Graceling: Chapter 31–Epilogue

He was a man of average height and average build, had a sturdy, no-nonsense wife and an inordinate number of children who seemed to run the gamut from infancy to Katsa’s age and older.

He was a man of average height and average build, had a sturdy, no-nonsense wife and an inordinate number of children who seemed to run the gamut from infancy to Katsa’s age and older.

They’d surmised, though Katsa had never told them explicitly, that the child eating bread and cheese as if she’d never seen it before was the Monsean princess who fled her father.

This ring was their ticket if any Lienid ship was to serve them willingly, and not in response to the threat of her Grace or the weight of her purse. Though she would capitulate to her Grace or her purse if necessary.

“Monsean,” Bitterblue whispered, and though Katsa didn’t change her gait, her senses sharpened and her whole body tingled with readiness until they’d left those ships behind and several more beyond them.

“I can see you well enough to know you for a pair of ragamuffins,” the boy said, “who’ve been fighting, by the looks of that bandage on your eye.”

“I’ll keep my hands in the air and my friend will stand away.”
Bitterblue stood and backed up a few steps, obligingly.

“She sees storms before they hit. We set out now to beat a blizzard coming up from the east.”
A weather seer. The prescient Graces were better than the mind-reading Graces, better by far, but still they gave Katsa a crawling feeling along her skin.

Well, this captain’s profession was well suited to her Grace, anyway, and it wasn’t adverse to their purposes—might even be advantageous.

Voices emanated from the lighted opening, and one of them was strong, commanding, and female.

They were lunging toward her, both of them, Jem brandishing his knife, Bear swinging his sword; and the sailor beside the captain had also pulled a blade.

Katsa clenched her teeth and prepared herself to say something very caustic, but Bitterblue’s voice stopped her.

If Prince Po had truly given her that ring, it would mean that he’d abdicated his princehood. He’d no longer be a prince of Lienid. He’d make her a princess and give her his castle and his inheritance.

The men laughed and told each other that Princess Katsa was a born sailor. To which Bitterblue added, once Bitterblue was well enough to come above deck and join in their banter, that Katsa was born to do anything normal people might consider terrifying.

“You shouldn’t encourage her,” Bitterblue said to Patch, her hands on her hips and her face turned up to glare into his. Her countenance fierce, for all that she was a fifth Patch’s size.

“Lady Princess, I reckon she’ll go up there eventually with or without my say-so, and I’d rather it be now while I’m watching, than at night, or during a squall.”

His Grace is limitless, and a king with his proclivities is a danger to all seven kingdoms.

The captain would hold at sea in a place near to Lienid, a specific place just west of an uninhabited island she could describe and another vessel could find, until such time as the other vessel came for her, or circumstances aboard her ship rendered it impossible for her isolation to continue.

“She’s a plucky little thing,” Red said, approvingly.
She was a plucky little thing. So little, so completely little, that Katsa knew, as every one of these sailors must know, how much luck she would need if she were to defend herself from an attacker.

She could make out the road that spiraled from the base of the pillar up to the city, and the platforms, too, rising from fields to city on ropes too thin for her eyes to discern.

The appearance of Lady Katsa of the Middluns, renowned Graceling thug, in possession of Po’s ring; the absurd, tragic story she had to tell about Leck and Ashen; and her subsequent intentions to turn the castle into a fortress and cut off contact with the outside world.

Katsa looked up to see strangers sitting around the walls of a long room; and at the room’s end, smiling and appraising them through a single eye, King Leck of Monsea.

To convince Ror to leave his city and his court and come to a remote corner of his kingdom, with his wife and his sons, and amuse Leck and subjugate himself to Leck, while Leck waited for a daughter who might never arrive.

Katsa thought dumbly that it was no wonder Po was so voluble. In Lienid everyone was, and everyone spoke at once.

The child queen could not be sent off trippingly to Monsea to announce that she was now in charge, and denounce the dead king an entire kingdom adored.

He climbed occasionally into the riggings, gasping, his gray eyes flying wide with laughter every time the ship plunged into the trough of a wave.

“Of course I trust you,” the child said, “and my men will defer to your judgment in all things while I’m gone.”

It does none of us any good at this juncture for you to barrel through Monsea with the queen of the kingdom on your horse, killing her soldiers left and right. What exactly would that accomplish?

And Queen Bitterblue was very changed from the skittish creature she and Po had cajoled from the inside of a hollow log months ago.

“I’m going to name my firstborn child after you.”
Katsa laughed at that. “For the child’s sake, wait for a girl. Or even better, wait until all your children are older and give my name to whichever is the most troublesome and obstinate.”

His story came out slowly, whenever he and Katsa were able to contrive ways to be alone.

He’d still had his sight, but it hadn’t felt quite right to him; it had changed in some way his head was too muddled to quantify, some way that gave him a deep sense of misgiving.

Before Katsa knew it she was teaching the trick to a pair of young soldiers from Monsea’s southern shore, and devising a drill to improve the opposite-hand swordplay of Bitterblue's guards.

The battles became increasingly amusing, partly because the brothers were so evenly matched and partly because as the snow melted the yard turned into a morass of mud.

Skye followed her sometime thereafter, summoned by his father to Leck City to assist with the imminent coronation.

Like any event requiring formal clothing, the crowning ceremony was tedious, but Bitterblue endured it with the appropriate gravity and poise.

Katsa didn’t mind the tedium, for Raffin was on one side of her and Bann on the other, and not five minutes passed without them amusing themselves in some way.

“This is not a Sunderan street carnival,” he whispered with great and dignified reproach.

The interruption grew to something rather large and intrusive, causing a coronation attendant to stumble in his litany of the Monsean rulers across time.

“At the coronation Skye accused me of refusing to marry you,” Po said; and now she heard a smile in his voice. “He was quite indignant about it.”