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Enter the Graceling Realm and let it work its magic . . .
When Queen Bitterblue took the throne of Monsea, she was a child, and her advisers ran the kngdom for her. Now she is beginning to question their decisions, especially how they handle the legacy of her father Leck, who who ruled through his Grace—a special talent for mind-altering—and his taste for darkness and violence. Bitterblue needs to know Monsea’s past to lead it into the future, so she begins exploring the city sreets at night, disguised and alone. As she does, she meets two thieves, who hold a key to the truth of Leck's reign. And one of them, with a Grace that he hasn't yet identified, holds a key to her heart.
Bitterblue is unforgettable—a gateway to the Graceling Realm that braids together magic, memory, and romance.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
- Sales Rank: #45908 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-05-01
- Released on: 2012-05-01
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
This rich and poignant fantasy grapples with the messy aftermath of destroying an evil overlord. Gorgeous, textured prose is filled with images of strange beauty and restrained horror. It propels an intricate narrative dense with subplots and rich in characters familiar and new. Weaving them together are all the lies: conspiracies and ciphers, fakes and false testimony, spies and thieves, disguises and deceptions, mazes and puzzles. They are lies spun from greed, shame, strategy, fear, duty - even kindness. And it is Bitterblue who, trapped in this net of deceit, must draw upon all her courage, cleverness and ferocious compassion to reveal the truth-and to care for those it shatters. Devastating and heartbreaking, this will be a disappointment for readers looking for a conventional happy ending. But those willing to take the risk will - like Bitterblue - achieve something even more precious: a hopeful beginning. Kirkus
About the Author
Kristin Cashore is an award-winning author in the fantasy and YA genre. She has an M.A. in children's literature and has lived in Pennsylvania, Florida, Sydney, Cambridge, Austin, Italy and even London before settling, for the moment, in Boston.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
When he grabs Mama’s wrist and yanks her toward the wall-hanging like that, it must hurt. Mama doesn’t cry out. She tries to hide her pain from him, but she looks back at me, and in her face, she shows me everything she feels. If Father knows she’s in pain and is showing me, Father will take Mama’s pain away and replace it with something else.
He will say to Mama, “Darling, nothing’s wrong. It doesn’t hurt, you’re not frightened,” and in Mama’s face I’ll see her doubt, the beginnings of her confusion. He’ll say, “Look at our beautiful child. Look at this beautiful room. How happy we are. Nothing is wrong. Come with me, darling.” Mama will stare back at him, puzzled, and then she’ll look at me, her beautiful child in this beautiful room, and her eyes will go smooth and empty, and she’ll smile at how happy we are. I’ll smile too, because my mind is no stronger than Mama’s. I’ll say, “Have fun! Come back soon!” Then Father will produce the keys that open the door behind the hanging and Mama will glide through. Thiel, tall, troubled, bewildered in the middle of the room, will bolt in after her, and Father will follow.
When the lock slides home behind them, I’ll stand there trying to remember what I was doing before all of this happened. Before Thiel, father’s foremost adviser, came into Mama’s rooms looking for Father. Before Thiel, holding his hands so tight at his sides that they shook, tried to tell Father something that made Father angry, so that Father stood up from the table, his papers scattering, his pen dropping, and said, “Thiel, you’re a fool who cannot make sensical decisions. Come with us now. I’ll show you what happens when you think for yourself.” And then crossed to the sofa and grabbed Mama’s wrist so fast that Mama gasped and dropped her embroidery, but did not cry out.
“Come back soon!” I say cheerily as the hidden door closes behind them.
I remain, staring into the sad eyes of the blue horse in the hanging. Snow gusts at the windows. I’m trying to remember what I was doing before everyone went away.
What just happened? Why can’t I remember what just happened? Why do I feel so—
Numbers.
Mama says that when I’m confused or can’t remember, I must do arithmetic, because numbers are an anchor. She’s written out problems for me so that I have them at these moments. They’re here next to the papers Father has been writing in his funny, loopy script.
46 into 1058.
I could work it out on paper in two seconds, but Mama always tells me to work it out in my head. “Clear your mind of everything but the numbers,” she says. “Pretend you’re alone with the numbers in an empty room.” She’s taught me shortcuts. For example, 46 is almost 50, and 1058 is only a little more than 1000. 50 goes into 1000 exactly 20 times. I start there and work with what’s left. A minute later, I’ve figured out that 46 into 1058 is 23.
I do another one. 75 into 2850 is 38. Another. 32 into 1600 is 50.
Oh! These are good numbers Mama has chosen. They touch my memory and build a story, for fifty is Father’s age and thirty-two is Mama’s. They’ve been married for fourteen years and I am nine and a half. Mama was a Lienid princess. Father visited the island kingdom of Lienid and chose her when she was only eighteen. He brought her here and she’s never been back. She misses home, her father, her brothers and sisters, her brother Ror the king. She talks sometimes of sending me there, where I will be safe, and I cover her mouth and wrap a hand in her scarves and pull myself against her because I will not leave her.
Am I not safe here?
The numbers and the story are clearing my head, and it feels like I’m falling. Breathe.
Father is the King of Monsea. No one knows he has the two different colored eyes of a Graceling; no one wonders, for his is a terrible Grace hidden beneath his eye patch: When he speaks, his words fog people’s minds so that they’ll believe everything he says. Usually, he lies. This is why, as I sit here now, the numbers are clear but other things in my mind are muddled. Father has just been lying.
Now I understand why I’m in this room alone. Father has taken Mama and Thiel down to his own chambers and is doing something awful to Thiel so that Thiel will learn to be obedient and will not come to Father again with announcements that make Father angry. What the awful thing is, I don’t know. Father never shows me the things he does, and Mama never remembers enough to tell me. She’s forbidden me to try to follow Father down there, ever. She says that when I am thinking of following Father downstairs, I must forget about it and do more numbers. She says that if I disobey, she’ll send me away to Lienid.
I try. I really do. But I can’t make myself alone with the numbers in an empty room, and suddenly I’m screaming.
The next thing I know, I’m throwing Father’s papers into the fire. Running back to the table, gathering them in armfuls, tripping across the rug, throwing them on the flames, screaming as I watch Father’s strange, beautiful writing disappear. Screaming it out of existence. I trip over Mama’s embroidery, her sheets with their cheerful little rows of embroidered stars, moons, castles; cheerful, colorful flowers and keys and candles. I hate the embroidery. It’s a lie of happiness that Father convinces her is true. I drag it to the fire.
When Father comes bursting through the hidden door I’m still standing there screaming my head off and the air is putrid, full of the stinky smoke of silk. A bit of carpet is burning. He stamps it out. He grabs my shoulders, then shakes me so hard that I bite my own tongue. “Bitterblue,” he says, actually frightened. “Have you gone mad? You could suffocate in a room like this!”
“I hate you!” I yell, and spit blood into his face. He does the strangest thing: His single eye lights up and he starts to laugh.
“You don’t hate me,” he says. “You love me and I love you.”
“I hate you,” I say, but I’m doubting it now, I’m confused. His arms enfold me in a hug.
“You love me,” he says. “You’re my wonderful, strong darling, and you’ll be queen someday. Wouldn’t you like to be queen?”
I’m hugging Father, who is kneeling on the floor before me in a smoky room, so big, so comforting. Father is warm and nice to hug, though his shirt smells funny, like something sweet and rotten. “Queen of all Monsea?” I say in wonderment. The words are thick in my mouth. My tongue hurts. I don’t remember why.
“You’ll be queen someday,” Father says. “I’ll teach you all the important things, for we must prepare you. You’ll have to work hard, my Bitterblue. You don’t have all my advantages. But I’ll mold you, yes?”
“Yes, Father.”
“And you must never, ever disobey me. The next time you destroy my papers, Bitterblue, I’ll cut off one of your mother’s fingers.”
This confuses me. “What? Father! You mustn’t!”
“The time after that,” Father says, “I’ll hand you the knife and you’ll cut off one of her fingers.”
Falling again. I’m alone in the sky with the words Father just said; I plummet into comprehension. “No,” I say, certain. “You couldn’t make me do that.”
“I think you know that I could,” he says, trapping me close to him with hands clasped above my elbows. “You’re my strong-minded girl and I think you know exactly what I can do. Shall we make a promise, darling? Shall we promise to be honest with each other from now on? I shall make you into the most luminous queen.”
“You can’t make me hurt Mama,” I say.
Father raises a hand and cracks me across the face. I’m blind and gasping and would fall if he weren’t holding me up. “I can make anyone do anything,” he says with perfect calm.
“You can’t make me hurt Mama,” I yell through my face that is stinging and running with tears and snot. “One day I’m going to be big enough to kill you.”
Father is laughing again. “Sweetheart,” he says, forcing me back into his embrace. “Oh, see how perfect you are. You will be my masterpiece.”
When Mama and Thiel come through the hidden door, Father is murmuring to me and I’m resting my cheek on his nice shoulder, safe in his arms, wondering why the room smells like smoke and why my nose hurts so much. “Bitterblue?” Mama says, sounding scared. I raise my face to her. Her eyes go wide and she comes to me and pulls me away from Father. “What did you do?” she hisses at Father. “You struck her. You animal. I’ll kill you.”
“Darling, don’t be silly,” Father says, standing, looming over us. Mama and I are so small, so small wound together, and I’m confused because Mama is angry at Father. Father says to Mama, “I didn’t strike her. You did.”
“I know that I did not,” Mama says.
“I tried to stop you,” Father says, “but I couldn’t, and you struck her.”
“You will never convince me of that,” Mama says, her words clear, her voice beautiful inside her chest, where I’m pressing my ear.
“Interesting,” Father says. He studies us for a moment, head tilted, then says to Mama, “She is a lovely age. It’s time she and I became better acquainted. Bitterblue and I will start having private lessons.”
Mama turns her body so that she’s between me and Father. Her arms around me are like iron bars. “You will not,” she says to Father. “Get out. Get out of these rooms.”
“This really could not be more fascinating,” Father says. “What if I were to tell you that Thiel struck her?”
“You struck her,” Mama says, “and now you’ll leave.”
“Brilliant!” Father says. He walks up to Mama. His fist comes out of nowhere, he punches her in the face and Mama plummets to the floor, and I’m falling again, but for real this time, falling down with Mama. “Take some time to clean up, if you like,” Father suggests as he stands over us, nudging us with his toe. “I have some thinking to do. We’ll continue this discussion later.”
Father is gone. Thiel is kneeling, leaning over us, dripping bloody tears onto us from the fresh cuts he seems to have acquired on either cheek. “Ashen,” he says. “Ashen, I’m sorry. Princess Bitterblue, forgive me.”
“You didn’t strike her, Thiel,” my mother says thickly, pushing herself up, pulling me into her lap and rocking me, whispering words of love to me. I cling to her, crying. There is blood everywhere. “Help her, Thiel, won’t you?” Mama says.
Thiel’s firm, gentle hands are touching my nose, my cheeks, my jaw; his watery eyes are inspecting my face. “Nothing is broken,” he says. “Let me look at you now, Ashen. Oh, how I beg you to forgive me.”
We are all three huddled on the floor together, joined, crying. The words Mama murmurs to me are everything. When Mama speaks to Thiel again, her voice is so tired. “You’ve done nothing you could help, Thiel, and you did not strike her. All of this is Leck’s doing. Bitterblue,” Mama says to me. “Is your mind clear?”
“Yes, Mama,” I whisper. “Father hit me, and then he hit you. He wants to mold me into the perfect queen.”
“I need you to be strong, Bitterblue,” Mama says. “Stronger than ever, for things are going to get worse.”
1
Queen Bitterblue never meant to tell so many people so many lies.
It all began with the High Court case about the madman and the watermelons. The man in question, named Ivan, lived along the River Dell in an eastern section of the city near the merchant docks. To one side of his house resided a cutter and engraver of gravestones, and to the other side was a neighbor’s watermelon patch. Ivan had contrived somehow in the dark of night to replace every watermelon in the watermelon patch with a gravestone, and every gravestone in the engraver’s lot with a watermelon. He’d then shoved cryptic instructions under each neighbor’s door with the intention of setting each on a scavenger hunt to find his missing items, a move useless in one case and unnecessary in the other, as the watermelon-grower could not read and the gravestone-carver could see her gravestones from her doorstep quite plainly, planted in the watermelon patch two lots down. Both had guessed the culprit immediately, for Ivan’s antics were not uncommon. Only a month ago, Ivan had stolen a neighbor’s cow and perched her atop yet another neighbor’s candle shop, where she mooed mournfully until someone climbed the roof to milk her, and where she was compelled to live for several days, the kingdom’s most elevated and probably most mystified cow, while the few literate neighbors on the street worked through Ivan’s cryptic clues for how to build the rope and pulley device to bring her down. Ivan was an engineer by trade.
Ivan was, in fact, the engineer who’d designed, during Leck’s reign, the three city bridges.
Sitting at the high table of the High Court, Bitterblue was a trifle annoyed with her advisers, whose job it was to decide what court cases were worth the queen’s time. It seemed to her that they were always doing this, sending her to preside over the kingdom’s silliest business, then whisking her back to her office the moment something juicy cropped up. “This seems like a straightforward nuisance complaint, doesn’t it?” she said to the four men to her left and the four to her right, the eight judges who supported her when she was present at this table and handled the proceedings themselves when she was not. “If so, I’ll leave it to you.”
“Bones,” said Judge Quall at her right elbow.
“What?”
Judge Quall glared at Bitterblue, then glared at the parties on the floor awaiting trial. “Anyone who mentions bones in the course of this trial will be fined,” he said sternly. “I don’t even want to hear mention of the word. Understood?”
“Lord Quall,” said Bitterblue, scrutinizing him through narrowed eyes. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“In a recent divorce trial, Lady Queen,” said Quall, “the defendant kept mumbling about bones for no reason, like a man off his head, and I will not sit through that again! It was distressing!”
“But you often judge murder trials. Surely you’re accustomed to talk of bones.”
“This is a trial about watermelons! Watermelons are invertebrate creatures!” cried Quall.
“Yes, all right,” said Bitterblue, rubbing her face, trying to rub away her incredulous expression. “No talk of—”
Quall flinched.
Bones, finished Bitterblue in her own mind. Everyone is mad. “In addition to the findings of my associates,” she said, standing to go, “the people on Ivan’s street near the merchant docks who cannot read shall be taught to do so at the court’s expense. Is that understood?”
Her words were met with a silence so profound that it startled her; her judges peered at her in alarm. She ran through her words again: The people shall be taught to read. Surely there was nothing so strange in that?
“It is in your power to make such a declaration,” said Quall, “Lady Queen.” He spoke with an implication in every syllable that she’d done something ridiculous. And why should he be so condescending? She knew perfectly well that it was within her power, just as she knew it was within her power to remove any judge she felt like removing from the service of this Court. The watermelon-grower was also staring at her with an expression of sheerest confusion. Beyond him, a scattering of amused faces brought the heat crawling up Bitterblue’s neck.
How typical of this Court for everyone else to act mad and then, when I’ve behaved in a perfectly reasonable manner, compel me to feel as if I were the mad one.
“See to it,” she said to Quall, then turned to make her escape. As she passed through the exit at the back of the dais, she forced her small shoulders straight and proud, even though it was not what she felt.
In her round tower office, the windows were open, the light was beginning to change to evening, and her advisers weren’t happy.
“We don’t have limitless resources, Lady Queen,” said Thiel, steel-haired, steel-eyed, standing before her desk like a glacier. “A declaration like that, once you’ve made it public, is difficult to reverse.”
“But, Thiel, why should we reverse it? Shouldn’t it distress us to hear of a street in the east city where people can’t read?”
“There will always be the occasional person in the city who can’t read, Lady Queen. It’s hardly a matter that requires the direct intervention of the crown. You’ve now created a precedent which intimates that the queen’s court is available to educate any citizen who comes forward claiming to be illiterate!”
“My citizens should be able to come forward. My father saw that they were deprived of education for thirty-five years. Their illiteracy is the responsibility of the crown!”
“But we don’t have the time or the means to address it on an individual basis, Lady Queen. You’re not a schoolteacher; you’re the Queen of Monsea. What the people need right now is for you to behave like it, so that they can feel that they’re in good hands.”
“Anyway,” broke in her adviser Runnemood, who was sitting in one of the windows, “nearly everyone can read. And has it occurred to you, Lady Queen, that those who can’t might not want to? The people on Ivan’s street have businesses and families to feed. When do they have time for lessons?”
“How would I know?” Bitterblue exclaimed. “What do I know about the people and their businesses?”
Sometimes she felt lost behind this desk in the middle of the room, this desk that was so big for her smallness. She could hear every word they were being tactful enough not to say: that she’d made a fool of herself; that she’d proven the queen to be young, silly, and naïve about her station. It had seemed a powerful thing to say at the time. Were her instincts so terrible?
“It’s all right, Bitterblue,” said Thiel, more gently now. “We can move on from this.”
There was kindness in the use of her name rather than her title. The glacier showing its willingness to recede. Bitterblue looked into the eyes of her top adviser and saw that he was worried, anxious that he’d harangued her too much. “I’ll make no more declarations without consulting you first,” she said quietly.
“There now,” said Thiel, relieved. “See? That’s a wise decision. Wisdom is queenly, Lady Queen.”
For an hour or so, Thiel kept her captive behind towers of paper. Runnemood, in contrast, circled along the windows, exclaiming at the pink light, bouncing on the balls of his feet, and distracting her with tales of consummately happy illiterate people. Finally, mercifully, he went away to some evening meeting with city lords. Runnemood was a pleasant man to look at and an adviser she needed, the one most adept at warding away ministers and lords who wished to talk Bitterblue’s ear off with requests, complaints, and obesiances. But that was because he himself knew how to be pushy with words. His younger brother, Rood, was also one of Bitterblue’s advisers. The two brothers, Thiel, and her secretary and fourth adviser, Darby, were all about sixty or so, though Runnemood didn’t look it. The others did. All four had been advisers to Leck. “Were we short-staffed today?” Bitterblue asked Thiel. “I don’t remember seeing Rood.”
“Rood is resting today,” said Thiel. “And Darby is unwell.”
“Ah.” Bitterblue understood the code: Rood was having one of his nervous episodes and Darby was drunk. She rested her forehead on the desk for a moment, afraid that otherwise she’d laugh. What would her uncle, who was the King of Lienid, think of the state of her advisers? King Ror had chosen these men as her team, judging them, on the basis of their previous experience, to be the men most knowledgeable about the kingdom’s needs for recovery. Would their behavior today surprise him? Or were Ror’s own advisers equally colorful? Perhaps this was the way in all seven kingdoms.
And perhaps it didn’t matter. She had nothing to complain of when it came to her advisers’ productivity, except perhaps that they were too productive. The paper that piled itself on her desk every day, every hour, was the evidence: taxes levied, court judgments rendered, prisons proposed, laws enacted, towns chartered; paper, paper, until her fingers smelled like paper and her eyes teared at the sight of paper and sometimes her head pounded.
“Watermelons,” Bitterblue said into the surface of her desk.
“Lady Queen?” said Thiel.
Bitterblue rubbed at the heavy braids wound around her head, then sat up. “I never knew there were watermelon patches in the city, Thiel. On my next yearly tour, may I see one?”
“We intend your next tour to coincide with your uncle’s visit this winter, Lady Queen. I’m no expert on watermelons, but I don’t believe they’re particularly impressive in January.”
“Could I go out on a tour now?”
“Lady Queen, it is the very middle of August. When do you imagine we could make time for such a thing in August?”
The sky all around this tower was the color of watermelon flesh. The tall clock against the wall ticked the evening away, and above her, through the glass ceiling, the light darkened to purple. One star shone. “Oh, Thiel,” Bitterblue said, sighing. “Go away, won’t you?”
“I will, Lady Queen,” said Thiel, “but first, I wish to discuss the matter of your marriage.”
“No.”
“You’re eighteen, Lady Queen, with no heir. A number of the six kings have sons yet unmarried, including two of your own cousins—”
“Thiel, if you start listing princes again, I’ll throw ink at you. If you so much as whisper the names of my cousins—”
“Lady Queen,” Thiel said, talking over her, completely unperturbed, “as little as I wish to upset you, this is a reality that must be faced. You’ve developed a fine rapport with your cousin Skye in the course of his ambassadorial visits. When King Ror comes this winter, he’ll probably bring Prince Skye with him. Between now and then, we’ll have to have this discussion.”
“We won’t,” Bitterblue said, clutching her pen hard. “There’s nothing to discuss.”
“We will,” said Thiel firmly.
If she looked closely enough, Bitterblue could make out the lines of healed scars on Thiel’s cheekbones. “There’s something I’d like to discuss,” she said. “Do you remember the time you came into my mother’s rooms to say something to my father that made him angry and he brought you downstairs through the hidden door? What did he do to you down there?”
It was as if she’d blown out a candle. He stood before her, tall, gaunt, and confused. Then even the confusion faded and the light went out of his eyes. He smoothed his impeccable shirtfront, staring down at it, tugging, as if tidiness mattered greatly in this moment. Then he bowed once, quietly; turned; and walked out of the room.
Left alone, Bitterblue shuffled papers, signed things, sneezed at the dust—tried, and failed, to talk herself out of a small shame. She’d done it on purpose. She’d known full well that he wouldn’t be able to bear her question. In fact, almost all of the men who worked in her offices, from her advisers to her ministers and clerks to her personal guard—those who had been Leck’s men—flinched away from direct reminders of the time of Leck’s reign—flinched away, or fell apart. It was the weapon she always used when one of them pushed her too far, for it was the only weapon she had that worked. She suspected that there’d be no more marriage talk for a while.
Her advisers had a single-mindedness that left her behind sometimes. That was why the marriage talk frightened her: Things that started as mere talk among them seemed to become real institutions, suddenly, forcefully, before she’d ever managed to comprehend them or form an opinion. It had happened with the law that gave blanket pardons for all crimes committed during Leck’s reign. It had happened with the charter provision that allowed towns to break free of their governing lords and rule themselves. It had happened with the suggestion—just a suggestion!—to block off Leck’s old living chambers, take down his animal cages in the back garden, and burn his belongings.
And it wasn’t that she was necessarily opposed to any of these measures, or regretted her approval once things settled down enough for her to comprehend that she’d approved. It was only that she didn’t know what she thought, she needed more time than they did, she couldn’t always be rushing ahead the way they were, and it frustrated her to look back and realize that she’d let herself be pushed into something. “It’s deliberate, Lady Queen,” they’d told her, “a deliberate philosophy of forward-thinkingness. You’re right to encourage it.”
“But—”
“Lady Queen,” Thiel had said gently, “we’re trying to lift people out of Leck’s spell and help them move on, you understand? Otherwise, people will wallow in their own upsetting stories. Have you spoken to your uncle about it?”
Yes, she had. Bitterblue’s uncle, after Leck’s death, had come halfway across the world for his niece. King Ror had created Monsea’s new statutes, formed its ministries and courts, chosen its administrators, then passed the kingdom into Bitterblue’s ten-year-old hands. He’d seen to the burning of Leck’s body and mourned the murder of his own sister, Bitterblue’s mother, who was gone. Ror had brought order out of chaos in Monsea. “Leck is still lodged in too many people’s minds,” he had said to her. “His Grace is a sickness that lingers, a nightmare you must help people to forget.”
But how was forgetting possible? Could she forget her own father? Could she forget that her father had murdered her mother? How could she forget the rape of her own mind?
Bitterblue laid her pen down and went, cautiously, to an east-facing window. She put a hand to the frame to steady herself and rested her temple against the glass, closing her eyes until the falling sensation receded. At the base of her tower, the River Dell formed the city’s northern boundary. Opening her eyes, she followed the river’s south bank east, past the three bridges, past where she guessed the silver docks and lumber docks, fish and merchant docks to be. “Watermelon patch,” she said, sighing. Of course, it was too far and too dark to see any such thing.
The River Dell here, as it lapped at the castle’s north walls, was slow-moving and wide as a bay. The boggy ground on the opposite shore was undeveloped, untraveled except by those who lived in Monsea’s far north, but still, for some unaccountable reason, her father had built the three bridges, each higher and more magnificent than any bridge needed to be. Winged Bridge, the closest, had a floor of white and blue marble, like clouds. Monster Bridge, the highest, had a walkway that rose as high as its highest arch. Winter Bridge, made of mirrors, was eerily hard to distinguish from the sky during the day, and sparkled with the light of the stars, the water, the city at night. They were purple and crimson shapes now in the sunset, the bridges, unreal and almost animal. Huge, slender creatures that stretched north across flashing water to useless land.
The falling sensation crept up on her again. Her father had told her a story of another sparkling city, also with bridges and a river—a rushing river whose water leapt off a cliff, plummeted through the air, and plunged into the sea far below. Bitterblue had laughed in delight to hear of that flying river. She had been five or six. She’d been sitting in his lap.
Leck, who tortured animals. Leck, who made little girls and hundreds of other people disappear. Leck, who became obsessed with me and chased me across the world.
Why do I push myself to these windows when I know I’ll be too dizzy to get a good look at anything? What is it that I’m trying to see?
She entered the foyer of her rooms that night, turned right to her sitting room, and found Helda knitting on the sofa. The servant girl Fox was washing the windows.
Helda, who was Bitterblue’s housekeeper, ladyservant, and spymaster, reached a hand into a pocket and passed Bitterblue two letters. “Here you are, dear. I’ll ring for dinner,” she said, heaving herself up, patting her white hair, and leaving the room.
“Oh!” Bitterblue flushed with pleasure. “Two letters.” She broke open the plain seals and peeked inside. Both were ciphered and both written in hands she knew instantly, the messy scrawl belonging to Lady Katsa of the Middluns, the careful, strong markings belonging to Prince Po of Lienid, who was Skye’s younger brother, and, with Skye, one of the two unmarried sons of Ror who would make Bitterblue dreadful husbands. Truly, comically dreadful.
She found a corner of the sofa to curl up in and read Po’s first. Po had lost his sight eight years ago. He could not read words on paper, for while the part of his Grace that allowed him to sense the physical world around him compensated for many aspects of his blindness, he had trouble demystifying differences on flat surfaces, and he could not sense color. He wrote in large letters with a sharp piece of graphite, because graphite was easier to control than ink, and he wrote with a ruler as a guide, since he could not see what he was writing. He also used a small set of movable wooden letters as a reference to help him keep his own ciphers straight in his mind.
Just now, his letter said, he was in the northern kingdom of Nander, stirring up trouble. Switching letters, Bitterblue read that Katsa, who was an unparalleled fighter and Graced with survival skills, had been dividing her time among the kingdoms of Estill, Sunder, and Wester, where she was also stirring up trouble. That was what they did with themselves, those two Gracelings, along with a small band of friends: They stirred up trouble on a serious scale—bribery, coercion, sabotage, organized rebellion—all directed at stopping the worst behavior of the world’s most seriously corrupt kings. “King Drowden of Nander has been imprisoning his nobles randomly and executing them, because he knows some are disloyal, but isn’t sure which,” wrote Po. “We’re going to spring them from prison. Giddon and I have been teaching townspeople to fight. There’s going to be a revolution, Cousin.”
Both letters ended the same way. Po and Katsa hadn’t seen each other in months, and neither of them had seen Bitterblue in over a year. Both intended to come to Bitterblue as soon as their work could spare them, and stay as long as they could.
Bitterblue was so happy that she curled herself up in a ball on the sofa and hugged a pillow for a full minute.
At the far end of the room, Fox had managed to climb to the very top of the tall windows, bracing her hands and feet against the window frames. There, she rubbed at her own reflection vigorously, polishing the surface to a high shine. Wearing a divided skirt of blue, Fox matched her surroundings, for Bitterblue’s sitting room was blue, from the carpet to the blue-and-gold walls to the ceiling, which was midnight blue and stenciled with gold and scarlet stars. The royal crown sat on a blue velvet cushion in this room, always, except when Bitterblue wore it. A hanging of a fantastical sky-blue horse with green eyes marked the hidden door that had once given passage down to Leck’s rooms below, before people had come in and done something to block off the stairway.
Fox was a Graceling, with one eye pale gray and the other dark gray, and she was startlingly pretty, almost glamorous, red-haired and strong-featured. Her Grace was a strange one: fearlessness. But it was not fearlessness combined with recklessness; it was only a lack of the unpleasant sensation of fear; and, in fact, Fox had what Bitterblue interpreted to be an almost mathematical ability to calculate physical consequences. Fox knew better than anyone what was likely to happen if she slipped and fell out of the window. It was that knowledge that kept her careful, rather than the feeling of fear.
Bitterblue thought such a Grace was wasted in a castle servant, but in post-Leck Monsea, Gracelings were not the property of the kings; they were free to work where they liked. And Fox seemed to like doing odd jobs in the upper north floors of the castle—though Helda did talk about trying her as a spy sometime.
“Do you live in the castle, Fox?” asked Bitterblue.
“No, Lady Queen,” answered Fox from her perch. “I live in the east city.”
“You work strange hours, don’t you?”
“It suits me, Lady Queen,” Fox responded. “Sometimes, I work the night through.”
“How do you get in and out of the castle at such odd hours? Does the Door Guard ever give you a hard time?”
“Well, it’s never any trouble getting out; they’ll let anyone out, Lady Queen. But to come in at the gatehouse at night, I show a bracelet that Helda’s given me, and to get past the Lienid at your own doors, I show the bracelet again and give the password.”
“The password?”
“It changes every day, Lady Queen.”
“And how do you get the password yourself?”
“Helda hides it for us somewhere, in a different place every day of the week, Lady Queen.”
“Oh? What is it today?”
“‘Chocolate pancake,’ Lady Queen,” said Fox.
Bitterblue lay on her back on the sofa for a while, giving this its due consideration. Every morning at breakfast, Helda asked Bitterblue to name a word or words that could serve as the key for any ciphered notes they were likely to pass to each other during the day. Yesterday morning, Bitterblue had chosen “chocolate pancake.” “What was yesterday’s password, Fox?”
“‘Salted caramel,’” said Fox.
Which had been the key Bitterblue had chosen two days ago. “What delicious passwords,” Bitterblue said idly, an idea forming in her mind.
“Yes, Helda’s passwords always make me hungry,” Fox said.
A hood lay draped on the edge of Bitterblue’s sofa, deep blue, like the sofa. Fox’s hood, certainly; Bitterblue had seen her wear simple coverings like that before. It was much plainer than any of Bitterblue’s coats.
“How often do you suppose the Lienid Door Guard changes guard?” Bitterblue asked Fox.
“Every hour on the hour, Lady Queen,” Fox responded.
“Every hour! That’s quite often.”
“Yes, Lady Queen,” replied Fox blandly. “I don’t suppose there’s much continuity in what any of them sees.”
Fox stood on the solid floor again, bent over a bucket of suds, her back to the queen.
Bitterblue took the hood, tucked it under her arm, and slipped out of the room.
Bitterblue had watched spies enter her rooms at night before, hooded, hunched, unrecognizable until they’d removed their covering garments. Her Lienid Door Guard, a gift from King Ror, guarded the castle’s main entrance and the entrance to Bitterblue’s living quarters, and did so with discretion. They were under no obligation to answer the questions of anyone but Bitterblue and Helda, not even the Monsean Guard, which was the kingdom’s official army and police. This gave Bitterblue’s personal spies the freedom to come and go without their presence being noted by her administration. It was a strange little provision of Ror’s, to protect Bitterblue’s privacy. Ror had a similar arrangement in Lienid.
The bracelet was no problem, for the bracelet Helda gave her spies was a plain leather cord on which hung a replica of a ring Ashen had worn. It was a proper Lienid ring in design: gold, inset with tiny, sparkly, deep gray stones. Every ring worn by a Lienid represented a particular family member, and this was the ring Ashen had worn for Bitterblue. Bitterblue had the original. She kept it in her mother’s wooden chest in the bedroom, along with all of Ashen’s rings.
It was strangely affecting to tie this ring to her wrist. Her mother had shown it to her many times, explained that she’d chosen the stones to match Bitterblue’s eyes. Bitterblue hugged her wrist to her body, trying to decide what her mother would think of what she was about to do.
Well. And Mama and I snuck out of the castle once too. Though not this way; by the windows. And with good reason. She was trying to save me from him.
She did save me. She sent me on ahead and stayed behind to die.
Mama, I’m not sure why I’m doing what I’m about to do. Something is missing, do you see? Piles of paper at my desk in my tower, day in, day out. That can’t be all there is. You understand, don’t you?
Sneaking was a kind of deceit. So was disguise. Just past midnight, wearing dark trousers and Fox’s hood, the queen snuck out of her own rooms and stepped into a world of stories and lies.
Most helpful customer reviews
271 of 290 people found the following review helpful.
Three Books, Three Styles
By Caitie
After reading the negative reviews on this novel, I wanted to set the record straight for those considering reading it.
First and foremost, this is Kristin Cashore's third novel, an extension of the stories begun in Graceling and Fire. These books tell the stories of two wildly different young women: Katsa, a Graced killer, and Fire, a beautiful human Monster. Each of these first two books differs greatly in tone, since Fire is a much more fragile girl than Katsa, who is wildly independent and self-sufficient. Bitterblue is named for the main character, Queen Bitterblue, who is yet another unique heroine. The books do not need to be read in order for readers to enjoy the stories, though this order does present some unique insights into the development of Leck's character.
Fans of Cashore's work (myself included) have been anticipating Bitterblue for a couple of years now, and I think that many readers, especially teens, were expecting Bitterblue to be as action-packed as the first two novels. These readers may find themselves disappointed, as this is the tale of a queen who (mostly) plays it safe, remains within her city, and has no special talent for fighting or mind control. Aside from having been born queen, Bitterblue is a normal human being, which is actually rather refreshing, since readers are not Gracelings or Monsters themselves. It gives us an idea of what it feels like to muddle through the Seven Kingdoms world without special, inborn talents. Though this change of character yields very different results from her first two books, it demonstrates Cashore's stylistic nimbleness and prevents her from following the same formulaic, cookie-cutter structures as other authors. I think that many of the people who dislike this book do so because they anticipated a series like The Hunger Games or Harry Potter, in which the story is one continuous arc unified by a single main character. This is not Cashore's yarn and I, for one, love her for it.
On the other hand, one way in which all three characters are similar is their sexual freedom, which is refreshing and necessary for young women to see and understand. As twenty-something woman who has spent her fair share of time feeling that sexuality was for boys only, I can honestly say that the care with which Cashore treats the topic of young feminine sexuality is careful, honest, and liberating. Very few YA authors allow female characters to actively participate in their own sexuality, which is too bad. In our post-feminist age, the repression of women's sexuality serves as a patriarchal yoke under which women still struggle despite our supposedly liberated status. All of Cashore's heroines make active choices with regards to romantic companionship; both Fire and Katsa are presented with young men whom they could marry who are acceptable candidates in that they are rich, handsome, and friends, but the chemistry just isn't right, and so each young woman walks away. Meanwhile, Katsa, Fire, and Bitterblue all pursue matches who are men they truly respect and with whom they feel a compatibility of spirit, regardless of rank and convenience. Furthermore, marriage is not pressed as a required state for feminine sexuality to take place, but is offered as a possible state of being for couples who feel comfortable with that level of commitment. I know that this take on marriage and sexuality will be bothersome to some readers, but I feel that this is a conversation that in our Twilight-obsessed world is too often overlooked, to the detriment of young women the world over.
The other reason why I loved Bitterblue was because it is a mind-bender. It's like reading a Sherlock Holmes novel in some ways, because little hints and clues from the very first chapter carry over throughout the remainder of the novel. Bitterblue faces betrayal in the present and specters of her family's past, and Cashore does not shy away from these touchy subjects, even though it would certainly have been easy to do so. Yes, there are certainly moments in the novel which most readers will find uncomfortable, but Cashore is willing to take her readers into the dark recesses of the human spirit in order to shed light and prove that tragic histories are not prophecies of future doom. I think that many teens with troubled pasts will find Bitterblue's struggles validating and reassuring because the novel promises that there can be peace after terror.
Overall, Cashore is an author of incredible dexterity. Her work reminds me of Tamora Pierce's writing in many ways (an author she herself claims as a source of great inspiration), and I anticipate only great things from her in the future, whatever characters and universes she chooses to bring to life.
125 of 149 people found the following review helpful.
Ambitious, but ultimately disappointing
By Dunyazad
I was very much looking forward to this book after reading Cashore's Fire and Graceling in preparation. I have to say, though, that I came away from it pretty disappointed, for a variety of reasons. (Warning: there will be spoilers here for the preceding books.) Cashore's concept is pretty ambitious: Bitterblue has grown up and is trying to rule a kingdom that had suffered under her evil, mind-controlling father for 35 years. Her advisors and many of the people around her still aren't in their right minds. Understandably, trying to function in this situation could be pretty frustrating, but I felt that Cashore brought that frustration a bit too close to the reader. It was hard to appreciate the story when many of the characters were so erratic and the protagonist was just caught in a bubble of confusion. I certainly don't mind a book that focuses on political intrigue rather than action, but the intrigues here just didn't make sense. Adding to that, I hardly recognized Bitterblue herself; she seemed like a quietly competent child when we met her last, but as an 18-year-old she seemed sort of clueless. I'm not sure what she was supposed to have been doing for the past 8 years, besides sitting under a mountain of paper, but I found it strained credibility that she had absolutely no idea about the layout of her own castle, barely remembering that her father had had an art gallery and possibly never having known the location of various more functional sub-buildings. Similarly, she had no idea who most of the people were, and had apparently been content just to sit around signing papers until the story began.
There were some promising parts, like when Bitterblue started sneaking out of the palace to interact with regular people in a way reminiscent of Disney's Princess Jasmine, because the regular people actually had reasonable personalities, unlike the palace staff. But eventually that ended, and we were back with all the crazy people in the palace. I just found the whole thing sort of frustrating, and read on because I wanted to find out how it all got resolved rather than because I was enjoying the experience. That made the book feel too long. And even the resolution wasn't particularly satisfying; it seemed anticlimactic after all the confusion and intrigues, and I didn't feel like I had really learned that much more about the mysteries of Leck's reign by the end of it. Details of the horrible things he'd done, yes, but not so much the psychology behind it.
I'll reflect on the story a bit more in the next few days, but I think my feeling of disappointment will remain.
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Updated to add further thoughts from the next day, with spoilers:
I think one of the problems may be that Cashore is more concerned with making comments about our world than about dealing with difficult issues in the context of her world. It's not that she doesn't face these difficult issues; characters often think about them, but I didn't really get a sense of satisfactory resolution. Here are a couple of examples:
There's a lot of focus on overthrowing monarchs who abuse their power, and on providing better systems of government for these kingdoms. Bitterblue herself reads from a book called "Monarchy is Tyranny" that her father had tried to destroy. But there's an obvious conflict here: Bitterblue herself is queen, and intends to remain queen. She realizes that this is a conflict, but doesn't really do anything about it. There's not even any suggestion of instituting a different system of government upon her death. This is in clear contrast to Fire, who sees that the power of monsters is too unpredictable and so takes difficult and decisive action to ensure that there won't be any more human monsters in the world.
In a similar vein, Cashore makes a point of emphasizing that homosexuality is okay. Bitterblue even suggests that Raffin may eventually be able to change the laws in the Middluns to allow gay marriage. But there's no real resolution to the much trickier question of what will happen when it's the king who's gay, and yet is expected to produce an heir. Of course there are various possible solutions, but these weren't really explored--and I couldn't help feeling that this was because the focus was really on our world, and not on the Seven Kingdoms. For us, it's enough to say that gay marriage should be allowed. But I'm more interested in exploring the political consequences of various decisions in their world than in listening to general moralizing, even when it's a point of view that I happen to support.
I don't know if I'm way off-base here, but there's a comment in the acknowledgements about Po's disability that really made me realize how focused Cashore is on political correctness. And when I started looking back at Bitterblue with the idea that Cashore was very concerned with political messaging, a lot of the less satisfying parts of the book seemed to make more sense to me. I think that Bitterblue isn't so much about taking a new world and seeing how it will develop on its own as it is about imposing certain attitudes from our own world into a fantasy setting, and I'm not sure that the result is entirely satisfactory.
I'd like to know what things will look like 50 years from now in the Middluns and in Monsea. There are some difficult political issues that will have to be resolved, and I don't think that the ending of Bitterblue really comes close to that resolution. The really hard decisions are left for the future.
I've seen some people say that the problem with Bitterblue is that there's too much politics and not enough action. I both agree and disagree. I think there's too much politics only because the politics isn't done very well; Cashore is stronger when she writes a more traditional quest narrative, like that in Graceling. Politics and intrigue require more nuance and shades of grey, and I didn't really see a lot of that here. There was plenty of confusion, yes, but in the end, every character was either purely good or purely bad at heart, regardless of what evils Leck may have forced them to perform. And I'd like to have seen at least the good characters making more difficult decisions: Will Raffin choose duty or love? What will happen if Bitterblue's heir turns out to be evil? (Because we saw in the prologue of Fire that Leck's evilness didn't come from childhood abuse or anything; he was literally just born that way.)
Sorry for making my additional comments longer than my original review. One thing I can say is that Bitterblue didn't leave my thoughts when I finished it: I'm still turning it over and over in my mind a day later, trying to figure out how a work that I was so excited about could have left me feeling so disappointed. I think it's a testament to Cashore's storytelling ability that I feel so strongly about this. I'd certainly encourage everyone to read Graceling and Fire.
33 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
Good, but with its faults
By Laila
(SPOILERS!!)
I adore Kristin Cashore's first two books, and I, like many others, eagerly awaited the publication of Bitterblue. It wasn't a bad book, and I'm glad that I bought it, but when I finished reading it I was disappointed. I knew before I started it that Bitterblue would be a different kind of book than Cashore's first two. Graceling and Fire were heavy on the action, while Bitterblue has a much more complicated plot, almost more like a thriller or a mystery novel. Some people didn't like this change, but I thought the storyline was well done. I found the plot to be well-paced, intelligent, and page-turning.
It took me awhile to pinpoint exactly what bothered me so much about Bitterblue, and I eventually realized that part it was the characters. I think one of Cashore's greatest strengths as an author is creating wonderful, endearing, realistic characters who you can't help but fall in love with. Yes, some of my favorite characters popped up, and those were my favorite parts to read, but I just really couldn't connect to any of the new characters in Bitterblue. Teddy annoyed me because he was written as such a perfect, innocent, wrongly-punished nice guy that I sort of wanted to vomit whenever he appeared (and then there was that cringe-inducing line "he's only trying to teach people to read!"). Hava, Madlen, Bren, etc.... I couldn't care less about most of them. Bitterblue herself certainly comes across as intelligent and thoughtful, and I respected her a lot, but I didn't love her the way I loved Katsa, Fire, Nash, Po etc.... or even as much as I had loved Bitterblue's younger self in Graceling. And Saf? I was completely uninterested in his character. If someone can give me any qualities of his that were supposed to make us really care about him, I would honestly love to hear them. He meets Bitterblue, is sort of nice to her, gets angry with her, steals her crown, spends the majority of the novel making her beg for forgiveness, sleeps with her, then leaves her. Soooooo when was I supposed to like this guy? It's definitely a downer when you couldn't care less about the romantic arc of a novel, especially when I loved both the romances in Cashore's previous books. There were some glimpses of wonderful new characters, basically Death (and Lovejoy), and the villains in the book were truly and horrifyingly villainous, so I know Kristin Cashore hasn't lost her knack for creating some of the best characters around. However, on the whole, I feel like she sacrificed memorable characters in order to focus on a more complicated plot.
Another thing that bothered me was Cashore's rather heavy-handed attempts at being politically correct. She obviously cares a lot about showcasing different races and different sexual orientations. Now you'd be hard-pressed to find another straight, white girl who supports gay rights/racial diversity more than I do, but I felt that Cashore tried a wee bit too hard to insert them into the book. I like that Raffin's gay, and I think that works, but then she just brings in two random female characters, doesn't have them do much, informs us that they're lesbians who hope the brother of one of them will impregnate them so they can have a kid, and then basically remove them from the plot. It just felt fake, like maybe she had a homosexual character quota to fill. Also, now Fire and everyone else from the Dells has brown skin? Again, this was just sort of thrown in there, after not being mentioned at all in Fire. I've seen racial diversity done way better, particularly in Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea" series. This just felt like Kristin Cashore was flipping through her books, realized "oh crap everybody's white!" then randomly decided to change the race of numerous characters after she's already written a book about them. It didn't feel real, and I while personally think that ignoring racial and sexual differences is bad, so is awkwardly forcing them into a storyline just to "prove" how much you care.
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