excursions. By mid-September Teddy was doing better, sitting up, even moving from room to room, with help. One night, when nothing was being printed, Teddy let Bitterblue come into the shop and taught her how to set type. The tiny letter molds were awkward to manage.
"You pick it up quickly," Teddy mused as she fought with an i that would not land base side down in the tray.
"Don't flatter me. My fingers are clumsy as sausages."
"True, but you have no trouble spelling words backwards with backward letters. Tilda, Bren, and Saf have good fingers, but they're always transposing letters and mixing up the ones that mirror each other. You haven't once."
Bitterblue shrugged, fingers moving faster now with letters that had a bit more heft, m's and o's and w's. "It's like writing in cipher. Some part of my brain goes quiet and translates for me."
"Write in cipher much, do you, baker girl?" Saf asked, coming through the outside door, startling her, so that she dropped a w in the wrong place. "The castle kitchen's secret recipes?"
ON A MORNING a week later, Bitterblue climbed the stairs to her tower, entered, and found her guard Holt standing balanced inside the frame of an open window. His back to the room, he leaned out, nothing but a casual handhold on the molding keeping him from falling.
"Holt!" she cried, convinced, in that first irrational moment, that
someone had fallen out the window and Holt was looking down at the body. "What happened?"
"Oh, nothing, Lady Queen," Holt said calmly.
"Nothing?" Bitterblue cried. "You're certain? Where is everyone?"
"Thiel is downstairs somewhere," he said, still leaning perilously out of the window, speaking loudly, but evenly, so that she could hear. "Darby is drunk. Runnemood is in the city having meetings and Rood is consulting with the judges of the High Court about their schedule."
"But—" Bitterblue's heart was trying to hammer its way out of her chest. She wanted to go to him and yank him back into the room, but she was afraid that if she got too close, she would touch him in the wrong way and send him plummeting. "Holt! Get down from there! What are you doing?"
"I was just wondering what would happen, Lady Queen," he said, still leaning out.
"You come back into this room this instant," she said.
Shrugging, Holt stepped down onto the floor, just as Thiel pushed into the room. "What is it?" Thiel asked sharply, looking from Bitterblue to Holt. "What's going on here?"
"What do you mean," said Bitterblue, ignoring Thiel, "you were wondering what would happen?"
"Don't you ever wonder what would happen if you jumped out a high window, Lady Queen?" asked Holt.
"No," cried Bitterblue, "I don't wonder what would happen! I know what would happen. My body would be crushed to death. Yours would too. Your Grace is strength, Holt, nothing else!"
"I wasn't planning to jump, Lady Queen," he said with a nonchalance that was beginning to make her furious. "I only wanted to see what would happen."
"Holt," said Bitterblue through gritted teeth. "I forbid you, absolutely forbid you, to climb into any more window frames and look down, wondering what would happen. Do you understand me?"
"Honestly," said Thiel, going to Holt and grabbing his collar, then pushing Holt to the door in a manner that was almost comical, as Holt was bigger than Thiel, almost twenty years younger, and enormously stronger. But Holt just shrugged again, making no protest. "Pull yourself together, man," said Thiel. "Stop giving the queen frights." Then he opened the door and shoved Holt through it.
"Are you all right, Lady Queen?" said Thiel, slamming the door shut, turning back to her.
"I don't understand anyone," Bitterblue said miserably, "or anything. Thiel, how am I to be queen in a kingdom of crackpots?"
"Indeed, Lady Queen," said Thiel. "That was an extraordinary display." Then he picked up a pile of charters from his stand, dropped them on the floor, picked them up again, and handed them to her with a grim face and shaking hands.
"Thiel?" Bitterblue said, seeing a bandage peeking out of one sleeve. "What did you do to yourself?"
"It's nothing, Lady Queen," he said. "Just a cut."
"Did someone competent look at it?"
"It doesn't warrant a healer, Lady Queen. I dealt with it myself."
"I'd like Madlen to examine it. It might need stitches."
"It needs nothing."
"That's a question for a healer to decide, Thiel."
Thiel made himself tall and straight. "A healer has already stitched it, Lady Queen," he said sternly.