“Have you gone raving mad? What are you going to do once I’ve taken your home and your possessions? Where are you going to live?”
His voice was very quiet. “I don’t want to go back to my home. I’ve been thinking of staying here, where it’s peaceful, and far away from everyone. I-I want to be alone.”
She gaped at him, her mouth open.
“You should go on with your life, Katsa. Keep the ring. I’ve said I don’t want it.”
She couldn’t speak. She shook her head, woodenly, then reached out and dropped the ring into his hands.
He stared at it, then sighed. “I’ll give it to Skye,” he said, “to take back to my father. He can decide what to do with it.”
He stood, and this time she was certain he checked his balance. He trudged away from her, his bow in hand. He caught hold of the root of a shrubbery and pulled himself onto a ledge of rock. She watched as he climbed into the mountains, and away from her.
———
During the night, the sound of breathing all around her, Katsa tried to work it out. She sat against the wall and watched Po lying in a blanket on the floor beside his brother and the Monsean guards. He slept, and his face was peaceful. His beautiful face.
When he’d come back to the cabin after their conversation, with his bow in one hand and an armload of rabbits in the other, he’d unloaded his quarry contentedly on his brother and shrugged himself out of his coat. Then he’d come to her, where she sat brooding against the wall. He’d crouched before her, taken her hands in his and kissed them, and rubbed his cold face against them. “I’m sorry,” he’d said; and she’d felt suddenly that everything was normal, and Po was himself, and they’d start again, fresh and new. Then over dinner, as the others bantered and Bitterblue teased her guards, Katsa watched Po withdraw. He ate little. He sank into silence, unhappiness in the lines of his face. And her heart ached so much to look at him that she walked out of the cabin and stumped around for ages alone in the dark.
At moments he seemed happy. But something was clearly wrong. If he would just… if he would only just look at her. If he would only look into her face.
And of course, if alone was what he needed, alone was what she would give. But – and she thought this might be unfair, but still she decided it – she was going to require proof. He was going to have to convince her, convince her utterly, that solitude was his need. Only then would she leave him to his strange anguish.
———
In the morning Po seemed cheerful enough; but Katsa, who was beginning to feel like a henpecking mother, registered his lack of interest in the food, even the Lienid food, spread across the table. He ate practically nothing, and then made some vague, unlikely remark about checking on the lame horse. He wandered outside.
“What’s wrong with him?” Bitterblue asked.
Katsa’s eyes slid to the child’s face, and held her steady gray gaze. There was no point pretending she didn’t know what Bitterblue meant. Bitterblue had never been stupid.
“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.