Graceling: Chapters 1–7

She only hoped that when he and Giddon followed her with their torches, they would see the moss slime, tread carefully, and not waken the dead by clattering headlong down the steps.

She swirled through the lot of them, kicking and kneeing and hitting, and the castle guard jumped up from his guardhouse desk, burst through the door, and ran into the fray.

“I can do it in the time allotted,” Katsa had said, and when Giddon had started to protest, she’d held up her hand.

She learned the angle, position, and intensity of a killing blow versus a maiming blow.

They eyed each other, warily, each no more than a shadow to the other.

There was a lilt to his words; it was not an accent she knew.

But he was unlike any thug she’d ever encountered. He didn’t feel brutish or stupid or threatening.

She thought him very strange, and impulsive, but she saw he’d relaxed his guard, and she wasn’t one to waste an opportunity.

And he wouldn’t trust her once he woke to that welt on his head.

The Council could be certain of this, for Oll was Randa’s spymaster and his confidant.

His kingdom sat between Estill and Wester on one axis and between Nander and Sunder on the other. It was a position too tenuous for alliances.

Katsa remembered the farmers of Estill that she and Oll had lifted secretly from their makeshift prison in a cowshed weeks before. Estillan farmers who could not pay the tithe to their king, Thigpen, because Thigpen’s army had trampled their fields on its way to raid a Nanderan village.

Thigpen should have been the one to pay the farmers; even Randa would have conceded this, had his own army done the damage.

They couldn’t tear through the narrow streets; they couldn’t make themselves conspicuous.

The horses carried them past wooden shacks and houses, stone foundries, shops with their shutters closed.

The buildings were neat, and most of them had recently been painted. There was no squalor in Randa City. Randa didn’t tolerate squalor.

Katsa would deliver Tealiff to Prince Raffin through a high doorway in a defunct section of the castle wall, the existence of which Oll kept carefully from Randa’s notice.

“I didn’t think Randa the type to conduct rescue missions.”
She hadn’t expected him to be so lucid.

A woman carried buckets across a farmyard, the handles hanging from a yoke balanced on her shoulder.

They made camp against an enormous rock crag that broke through the base of one of the eastern hills.

“What’s the point of a public execution,” he said, “if the public misses the part where the fellow dies? I can see that when I give orders I shall have to compensate for your mental ineptitude.”

“What’s the point of a public execution,” he said, “if the public misses the part where the fellow dies? I can see that when I give orders I shall have to compensate for your mental ineptitude.”

A tax that the King of Wester had decided to levy on the villages of Estill—a tax Wester’s soldiers saw fit to collect by slaying Estillan villagers and emptying their pockets.

What might she be capable of—if she acted of her own volition and outside Randa’s domain?

It was the happiest and headiest moment of her life.

One or two more escapades and the news of their missions began to trickle into useful channels.

They didn’t just talk about subversion; they planned it and carried it out. Inevitably over time they attracted allies outside the court.

She wouldn’t relinquish the small amount of control she’d taken over her life.

They made good time, though Katsa chafed at their pace.

The weather held through the day and into the night, but sometime before dawn, clouds blotted out the stars above their camp. In the morning they broke camp quickly and set out with some trepidation.

But of course the inn was unaccustomed to housing royalty, and the entire family threw itself into a dither in an attempt to make the king’s niece, the king’s underlord, and the king’s captain comfortable.

The white walls were made of a stone that sparkled, and they rose so high that she had to crane her neck to find the tops of the turrets above.

She could claim a headache. She wished she could take Raffin’s headache remedy and turn her hair blue. It would give her a respite from Randa’s dinners.

“Not enough,” Helda said, nodding emphatically.

But she couldn't fathom a lady who didn’t want to be beautiful, who didn’t want a legion of admirers.

And so she believed Katsa was both people, though Katsa couldn’t imagine how she reconciled them in her mind.

It occurred to her that it wasn’t just the strangeness of his eyes that disconcerted her. It was that he wasn’t afraid to hold hers.

Katsa kept her eyes on her venison and carrots.

“The elderly are prone to discomforts. It’s our duty to keep them comfortable,” he said, “and safe.”

“My Lady,” Lord Davit said, “are you quite all right? You look a bit flushed.”