa began to understand that while some of his sorry state was attributable to plain unhappiness, an even larger part of it stemmed from his Grace itself. For he was still growing into it; and now that he no longer had vision to anchor his perception of the world, he was constantly overwhelmed.

  One day beside the pool, during a rare break between snowstorms, she watched him notch an arrow calmly to his bow and aim at something she couldn't see. A ledge of rock? A tree stump? He cocked his head as if he were listening. He released the arrow, and it sliced through the cold and thwacked into a patch of snow. "What—" Katsa started to say, and then stopped when a spot of blood welled to the surface and colored the snow around the arrow's shaft.