Lovisa was thinking of the cave her mother had used to tell her about, where she and Katu had been sent when they were children, as a punishment. Lovisa imagined it vast and secret, with smooth, curved walls and high ceilings, far removed from regular life, a place to hide, and not so scary if Katu was there too. She wished she could live in that cave, alone, touched by nothing. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Are you coming into the bath?” asked the queen.

“No,” said Lovisa, who needed solitude.

“All right,” said Bitterblue, removing her shoes, inspecting the burst blister on the bottom of her foot. Touching Lovisa with worried glances.

“I would like to return my uncle’s ring to his body,” Lovisa said.

“I understand that,” said Bitterblue. “Things like that have meaning. I had one ring that was unique and irreplaceable, and more important than any others. It was one my mother wore, in honor of me.” She held her palms open and examined them, as if she were looking for something there. “It slipped off while the silbercows were rescuing me,” she said. “It’s at the bottom of the Brumal Sea.”

How nice to have a mother to mourn, instead of parents you wished were dead.

Lovisa shouldered her way out of the room and into the cold.

—

Lovisa had done a lot of sneaking in her life, poking where she didn’t belong, but never in a forest.

She knew the path from the bathhouse to Vera’s office, so she headed down that path now. She noticed that it wasn’t the most direct route to Vera’s office; rather, beginning with a scramble of high rock, it veered off the wrong way at first. For misdirection? The footprints and packed snow began again after the scramble of rock, but someone standing at the bathhouse wouldn’t be able to see that. The path turned to high rocks again as she neared Vera’s office. A stranger who found Vera’s office first would likely not find the bath.

She didn’t go into Vera’s office. Instead she searched the office’s perimeter for more groups of rocks that could make a footprint-free path. She saw two options: one easier path with high, flat boulders, the other with sharp, sloping rocks that lined the crest of a winding ridge.

Seeing no reason to make this harder than necessary, she chose the easier route. For three minutes or so, she stepped from boulder to boulder, sometimes needing to jump, once using an overhanging limb to swing herself across a gap. Eventually, the boulders petered out into untouched snow. This was a path to nowhere.

She turned back. When she reached Vera’s office, Vera was standing there, watching her arrival.

Lovisa ignored her.

“You’re an interesting one,” Vera said.

“How are we getting to Torla’s Neck?” Lovisa said.