Iron Hearted Violet (12 page)

The Captain attempted to mount his horse but, because of his injuries, could not do it on his own. In frustration, he kicked at the ground and punched the animal hard in its flank. The Captain’s men helped him onto his horse and followed behind. They moved in single file down the trail in a slow plod until they were quite out of sight, when, with a smack on the hides of a dozen horses, they galloped away.

“My beloved,” Randall said to his soldiers, his strength escaping in a sigh, “I owe you my thanks. But we cannot tarry. See to the boy first—his wound has festered too long. And to our fallen comrades. And then let us ride, my friends. The faster we get to the border, the safer we all are, I expect.”

The King looked into the face of his lieutenant, a young, tall woman with a scar across one cheek.

“Sire,” she said. She hesitated, cleared her throat, and stared hard at the ground. “When the three uncaptured members of your party neared home, they were met by messengers from the castle. Because of the”—she cleared her throat again—“
situation
, the message is now carried…
I
carry the message, sire.” Her eyes, quite suddenly, filled with tears. “The Queen—”

King Randall heard no more. He leaped onto his horse’s back, pointed its nose toward home, and flew into the green.

It was as though the hidden library
wanted
Violet to find it. She had searched for hardly more than an hour when she suddenly stumbled into a corridor choked with dust, which shortly opened into a vestibule, which opened into a room.

It was silent.

It held its breath.

She went to the painting—the enslaved dragons, the pile of hearts, the oddly lengthened figure in the center. And the symbols at the bottom that, even now, were trembling, shifting, their curves and slashes snaking into new
curves and new slashes, until they finally wrote themselves into letters that she knew.

She wished Demetrius were there.

She wished her father were there, too.

And yet…
in a strange way, she was glad to be alone. She was glad that the room, and the library and the painting and the dust and the strange symbols, exactly as they had been before, were hers, and
hers alone
, to find.

They were
beautiful
.

The painting was silent.
NYBBAS
, its letters said. Violet didn’t say it out loud, though she could
feel
the painting wishing she would. She stared at the figure wrought in delicate mirrors. She saw herself staring back—and then, quite suddenly, she was not alone in the mirror. In the shining center of its narrow face was a pair of yellow, blinking eyes. Violet gasped.

“What are you?” she asked out loud.

DO NOT ASK WHAT YOU DO NOT CARE TO KNOW.
It wasn’t a voice in her ears. It was in her head. It skittered around her skull with its spidery legs. She shuddered.
AND DO NOT ASK WHAT YOU HAVE ALREADY GUESSED.

She took a step backward, her foot landing on something hard and square. Violet looked down. It was the book that she had dropped all those years before. The book that haunted her dreams. Keeping her eyes on the painting, she reached down, grabbed the book, and slid it into her satchel.
At last
, she thought.

“Don’t tell me what I know or what I wish to know,” Violet said. Her voice shook. Her eyes burned. Her mother lay dying, and it was Violet’s own fault—she was sure of it. Her father was missing, and this was her fault as well. “What are you? What kind of painting speaks?” Her skin tingled, and her stomach flipped. Her heart urged her to turn, to stop her ears, to run away. But she resisted. After all this time
wondering
, she had to know.

GO, CHILD
, the painting said, as though hearing her thoughts.
GO AND FORGET. YOU DO NOT WANT TO STAY HERE.

“I am a perfectly good judge of what I want, thank you,” Violet said, her eyes narrowing on the mirrored figure in the painting. It had lips now. And blushing cheeks. “Tell me what you are, or I shall have my soldiers burn this library to cinders.”

I AM THE ONE YOU HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR, CHILD.

“I haven’t been looking for anyone.” Violet clutched her satchel to her chest. “And you haven’t told me what you are.”

OH, BUT YOU KNOW.

“I don’t. And you are playing games. Tell me what you are this minute. I command it.”

The mirrored figure in the painting closed its yellow eyes. It grinned its golden grin.
AND I OBEY. INDEED I MUST.

Outside, the bells rang and rang and rang. Prayers, mourning, or welcome? Violet did not know. She couldn’t move. Dust clouded the air around her, making her cough.

IT’S A STORY THAT YOU KNOW. IT’S A STORY THAT YOU’VE TOLD. I’VE HEARD YOU TELL IT. LONG AGO, YOU SAID, THERE WAS ONLY ONE WORLD. ONE UNIVERSE. I LISTENED WHILE YOU WOVE THE TALE, AND I SMILED. BECAUSE THE TALE IS TRUE. I WAS THERE, AND I KNOW.

“No,” Violet breathed.

AND MY BROTHER—THAT RUNTY IDIOT—MADE THREE WORLDS WHERE ONCE THERE WAS ONE. I WAS THERE.

“It’s not possible,” Violet said.

AND MY SIBLINGS, IN THEIR JEALOUSY, IN THEIR… LIMITATIONS. THEY TRAPPED ME HERE. FOREVER. AND THE MULTIVERSE FORGOT ME. AND NOW I MUST ONLY OBEY. NOW I LIVE TO SERVE.

“But no one believes… it’s not supposed to be…” Violet tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry. “It’s not
true
.”

OH, BUT IT IS, CHILD. AND YOU KNOW IT IS. INDEED, I CAN SEE THE RECOGNITION ON YOUR FACE.

“I—”

VIOLET. POOR, WEAK-HEARTED, UNATTRACTIVE VIOLET. I’M HERE TO HELP YOU.

“No one can help me,” Violet murmured.

I CAN, I MUST, AND I WILL.

“What are you?”

MY DARLING CHILD. I AM THE THIRTEENTH GOD.

Violet turned and shot across the dusty library at a run.

OH, DON’T GO!
(The voice crept its fingers up her spine.)
COME BACK.

The satchel fell to the ground. She stopped to grab it, chanced one look at the painting. At the figure in the center, cut from mirror. Its yellow eyes were large and wet with tears. She snatched her bag and book and kept running.

SAY MY NAME. PLEEEEASSSSE.
(The voice was in her hair. It was in her eyes. It scattered across her skin.)

She dropped to her knees and skidded into the corridor.

SAY MY NAME, AND I CAN HELP YOU. SAY MY NAME, AND I CAN MAKE EVERYTHING RIGHT.
(The voice spun about her feet. It wound around her arms and legs like spider silk.)

But she couldn’t. Not yet. She clutched her satchel to her chest as she scrambled through the dark passageway. She didn’t look back.

Behind her, the voice from the painting opened its throat and howled.

When King Randall arrived—bloody, panting, and utterly spent—he threw himself at the foot of his wife’s sickbed, weeping on the covers. The Queen gave a startled, strangled cry—but that was the only sign that she sensed her husband’s presence in the room. Her fever deepened and worsened. The King had an hour—perhaps two. He held her hands—so pale now they were nearly gray—and mourned the loss of their son. He kissed her hair, her cheeks, each eyelid, each blessed fingertip.

Before the setting of the Lesser Sun, the Queen was dead.

My dears, I remember the moment that she expelled her last breath—when her body transformed from warm flesh to cold clay. I stood in the corridor just outside the chamber, waiting for Violet to return, but I waited in vain. From the room there was a sudden commotion of voices. A rush, a panic of clattering dishes and tools, and a splintering of glass. And then it was terribly silent.

I couldn’t move.
She is alive
, my heart whispered.
She is alive. She is alive.

A moment later, from that harsh, tight silence erupted an anguished cry—the sound of loss, and grief, and love broken to pieces.

Violet, meanwhile, found herself in a pasture on the western side of the castle, the strange book clutched in her hands—its language infuriatingly familiar yet still indecipherable. She refused to greet her father or to return to her mother’s bedchamber. She didn’t even ask about Demetrius, whose wounds had been tended in the field; who was at present being carried, weak and feverish, by Marda, the Mistress of the Falcons, and who would soon be fussed over by a worried father and a team of physicians sent by the King. But not by Violet.

Violet stayed away. She felt no grief, no worry, no
sorrow. She only felt a terrible numbness like ice encapsulating her heart. She refused to acknowledge the black flags that flew from the roofs of the castle or to listen to the funeral bells that rang, even now, without ceasing. Instead, she climbed to the roof of the summer stables, lay down on the mossy planks, and watched the sky.

Violet let her fingers drift through the book’s pages, as though the touch of paper would make clear the meaning of those strange, unknowable words. She paused at a picture of a girl in front of a mirror. The mirror was wide and very tall, its wood frame intricately carved with tiny lizards, twisting and writhing up the sides. She sat up.

“I know that mirror,” she said out loud.

The girl standing in front of the mirror was mousy and plain, but the girl
in
the mirror was another matter entirely. She was a thing of beauty, delicate, red-lipped, and black-haired. She looked like the Queen. Violet squeezed her eyes shut to stop the tears, and rested her chin on her knees. The Greater Sun had just dipped under the rim of the world, while the Lesser Sun lingered at the edge like a shadow. This caused a bleeding of light all along the horizon—a glowing golden hoop encircling the world.

A story
, Violet mused.
A forbidden story.
How can a story
be forbidden and impossible to forbid at the same time? And why would it make everyone so cross just to have it mentioned?

Now, Violet’s imagination was a powerful thing. She knew that stories had their own sorts of magic—beauty can be given or taken away, as can power and love and even hope. Sometimes even the dead come back. And if the dead could be brought back
within
the story, what if the story’s magic could be unlocked? What then?

What if her mother could live, not just in the stories about her but
all the time
?

What kind of power can a story gain when people forbid its telling?
Violet wondered and wondered, until the wondering swelled to bursting in her heart, and she could no longer bear the suspense. She decided to try an experiment. Violet opened her eyes and cleared her throat. She stared hard at the shining rim of the sky.

“Good night, Nybbas,” she said, testing the word on her tongue. Instantly, the gold at the edge of the world grew brighter. Then brighter again. It rippled and hummed and buzzed before fading into the glittering stars and vanishing.

Still, the name
did
something.

The name had
weight
.

Interesting
, Violet thought as she stood, leaped lightly onto the ground, and walked toward the castle.