“I’ll have to know eventually,” she said dully. “It’s not like I can live my life never knowing.”
“How about I promise to tell you what I know,” said Bitterblue, “but not right now?”
Lovisa was thinking of the cave her mother had used to tell her about, where she and Katu had been sent when they were children, as a punishment. Lovisa imagined it vast and secret, with smooth, curved walls and high ceilings, far removed from regular life, a place to hide, and not so scary if Katu was there too. She wished she could live in that cave, alone, touched by nothing. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Are you coming into the bath?” asked the queen.
“No,” said Lovisa, who needed solitude.
“All right,” said Bitterblue, removing her shoes, inspecting the burst blister on the bottom of her foot. Touching Lovisa with worried glances.
“I would like to return my uncle’s ring to his body,” Lovisa said.
“I understand that,” said Bitterblue. “Things like that have meaning. I had one ring that was unique and irreplaceable, and more important than any others. It was one my mother wore, in honor of me.” She held her palms open and examined them, as if she were looking for something there. “It slipped off while the silbercows were rescuing me,” she said. “It’s at the bottom of the Brumal Sea.”
How nice to have a mother to mourn, instead of parents you wished were dead.
Lovisa shouldered her way out of the room and into the cold.
* * *
—
Lovisa had done a lot of sneaking in her life, poking where she didn’t belong, but never in a forest.
She knew the path from the bathhouse to Vera’s office, so she headed down that path now. She noticed that it wasn’t the most direct route to Vera’s office; rather, beginning with a scramble of high rock, it veered off the wrong way at first. For misdirection? The footprints and packed snow began again after the scramble of rock, but someone standing at the bathhouse wouldn’t be able to see that. The path turned to high rocks again as she neared Vera’s office. A stranger who found Vera’s office first would likely not find the bath.
She didn’t go into Vera’s office. Instead she searched the office’s perimeter for more groups of rocks that could make a footprint-free path. She saw two options: one easier path with high, flat boulders, the other with sharp, sloping rocks that lined the crest of a winding ridge.
Seeing no reason to make this harder than necessary, she chose the easier route. For three minutes or so, she stepped from boulder to boulder, sometimes needing to jump, once using an overhanging limb to swing herself across a gap. Eventually, the boulders petered out into untouched snow. This was a path to nowhere.
She turned back. When she reached Vera’s office, Vera was standing there, watching her arrival.
Lovisa ignored her.
“You’re an interesting one,” Vera said.
“How are we getting to Torla’s Neck?” Lovisa said.
“There’s some news from the city,” Vera said. “Two houses burnt down in Flag Hill.”
Lovisa stopped. Said nothing, just looked at Vera with as much dispassionate boredom as she could muster.
“The fire was started by a suicidal girl named Lovisa Cavenda who lived in one of the houses,” said Vera. “Then spread to the other house when an airship exploded. The mother of the girl, who happens to be President Ferla Cavenda, was injured by falling wood. The daughter is presumed dead. Sad story, isn’t it?”
Lovisa swallowed. “Was anyone else hurt besides the president and the daughter?”
“No,” said Vera.
Her brothers were safe.
“But there’s talk of changing the laws about how airships are docked,” Vera said, “now that we see what happens if the dock catches fire.”
Her mother was alive and her brothers were safe. And her parents were using the fire as an opportunity to ruin her reputation and pretend she was dead.
Her brothers probably believed that story. Mari probably did too. Lovisa’s voice was rough. “How much does it cost to send a signal message from Torla’s Neck to the Magistry in Ledra?”
“That depends,” said Vera. “If you’re reporting some sort of crime, and if you have credible evidence of the crime, it doesn’t cost anything.”
“The Queen of Monsea is pretty credible evidence,” said Lovisa.
“I expect you’re right,” said Vera, with a quick smile that looked more like a grimace. Then she said, “How old are you?”
“Sixteen,” said Lovisa.
For the first time, a softness touched Vera’s face. To avoid the way it made her start to feel things, Lovisa turned and began scaling the second rock path, the one that looked uneven and difficult. Once she was on it, she found that it had deceived her, for with every step, a clear, flat surface met her feet. It was designed to look more treacherous than it was.
“Don’t you worry about what you find out there, Lovisa Cavenda,” said Vera. “I don’t know what brought you here with the Monsean queen, but we’ll get you to Torla’s Neck safe.”
* * *
—
What Lovisa found was a trail of trampled snow that led to a clearing. An enormous white sheet was stretched across the clearing between the trees, like a high roof. Lovisa understood that it was meant to look like a snowy field to any airships passing above.
Below the sheet was something resembling a toy airship her brothers might have made out of junk they’d found around the neighborhood on garbage collection day. It was tiny. The passenger area, which was roofless, was smaller than the smallest rowboat Lovisa had ever seen. The balloon, made of patches of some unrecognizable fabric, was pitiful, as if a real airship had had a baby that now lay sleeping, dreaming it could fly. The entire thing, car, sails, balloon, mast, boom, lines, was painted black.
Lovisa climbed inside. She wanted to see the varane tank that supplied the balloon with gas. When she found it, she started to laugh. It looked like something built of cheap tin and battered under the hooves of horses.
It was strange, the way she couldn’t feel fear anymore. It was as if a balloon of nothingness had replaced her insides. She didn’t care if this illegal pseudo-airship fell out of the sky while they flew to Torla’s Neck.
No. That wasn’t quite true, because her brain was starting to work again, ever since hearing that her brothers were safe. Where were they? Who was caring for them? Maybe Viri, Erita, and Vikti would never forgive Lovisa for what she’d done. But she could still send a message to the Ledra Magistry. With the queen’s help, she could get her parents put into prison, couldn’t she? In prison, they would be far away from the boys. Surely that would be better. Someone would take care of them, right? Someone competent, who didn’t ruin everything, the way she did. Lovisa wanted a different life for her brothers than the one she’d lived. She wanted more for them: more choice, less punishment, less fear. She didn’t need to be able to feel her feelings to know that that was true.