any kind of thought at all—especially about things that might benefit from a great deal of thinking. What had Danzhol said about the town charters being a promise of the queen's considerate inattention? Clearly, her inattention to Danzhol had led to disastrous results. Were there people at whom she should be looking more closely?
She stumbled across a grave with loose soil in the shape of a mound. Someone newly dead. How sad, she thought. There's something horribly sad, but also right, about the body of someone who has died disappearing into the ground. Burning a body was sad too. And yet Bitterblue felt deeply that burning was also right.
No one who loved Mama was there to mark her passing. She burned alone.
Bitterblue felt her feet planted in the ground of this graveyard, as if she were a tree, unable to move; as if her body were a gravestone, dense and heavy.
I left her behind, for Leck to pretend to mourn. I shouldn't still feel this way, she thought with an unexpected flash of fury. It was years ago.
"Sparks?" said a voice behind her. She turned to find herself staring into the face of Sapphire.
Her heart flew into her throat. "Why are you here?" she cried. "Not Teddy!"
"No!" Saf said. "Don't worry. Teddy's well enough, for a man who's been cut open."
"Then why?" she said. "Are you a grave robber?"
He snorted. "Don't be daft. It's a shortcut. Are you all right, Sparks? I'm sorry if I interrupted something."
"You didn't."
"You're crying."
"I'm not."
"Right," he said mildly. "I suppose you got rained on."
Somewhere, one of the city clocks began to strike midnight. "Where are you going?" Bitterblue asked.
"Home."
"Let's go, then," she said.
"Sparks," he said, "you're not invited."
"Do you burn your dead," she said, ignoring this, leading him out of the graveyard, "or bury them?"
"Well, it depends where I am, doesn't it? It's Lienid tradition to
bury people at sea. In Monsea, it's tradition to bury them in the ground."
"How do you know the old Monsean traditions?"
"I could ask you the same question; I wouldn't have expected you to know. Except that I never expect the expected from you, Sparks," he added, a tired sort of dreariness coming over his voice. "How is your mother?"
"What?" she said, startled.
"I hope the tears are nothing to do with your mother. Is she well?"
"Oh," Bitterblue said, remembering that she was a castle baker girl. "Yes, she's well. I saw her tonight."
"Then that's not what's wrong?"
"Saf," she said. "Not everyone who lives in the castle can read."
"Huh?"
She didn't know why she was saying this now; she didn't know why she was saying it at all. She hadn't even realized until this moment that she believed it. It was just that she had the need to tell him something honest, something honest and unhappy, because cheerful lies tonight were too depressing and too sharp, turning in on her like pins. "I said before that everyone under the queen's roof reads," she said. "I've—developed doubts."
"All right," he said warily. "I knew that for a corker when you first said it. So did Teddy. Why are you admitting it now?"
"Saf," she said, stopping in her tracks in the middle of the street to face him, needing at this moment to know. "Why did you steal that gargoyle?"
"Hm," he said, amused in an unamused sort of way. "What's your game tonight, Sparks?"
"I don't have a game," Bitterblue said miserably. "I just want things to start making sense. Here," she said, pulling a small parcel from her pocket and shoving it into Saf's hand. "These are from Madlen."
"More medicines?"
"Yes."
Musing over the medicines, his feet square in the street, Saf seemed to be considering something. Then he glanced at her. "What about a game of trading truth for truth?" he said.
This struck her as a terrible idea. "How many rounds?"
"Three, and we must both swear to be honest. You must swear on your mother's life."
Well then, she thought. If he presses me too hard, I can lie, for my mother is dead. He would lie, if pressed, too, she added stubbornly, arguing with the part of her that rose up to insist that a game like this should be played in good faith. "All right," she said. "Why did you steal the gargoyle?"
"No, I go first, because the game was my idea. Are you a spy for the queen?"
"Great seas!" Bitterblue said. "No."
"That's all I get? A 'no'?"
She glared into his grinning face. "I'm not anyone's spy but my own," she said, realizing, too late, that