This seemed wrong to Lovisa, for she was big. Her brothers were little. The big protected the little.
“It was my job too,” she said.
“With your father there?” said Nev. “As big as he was, the man that he was? I’ve seen him, Lovisa. He would leave you to defend your brothers?”
“It’s not that simple,” Lovisa said. “My mother was his wife. He had obligations to her.”
“After you would spend that time in your father’s library,” Nev said. “When you were little. What happened next?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well? Did your mother forgive you?”
“No,” Lovisa said. “Of course not. We would come out for dinner. She would wait for my dinner to be served. Then, before I could eat it, she would take me away from the table and put me upstairs, in this room in the attic where she took us for punishments.”
“And your father would sit at the table?” Nev said. “And watch you go?”
“Yes,” Lovisa said, startled by the question. “But he wasn’t the one I’d crossed. It was my mother, you understand?”
At the sudden, soft sorrow in Nev’s face, Lovisa went quiet, thinking. Then gradually, inconsolably, sad.
“Oh,” Lovisa said. “I see.”
Chapter Forty-five
Lovisa was sitting on a bench Nev had shown her after Lovisa had complained that there was no place to think in Ledra. The bench was at the Cliff Farm, overlooking the water.
“I sit there sometimes and look for silbercows,” Nev had said.
So now Lovisa sat there too, occasionally smelling a whiff of manure that reminded her of Nev’s home in the north. The light was falling, stars beginning to prick the violet sky. Lovisa had used to sit in the dorm foyer and watch people, pulling information into herself to consider later, to fit into the puzzle of who was doing what, and why. She still did that. But now she also sat here, looking out across the sea and sky. Like the dorm foyer, this cliff was a place on the edge of something.
Lovisa had gone to Gorga Balava, her professor, after class on Monday, demanding an explanation from him about zilfium pollution.
“Surely you’ve read the studies, Lovisa,” he’d said, squinting at her with a puzzled expression. On his arm, his silly fox was wearing a hat with two ear holes and a pom-pom, tied with a ribbon under her chin. “You should talk to a scientist, or a Scholar.”
She’d gone to Gorga exactly because he was an Industry rep, not a Scholar. “I’m not asking you to explain what pollution is,” she said scornfully. “I’m asking you to explain why you don’t care about it.”
“I do care about it.”
“Just not enough to do something about it?”
“What should I do, Lovisa? Let Winterkeep’s industries fall behind the advances of the rest of the world? So that no one will trade with us, no one will send students to our schools, or take our opinions and resources into account when larger decisions are being made?”
“You could insist on research into other fuels besides zilfium,” said Lovisa. “You could try to get the rest of the world to care about the problem. You could break the Varanas’ monopoly on varane production. You could ask someone other than your self-interested Ledran friends for ideas. You could try to inspire people!”
Gorga’s eyes had gone rather bright as he watched her rising agitation. “This is the start of an excellent list, Lovisa,” he’d said. “What would you think of an independent study next term, examining these questions more fully?”
* * *
—
On her bench on the cliff, Lovisa was trying to come to a decision about the queen’s offer when something extraordinary happened.
A vibration grew around her, starting low, then pushing itself into her consciousness. It was a sense of something swelling, impossibly, in the sea. And it was dark on the water, the light falling fast. But Lovisa saw.
What was it that she saw? Looking back later, Lovisa was never sure what the honest answer was to that question. She saw a mountain, black in silhouette, rising out of the ocean. It had long, winding, wavering legs. And it was making a dreadful, almost unbearable noise, maybe not the kind her ears could hear—it was hard to tell what part of her body was hearing it—but the kind that flooded every cell with a need for the terrible, loud pressure to stop.
One of the mountain’s long legs was holding something. An object with hard edges. Slowly, the leg lifted the object into the air, water streaming down from its surface. Then the leg placed the object gently on the beach to the left of Lovisa’s cliff, nearer to the city.
The mountain receded. Gradually, mercifully, so did the noise.
At her bench, Lovisa was standing. “Icositetrapus cyclops!” she was shouting aloud to the air. “Icositetrapus cyclops! What? What?” turning in circles, looking for someone to talk to. Someone to whom to say, “Did you see that?” and demand, “What was that?”
She was alone.
Lovisa sat down, stood up again, sat down. She couldn’t begin to understand it. Nor could she believe it, except that at the water’s edge on the sand to the left, a large, oblong shape that had certainly not been there before was cast ashore, like a beached ship.
In fact, the more Lovisa looked, the more she believed that it was a beached ship.
She began to be frightened that she was losing her sanity. When, a moment later, voices and images appeared in her mind unbidden, her fears sharpened into a certainty.
Then she saw the small, smooth shapes out at sea, gliding, playing in the sunset water. Silbercows? Is that what was happening? Had they noticed her? Could they possibly—
Yes. She felt them, like a soft touch brushing against her heart. They were calling out to her, wanting to talk. To her!
We heard you, they said, in the north. We heard you say you’re sorry.
It wasn’t words; it was pictures, ideas. Feelings. Lovisa felt breathless, dizzy, but she thought she understood.
It’s not your fault, they told her.
What? she said, not sure how to talk to them, not sure what to say. What just happened?
That creature you saw just now, they told her. It wasn’t the Keeper. Not exactly. The Keeper is a story. That was our big, strong friend. She’s real.
How did one talk to silbercows? She tried it again. I don’t understand, she told them.
That ship on the beach is the Seashell, they told her. With two bodies trapped inside. Mikka and Brek.
Lovisa was cast into a new kind of shock. What? she cried out. You brought us the Seashell? How did you do that? Why would you do that?