Graceling

by Kristin Cashore

  "And you must expect me to behave strangely. I'll have to pretend I'm Graced with fighting, no more, and that I believe every word he says."

  "And I'll practice my archery, and my knife throwing," Katsa said. "For I've a feeling that when all is asked and revealed, King Leck will find himself on the end of my blade."

  Po shook his head and did not smile. "I've a feeling it's not going to be that easy."

  THE THIRD DAY of their crossing was the windiest, and the coldest. The mountain pass led them between two peaks that were hidden, sometimes, behind cyclones of snow. Their boots crunched through patches of snow; and flakes drifted onto their shoulders from the thin blue sky and melted into Katsa's hair.

  "I like winter in the mountains," she said, but Po laughed.

  "This isn't winter in the mountains. This is autumn in the mountains, and a mild autumn at that. Winter is ferocious."

  "I think I should like that, too," she said, and Po laughed again.

  "I wouldn't be a bit surprised. You'd thrive on the challenge of it."

  The weather held, so that Katsa's declaration could not be put to the test. They moved as fast as the terrain would permit. For all his marveling at Katsa's energy, Po was strong and quick. He teased her for the pace she set, but he didn't complain; and if he stopped sometimes for food and water, Katsa was grateful, for it reminded her to eat and drink as well. And it gave her an excuse to turn around and stare behind them, at the mountains that stretched from east to west, at the whole world she could see—for she was so high that she felt she could see the whole world.

  And then suddenly, they reached the top of the pass. Before them the mountains plunged into a forest of pines. Green valleys stretched beyond, broken by streams and farmhouses and tiny dots that Katsa guessed were cows. And a line, a river, that thinned into the distance and led to a miniature white city at the edge of their sight. Leck City.

  "I can barely see it," Po said, "but I trust your vision."

  "I see buildings," Katsa said, "and a dark wall around a white castle. And look, see the farmhouses in the valley? Surely you can make those out. And the cows, do you see the cows?"

  "Yes, I can see them, now that you mention it. It's gorgeous, Katsa. Have you ever seen a sight so gorgeous?"

  She laughed at his happiness. For a moment, as they looked down on Monsea, the world was beautiful and without worry.

  THE DOWNHILL scramble was more treacherous than the uphill climb. Po complained that his toes were liable to burst through the front of his boots; and then he complained that he wished they would, for they ached from the constant downhill beat of his feet. And then Katsa noticed that he stopped complaining altogether and sank into a preoccupation.

  "Po. We're moving fast."

  "Yes." He shaded his eyes with his hand and squinted down at the fields of Monsea. "I only hope it's fast enough."

  They camped that night beside a stream that ran with melting snow. She sat on a rock and watched his eyes that glimmered with worry. He glanced at her and smiled suddenly. "Would you like something sweet to eat with this rabbit?"

  "Of course," she said, "but it makes little difference what I want, if all we have is rabbit."

  He stood then and turned away into the scrub.

  Where are you going?

  He didn't answer. His boots scraped on rock as he disappeared into blackness.

  She stood. "Po!"

  "Don't worry your heart, Katsa." His voice came from a distance. "I'm only finding what you want."

  "If you think I'm just going to sit here—"

  "Sit down. You'll ruin my surprise."

  She sat, but she let him know what she thought of him and his surprise, rattling around in the dark and breaking his ankles on the rocks most likely, so she'd have to carry him the rest of the way down the mountain. A few minutes passed, and she heard him returning. He stepped into the light and came to her, his hand cupped before him. When he knelt before her, she saw a little mound of berries in his palm. She looked into the shadows of his face.

  "Winterberries?" she asked. "Winterberries." She took one from his hand and bit into it. It popped with a cold sweetness. She swallowed the soft flesh and watched his face, confused. "Your Grace showed them to you, these winterberries."

  "Yes."

  "Po. This is new, isn't it? That you should sense a plant with such clarity. It's not as if it were moving or thinking or about to crash down on top of you."

  He sat back on his heels. He tilted his head. "The world is filling in around me," he said, "piece by piece. The fuzziness is clearing. To be honest, it's a bit disorienting. I'm ever so slightly dizzy."

  Katsa stared at him. There was nothing to say in response to this; his Grace was showing him winterberries, and he was ever so slightly dizzy. Tomorrow he would be able to tell her about a landslide on the other side of the world, and they would both faint.

  She sighed and touched the gold in his ear. "If you put your feet into the stream, the snow water will soothe your toes, and I'll rub the warmth back into them when you're done."

  "And if I'm cold in places other than my toes? Will you warm me there, too?"

  His voice was a grin, and she laughed into his face. But then he took her chin in his hand and looked into her eyes, seriously. "Katsa. When we get closer to Leck, you must do whatever I tell you to. Do you promise?"

  "I promise."

  "You must, Katsa. You must swear it."

  "Po. I've promised it before, and I'll promise it again, and swear it, too. I'll do what you say."

  He watched her eyes, and then he nodded. He emptied the last few berries into her hand and bent down to his boots.

  "My toes are such a misery, I'm not sure it's wise to release them. They may revolt and run off into the mountains and refuse to return."

  She ate another winterberry. "I expect I'm more than a match for your toes."

  THE NEXT DAY there were no more jokes from Po, about his toes or anything else. He hardly spoke, and the farther they moved down the path that led to King Leck, the more anxious he seemed to become. His mood was contagious. Katsa was uneasy.

  "You'll do what I say, when the time comes?" he asked her once.

  She opened her mouth to give voice to a surge of irritation at the question she'd already answered and must now answer again. But at the sight of him trudging down the path beside her, tense and worried, she lost hold of her anger.

  "I'll do what you say, Po."

  Chapter Twenty-three

  "KATSA."

  His voice woke her. She opened her eyes and knew it to be about three hours before dawn. "What is it?"

  "I can't sleep." She sat up. "Too worried?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, I assume you didn't wake me just for my company."

  "You don't need the sleep; and if I'm going to be awake we may as well be moving."

  And she was up, and her blanket rolled, and her quiver and bow and bags on her back in an instant. A path, sloping downhill, ran through the trees. The forest was black. Po took her arm and led her as best he could, stumbling over stones and resting his hand on trees she couldn't see to steady their passage.

  When a cold, gritty light finally brought shadow and shape to their path, they moved faster, practically ran. Snow began to fall, and the trail, wider and flatter, glowed a pale blue. The inn that would sell them horses was beyond the forest, hours away by foot. As they hurried on, Katsa found herself looking forward to the rest for her feet and her lungs that the horses would bring. She opened the thought to Po.

  "It takes this," he said, "to tire you. Running, in the dark, on no sleep, and no food, after days of climbing in the mountains." He didn't smile, and he wasn't teasing. "I'm glad. Whatever it is we're running toward, we're likely to need your energy, and your stamina."

  That reminded her. She reached into a bag on her back. "Eat," she said. "We must both eat, or we'll be good for nothing."

  IT WAS MIDMORNING, and the snow still drifted down, when they
neared the place where the forest stopped abruptly and the fields began. Po turned to her suddenly, alarm screaming in every feature of his face. He began to run headlong down the path through the trees, toward the edge of the forest. And then Katsa heard it—men's voices raised, yelling, and the thunder of hooves, coming closer. She ran after Po and broke through the trees several paces behind him. A woman staggered across the fields toward them, a small woman with arms raised, her face a mask of terror. Dark hair and gold hoops in her ears. A black dress, and gold on the fingers she stretched out to Po. And behind her an army of men on galloping horses, led by one man with streaming robes and an eyepatch, and a raised bow, and a notched arrow that flew from the bow and struck the woman square in the back. The woman jerked and stumbled. She fell on her face in the snow.

  Po stopped cold. He ran back to Katsa, yelling, "Shoot him! Shoot him!" but she had already swung the bow from her back and reached for an arrow. She pulled the string and took aim. And then the horses stopped. The man with the eyepatch screamed out, and Katsa froze.

  "Oh, what an accident!" he cried.

  His voice was a choke, a sob. So full of desperate pain that Katsa gasped, and tears rose to her eyes.

  "What a terrible, terrible accident!" the man screamed. "My wife! My beloved wife!"

  Katsa stared at the crumpled body of the woman, black dress and flung arms, white snow stained red. The man's sobs carried to her across the fields. It was an accident. A terrible, tragic accident. Katsa lowered her bow.

  "No! Shoot him!"

  Katsa gaped at Po, shocked at his words, at the wildness in his eyes. "But, it was an accident," she said.

  "You promised to do what I said."

  "Yes, but I'm not going to shoot a grieving man whose wife has had such an accident—"

  His voice was angry now, as she'd never heard it. "Give me the bow," he hissed, so strange and rough, so unlike himself.

  "No."

  "Give it to me."

  "No! You're not yourself!"

  He clutched his hair then and looked behind him desperately, at the man who watched them, his one eye cocked toward them, his gaze cool, measuring. Po and the man stared at each other for just a moment. Some flicker of recognition stirred inside Katsa, but then it was gone. Po turned back to her, calm now. Desperately, urgently calm.

  "Will you do something else, then?" he said. "Something much smaller, that will hurt no one?"

  "Yes, if it will hurt no one."

  "Will you run with me now, back into the forest? And if he starts to speak, will you cover your ears?"

  What an odd request, but she felt that same strange flicker of recognition; and she agreed, without knowing why. "Yes."

  "Quickly, Katsa."

  In an instant they turned and ran, and when she heard voices she clapped her hands to her ears. But she could still hear words barked here and there, and what she heard confused her. And then Po's voice, yelling at her to keep running; yelling at her, she thought vaguely, to drown out the other voices. She half heard a muffled clatter of hooves growing behind them. The clatter turned into a thunder. And then she saw the arrows striking the trees around them.

  The arrows made her angry. We could kill these men, all of them, she thought to Po. We should fight. But he kept yelling at her to run, and his hand tightened on her shoulder and pushed her forward, and she had that sense again that all was not right, that none of this was normal, and that in this madness, she should trust Po.

  They raced around trees and clambered up slopes, rushing in whatever direction Po chose. The arrows dropped off as they moved deeper into the forest, for the woods slowed the horses and confused the men. Still they kept running. They came to a part of the forest so thickly wooded that the snow had caught in the branches of the trees and never reached the ground. Our footprints, Katsa thought. He's taken us here so they can't trace our footprints. She clung to that thought, because it was the only piece of this senselessness she understood.

  Finally, Po pulled her hands from her ears. They ran more, until they came to a great, wide tree with brown needles, the ground littered with dead branches that had fallen from its trunk. "There's a hollow place, up high," Po said. "There's an opening in the trunk. Can you climb it? If I go first, can you follow?"

  "Of course. Here," she said, making a cup with her hands. He put one foot into her palms and jumped, and she lifted him up as high as she could into the tree. She made handholds and footholds of the rough places in the trunk and hustled up after him. "Avoid that branch," he called down to her. "And this one: A breeze would knock it down." She used the limbs he used; he climbed and she followed. He disappeared, and a moment later his arms reached out of a great hole above her. He pulled her inside the tree, into the hollowed-out space he'd sensed from the ground. They sat in the dark, breathing heavily, their legs entwined in their tree cave.

  "We'll be safe here, for now," Po said. "As long as they don't come after us with dogs."

  But why were they hiding? Now that they sat still, the strangeness of all that had happened began to pierce Katsa's mind, like the arrows the horsemen had shot at their backs. Why were they hiding, why weren't they fighting? Why were they afraid? That woman had been afraid, too. That woman who looked like a Lienid. Ashen. The wife of Leck was a Lienid, and her name was Ashen—and yes, that made sense, because that grief-stricken man had called her his wife. That man with the eyepatch and the bow in his hands was Leck.

  But wasn't it Leck's arrow that had struck Ashen? Katsa couldn't quite recall; and when she tried to watch that moment again in her mind, a fog and falling snow blocked her sight.

  Po might remember. But Po had been so strange, too, telling her to shoot Leck as he grieved over his wife. And then telling her to cover her ears. Why cover her ears?

  That thing that she couldn't quite grasp flickered again in her mind. She reached for it and it disappeared. And then she was angry, at her thickheadedness, her stupidity. She couldn't make sense of all this, because she was too unintelligent.

  She looked at Po, who leaned against the wall of the tree and stared straight ahead at nothing. The sight of him upset her even more, for his face seemed thin, his mouth tight. He was tired, worn out, most likely hungry. He'd said something about dogs, and she knew his eyes well enough to recognize the shadows of worry that sat within them.

  Po. Please tell me what's wrong.

  "Katsa." He sighed her name. He rubbed his forehead and then looked into her face. "Do you remember our conversations about King Leck, Katsa? What we said about him, before we saw him today?"

  She stared at him and remembered they'd said something; but she couldn't remember what it was.

  "About his eyes, Katsa. Something he's hiding."

  "He's..." It came to her suddenly. "He's Graced."

  "Yes. Do you remember what his Grace is?"

  And then it began to trickle back to her, piece by piece, from some part of her mind she hadn't been able to reach before. She saw it again clearly. Ashen, terrified, fleeing from her husband and his army; Leck shooting Ashen in the back; Leck crying out in pretended grief, his words fogging Katsa's mind, transforming the murder her eyes had seen into a tragic accident she couldn't remember. Po screaming at her to shoot Leck; and she refusing.

  She couldn't look him in the face, for shame overwhelmed her.

  "It's not your fault," he said.

  "I swore to you I'd do what you said. I swore it, Po."

  "Katsa. No one could've kept that promise. If I'd known how powerful Leck was, if I'd had the slightest idea—I never should have brought you here."

  "You didn't bring me here. We came together."

  "Well, and now we're both in great danger." He stiffened. "Wait," he whispered. He seemed to be listening to something, but Katsa could hear nothing. "They're searching the forest," he said after a minute. "That one turned away. I don't think they have dogs."

  "But why are we hiding from them?"

  "Katsa—"

 
"What do you mean, we're in great danger? Why aren't we fighting these butchers, why..." She dropped her face into her hands. "I'm so confused. I'm hopelessly stupid."

  "You're not stupid. It's Leck's Grace that takes away your own thought, and it's my Grace that sees so much more than a person should. You're confused because Leck confused you deliberately with his words, and because I haven't told you yet what I know."

  "Then tell me. Tell me what you know."

  "Well, Ashen is dead—that, I don't have to tell you. She's dead because she tried to escape Leck with Bitterblue. Here we see her punishment for protecting her child." She heard his bitterness and remembered that Ashen was not a stranger to him, that he had seen a member of his family murdered today. "I believe you were right about Bitterblue," he said. "I'm almost sure, from what Ashen wanted as she ran toward me."

  "What did she want?"

  "She wanted me to find Bitterblue, and protect her. I ... I don't know what it is Leck wants with her, exactly. But I think Bitterblue's in the forest, hiding, like us."

  "We must find her before they do."

  "Yes, but there's more you need to know, Katsa. We're in particular danger, you and I. Leck saw us, he recognized us. Leck saw us..."

  He broke off, but it didn't matter. She understood, suddenly, what Leck had seen. He'd seen them run away when they shouldn't have had the slightest idea of their danger. He'd seen her put her hands over her ears when they shouldn't have known the power of his words.

  "He doesn't—he doesn't know how much of the truth I know," Po said. "But he knows his Grace doesn't work on me. I'm a threat to him and he wants me dead. And you he wants alive."

  Katsa's eyes snapped to his face. "But they were shooting at us—"

  "I heard the command, Katsa. The arrows were meant for me."

  "We should have fought," Katsa said. "We could've taken those soldiers. We must find him now and kill him."

  "No, Katsa. You know you can't be in his presence."

  "I can cover my ears somehow."