What were her parents fighting about? What was her father storing in the attic room? And why had her mother passed her father candy, wrapped up in a wallet as if it were a state secret?
In one pocket, the box with the key imprint bumped against Lovisa’s leg. She reached in to touch it. Then, from another pocket, she unearthed some biscuits, which she ate in lieu of breakfast.
Chapter Nine
Bitterblue woke to dim gray light, the scent of lavender, and the feeling that her hands and feet were on fire.
“I don’t want to die,” she cried out, confused, then hearing her own voice and understanding she mustn’t be dead. Feeling soft, silky blankets and pillows around her; realizing she wasn’t drowning.
She was in a small room, its walls touched by weak light filtering through a high window. The lavender smell came from the bedding, but there was another smell underneath. A more pervasive smell, as if the lavender was meant to mask something less pleasant. More animal.
“Winterkeep,” Bitterblue said, remembering. “Is this Winterkeep?”
Other memories began to form. The ship. The wave. The incredible moment of being tossed through the air, like a doll stuffed with beans, then splashing into the sea. Being surrounded by those purple creatures, just at the moment of giving up. Silbercows, Bitterblue thought, remembering more about Winterkeep. They rescued me and brought me to people in an airship. They showed me pictures in my mind. They saved my life!
Bitterblue shoved her blankets back and swung her feet down, thinking she would go find everyone, tell them she was awake. But when she tried to stand, her feet screamed with pain and she fell back onto the bed.
“Ow!” she cried. “Hello? Giddon?”
When no one came, she took stock. She was wearing someone else’s pajamas and her toes were bandaged. Frostbite? Chillblains? Her fingers hurt too, as did her nose and ears, but they weren’t bandaged. Touching her arms, she noticed that her knives were missing. Then she realized that her gold rings were gone too; then remembered her mother’s ring.
Oh, no, she thought, imagining the ring falling into darkness, thudding against the floor of the Brumal Sea. I’m sorry, Mama, she thought, with the desolate sense that she’d abandoned her actual mother in a cold and lonely place. I hope there are interesting things to see down there.
“Giddon?” she said out loud. “Where is everyone?”
Grumbling about how she always had to do everything for herself, Bitterblue put her feet to the floor again and, carefully, tried to stand. It hurt, but she could do it. She shuffled forward a step or two, until it became too painful. Then she knelt, tried crawling, which was equally painful because her hands ached. Slowly, she made her way to the door. She reached for the knob.
The door was locked.
That was strange.
Giddon? Why would the door be locked?
She knocked on the door with her elbow and called out once more, but nothing happened.
Shifting toward a different understanding of her situation, Bitterblue studied the room. The only furniture was the bed. There were no lamps. She thought the thick rug might be the source of the unpleasant smell. She saw a chamber pot peeking out from under the bed. The window was high in the wall, too high for Bitterblue to reach.
And the door is locked, she told Giddon. And you’re not here. And I’ve been left with no food or water or lamps, and someone has taken my rings.
Something inside Bitterblue was becoming interested and still. She shuffled back to the bed, noticing the distinctly Keepish softness of the silk of her sheets, the bright Keepish shade of crimson. Pulling the covers around her shivering body, she lay down, then proceeded to think. About her drowned men; about zilfium, and people importing it from her mountains. About why someone in Winterkeep might want the Queen of Monsea locked in a room.
* * *
—
She woke to the tiniest sound, a scratch or a scrape, and sat up fast. The room looked the same, but the light had become more diffuse. She could see a pale blue sky through her window.
Then she saw something gleaming white on the rug. Someone had slipped a piece of paper under the door.
Well. At least that’s something.
Steeling herself against the pain, Bitterblue climbed down to the rug again and crawled to the door. Po told me once that there’s no shame in crawling, when you can’t walk, she said to Giddon, picking the paper up.
It was a picture of Bitterblue City, a print, one she’d seen before. In fact, she’d sent Mikka and Brek to Winterkeep each with a copy. This version of the picture, however, had been altered. Her castle and the bridges all flew flags, drawn in graphite, that hadn’t been in the original. Some of the flags showed a scene of silbercows in the ocean, a gigantic, underwater creature below them: the flag of Winterkeep. Some of the flags showed hills rising to a mountain peak, and above the peak, a single star shaped like a sword with a cross guard. Giddon had drawn this flag for her. It was the new flag of Estill.
Bitterblue’s hands held the paper tightly, for she could not help but understand this. It was a declaration of war.
PART TWO
The Keeper
The creature who lived at the bottom of the sea gazed at the little metal egg with the sparkly ring and pin, fondling it with the tip of one of her tentacles.
She hadn’t pulled the pin yet to see if anything happened. She was waiting for the moment when she really needed cheering up. She thought it would come soon, for she did not like her new, disrupted world.
For one thing, there were the four silbercows who’d escaped from the massacre, who’d seen her, and chastised her for not helping. They’d told all the other silbercows about her, calling her that name they insisted on using, Keeper. Then silbercows had come in droves to stare at her and say “Keeper” at her. Some had touched her. Some had even tried to talk to her, which had been the scariest thing of all and had made her vibrate and cry and feel so dizzy that she saw stars. And they kept pressing in, asking her to do things, “Keeper” things she didn’t understand, like play with whales or sing. It was terrible. Nothing felt more lonely than being surrounded by silbercows who thought she was somebody else, instead of who she really was, someone they could see if they just looked, a large but ordinary creature with a round body, thirteen tentacles, and twenty-three eyes, who loved her treasures and wanted to be left alone.
One day, while they were all pressing in, a song of sadness burst out of the creature. It was the first song she could ever remember singing, beautiful and wordless, all about who she was. It started as a screech and a buzz, then a rumble, then a jagged explosion of sensation that felt really good to her, really true and brave. The silbercows leaped back in alarm. Then all of them except for the original four sped away. She kept singing. It felt so right.