"I don't know," Katsa said. "He won't tell me."
"Sometimes he seems himself," Skye said, "and other times he sinks into a mood." He cleared his throat. "But I thought it might be a lovers' quarrel."
Katsa looked at him levelly. She ate a piece of bread. "It's possible, but I don't think so."
Skye raised an eyebrow and grinned. "Seems to me you'd know if it were."
"If only things were that simple," Katsa said, drily. "There's something strange about his eyes," Bitterblue said.
"Yes," Katsa said, "well, it's likely he has the strangest eyes in all seven kingdoms. But I'd have expected you to notice that before now."
"No," Bitterblue said. "I mean there's something di fferent about his eyes."
Something different about his eyes.
Yes, there was a difference. The difference was that he wouldn't look at her, or at any of them. Almost as if it pained his heart to raise his eyes and focus on another person. Almost as if –
An image flashed into her mind then, out of nowhere. Po falling through the light, a horse's enormous body falling above him. Po, slamming into the water face-first, the horse crashing in after him.
And more images. Po, sick and gray before the fire, the skin of his face bruised black. Po squinting at her and rubbing his eyes.
Katsa choked on her bread. She shot to her feet and knocked over her chair.
Skye thumped her back. "Great seas, Katsa. Are you all right?"
Katsa coughed, and gasped something about checking on the lame horse. She ran out of the cabin.
Po wasn't with the horses, but when Katsa asked after him, one of the guards pointed in the direction of the pool. Katsa ran behind the cabin and over the hill.
He was standing, his back to her, staring into the frozen pond. His shoulders slumped and his hands in his pockets.
"I know you're invincible, Katsa," he said without turning around. "But even you should put on a coat when you come outside."
"Po," she said. "Turn around and look at me."
He dropped his head. His shoulders rose and fell with one deep breath. He didn't turn around.
"Po," she said. "Look at me."
He turned then, slowly. He looked into her face. His eyes seemed to focus on hers, for just an instant; and then his eyes dropped. They emptied. She saw it happen; she saw his eyes empty.
She whispered. "Po. Are you blind?"
At that, something in him seemed to break. He fell to his knees. A tear made an icy track down his face. When Katsa went to him and dropped down before him, he let her come; the fight had gone out of him and he let her in. Katsa's arms came around him. He pulled Katsa against him, practically smothered her with his grip, and cried into her neck. She held him, simply held him, and touched him, and kissed his cold face.
"Oh, Katsa," he cried. "Katsa."
They knelt like that for a very long time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
That morning a squall kicked up. By afternoon the squall had turned into a gentle but soggy storm. "I can't bear the thought of more winter-weather travel," Bitterblue said, half asleep before the fire. "Now that we're here with Po, can't we stay here, Katsa, until it stops snowing?"
But on the heels of that storm came another, and after that storm another, as if winter had torn up the schedule and decided it wasn't going to end after all. Bitterblue sent two guards with a letter for Ror. Ror wrote back from Bitterblue's court that the weather was just as well; the more time Bitterblue gave him to sort out the stories Leck had left behind, the smoother and the safer her transition to the throne would be. He would plan the coronation for true spring, and she could wait out the storms for as long as she wished.
Katsa knew the cabin's close quarters were trying to Po, burdened as he was with his unhappy secret. But if everyone was staying, then at least he didn't have to justify quite yet his own intention not to leave. He kept his discomfort to himself and helped the guards lead the horses to a nearby rock shelter he claimed to have found during his recovery.
His story came out slowly, whenever he and Katsa were able to contrive ways to be alone.
The day of Katsa and Bitterblue's departure had not been easy for Po. He'd still had his sight, but it hadn't felt quite right to him; it had changed in some way his head was too muddled to quantify, some way that gave him a deep sense of misgiving.
"You didn't tell me," Katsa said. "You let me leave you like that."
"If I'd told you, you never would have gone. You had to go."
Po had stumbled his way to the cabin's bed. He'd spent most of that day lying on his unhurt side with his eyes closed, waiting for Leck's soldiers and for his dizziness to pass. He'd tried to convince himself that when his head cleared, his sight would, too. But waking the next morning, he'd opened his eyes to blackness.
"I was angry," he told her. "And unsteady on my feet. And I was out of food, which meant that I had to find my way to the fish trap. I couldn't be bothered. I didn't eat, that day or the next."
What had driven him finally to the pool was not his hunger. It was Leck's soldiers. He'd sensed them climbing the rocks toward the cabin. "I was up and stumbling," he told her, "before I even realized what I was doing. I was barreling around the cabin collecting my things; and then I was outside, finding a crack in a rock to hide them. I wasn't at my most lucid. I'm sure I must have fallen down, over and over. But I knew where the pool was, and I got myself to it. The water was awful, so cold, but it woke me, and it was less dizzying, somehow, to be swimming, rather than walking. I made it to the cave somehow, and somehow I pulled myself onto the rocks. And then, in the cave, with the soldiers shouting outside and my body so cold I thought I would bite off my own tongue with my chattering teeth – I found it, Katsa."
He stopped talking, and he was quiet for so long that she wondered if he'd forgotten what he'd been saying.
"What did you find?"
He turned his head to her, surprised. "Clarity," he said. "My thoughts cleared. There was no light in the cave; there was nothing to see. And yet I sensed the cave with my Grace, so vividly. And I realized what I was doing. Sitting in the cabin, feeling sorry for myself, when Leck was out there somewhere and people were in danger. In the cave it struck me how despicable that was."
The thought of Leck had brought Po back into the water, out of the cave and to the fish trap. Back to the cabin to fumble, numb from cold, with the lighting of the fire. The next few days were grim. "I was weak and dizzy and sick. I walked, at first, never farther than the fish trap. Then with Leck in my mind I pushed a bit farther. My balance was passable, if I was sitting still. I made the bow. With Leck in my mind, I began to practice shooting it."
His head dropped. Silence settled over him. And Katsa thought she understood the rest. Po had held the notion of Leck close to himself; Leck had given him a reason to reach for his strength. He'd driven himself toward health and balance. And then they'd returned to him with the happy news that Leck was dead. Po was left without a reason. Unhappiness had choked him once again.
The very fact of his unhappiness made him unhappy.
"I've no right to feel sorry for myself," he said to her one day, when they'd gone out into a quiet snowfall to fetch water. "I see everything. I see things I shouldn't see. I'm wallowing in self-pity, when I've lost nothing."
Katsa crouched with him before the pool. "That's the first truly idiotic thing you've ever said to me."
His mouth tightened. He picked up one of the rocks they used to bash through the ice. He lifted the rock above his head and drove it, hard, into the frozen surface of the pool; and finally she was rewarded with a low rumble of something that almost passed for a laugh. "Your brand of comfort bears some similarity to your tactical offense."