Graceling: Chapters 16–21

And he’d better not ride as if he were half asleep, or she’d leave him in the dust. She was not in the mood to dawdle.

As their horses cantered out of the stable yard, she didn’t look back.

Po was conspicuously a Lienid and enough the subject of idle talk to be recognized by virtue of his own eyes and by the Graceling company he kept.

“And now I’m wondering,” he said, “how it is you don’t realize your eyes ensnare me, just as mine do you. I can’t explain it, Katsa, but you shouldn’t let it embarrass you. For we’re both overtaken by the same—foolishness.”

“Your eyes are beautiful,” he said, and she felt warm suddenly, warm in the sun that dappled through the treetops and rested on them in patches.

If we arrived at his court he’d probably mount an offensive, and we’d have to start hurting people. I’d prefer to avoid that, wouldn’t you? If there’s going to be an enormous mess, let it be at the court of the guilty king, not the king who’s merely complicitous.

“You won’t even take your bow? Are you planning to throttle a moose with your bare hands, then?”

She slipped between the gnarled trees and into the damp silence of the forest.

“True. But you’re better than I am, Katsa. And it doesn’t humiliate me.” He fed a branch to the fire. “It humbles me. But it doesn’t humiliate me.”

It occurred to her how susceptible he must be to intrusions.

She stifled the laugh that rose into her throat.

She coughed, and forced her face into a mask of penitence, which wouldn’t have fooled even the most incompetent of mind readers. But she hadn’t meant it, truly she hadn’t, and he must know that.

He might know where she aimed her next blow, but after a barrage of hits he simply couldn’t keep up with her anymore; he couldn’t move fast enough to block her.

“I hope you’re hungry,” she said to him. “I don’t want this goose to go to waste.”
“I’m ravenous.”

But I also heard you were some kind of feckless thug and that Randa had you under his thumb.

The farther south one rode into Sunder, the heavier and thicker the wood of the trees, and the stronger and more imposing the houses and inns.

The room had recovered from the hush that afflicted it when Po and Katsa first walked through the door.

The men were noisy now, and jovial, and if they did peek at the Graceling royalty over their cups and around their chairs, well, at least they didn’t stare outright.

The finery of the merchants stood out among the muted browns and oranges of the people of the town.

Katsa was the only woman in the room, save a harried serving girl, the innkeeper’s daughter, who ran among the tables with a tray full of cups and pitchers.

His face was impassive.

“I only guessed you were looking for the key. It wasn’t my Grace, so you needn’t get all huffy about it.”

“I meant, Lord Prince, that it’s not worth our time to divulge information if you’ll not compensate us enough for six men.”

“I won’t haggle over a price when I don’t know the breadth of your information. You’ll be fairly compensated. If that doesn’t satisfy you, you’re free to leave.”

“How interesting,” Po said, and the farce had begun. Po asked all the questions one would ask if one were conducting this interrogation seriously.

And disappointed, most likely, that he hadn’t managed to send Po and Katsa on a futile mission.

“Yes, but my sense of your energy heightened suddenly, and I know you well enough to guess when you’re likely to take a swing at someone.” He half-smiled, tiredly. “No one could ever accuse you of being inconsistent.”

“It is,” he insisted, and she laughed again at his earnestness.

Perhaps Raffin included his salve for headaches among the medicines.

“That man truly believed in Leck's philanthropy. But am I the only person who finds it a bit odd that there should be so many slashed-up dogs and squirrels in Monsea that need rescuing? Are the trees and the rocks made of broken glass?”

That would be arrogance, and she saw that arrogance was foolishness; she should strive for humility—and there was another way he’d helped her.

She hadn’t asked for a person whose company she wished.
Katsa couldn’t bear her own inanity.

She drew herself into a shell of sullenness and chased away every thought that entered her mind.

Ten minutes was a far greater range than she’d understood his Grace to encompass; but that was an argument for another time.

It was unfamiliar, and she poked and prodded it, as she would have prodded an alien toe unexpectedly her own.

But Katsa felt palpably that the horses were moving as slowly as her mind.

“But that doesn’t tell me how you’ll feel, always to be subject to my whim.”
“It isn’t your whim. It’s the need of your heart. You forget that I’m in a unique position to understand you, Katsa. Whenever you pull away from me I’ll know it’s not for lack of love. Or if it is, I’ll know that, too; and I’ll know it’s right for you to go.”

He was willing to risk unhappiness. And there was the crux of the matter.

Then he swung at her face with one fist and she flashed her arm upward to block him. The explosion of arm on arm woke her from her stupor.

The knack you have with fire in a rainstorm.