Katsa looked over his shoulder. A bird sat on a branch, plucking at the feathers under its wing. “I see it.”

“Before, I would have tried to fight off my perception of the bird, so as to concentrate on the ground under my feet and you in my arms. But now I just let the bird, and everything else that’s irrelevant, wash over me; and the irrelevant things fade away a bit, naturally. So that you are all of my focus.”

Katsa was experiencing an odd sensation. It was as if a nagging ache had suddenly lifted and left her with a stunning absence of pain. It was relief and hope together. “Po. This is good.”

He sighed. “It’s a great comfort to be less dizzy.”

She hesitated, and then decided she might as well say it, seeing as he probably already knew it. “I think it’s time you started fighting again.”

He smiled slightly. “Oh? Is that what you think?”

She rose nobly to the defensive. “And why not? It’ll bring back your strength, improve your balance. Your brother makes a perfect opponent.”

He touched his forehead to hers. His voice was very quiet. “Calm yourself, wildcat. You’re the expert. If you think it’s time I started fighting, then I suppose it’s time I started fighting.”

He was smiling still, and Katsa couldn’t bear it, because it was the smallest and the saddest smile in all the world. But as he raised his fingers to touch her face, she saw that he was wearing his ring.

Chapter Thirty-nine

IT BECAME a kind of school. Katsa made up drills for Skye and Po that were first and foremost a challenge to Po’s strength. Skye was satisfied, for the drills favored him. Katsa was satisfied, for she could see Po’s progress. She set them always to wrestling, rarely to proper hand fighting, and reminded Po constantly, in his mind and out loud, to muscle rather than Grace his way out of every scrape.

Alongside the grappling brothers, Katsa taught Bitterblue to hold a sword, and then to block with one, and then to strike. Position and balance, strength and motion, speed. The child was as awkward at first with the sword as she had been with the knife, but she worked stubbornly, and like Po she made progress.

And Katsa’s school grew. The guards and messengers couldn’t resist the spectacle of the Lady Katsa teaching swordplay to their young queen, or the Lienid Graceling and his brother wrestling each other into the ground. They gathered round, asking this and that question about a drill she fabricated for the princes, or a trick she taught Bitterblue to compensate for the queen’s lack of size and strength. 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. Katsa enjoyed it thoroughly. It pleased her to watch her students grow stronger.