“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.”
“You’ve lost something,” she said, “and you’ve every right to feel sorrow for what you’ve lost. They’re not the same, sight and your Grace. Your Grace shows you the form of things, but it doesn’t show you beauty. You’ve lost beauty.”
His mouth tightened again, and he looked away from her. When he looked back she thought he might be about to cry But he spoke tearlessly, stonily. “I won’t go back to Lienid. I won’t go to my castle, if I’m not able to see it. It’s hard enough to be with you. It’s why I didn’t tell you the truth. I wanted you to go away, because it hurts to be with you when I can’t see you.”
She tilted her head back and considered his stormy expression. “This is very good,” she said. “This is some excellent self-pity.”
And then the rumble of his laughter again, and a kind of helpless heartache in his face that caused her to reach for him, take him into her arms, and kiss his neck, his snow-covered shoulder, his finger not wearing its ring, and every place that she could find. He touched her face gently. He touched her lips and kissed her. He rested his forehead against hers.
“I would never hold you here,” he said. “But if you can bear this – if you can bear me behaving like this – I don’t really want you to leave.”
“I’ll not go,” Katsa said, “for a long time. I’ll not go until you want me to; or until you’re ready to go yourself ”
———
He had quite a talent for playing a part. Katsa saw this now, because she saw the transformation now, whenever they were alone and he stopped pretending. To his brother and his cousin he presented strength, steadiness, health. His shoulders were straight, his stride even. When he couldn’t hide his unhappiness, he played it as moodiness. When he couldn’t find the energy to direct his eyes to their faces and pretend to see them, he played it as inattention. He was strong, cheerful – strangely distracted, perhaps, but healing well from grave injury. It was an impressive act – and for the most part, it seemed to satisfy them. Enough, at least, that they never had reason to suspect the truth of his Grace, which was ultimately all he was trying to hide.
When he and Katsa were alone, hunting, collecting water, or sitting together in the cabin, the disguise quietly fell from him. Weariness pulled at his face, his body, his voice. He put his hand out occasionally, to a tree or a rock, to steady himself.
His eyes focused, or pretended to focus, on nothing, ever. And Katsa began to understand that while some of his sorry state was attributable to plain unhappiness, an even larger part of it stemmed from his Grace itself. For he was still growing into it; and now that he no longer had vision to anchor his perception of the world, he was constantly overwhelmed.
One day beside the pool, during a rare break between snowstorms, she watched him notch an arrow calmly to his bow and aim at something she couldn’t see. A ledge of rock? A tree stump? He cocked his head as if he were listening.
He released the arrow, and it sliced through the cold and thwacked into a patch of snow. “What – ” Katsa started to say, and then stopped when a spot of blood welled to the surface and colored the snow around the arrow’s shaft.
“A rabbit,” he said. “A big one.”
He started forward toward his buried kill, but had taken little more than a step when a flock of geese swooped down from overhead. He put his hand to his temple and fell to one knee.
Katsa strung two arrows and shot two geese. Then she hauled Po up. “Po, what – ”
“The geese. They took me by surprise.”
She shook her head. “You could sense animals before, but the sense of them never knocked you down.”
He snorted with laughter, and then his laughter fizzled into a sigh. “Katsa. Try to imagine how things are now My Grace shows me every detail of the mountain above me, and the drop to the forest below me. I feel the movement of every fish in the pool and every bird in the trees. The ice is growing back over our water hole. Snow is forming fast in the clouds, Katsa. In a moment I expect it’ll be snowing again.” He turned his face toward her now, urgently. “Skye and Bitterblue are in the cabin. Bitterblue’s anxious about me, she doesn’t think I eat enough. And you’re here, too, of course – your every movement, your body, your clothing, your every worry coursing through me. The sighted can focus their eyes. I can’t focus my Grace. I can’t turn this off. How exactly, when I’m aware of everything above, below, before, behind, and beyond me, am I supposed to keep my mind on the ground beneath my feet?”