Kristin Cashore Page 3

  THE FORESTS of the southern Middluns gave way to hills, low hills at first that would grow as they neared Estill. They stopped only once, at midday, to change their horses at a secluded inn that had offered its services to the Council.

  With fresh horses they made good time, and by nightfall they approached the Estillan border. With an early start they could reach the Estillan estate that was their destination by midmorning, do their business for Randa, and then turn back. They could travel at a reasonable pace and still return to Randa City before nightfall of the following day, which was when they were expected. And then Katsa would know whether Prince Raffin had learned anything from the Lienid grandfather.

  They made camp against an enormous rock crag that broke through the base of one of the eastern hills. There was a chill to the night, but they decided against a fire. Mischief hid in the hills along the Estillan border, and though they were safe with two sworded men and Katsa, there was no reason to attract trouble. They ate a supper of bread, cheese, and water from their flasks, and then they climbed into their bedrolls.

  “I’ll sleep well tonight,” Giddon said, yawning. “It’s lucky that inn came forward to the Council. We would’ve ridden the horses into the ground.”

  “It surprises me, the friends the Council is finding,” Oll said.

  Giddon propped himself up onto his elbow. “Did you expect it, Katsa? Did you think your Council would spread as it has?”

  What had she expected when she’d started the Council? She’d imagined herself, alone, sneaking through passageways and around corners, an invisible force working against the mindlessness of the kings. “I never even imagined it spreading beyond me.”

  “And now we have friends in almost every kingdom,” Giddon said. “People are opening their homes. Did you know one of the Nanderan borderlords brought an entire village behind his walls when the Council learned of a Westeran raiding party? The village was destroyed, but every one of them lived.” He settled down onto his side and yawned again. “It’s heartening. The Council does some good.”

  KATSA LAY on her back and listened to the men’s steady breathing. The horses, too, slept. But not Katsa: Two days of hard riding and a sleepless night between, and she was awake. She watched clouds flying across the sky, blotting out the stars and revealing them again. The night air puffed and set the hill grass rustling.

  The first time she’d hurt someone for Randa had been in a border village not far from this camp. An underlord of Randa’s had been exposed as a spy, on the payroll of King Thigpen of Estill. The charge was treason and the punishment was death. The underlord had fled toward the Estillan border.

  Katsa had been all of ten years old. Randa had come to one of her practice sessions and watched her, an unpleasant smile on his face. “Are you ready to do something useful with your Grace, girl?” he called out to her.

  Katsa stopped her kicking and whirling and stood still, struck by the notion that her Grace could have any beneficial use.

  “Hmm,” Randa said, smirking at her silence. “Your sword is the only bright thing about you. Pay attention, girl. I’m sending you after this traitor. You’re to kill him, in public, using your bare hands, no weapons. Just him, no one else. I’m sure we all hope you’ve learned to control your bloodlust by now.”

  Katsa shrank suddenly, too small to speak, even if she’d had something to say. She understood his order. He refused her the use of weapons because he didn’t want the man to die cleanly. Randa wanted a bloody, anguished spectacle, and he expected her to furnish it.

  Katsa set out with Oll and a convoy of soldiers. When the soldiers caught the underlord, they dragged him to the square of the nearest village, where a scattering of startled people watched, slack jawed. Katsa instructed the soldiers to make the man kneel. In one motion she snapped his neck. There was no blood; there was no more than an instant’s pain. Most in the crowd didn’t even realize what had happened.

  When Randa heard what she’d done he was angry, angry enough that he called her to his throne room. He looked down at her from his raised seat, his eyes blue and hard, his smile nothing more than a baring of teeth. “What’s the point of a public execution,” he said, “if the public misses the part where the fellow dies? I can see that when I give orders I shall have to compensate for your mental ineptitude.”

  After that his commands included specifics: blood and pain, for this or that length of time. There was no way around what he wanted. The more Katsa did it, the better she got at it. And Randa got what he wished, for her reputation spread like a cancer. Everyone knew what came to those who crossed King Randa of the Middluns.

  After a while Katsa forgot about defiance. It became too difficult to imagine.

  ON THEIR many travels to perform Randa’s errands, Oll told the girl of things Randa’s spies learned when they crossed into the other kingdoms. Young girls who had disappeared from an Estillan village and reappeared weeks later in a Westeran whorehouse. A man held in a Nanderan dungeon as punishment for his brother’s thievery, for his brother was dead, and someone had to be punished. A tax that the King of Wester had decided to levy on the villages of Estill—a tax Wester’s soldiers saw fit to collect by slaying Estillan villagers and emptying their pockets.

  All these stories Randa’s spies reported to their king, and all of them Randa ignored. Now, a Middluns lord who had hidden the majority of his harvest in order to pay a smaller tithe than he owed? Here was worthwhile news; here was a problem relevant to the Middluns. Randa sent Katsa to crack the lord’s head open.

  Katsa couldn’t say where the notion had come from, but once it pushed its way into her mind, it would not leave. What might she be capable of—if she acted of her own volition and outside Randa’s domain? It was something she thought about, something to distract herself as she broke fingers for Randa and twisted men’s arms from their sockets. And the more she considered the question, the more urgent it became, until she thought she would blaze up and burn from the frustration of not doing it.

  In her sixteenth year she brought the idea to Raffin. “It just might work,” he said. “I’ll help you, of course.” Next she went to Oll. Oll was skeptical, even alarmed. He was used to bringing his information to Randa so Randa could decide what action to take. But he saw her side of it eventually, slowly, once he understood that Katsa was determined to do this thing with or without him, and once he convinced himself that it would do the king no harm not to know every move his spymaster made.

  In her very first mission, Katsa intercepted a small company of midnight looters that the Estillan king had set on his own people, and sent them fleeing into the hills. It was the happiest and headiest moment of her life.

  Next Katsa and Oll rescued a number of Westeran boys enslaved in a Nanderan iron mine. One or two more escapades and the news of their missions began to trickle into useful channels. Some of Oll’s fellow spies joined the cause, and one or two underlords at Randa’s court, like Giddon. Oll’s wife, Bertol, and other women of the castle. They established regular meetings that took place in secluded rooms. There was an atmosphere of adventure at the meetings, of dangerous freedom. It felt like play, too wonderful, Katsa thought sometimes, to be real. Except that it was real. They didn’t just talk about subversion; they planned it and carried it out.

  Inevitably over time they attracted allies outside the court. The virtuous among Randa’s borderlords, who were tired of sitting around while neighboring villages were plundered. Lords from the other kingdoms, and their spies. And bit by bit, the people—innkeepers, blacksmiths, farmers. Everyone was tired of the fool kings. Everyone was willing to take some small risk to lessen the damage of their ambition and disorder and lawlessness.

  Tonight, in her camp on the Estillan border, Katsa blinked at the sky, wide awake, and thought about how large the Council had become, how fast it had spread, like one of the vines in Randa’s forest.

  It was out of her control now. Missions were carried out in the name of the Council in pl
aces she’d never been, without her supervision, and all of it had become dangerous. One careless word spoken by the child of some innkeeper, one unlucky encounter across the world between two people she’d never met, and everything would come crashing down. Her missions would end, Randa would see to it. And then, once again, she would be no more than the king’s strongarm.

  She shouldn’t have trusted the strange Lienid.

  Katsa crossed her arms over her chest and stared at the stars. She would like to take her horse and race around the hills in circles. That would calm her mind, tire her out. But it would tire her horse as well, and she wouldn’t leave Oll and Giddon alone. And besides, one didn’t do such things. It wasn’t normal.

  She snorted, and then listened to make sure that no one woke. Normal. She wasn’t normal. A girl Graced with killing, a royal thug? A girl who didn’t want the husbands Randa pushed on her, perfectly handsome and thoughtful men, a girl who panicked at the thought of a baby at her breast, or clinging to her ankles.

  She wasn’t natural.

  If the Council were discovered, she would escape to a place where she wouldn’t be found. Lienid, or Monsea. She’d live in a cave, in a forest. She’d kill anyone who found her and recognized her.

  She wouldn’t relinquish the small amount of control she’d taken over her life. She must sleep.

  Sleep, Katsa, she told herself. You need to sleep, to keep your strength.

  And suddenly tiredness swept over her, and she was asleep.

  Chapter Four

  IN THE MORNING they dressed like themselves, Giddon in traveling clothes befitting a Middluns underlord, and Oll in his captain’s uniform. Katsa changed into a blue tunic lined with the orange silk of Randa’s courts, and the matching trousers she wore to perform Randa’s errands, a costume to which he consented only because she was abusive to any dresses she wore while riding. Randa didn’t like to think of his Graceling killer doling out punishment in torn and muddy skirts. It was undignified.

  Their business in Estill was with an Estillan borderlord who had arranged to purchase lumber from the southern forests of the Middluns. He had paid the agreed price, but then he’d cleared more than the agreed number of trees. Randa wanted payment for the additional lumber, and he wanted the lord punished for altering the agreement without his permission.

  “I give you both fair warning,” Oll said as they cleared the camp of their belongings. “This lord has a daughter Graced with mind reading.”

  “Why should you warn us?” Katsa asked. “Isn’t she at Thigpen’s court?”

  “King Thigpen has sent her home to her father.”

  Katsa yanked hard on the straps that attached her bag to her saddle.

  “Are you trying to pull the horse down, Katsa,” Giddon said, “or just break your saddlebag?”

  Katsa scowled. “No one told me we’d be encountering a mind reader.”

  “I’m telling you now, My Lady,” Oll said, “and there’s no reason for concern. She’s a child. Most of what she comes up with is nonsense.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with her?”

  “What’s wrong with her is that most of what she comes up with is nonsense. Or useless, irrelevant, and she blurts out everything she sees. She’s out of control. She was making Thigpen nervous. So he sent her home, My Lady, and told her father to send her back when she became useful.”

  In Estill, as in most of the kingdoms, Gracelings were given up to the king’s use by law. The child whose eyes settled into two different colors weeks, months, or on the rarest occasions years after its birth was sent to the court of its king and raised in its king’s nurseries. If its Grace turned out to be useful to the king, the child would remain in his service. If not, the child would be sent home. With the court’s apologies, of course, because it was difficult for a family to find use for a Graceling. Especially one with a useless Grace, like climbing trees or holding one’s breath for an impossibly long time or talking backward. The child might fare well in a farmer’s family, working among the fields with no one to see or know. But if a king sent a Graceling home to the family of an innkeeper or a storekeeper in a town with more than one inn or store to choose from, business was bound to suffer. It made no difference what the child’s Grace was. People avoided a place if they could, if they were likely to encounter a person with eyes that were two different colors.

  “Thigpen’s a fool not to keep a mind reader close,” Giddon said, “just because she’s not useful yet. They’re too dangerous. What if she falls under someone else’s influence?”

  Giddon was right, of course. Whatever else the mind readers might be, they were almost always valuable tools for a king to wield. But Katsa couldn’t understand why anyone would want to keep them close. Randa’s chef was Graced, and his horse handler, and his winemaker, and one of his court dancers. He had a juggler who could juggle any number of items without dropping them. He had several soldiers, no match for Katsa, but Graced with sword fighting. He had a man who predicted the quality of the next year’s harvest. He had a woman brilliant with numbers, the only woman working in a king’s countinghouse in all seven kingdoms.

  He also had a man who could tell your mood just by putting his hands on you. He was the only Graceling of Randa’s who repelled Katsa, the only person in court besides Randa himself whom she took pains to avoid.

  “Foolish behavior on the part of Thigpen is never particularly surprising, My Lord,” Oll said.

  “What kind of mind reader is she?” Katsa asked.

  “They’re not sure, My Lady. She’s so unformed. And you know how the mind readers are, their Graces always changing, and so hard to pin down. Adults before they’ve grown into their full power. But it seems as if this one reads desires. She knows what it is other people want.”

  “Then she’ll know I’ll want to knock her senseless if she so much as looks at me.” Katsa spoke the words into the mane of her horse. They were not for the ears of her companions, for them to pull apart and make a joke of. “Is there anything else I need to know about this borderlord?” she asked aloud as she stepped into her stirrup. “Perhaps he has a guard of a hundred Graced fighters? A trained bear to protect him? Anything else you’ve forgotten to mention?”

  “There’s no need to be sarcastic, My Lady,” Oll said.

  “Your company this morning is as pleasant as always, Katsa,” Giddon said.

  Katsa spurred her horse forward. She didn’t want to see Giddon’s laughing face.

  THE LORD’S HOLDING stood behind gray stone walls at the crest of a hill of waving grasses. The man who ushered them through the gate and took their horses told them that his lord sat at his breakfast. Katsa, Giddon, and Oll stepped directly into the great hall without waiting for an escort.

  The lord’s courtier moved forward to block their entrance into the breakfast room. Then he saw Katsa. He cleared his throat and opened the grand doors. “Some representatives from the court of King Randa, My Lord,” he said. He slipped behind them without waiting for a response from his master and scampered away.

  The lord sat before a feast of pork, eggs, bread, fruit, and cheese, with a servant at his elbow. Both men looked up as they entered, and both men froze. A spoon clattered from the lord’s hand onto the table.

  “Good morning, My Lord,” Giddon said. “We apologize for interrupting your breakfast. Do you know why we’re here?”

  The lord seemed to struggle to find his voice. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said, his hand at his throat.

  “No? Perhaps the Lady Katsa could help you bring it to mind,” Giddon said. “Lady?”

  Katsa stepped forward.

  “All right, all right.” The lord stood. His legs jarred the table, and a glass overturned. He was tall and broad shouldered, larger even than Giddon or Oll. Clumsy now with his fluttering hands, and his eyes that flitted around the room but always avoided Katsa. A bit of egg clung to his beard. So foolish, such a big man, so frightened. Katsa kept her face expressionless, so that no
ne of them would know how much she hated this.

  “Ah, you’ve remembered,” Giddon said, “have you? You’ve remembered why we’re here?”

  “I believe I owe you money,” the lord said. “I imagine you’ve come to collect your debt.”

  “Very good!” Giddon spoke as if to a child. “And why do you owe us money? The agreement was for how many acres of lumber? Remind me, Captain.”

  “Twenty acres, My Lord,” Oll said.

  “And how many acres did the lord remove, Captain?”

  “Twenty-three acres, My Lord,” Oll said.

  “Twenty-three acres!” Giddon said. “That’s rather a hefty difference, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “A terrible mistake.” The lord’s attempt at a smile was pained. “We never realized we’d need so much. Of course, I’ll pay you immediately. Just name your price.”

  “You’ve caused King Randa no small inconvenience,” Giddon said. “You’ve decimated three acres of his forest. The king’s forests are not limitless.”

  “No. Of course not. Terrible mistake.”

  “We’ve also had to travel for days to settle this matter,” Giddon said. “Our absence from court is a great nuisance to the king.”

  “Of course,” the lord said. “Of course.”

  “I imagine if you doubled your original payment, it would lessen the strain of inconvenience for the king.”

  The lord licked his lips. “Double the original payment. Yes. That seems quite reasonable.”

  Giddon smiled. “Very good. Perhaps your man will lead us to your countinghouse.”

  “Certainly.” The lord gestured to the servant at his side. “Quickly, man. Quickly!”

  “Lady Katsa,” Giddon said as he and Oll turned toward the door, “why don’t you stay here? Keep His Lordship company.”

  The servant led Giddon and Oll from the room. The big doors swung shut behind them. Katsa and the lord were alone.