“Skye!” said Bitterblue, who was now staring at her cousin in amazement. “Are you in love with Saf?”
Abruptly, Giddon stood. “Hava,” he said, his mouth full of pie. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“I don’t want to go for a walk,” Hava said. Then, at Giddon’s severe look, she added, “Fine. But bring pie.”
After slapping more pie onto his plate, Giddon strode to the big doors and waited. With a great, impatient sigh, Hava grabbed a fork from the table and followed him. Giddon wanted to stay, so he could know how Bitterblue felt about her cousin being in love with Saf. But he would give them their privacy. It was what someone with more noble instincts than his would do.
Chapter Three
“Saw that coming,” Hava said as they walked away from the queen’s rooms.
“You did?” said Giddon, truly surprised. “How? Have you been spying on Skye?”
“Of course not,” she said scornfully. “How would that look?”
“You could make it look however you wanted it to look,” said Giddon, for Hava was a Graceling who was Graced with a kind of hiding that allowed her to change what people thought they saw when they looked at her. If she wanted to, Hava could stand in a room with Saf and Skye pretending to be a curtain in the window while they said and did all sorts of things, never knowing she was there. Every Grace was different, and each was variably useful. Saf had the Grace of giving people wonderful dreams, which Giddon found irritatingly romantic. Hava’s Grace, on the other hand, made her an excellent spy.
But of course she would never spy on Skye and Saf.
“I don’t use my Grace without my sister’s permission,” Hava said in a scathing voice. “Can you see her asking me to spy on her own cousin? Especially on his love life?”
“No, of course not.”
When Giddon sank into silence, Hava took a few sidelong looks at him and seemed to thaw into a more sympathetic person. Taking charge, she led him around corners and up and down several flights of stairs. Eventually, she brought him to the art gallery that Giddon knew was her favorite place in the castle. Hava’s mother had been a sculptor. Her father had been Bitterblue’s father, King Leck, though this was a secret. Giddon was one of few people who knew. Hava’s mother was dead, for King Leck had killed her, many years ago. He’d killed Bitterblue’s mother too. Then he himself had been killed, turning Princess Bitterblue into a ten-year-old queen.
In a room crowded with her mother’s sculptures, Hava sat on a raised section of floor and patted the place beside her.
Sitting numbly, Giddon held the plate out between them. For a while, they did nothing but eat pie.
“Anyway, Bitterblue doesn’t care about Skye and Saf,” said Hava, finally picking up the dropped conversation.
“How can you say that? Didn’t you see the expression on her face just then?”
“Because she was surprised, you blockhead. Not because she’s still hung up on Saf. That was over four years ago!”
“Was it really?” Giddon said, scratching his head in confusion.
“You’re hopeless,” Hava said, holding a forkful of pie out to him, even though he had his own fork. He opened his mouth, deciding to accept the pie as a shameful token of his hopelessness, which Hava had laid bare in that way Hava always had. Bitterblue’s half sister didn’t look like Bitterblue. She was tall, pale, and straw-haired. Hava also had one eye copper and the other bloodred, for Gracelings had two-colored eyes. Hava was only twenty years old, but often seemed older and cleverer than Giddon, who was thirty-one. Except when she was being a brat, which was often enough. Though even her brattiness left him feeling six years old sometimes.
“All right,” he said. “Tell me what you know.”
“Saf and Skye have been together for two years or so,” Hava said. “A little longer. Saf keeps breaking up with him and coming back. Saf’s a lot younger than Skye, you know. And he more or less hates that Skye is a prince.”
“He could always stop falling in love with royalty.”
“Oh, grow up, Giddon,” said Hava, which made Giddon snort. “Anyway, that’s pretty much all I know, beyond what Skye just said. They made an arrangement that Saf would go to Winterkeep without Skye, for six months at the most, because Saf needed some time.”
“Time to do what?” said Giddon. “Sleep with everyone he met?”
“Why would you care if he did? Time to think, you idiot.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because I’m not stuck behind a fog of my own projections?”
Giddon snorted again.
“Haven’t you wondered why Skye is hanging around?” Hava said. “He never stays here this long. But a letter from Winterkeep gets to Bitterblue City five or six weeks faster than to Lienid, don’t you see?”
Giddon supposed he was beginning to see.
“Why are you hanging around this court?” Hava added significantly.
“You know I can’t go home,” said Giddon. He’d been a lord once, with an estate in the kingdom of the Middluns. A beautiful estate, with forests and farms and horses, and hundreds of people in his care. King Randa had banished him, stripped him of his title, then razed his castle to the ground, to punish him for his Council work. The people who’d depended upon Giddon had had to accept Randa as a landlord, or else find new homes and work. “And I need to be near Estill,” he said. “You know we’re worried about their new government. I’m keeping an eye out.”
“Wouldn’t you have a better view of Estill if you were actually in Estill?” Hava said. “Rather than sitting across from my sister every night at dinner?”
“Brat,” said Giddon.
“Bully,” said Hava. “I’m done with our walk now. I’m going back to see what happened.”
After she left, Giddon sat alone for a while, finding his better self before he allowed himself to return to the queen.
* * *
—
Usually, Giddon had easier access to his better self.
Didn’t he?
After all, he spent most of his time trying to figure out how to solve people’s problems without creating worse problems. Sometimes they were small problems, like what three kinds of batter should make the layers for the queen’s twenty-third birthday cake. This was not a Council matter, of course, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t the man for the job.
One morning, in the week after Bitterblue received Saf’s letter, Giddon overheard Helda, the elderly woman who took care of Bitterblue’s domestic needs, muttering indignantly to a member of her staff in the corridors.