Iron Hearted Violet (10 page)

And then she heard it.

“That one,” a voice said. “There.”

Violet sat up and opened her eyes. She was alone. Who had spoken?

“Hello?” she said, peering up at the leaves, then down to the undergrowth and the shadows. No one was there.

A second voice. “Are you sure? You’ve thought that before, you know.”

“No,” the first voice said with a bite of exasperation and annoyance at the center of the sound. “No, that is not what I said at all. Before I said
maybe
. There is a great difference between
maybe
and
definitely
. Now I know for sure. Definitely.”

The second voice snorted. “Tosh!” it said.

“Who’s there?” Violet asked, scrambling to her feet. “What do you want?”

“Ooooh, look at that, loudmouth,” the first voice said. “She can hear you. Now you’ve done it.”

“She can
not
,” the second voice said. “None of ’em can. Big’uns are as deaf as iron.”

“Hush up, featherbrain.”

“I
can
hear you, you know.” Violet took a step back to look at the roof, when she heard a gasp and a clatter and then nothing. Only silence.

“Hello?” she called.

The yard was quiet. Even the field and the trees and the undergrowth hushed, though it was a brittle and uncomfortable silence, as though the whole world was bracing itself. But for what? Violet did not know.

Her skin prickled and itched. It grew hot, then cold, then hot again, and she knew, as sure as she knew that the sky was clear and the day was cool, she
knew
that she was being watched.

“Fine,” she said, more loudly than before. She turned on her heel in a huff. “Please yourself.” She began walking across the gravel yard. But just as she rounded the corner of the stable, she heard the first voice once again.

“See? I told you she’d be able to hear us. And I told you she was the one—the right one. Or one of them, anyway.”

The King and his hunters did not move. And though the blade upon the good King’s throat pressed cruelly into his flesh—so deep that a tiny bead of blood, bright as a ruby, shone at the top of the blade before oozing lazily downward—the King’s face remained implacable and detached. Demetrius couldn’t take his eyes off the bead of blood. Indeed, the redness of the blood, and the horror of it, were all he could see. They eclipsed the world. Very slowly he balled his hands into fists.

“Well then,” said the Captain of the Guard. A cruel smile creased his face. “My dear friends. Look what I have caught. A lowland rat scurrying into our fair kingdom. What was it thinking?”

The soldiers of the Mountain King laughed.

It was more than he could stand. Demetrius (oh, that good boy! and, oh, that terrible fool!), without thinking, without planning ahead, pawed the ground like a bull, lowered his head and shoulders, and with an animal grunt, rammed his skull into the Captain’s rib cage. It was a very brave and very stupid thing to do. The Captain was a giant of a man, and cunning, too. The weight and force of Demetrius’s body caused hardly a jostle in the big man’s stance and certainly didn’t pull the tip of his sword from the throat of the King. In quick succession, he grabbed the boy by the back of his tunic, tossed him up into the air, and threw him down hard onto the ground. And before Demetrius could even breathe, the Captain had unsheathed his stiletto from his belt and, with a casual flick of his wrist, sent the blade directly into the boy’s shoulder.

The pain nearly blinded him.

“Damn,” the Captain said. “I missed.”

The King swore, and the assembled party shouted, but Demetrius was too astonished to make a sound.

“I was going for the throat,” the Captain said casually, narrowing his eyes at the King, “but perhaps, given the reaction of your overly emotive crew, it’s best if I let the boy live. For now.” He spat on the ground. “He may be useful.”

Demetrius, panting in pain, pulled up to his knees, yanked the blade out himself, and stanched the bleeding with the heel of his hand.

“Bind him,” the Captain of the Guard said. He kept his sword on good King Randall’s neck. The King did not flinch. After his brief eruption, his face no longer betrayed even a hint of fear or worry but instead remained as calm and unreadable as stone.

“We are always delighted to see the emissaries of our cousin to the north,” the King said slowly and formally, as though he was standing in the Great Hall. “May we inquire the nature of this visit, sir?”

The Captain paled. He had expected the captive to beg, insult, or even engage in a foolhardy attempt at an attack. He was not expecting the address of a King.

Still, he was not the Captain of the most elite unit of
the Mountain King’s guard for nothing. He set his jaw and twisted his lips into a sneer. “We are responding,
Your Majesty
, to an act of war.”

The King raised his eyebrows. “Our hunting party?”

“I don’t care what you choose to call yourselves,” the Captain said, waving at the disarmed hunters and their weapons piled on the ground. “What I see is a fierce assembly, armed to the teeth, one mile within our borders and heading, apparently, to the castle.”

“Indeed,” the King said thoughtfully. “Indeed.”

It was, I believe, an act of sheer will for the King to refrain from glancing into the rocky grotto where the dragon, its transport, and the Mistress of the Falcons and the two trappers lay in wait. From where the Captain stood, the entrance to the grotto was invisible, and as he had not yet ordered a soldier to gather any strays, the King knew it was unlikely that the Captain had seen them enter or exit with the dragon.

And thus did our beloved King permit his hands to be bound, his ankles tied with a lash that looped under the belly of his horse, and his horse tethered to the others. He looked out at the faces of his companions, all bound, and said, “I am truly sorry, my friends.”

He turned to Demetrius, the boy’s face an ashy mask of pain. “I don’t know how I shall face your father, beloved Demetrius. My heart aches with sorrow for this attack on you, for the danger I have put you in.” The King’s voice halted and broke. “It is unforgivable, dear child, and I am sorry.”

The hunters, all grave-faced, said nothing.

For they, too, knew that three of their number hid and listened at the rocky lip of the grotto’s entrance. They knew that once they had plodded away, they might—should they look behind them—see the shadow of a flank, the wisp of a tail, and the broad-winged beat of the five falcons on their launch to the sky as the two trappers and the Mistress of the Falcons thundered their way toward home.

Slowly, quietly, they whispered to their horses. Slowly they breathed courage to one another. And as they looked at the Captain and his men with an expression of unabashed contempt, they thought this:

Just wait.

There was little the physicians could do. They could only wait. Both the Princess Violet and I were called back to the sickroom and took turns sitting next to the feverish Queen. A nurse laid a pallet and blankets on the floor, where we could catch an hour or two’s rest from time to time. We whispered story after story after story to the failing Queen. Tales of mages and deadly spindles and true love transformed yet undeterred all rasped from our dry mouths, our lips chapped and cracked from worry and weeping.

Some of our stories might be familiar to you, my dears,
did you know? Stories have a tendency to seep across the shining membrane walls separating the universes. They whisper and flutter like the feathers of birds, from island to mainland and back again. They fall into dreams like rain.

Do you know, for example, the one about the broken-hearted maiden, cheated out of marriage by a false youth, who goes to live on a remote, rocky shore and swears off love forever—only to win the heart of a fearsome leviathan that lurked in the dark, treacherous reef?

Or the one about the young man who, after refusing the attentions of a very persistent and very powerful goddess, chose to transform himself into a tree rather than submit to a marriage without love?

Or perhaps you’ve heard of the king who grew tired of the world and shut himself inside a tall tower with a single window from which he could gaze at the stars—and of his patient wife, who waited for his beard to grow long enough to allow her to climb up and fetch him home?

If not those, I assure you there are others that have drifted back and forth from time out of mind.

As we told our stories, the Queen’s fever deepened. She gasped and sighed and moaned, and whether she was vaguely awake or vaguely asleep, she was always imprisoned
by her strange and desperate dreaming. She sweated and shivered and went pale to flushed to pale again. And Violet—poor Violet!—did her best to soothe her mother. She tenderly dipped the cooling cloth into a silver bowl of fresh-drawn water and dabbed her beautiful mother’s fevered face. She applied salve to the Queen’s blistered lips, ice to her palms, and scented oil under her nose.

Toward the end of the sixth day, the Queen’s ravings began to clarify into words.

“The dragon is the least of your worries,” she said in midafternoon.

“The hunters are hunted,” she said as the cook brought in tea, and the grim-faced physicians listened to her breathing and pulse.

“
Run!
” she screamed in the waning light, her body thrashing nearly out of the bed.
“Run, my love!”

And then: “The King has been taken. They’ve taken the King!”

Violet and I—along with the nurses and midwives and magicians—told her again and again that what she saw was merely a dream, but the Queen couldn’t hear us.

But of the four riders sent to fetch the King, only one returned. And the King was not with him. Instead, he was
accompanied by two trappers and the Mistress of the Falcons.

Within the quarter hour, they stood before the Princess, the High Chancellor, the four generals, and the Council of Scholars. I was there, too, though by rights I should not have been. But Violet insisted, and no one had the heart to refuse her.

During the meeting, the escaped members of the King’s hunting party ignored the senior members of the council, with their grave voices and their pompous ponderings. Instead, they kept their eyes on one person, and that was Violet. Imagine, my dears, the child Violet! She would not release my hand, and I was therefore privy to information far above my rank and station. And
oh
, it was terrible! The grim faces of the men and women of the hunting party. The shivering child standing before them.

“The King has been taken,” the Mistress of the Falcons said, and though of course she already knew it was true, still she gasped sharp and high, as though in pain. Her given name was Marda, and she was tall and very strong. She wore a leather tunic and leggings—both well worn and soft—and a gray hood that shadowed her features. Though it would have been right and proper for her to remove the
hood in the presence of the court, it was clear to all of us that her eyes were red and heavy from weeping, and we thought better than to mention it.

“Three of us remain in the mountains to track the prisoners,” the rider said. “The trail will be marked—a leftward slash at regular intervals while the prisoners remain alive. A rightward slash for each death. An X if their captors should have the audacity to—”

“Enough!” Violet commanded, her voice trembling, though her body was still and calm, her eyes locked on the Mistress of the Falcons. Violet gripped my hand so tightly that she left finger-shaped bruises under my knuckles. She drew herself up to her full height and turned to face the advisers.

“Who here are the generals?” Violet asked.

The four generals, large and gruff women and men, stepped forward and knelt before the Princess. “We are, Lady,” they murmured.

Violet knew them all, though not very well. And she had no idea, not really, what exactly they
did
. She simply knew they were in charge of… well, a
lot
. Soldiers, horses, stores of equipment. They looked up at her expectantly. Violet cleared her throat.

“Assemble as many soldiers as you need. Bring the fastest, the strongest, and the best. And bring him home.” Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. “Please,” she added before returning to her mother.