by Graceling
Her eyes dropped from the princess to the map on the ground before her. It was a map of the Sunderan-Monsean border, the impassable Monsean peaks. If Po were here he would suspect what she was thinking. She could imagine the monstrous argument they would be having.
She imagined the argument, because it helped her to come to her decision.
When they’d eaten their dinner she rolled up the maps and fastened their belongings to the saddle. “Up you go, Bitterblue. We can’t waste this night. We must move on.”
“Po warned you not to run the horse ragged,” Bitterblue said.
“The horse is about to enjoy a very thorough rest. We’re heading into the mountains, and once we get a bit higher we’ll be setting him free.”
“Into the mountains,” Bitterblue said. “What do you mean, into the mountains?”
Katsa scattered the remains of their fire. She dug a hole with her dagger to hide the bones of their dinner. “There’s no safety for us in Monsea. We’re going to cross the mountains into Sunder.”
Bitterblue stood still beside the horse and stared at her. “Cross the mountains? These mountains, here?”
“Yes. The mountain pass at the northern border will be guarded. We must find our own passageway, here.”
“Even in summer, no one crosses these mountains,” the girl said. “It’s almost winter. We have no warmer clothes. We have no tools, only your dagger and my knife. It’s not possible. We’ll never survive.”
Katsa had a response to that, though she knew none of the particulars. She lifted the girl into the saddle and swung onto the horse behind her. She turned the animal west.
She said, “I will keep you alive.”
THEY DIDN’T really have only one dagger and one knife to bring them over the Monsean peaks into Sunder. They had the dagger and the knife; a length of rope; a needle and some cord; the maps; a fraction of the medicines; most of the gold; a small amount of extra clothing; the ratty blanket Bitterblue wore; two saddlebags; one saddle; and one bridle. And they had anything that Katsa could capture, kill, or construct with her own two hands as they climbed. This, first and foremost, should include the fur of some beast, to protect the child from the nagging cold they encountered here and the dangerous cold that awaited them—and that Katsa wouldn’t dwell on, because when she dwelled she began to doubt herself.
She would make a bow, and possibly snowshoes—like the ones she’d worn once or twice in the winter forests outside Randa City. She thought she remembered how the snowshoes looked, and how they worked.
When the sky behind them began to lighten and color, Katsa pulled the child down from the horse. They slept for an hour or so, huddled together in a mossy crevice of rock. The sun rose around them. Katsa woke to the sound of the girl’s teeth chattering. She must wake Bitterblue, and they must get moving; and before the day was out, she must have a solution to the cold that gave this girl no rest.
BITTERBLUE BLINKED at the light.
“We’re higher,” she said. “We’ve climbed in the night.”
Katsa handed the child what was left of yesterday’s dinner. “Yes.”
“You still have it in your head for us to cross the mountains.”
“It’s the only place in Monsea Leck won’t search for us.”
“Because he knows we’d be mad to try it.”
There was something petulant in the child’s tone, the first hint of complaint from the girl since Katsa and Po had found her in the forest. Well, she had a right. She was tired and cold; her mother was dead. Katsa spread the map of the Monsean peaks across her lap and said nothing.
“There are bears in the mountains,” Bitterblue said.
“The bears are asleep until spring,” Katsa said.
“There are other animals. Wolves. Mountain lions. Animals you’ve not seen in the Middluns. And snow you’ve not seen. You don’t know what these mountains are like.”
Between two mountain peaks on Katsa’s map was a path that seemed likely to be the least complicated route into Sunder. Grella’s Pass, according to the scrawled words, and presumably the only route through the peaks that had been traveled by another.
Katsa rolled up her maps and slipped them into a saddlebag. She hoisted the girl back up into the saddle. “Who is Grella?” she asked.
Bitterblue snorted and said nothing. Katsa swung onto the horse behind the child. They rode for a number of minutes before Bitterblue spoke.
“Grella was a famous Monsean mountain explorer,” she said. “He died in the pass that bears his name.”
“Was he Graced?”
“No. He wasn’t Graced like you. But he was mad like you.”
The sting of the remark didn’t touch Katsa. There was no reason for Bitterblue to believe that a Graceling who’d only recently seen her first mountain could guide them through Grella’s Pass. Katsa herself wasn’t sure of it. She knew only that when she weighed the danger of the King of Monsea against the danger of bears, wolves, blizzards, and ice, she found with utter certainty her Grace to be better equipped to face the mountains.
So Katsa said nothing, and she didn’t change her mind. When the wind picked up and Katsa felt Bitterblue shivering, she drew the child close, and covered her hands with her own. The horse stumbled its way upward, and Katsa thought about their saddle. If she took it apart and soaked it and beat it, its leather would soften. It would make a rough coat for Bitterblue, or perhaps trousers. There was no reason to waste it, if it could be made to provide warmth; and very soon the horse would need it no longer.
***
THEY CLIMBED blindly, even during the day, never knowing what they might encounter next, for the hills and trees rose before them and hid the higher terrain from their view. Katsa caught squirrels and fish and mice for their meals, and rabbits, if they were lucky. Beside their fire every night, she stretched and dried the pelts of their dinners. She rubbed fish oils and fat into the hides. She pieced together the pelts, experimenting with them and persisting until she’d made the child a rough fur hood, with ends that wrapped around her neck like a scarf. “It looks a bit odd,” Katsa said when it was done and the child tried it on. “But vanity doesn’t strike me as one of your qualities, Princess.”
“It smells funny,” Bitterblue said, “but it’s warm.”
That was all Katsa needed to hear.
The terrain grew rougher, and the brush wilder and more desperate looking. At night as the fire burned and Bitterblue slept, Katsa heard rustles around their camp that she hadn’t heard before. Rustles that made the horse nervous; and howls sometimes, not so far away, that woke the child and brought her, shivering, to Katsa’s side, admitting to nightmares. About strange howling monsters and sometimes her mother, she said, not seeming to want to elaborate. Katsa didn’t prod.
It was on one of these nights when the sound of the wolves drove the child to Katsa that Katsa set down the stick she was whittling into an arrow and put her arm around the girl. She rubbed warmth into Bitterblue’s chapped hands. And then she told the child, because it was on her own mind, about Katsa’s cousin Raffin, who loved the art of medicine and would be ten times the king his father was; and about Helda, who had befriended Katsa when no one else would and thought of nothing but marrying her off to some lord; and about the Council, and the night Katsa and Oll and Giddon had rescued Bitterblue’s grandfather and Katsa had scuffled with a stranger in Murgon’s gardens and left him lying unconscious on the ground—a stranger who’d turned out to be Po.
Bitterblue laughed at that, and Katsa told her how she and Po had become friends, and how Raffin had nursed Bitterblue’s grandfather back to health; and how Katsa and Po had gone to Sunder to unravel the truth behind the kidnapping and followed the clues into Monsea and to the mountains, the forest, and the girl.
“You aren’t really like the person in the stories,” Bitterblue said. “The stories I heard before I met you.”
Katsa braced herself against the flood of memories that never seemed to lose their fr
eshness and always made her ashamed. “The stories are true,” she said. “I am that person.”
“But how can you be? You wouldn’t break an innocent man’s arm, or cut off his fingers.”
“I did those things for my uncle,” Katsa said, “at a time when he had power over me.”
And Katsa felt certain again that they were doing the right thing, to climb toward Grella’s Pass, to the only place Leck wouldn’t follow. Because Katsa couldn’t protect Bitterblue unless her power remained her own. Her arm tightened around the girl. “You should know that my Grace isn’t just fighting, child. My Grace is survival. I’ll bring you through these mountains.”
The child didn’t answer, but she put her head on Katsa’s lap, curled her arm onto Katsa’s leg, and burrowed against her. She fell asleep like that, to the howl of the wolves, and Katsa decided not to pick up her whittling again. They dozed together before the fire; and then Katsa woke and lifted the girl onto the horse. She took the reins and led the beast upward through the Monsean night.
THE DAY came when the terrain grew impossible for the horse. Katsa didn’t want to kill the animal, but she forced herself to consider it. There was leather to be gotten from him. And if he were left alive, he would wander the hills and give the soldiers who found him a clue to the fugitives’ location. On the other hand, if Katsa killed the horse, she couldn’t possibly dispose of his entire body. They would have to leave the carcass on the mountainside for the scavengers; and if soldiers found it, its bones picked clean, it would serve as a much more definite marker of their location and direction than a horse wandering free. Katsa decided with some relief that the horse must live. They removed his bags, his saddle, and his bridle. They wished him well and sent him on his way.
They climbed with their own hands and feet, Katsa helping Bitterblue up the steepest slopes, and lifting her onto rocks too big for her to climb. Thankfully, on the day she’d slid down the walls of her castle clinging to knotted sheets, Bitterblue had worn good boots. But she tripped now over her ratty dress. Finally, Katsa cut the skirts away and fashioned them into a crude pair of trousers. The girl’s passage after that was faster and less frustrating.
The saddle leather was stiffer than Katsa had anticipated. She fought with it at night while Bitterblue slept, and finally decided to cut the girl four makeshift leggings, one for each lower leg and one for each upper leg, with straps to tie them in place over the trousers. They looked rather comical, but they gave her some protection from the cold and the damp. For more and more often now, as they trudged upward, snow drifted from the sky.
FOOD BECAME SCARCE. Katsa let no animal go to waste; if something moved, she brought it down. She ate little and gave most of their food to Bitterblue, who gobbled down whatever she was given.
In the light of each morning, Katsa removed the girl’s boots and checked her feet for blisters. She inspected the girl’s hands to make sure that her fingers weren’t frostbitten. She rubbed ointment into Bitterblue’s cracked skin. She handed Bitterblue the water flask every time they stopped to rest. And Katsa stopped them often for these rests, for she began to suspect that this child would collapse before admitting she was tired.
Katsa was not tired. She felt the strength of her arms and legs and the quickness of her blade. She felt most acutely the slowness of their pace. At times she wanted to hoist the child over her shoulder and run up the mountainside at full tilt. But Katsa suspected that eventually on this mountain she would need every bit of her Graceling strength; and so she must not exhaust herself now. She curbed her impatience as best she could, and focused her energies on providing for the child.
THE MOUNTAIN LION was a gift, really, coming as it did at the beginning of the first true snowstorm they encountered.
The storm had been building all afternoon. The clouds knitted together. The snowflakes swelled and sharpened. Katsa made camp at the first possible place, a deep crevice in the mountain sheltered by a rocky overhang. Bitterblue went off to collect kindling, and Katsa set out, her dagger in her belt, to find them some dinner.
She struck a path upward, over the sheet of rock that formed the roof of their shelter. She headed into one of the clumps of trees that grew skyward on this mountain, roots clinging more to rock than to soil. Her senses were alert for any movement.
What she saw first was the slightest flicker, in the corner of her eye. A brown flicker up high in a tree, a flicker that curled and lifted, different somehow from the way a tree branch moved; and the limb of a tree that swung in an odd way—bounced, really, not as a wind would move it, but as if something heavy weighed it down.
Her body moved faster than her mind, recognizing predator and comprehending itself as prey. Instantly her dagger was in her hand. The great cat plunged, screeching, and she hurled the blade into its stomach. As she dropped and rolled away, its claws tore into her shoulder. Then the cat was upon her, great heavy paws slamming her shoulders against the ground and pinning her to her back. It came snarling at her, claws swiping and teeth bared, so fast that it was all she could do to keep her chest and neck from being ripped apart. She wrestled with its hopelessly strong forearms and swung her head away as its teeth came crashing together right where her face had just been. It slashed her breast savagely. When its teeth lunged for her throat Katsa grabbed its neck and screamed, pushed its snapping jaws away from her face. The animal reared above her and raked her arms with its claws. She saw a flash of something in its stomach, and remembered the dagger. Its teeth descended again and Katsa swung out, smashing its nose with her fist. It recoiled for the merest second, stunned, and in that second she reached desperately for the dagger. The cat lunged again, and Katsa thrust the dagger into its throat.
The cat made one horrible hissing, bubbling noise. Then it collapsed onto Katsa’s chest, and its claws slid away from her skin. The mountain was quiet, and the lion was dead.
Katsa heaved the cat away. She propped herself onto her right elbow and wiped the animal’s hot blood out of her eyes. She tested her left shoulder and winced at the pain. She choked back an enormous surge of irritation that she should now have an injury that might slow them down; and she tore open her coat and sighed, disgusted, at the gashes in her breast that stung almost as badly as those in her shoulder. And other rips and tears, she realized now, as each movement uncovered a new sting. Smaller cuts, on her neck and across her stomach and arms; deeper cuts in her thighs, where the cat had pinned her with its hind feet.
Well, there was no reason to lie around feeling sorry for herself. The snow was falling harder now. This fight had brought her injury and inconvenience, but it had also brought food that would last them a good long time, and fur for a coat that Bitterblue very much needed.
Katsa heaved herself to her feet. She considered the great lion that lay dead and bloody before her. Its tail—that’s what she’d seen lifting and curling in that tree. The first clue that had saved her life. From head to tail the cat was longer than her height, and she guessed it weighed a good deal more than she did. Its neck was thick and powerful, its shoulders and back heavily muscled. Its teeth were as long as her fingers, and its claws longer. It occurred to her that she had not done so badly in this fight, despite what Bitterblue would think when she saw her. This was not an animal she would have chosen to fight in hand-to-hand combat. This animal could have killed her.
She realized then how long she had left Bitterblue alone, and a gust of wind blew thickening snow into her face. She pulled the dagger from the cat’s throat, wiped it on the ground, and slipped it into her belt. She rolled the cat onto its back and grasped one of its forelegs in each hand. She gritted her teeth against the ache in her shoulder, and dragged the cat down to their cave.
***
BITTERBLUE RAN up from the camp when she saw Katsa coming. Her eyes widened. She made an unintelligible noise that sounded like choking.
“I’m all right, child,” Katsa said. “It only scratched me.”
“You’re covered in blood
.”
“Mostly the cat’s blood.”
The girl shook her head and pulled at the rips in Katsa’s coat. “Great seas,” she said, when she saw the gashes in Katsa’s breast. “Great seas,” she whispered again, at the sight of Katsa’s shoulder, arms, and stomach. “We’ll have to sew some of these cuts closed. Let’s clean you up. I’ll get the medicines.”
THAT NIGHT their camp was crowded, but the fire warmed their small space, and cooked their cat steaks, and dried the tawny pelt that would soon become Bitterblue’s coat. Bitterblue supervised the cooking of the meat; they would carry the extra frozen as they climbed.
The snow fell harder now. The wind gusted snowflakes into their fire, where they hissed and died. If this storm lasted, they’d be comfortable enough here. Food, water, a roof, and warmth; they had all they needed. Katsa shifted so that the fire’s heat would touch her and dry the tattered clothing she’d put on again after washing because she had nothing else to wear.
She was working on the great bow she’d been making for the past few days. She bent the stave, and tested its strength. She cut a length of cord for the string. She bound the string tightly to one end of the stave and pulled on it, hard, to stretch it to the other end. She groaned at the ache in her shoulder, and the soreness of her leg where the bow pressed into one of her cuts. “If this is what it’s like to be injured, I’ll never understand why Po loves so much to fight me. Not if this is how he feels afterwards.”
