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.
"LADY QUEEN?"
The sun was setting and a light snowfall had begun. Bitterblue looked up from her desk into the familiar, sharp, and weary face of Death.
"Death," Bitterblue said