Saf had given Po the watch as a parting gift, and as thanks for saving his neck. "It'd be a funny way to keep time, wouldn't it?" said Bitterblue. "Quarter past would be twelve and a half minutes past the hour. And by the way, that's stolen property."
"But doesn't it seem that that's why Leck did everything?" said Po. "To imitate the Dells?"
"Perhaps it's another one of his botched imitations," said Giddon.
"Giddon," said Bitterblue, "what will you do after Estill?"
"Well," he said, a quiet shadow touching his face. She knew where Giddon wanted to go after Estill. She wondered if the Council would make a project of it. She also wondered if going to see something that was no longer there was a good idea—and if that mattered, when it came to a person's heart. "I suppose it depends on where I'm needed," he said.
"If there's no place you're urgently needed, or if you're undecided, or if, perhaps, you're thinking of visiting the Dells—would you consider coming back here for a little while first?"
"Yes," he said without hesitation. "If I'm not needed elsewhere, I'll come back here for a while."
"That is a comfort," said Bitterblue quietly. "Thank you."
Her friends were leaving, finally. In a matter of days, they were leaving for Estill, and it was the real thing this time; the revolutionaries and a few select Estillan nobles had agreed to come together, take their king by surprise, and change the lives of all Estillan people. Bitterblue was happy about her uncle's navy to the south and her strange new friends to the east. She knew she was going to have to be patient, to wait and see what would happen. And she also knew that she'd have to have faith in her friends, not dwell on thoughts of them in a war. Bann, her old sparring partner. Po, who pushed himself too hard and was hurting now from the loss of a brother. Katsa, who would come apart if something happened to Po. Giddon. It startled her, how quickly tears came to her eyes when she thought of Giddon leaving.
Raffin was staying behind in Monsea as liaison, which was a balm to Bitterblue's heart, even though he was inclined to long silences and staring moodily into potted plants. She'd found him in the back garden that morning, on his knees in the snow, taking clippings from some dead perennials.
"Did you know," he said, peering up at her, "that in Nander, they've decided they don't want a king?"
"What?" she said. "No king at all?"
"Yes," he said. "The committee of nobles will continue to rule by vote, alongside another committee of equal power that will be comprised of representatives elected by the people."
"You mean like a sort of . . . aristocratic and democratic republic?" said Bitterblue, plucking terms from the book about monarchy and tyranny.
"Something like that, yes."
"Fascinating. Did you know that in the Dells, a man can take a husband and a woman can take a wife? Fire told me so."
"Mnph," he said, then focused his eyes on her quietly. "Is that true?"
"It is. And the king himself is married to a woman who hasn't a drop of noble blood in her veins."
Raffin was quiet for a moment, poking around in the snow with a stick. Bitterblue spent that moment in front of Bellamew's sculpture, looking into the living eyes of her mother. Touching the scarf she was wearing and gathering strength. Finally, Raffin said, "That's not the way of things in the Middluns."
"No," said Bitterblue. "But it is the way in the Middluns for the king to do as he likes."
Raffin stood, knees cracking, and came to her. "My father is a healthy man," he said.
"Oh, Raffin," she said. "May I give you a hug?"
IT WAS HARD to say good-bye.
"Do you think I could ever write you letters in embroidery that you could feel with your fingers, Po," Bitterblue asked him, "when you're away?"
He cracked a grin. "Katsa scratches me notes now and then in wood, when she's desperate. But wouldn't you have to learn to embroider?"
"There is that," said Bitterblue, smiling with him, hugging him.
"I'll come back," Po said to her. "I promised, remember?"
"I'll come back too," said Katsa. "It's time I gave lessons here again, Bitterblue."
Katsa hugged her for a long time, and Bitterblue understood that this was always how it would be. Katsa would come and then Katsa would go. But the hug was real, and lasting, even though it would end. The coming was as real as the going, and the coming would always be a promise. It would have to be good enough.
She went to the art gallery the night they all left, because she was lonely.
And then Hava led Bitterblue downstairs, to a place in the castle Bitterblue hadn't yet been. They sat together at the top of the prison steps, listening to Goldie sing a lullaby to her prisoners.
45
AN UNCLE AND king was waiting for Bitterblue in Monport, with a navy on display for her pleasure. Bitterblue would go to meet him.
The day before she left, she sat in her office, reflecting. Thirty of Leck's thirty-five journals had been destroyed in the fire Thiel had lit. Terrified now of fire, Death was trying to read, decipher, and memorize the five surviving journals in one mad rush. Bitterblue understood the scope of such a catastrophic loss of information. But she couldn't make herself grieve. Her relief was too great. She thought she might like to read her father's five remaining journals, eventually, someday. Five journals did not feel undoably awful. Maybe she would be able to read them, years from now, before a fireplace, wrapped in blankets, while someone held her tight. But not now.
She'd asked Helda to take her mother's sheets away. They were also for some other day, some other time when they weren't so painful. Maybe someday, they would feel more like a memory of pain than like pain itself. And she didn't need them around to remember. She had her mother's chest and all the things in it, she had Ashen's scarves and the Bellamew sculpture, and she had her grief.
Her new sheets were smooth and even. When they touched her skin softly, without the rough bumps of embroidery at the edges, she was startled; and a kind of relief eased its way through her, as if the sores in her mind and on her heart might begin to heal.
My kingdom's challenge, she thought, is to balance knowing with healing.
Her clerks and guards had taken to coming to her for confessionals. Holt had started it, appearing in her office one day and saying, "Lady Queen, if you're to forgive me, I'd like you to know what you're forgiving me for."
It had not been an easy thing for Holt to do. He had killed inmates in the prisons for Thiel and Runnemood, and he couldn't even begin to force into words the things Leck had made him do. He became confused and tongue-tied, kneeling before Bitterblue with his hands clutched together and his head bowed.
"I do want to tell you, Lady Queen," he finally choked out. "But I can't."
Bitterblue didn't know what to do for her people who needed to tell things but couldn't. She thought it might be something to ask Po—who had a special insight into what would do people good—or Fire. "I'll help you with this, Holt," she said. "I promise, I won't leave you alone with this. Will you be patient with me, and I'll be patient with you?"
She had one more ministry to build. Of all of her ministries, it would be the one with which she would take the most care. She wouldn't force it on anyone, but she would make its existence widely known. It would be a ministry for all the people whose pain could be acknowledged, maybe even eased, by the telling and recording of what their own experiences had been. It would have a space of its own in the castle, a library where stories were kept, and a minister and staff that her friends would help her choose. Some of the staff would travel, to reach people who couldn't come to the city. It would be a safe place for the sharing of burdens and the capturing of memories before they disappeared. It would be called the Ministry of Stories and Truth, and it would help her kingdom heal.