Winterkeep

by Kristin Cashore

  “Are you seriously suggesting that the night we were all in shock from losing our queen,” said Giddon, “Hava robbed one of your neighbors?”

  “Anyway, robbed her of what?” said Hava. “What formulas?”

  “Varane,” said Lovisa, with a dismissive gesture. “The airship gas. I don’t believe you don’t know.”

  “And I don’t like your indignation about thieves,” said Hava. “Your own father is one of the thieves who tricked Queen Bitterblue out of some of her zilfium.”

  Lovisa remembered that incident. Lots of people had done that, and her father was not a thief. “It’s not his fault if his vendors don’t know their own business,” she said hotly.

  “Sounds like your father doesn’t know his business,” said Hava. “We heard he’s growing his shipping firm too fast, even running it into the ground.”

  And that was an outrageous lie. “Better than running a whole country into the ground,” snapped Lovisa.

  Immediately, three things happened. First, Hava surged toward her, white with fury. Second, Giddon stepped forward to block Hava. And third, the moment Giddon wrapped his arms around her, Hava turned into a sculpture again.

  Then she changed into an enormous bird, then a bear, then a sculpture again; it was terrifying, impossible, and Lovisa cried out, bent herself over her own heaving stomach. But she also kept looking, unable to stop herself.

  “We’re going to leave now,” Giddon said calmly, as if the transformation weren’t taking place. “Would you be kind enough to let your parents and Quona Varana know we’ve gone?”

  “Yes, all right,” Lovisa gasped.

  “One thing before you go,” said Giddon. “Is that a real place?” He nudged his chin toward a painting on the wall across the room.

  Lovisa, still fixated on Hava, didn’t even glance at the painting, which she knew showed a large house on a cliff above the sea. “Yes.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s the Cavenda estate in the north. My mother and my uncle Katu grew up there.”

  “Thank you,” said Giddon. “Do a lot of people in Winterkeep have houses on cliffs?”

  What a weird, stupid question. “Yes!” she said. “Why would you ask that?”

  “No reason. I suggest you close your eyes and find your way out of the room.”

  Closing her eyes as an experiment, Lovisa was instantly less disoriented. She bumbled and groped her way to the door, peeking back at them once before she went out. Hava wasn’t changing anymore. She’d frozen into a sculpture of an angry, rageful woman much older than herself, and though her mouth wasn’t moving, Lovisa could hear her directing low, furious, indistinguishable words at her captor.

  Lovisa left the room.

  * * *

  —

  In the corridor, no guard was in sight, so Lovisa filled her pockets and hands with pastries. Then she snuck up the stairs to the nursery wing.

  She found the boys tucked together on Vikti’s bed, whispering to one another. Their eyes went wide with fright when she cracked the door open. Then, when they saw her, not to mention the treasures she carried, their faces transformed into the pure happiness that always made Lovisa feel that whenever she wasn’t with them, she was abandoning them.

  They waved her in, making a space for her on the bed. Then, for a while, they all gorged themselves on pastries, the boys asking excited questions with full mouths and shushing one another repeatedly, for the nannies were in the rooms nearby, and each boy was supposed to be asleep in his own bed. Was it true there was a Graceling at dinner? Did Lovisa get to sit near her? What was she like?

  It was a question with too many confusing answers, so Lovisa kept it simple, explaining what Hava could do. The boys went rigid with amazement and delight at her description, like little sculptures of their own.

  “And how have you been?” she asked them.

  “Mother and Papa are angry at each other,” Erita said.

  “Really? What are they angry about?”

  Vikti and Viri both shrugged, but Erita had more to report. “Papa was reckless and impulsive,” he said.

  Lovisa remembered what Hava had said about Benni’s shipping firm. “You heard that?”

  “I heard Mother whisper-yelling at Papa that he was reckless and impulsive.”

  “What does reckless and impulsive mean?” Viri asked, then instantly shrank, as if remembering what happened the last time he’d asked Lovisa what a word meant. “Never mind,” he said quickly.

  Lovisa needed a moment to swallow the sadness that rose into her throat. “I hope you’ll always ask me what words mean, Viri,” she said. “Always. Reckless means careless, not careful. Like, it would be reckless to jump out of a high window, or fly the airship too far from shore, where the wind is too strong. Impulsive means doing something suddenly without thinking it through. Like, you might impulsively eat too many pastries because they looked good, then regret it when you threw up, not that I know anyone who would do anything like that.”

  The boys thought this was the funniest joke they’d ever heard.

  “Did Mother say why Papa was reckless and impulsive?” asked Lovisa.

  “No, but now they’re in an impossible situation,” Erita said. “And Mother can’t trust Papa to fix it, because he’ll mess it up, so she’s going to fix it herself, which is something someone as important as the president of Winterkeep should not have to do.”

  “Wow,” said Lovisa. “You have really good ears.”

  “Erita is the best at snooping,” Viri said proudly.

  “I was in the stairway between Mother’s study and Papa’s library,” Erita said, with solemn modesty. “I couldn’t help hearing it! I think Mother forgot she put me in there.”

  “She put you in there?” said Lovisa, puzzled.

  “She’s renovating the attic room,” said Erita.

  “Oh, I see,” said Lovisa, trying to decipher this. “So she put you in the staircase instead, so you could”—she pitched her voice low to sound like Ferla’s—“‘think hard about what you’ve done’?”

  “Yes,” said Erita, giggling in delight. “But I didn’t mind it at all. I just climbed down and sat at the door to Papa’s library, where it was warm and I could hear Papa working. But I pretended to be upset when she finally let me out, so she’d do it again.”

  “I see,” said Lovisa. “It doesn’t seem like it would be very nice in there.”

  “It’s dusty. But it’s way more interesting than the attic room. Are you staying overnight, Lovisa?”

  Guilt stabbed her. “No. I have to go back to the dorm.”

  “But why?”

  “I have homework to do.”

  “Couldn’t you do it here?”

  “I didn’t bring it.”

  “Could you go get it?”

  “I don’t have time,” she said, knowing she could skip her homework, that the homework shouldn’t matter more than her brothers; but also knowing that she couldn’t stay overnight in this house, where at every moment she felt the darkness closing around her like a cold, lonely cave. Knowing that part of the reason she needed to go was to escape the sadness of these boys. Selfish coward.

  She kissed their freckled noses before she left, told them to take care of one another. It was something Katu often said to them, when he took off on his adventures. “You kids take care of each other until I get back, all right?” It occurred to her to wonder—for the first time—if Katu left because he was excited about where he was going, or because he also felt the trap closing around him if he stayed.

  Shutting Vikti’s bedroom door, Lovisa snuck out of the nursery wing and made her way to the door at the base of the attic steps. She was curious about her mother’s supposed renovations. When had these “renovations” started, exactly? Shouldn’t there be signs of disarray? Paper on the floors to p
rotect the rugs from workers’ boots, or something like that? Lovisa knew better. Why all the secrecy about whatever Benni was keeping in the attic room?

  Ferla’s fox sat in front of the attic door. She was certain it was him; though foxes looked a lot alike, she recognized that malevolent gaze, and her mother’s fox had a longish nose and jaunty ears. He was panting, and also guarding a pastry that sat on the rug at his feet. It was odd behavior, but it hardly mattered. What mattered were his glimmering eyes, resting on Lovisa’s suspicious face.

  Downstairs, dinner was breaking up, guests milling through the drawing rooms and the game room, teas in hand. Lovisa decided to let her parents and Quona figure out for themselves that Giddon and Hava had gone. Finding her coat, she slipped outside into the cold. She wanted to go around to the back of the house and look up at the attic room window—for a light? A sign? A clue? Of what? Something impulsive her father had done? Some way in which he was damaging his own business?

  But the fox had already seen her. It wasn’t worth the door guards seeing her too.

  The house glowed with the light of silbercow oil as she headed toward campus.

  * * *

  —

  When she reached her dormitory, a boy named Nori Orfa was on his way out. He was a northerner like Nev, but two-named like the Cavendas, from one of Winterkeep’s most prestigious tea manors in Torla’s Neck. In fact, he was one of the many Keepish who lived in a house on a cliff above the sea. Lovisa didn’t like Nori Orfa, at all. She knew a girl he’d hurt, with lies. And she wasn’t surprised to see him visiting this dorm; she’d noticed him and Nev chatting outside recently, stupid grins on their faces, like they thought they had a secret.

  He smiled at her in that unsubtle, flirtatious way he always had, then held the door open for her in a way that crowded her and felt more intimate than it needed to. Ignoring him, she trudged up the steps, then through the corridors. As she passed Nev’s bedroom, she heard a scuffle inside, like someone was dragging the furniture. Then a yowl, then a laugh.

  She knocked on the door. She couldn’t help herself.

  A moment later, Nev swung the door open sharply. When she saw Lovisa, her face went expressionless. “Yes?” she said.

  Lovisa’s eyes slid to Nev’s bed, automatically looking for rumpled blankets, the kind of disarray that might mean she’d just been having sex with Nori Orfa. She saw nothing. The blankets were neatly folded and a steaming cup on the desk suggested that Nev was doing homework. Her stove was burning and her window was full of plants, as always. Nev was one of those people who knew one plant from another.

  “I heard yelling,” Lovisa said.

  “Did you?”

  There was a small movement under Nev’s bed. A dark nose poked out and one yellow eye peered up at Lovisa.

  “You have a fox kit now?” said Lovisa.

  “As you see.”

  “Are you bonded?”

  “Is that any of your business?”

  “Do you know it’s against the rules to live in an academy dorm with an unbonded fox?”

  “I have an exception from a teacher,” said Nev.

  “You mean Quona Varana,” said Lovisa, understanding. “She gave you that fox, didn’t she.”

  “As you know perfectly well, people can’t give people foxes,” said Nev. “Foxes choose their companions. She needed surgery. I performed it. She decided to stay with me afterward. It seemed appropriate to Quona, because I’m an animal medicine student. Now I’m caring for her.”

  “Right. She’s homework,” Lovisa said as the kit emerged further, her enormous ears comical above her tiny, bandaged face. “What’s her name?”

  “I don’t know what she calls herself. I call her Little Guy.”

  “Stupid name. She looks like a pirate. What happened to her?”

  “I had to cut an aronworm from her face. It’s a pale, bulbous, wormlike parasite,” Nev said blandly, as if she were trying to be disgusting on purpose.

  “She’s cute,” Lovisa said, startling Nev, and herself too. She pushed away from the doorframe, grasping for an insult. “So that’s what you and Quona do together? Remove parasites? Do you go to her house and pet her cats? Does she take you with her when she communes with silbercows?”

  Something closed in Nev’s eyes. A curtain coming down, for Nev to hide something behind. It was interesting. “I’ve seen some injured silbercows recently,” she said. “Did you know that? Some have come to shore with cuts and burns.”

  “So?”

  “So?” Nev repeated, with so much contempt that Lovisa took a small step backward. “Silbercows are important. They understand things about the world that we can’t. They rescue drowning people.”

  Lovisa had tried to talk to silbercows once, at her mother’s house in Torla’s Neck, when she was little. It hadn’t worked. The purple blobs out at sea had offered no acknowledgment of her existence whatsoever. It had made her feel . . . insufficient. Like she wasn’t important enough. And it had made her half suspect that anyone who said they talked to silbercows was lying.

  “They haven’t done such a good job rescuing drowning people lately,” said Lovisa, thinking of the queen. “I think Quona’s just trying to brainwash you into believing her family’s party line so you’ll vote for the Scholars.”

  “Why would I care about party lines?” said Nev. “I’m not political, I’m an animal doctor in training. And at least I’m that. You’re not anything.”

  Tears stung Lovisa’s throat. “Good night,” she said, turning away so that Nev wouldn’t see her expression.

  “Good night,” said Nev, sounding confused suddenly, as if she hadn’t expected to drive Lovisa off with her words. And why should she? She was only being honest, as Nev always was.

  In the hallway, a crowd of boys passed by, greeting Lovisa, moving on. The last boy in the group was Mari Devret, who turned to look into the room of his ex. In an instant, his unhappy eyes seemed to absorb everything: Nev’s fox kit, Nev’s tidy bed, the messy piles on Nev’s desk, the plants in Nev’s window, Nev herself. Lovisa watched his eyes flash across Nev’s face, hurt, reproachful.

  Sighing, she took his arm and pulled him away.

  “What?” he said defensively.

  “When are you going to stop being so pathetic?”

  “When you stop being mean,” he said, then canted his face, looking at Lovisa more closely. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Shut up.”

  “Very convincing,” he said. “How was dinner?”

  “There was an incident with a Graceling.”

  “Really? What kind of Graceling?”

  “She can change what you think you see when you look at her. She kept turning into a sculpture at the dinner table.”

  This seemed to cheer Mari up. “That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Mari?” Lovisa said, slowing her pace, letting the other boys move on. Pari Parnin, Kep Gravla, boys she would never trust with anything precious.

  “Yeah?” he said, pausing with her. Then, when she didn’t speak, he searched her face again with his clear, perceptive eyes. “What’s wrong, Lovisa?”

  Mari was, for all intents, Lovisa’s oldest friend, the friend who knew more of her childhood secrets than anyone. It had been a long time since she’d shared any secrets with him, or with anyone. But now she wanted to tell him about the snooping Monseans. Why had they been trying to get into her father’s desk? What were they looking for in there? Also, the thing they’d said about Benni running his shipping firm into the ground. It had made her so angry. But could it be true? The bitter feud between her parents, who usually never directed their bitterness at each other. Benni’s banker’s box—and the renovations—in the attic room. Lovisa couldn’t connect the dots, but Mari had an imagination. He might have ideas. She knew she could trust him to kee
p it to himself too.

  She found herself hesitating, not knowing why. “Will you vote Industrialist when you’re older?” she asked instead.

  “I guess so,” he said, not looking much interested. “You know I’m not political.”

  Yes, she knew that Mari had no interest in his mother’s political career, nor in his father’s bank. Mari wanted to be a doctor, as in, for humans; he always had, since they were little. His parents were proud of him, for wanting to do something different. He was in the school of medicine here at the academy.

  “I’m thinking of changing schools,” she said, only thinking of it as the words came out of her mouth.

  “Really?” he said, surprised. “To what?”

  Lovisa had no answer to that. She’d never questioned her school before and she didn’t suppose she was truly questioning it now. She wasn’t sure what she was questioning. “I’ll tell you another time,” she said.

  “Yeah, okay. You’re being weird, you know that?”

  “I’m just tired. Good night, Mari.”

  “Okay, good night. You know where I am if you want to talk about this wonderful new plan to get disowned by both your parents,” he said.

  She smiled, despite herself, then left him at his door. Inside her own room, the glow of streetlamps illuminated a crystalline pattern of frost on her window. She knew without looking that her desk was still covered with work. She knew she faced a long night of reading papers that bored her, burning her small stove for heat, wrapping herself in furs and blankets. Maybe moving out to the chair by the fire in the foyer, where studying felt less lonely, less meaningless.

  Why did she work so hard, when she cared so little? She’d never found politics difficult to follow, because every dispute was the same. People were motivated by money, power, idealism, fame. Usually money. What was the real reason the Scholars didn’t want to legalize zilfium use in Winterkeep? In Parliament, Scholars yelled at Industrialists for not caring about the air and water pollution that would impact Keepish industries like fishing and farming. They yelled about Winterkeep’s beauty. Sometimes they even yelled about fairy tales, as if they actually mattered: According to the oldest stories of the silbercows, humanity’s most solemn promise was to help protect the planet. The Keeper was watching.