Iron Hearted Violet (6 page)

Instinct made him raise his hand and wave, though he couldn’t see anyone on the parapet waving back—he was too far away. Still, he could
feel
himself being waved at and missed. And in that moment he had half a mind to turn around and head home.

The light shone tenderly on the stones and moss and leafless vines, and he could have sworn he caught a glimpse of something hard, bright, and glittering along the castle’s foundation. Like a thousand jeweled eyes. He blinked twice and it was gone. With a jerk of his heels and a quick whistle, he set his horse onward toward the mountains, a tight knot of anxiety curling around his heart.

Violet’s birthday had been observed and celebrated in the days prior to her father’s departure, and though at the time she had felt happy and content and
loved
, she watched the retreating figure of the King and his entourage (
Including that rat Demetrius
, she thought scathingly.
Traitor!
) with a growing emptiness. She stood with her mother at the top of the northern wall as the hunting party’s horses thundered down the broad road and disappeared into the wood. The Queen rested her hand upon her daughter’s shoulder, a faintly hummed lullaby drifting from her tightly pressed lips.

“I don’t want to sound ungrateful,” Violet said, keeping her eyes on the forest that had just swallowed her father, hoping vainly that he might change his mind and come home.

“I know, my love,” the Queen said.

“It isn’t that I need anything more,” Violet continued. “Because I don’t. And I had a wonderful birthday, honestly I did.”

“I know, Violet,” the Queen said, still humming under her breath. Violet recognized the song. It was the same lullaby that her mother had sung to her as an infant. It didn’t occur to her at the time to wonder at it. “Would you like to play at stories, my love? It does so often cheer you up. We could begin with a beautiful princess stealing away from home in the dead of night, setting off on a desperate journey.”

Violet bit her lip. “No, thank you, Mother,” she said.
A beautiful princess
, she thought, and her heart sank just a little bit deeper.

“It’s just…” Violet hesitated. “It’s just that he’ll be gone so awfully long. And for what? A stupid dragon. I don’t understand why he thinks it’s so important.”

“And yet he does. Your father is not one to stop learning.
Nor is he one to stand aside when there are those who need his help. It’s part of who he is.” There was a catch in the Queen’s voice.

Violet didn’t notice.

“It’s just this—” She paused again, gesturing to the empty road, as if her father’s and her friend’s absences each had substance and mass. Each absence felt palpable and crushing. A terrible weight. A gift gone wrong. “It’s just a rotten birthday present, that’s all.” She pulled away and hurried down the worn stone steps without looking back at her mother.

If she had paused, if she had looked back, she might have noticed the tears in her mother’s eyes. If she had turned, she might have noticed the pallor in her mother’s face, or the recent tightness of her gown around her belly, or the deepening lines of worry around her mouth.

But Violet
didn’t
turn. And she didn’t notice.

At the bottom of the stairs stood a mirror in a heavily polished wood frame. It was two and a half times as tall as Violet herself, and four times as wide. Carved at the top of the mirror was the likeness of a dragon, its jaws wide open, each tooth glinting with inlaid mother-of-pearl. Gnarled claws curled around the upper rim, and two beady eyes
made of cut glass gleamed over the top. All along the edges of the mirror, the artisan had carved no fewer than three hundred (Violet had counted) tiny lizards, so supple and delicate as they twisted and writhed that their wooden bodies seemed ever to be in motion. The mirror was old—more than five hundred years, people said—and had endlessly fascinated Violet from the time she was a very little girl.

She stood in front of the mirror, facing her own reflection—her mismatched eyes, her inconsistent skin, her slightly lopsided face. Normally, Violet wasn’t much of a mirror-gazer. “I already
know
what I look like,” she’d say impatiently. And she knew that she was ugly. No amount of mirror-gazing would change that, ever. But on this day, her reflection caught her attention, arrested her on the spot. She stared at the ooze of tears making its way down the edges of her cheeks, at her lips weighting into a frown.

Selfish
, she thought.

Dull
, she thought again. She closed her eyes, her heart caught between wishing that she was useful enough to have been invited on her father’s excursion and wishing that she was clever enough to have convinced him to stay.

She opened her eyes and stared at her reflection.

Not pretty enough
, a voice whispered in the back of her mind.
Not enough for a
real
princess
, it said even more quietly. It was a thought that had been surfacing quite a bit lately. Violet shrugged it away.

“Yes I am,” she said to no one in particular. She glared at her reflection. Her reflection did not glare back. “I’m
real
.” No one answered. She closed her eyes, turned away, and hurried down the hall.

Violet didn’t notice that there was something…
odd
about her reflection in the mirror. If she had been paying attention, she might have seen that her reflection did
not
—as reflections typically do—mirror her movements and vanish into the limit of the mirrored space.

No. Her reflection remained.

It
remained
.

And as Violet—the
real
Violet—reached the end of the hall, wiping her tears away as she did, the reflection in the mirror—the
wrong
Violet—spread its lips into a cruel yellow grin.

The hunting party had been gone for a double phase of the Lesser Moon when something that was once known only to a select few became known to all: The Queen—our dear, beautiful, and wise Queen—was expecting another child. Given the sorrowful conclusion of her other pregnancies (besides the miraculous birth of Violet, that is) and the increasing danger to her life and health, we worried for her. Every breathing soul among us.

Still, the entire castle was under strict orders not to
enlighten the King—not even when a supply team was sent to replenish the dwindling stores of the hunting party. “The King must not know,” she said.

“He has been searching for a dragon for as long as I have known him, and he may never have another chance,” she reasoned. “Why give him cause to worry? Either the child will live or it will not, and there is nothing that the King can do about it.”

And perhaps that was true. But
oh
, how we
worried
! And though she pretended not to, so did the Queen.

Violet, for her part, became like a shadow to her mother. She went where the Queen went, ate when the Queen ate, slept when the Queen slept. She fetched drinks and foodstuffs and reading material. She sat in on meetings and hearings and councils—even those that were the
most
boring and the
most
tedious.

The Queen indulged this, calling Violet “my little apprentice.”

“Remember, my darling,” she said seriously, “the more tedious the meeting, the better the training for later. I wish I could tell you that the tedium becomes enjoyable as one grows old, but alas, I cannot.” She laughed at this, but then
the laugh became a grimace, and the grimace became a cry, and our gray-faced Queen found herself beset by physicians once again.

After a particularly long meeting, the Queen retreated to her chambers to lie down. Violet remained at her mother’s side for a bit to tell her a story—a tale about an apprentice storyteller who had fallen in love with a painting, and how the painting tried to take over the world. But her mother didn’t hear the ending, for she drifted off to sleep somewhere in the middle. Violet leaned against the pillows, holding her mother’s hand.

How can a painting take over the world?
she found herself wondering. The story itself—like many of her stories—spun out of her mouth unbidden and unplanned. She was sure that parts of it were from the stories she had heard or read and that other parts were built of her own invention. But how
much
she had gathered from elsewhere, she couldn’t say.

And in any case, she was sure of this much: She had no idea how the story ended.

A painting that took over the world? Or wanted to. Was it possible?

Once again her mind drifted to that hidden library, and
its strange painting, and the book that she had dropped so many years ago. It haunted her dreams still—all flipping pages and dusty pictures and open eyes. Every morning, she woke with the uncanny belief that she was
meant
to be able to decipher the strange lettering in the book, that it would rewrite itself, just as the letters at the bottom of the painting had rewritten themselves, if she just had the chance to see it again.

The sleeping Queen shifted and murmured. She threw her arm across the side of her face, and the lines around her mouth tightened. Violet slid off the slick coverlet, her feet slapping softly on the stone floor. “I’ll be back, Mother,” Violet said, picking up her mother’s hand and kissing the knuckles. And very quietly, she hurried out of the room.

What Violet did not know was that she was being watched. In the opposite corner, standing in the shadows, were two figures, one young (more boy than man) and one very, very old. And they were
small
. So small that if Violet had been standing there, they would have only reached the knob of her knee. Once Violet closed the door behind her, the older one crossed his arms and gave a low, glowering grunt.

“Something you ate?” the younger one said.

“Don’t be an idiot, Nod,” the older one said absently. It was a phrase he said a lot. “The real question is
why
. Why does that girl know about the painting?”

The younger one—the one called Nod—leaned back on his heels. “P’raps she doesn’t. It’s a common enough story.”

“It’s not common at all, you dolt. We haven’t heard a soul breathe a word of it for the last five hundred years. And did you hear her? She described that wretched painting to a T. I thought we hid that room well and good, that’s what I thought. A lot of work for nothing, wasn’t it?”

“
I
didn’t help hide the room,” Nod said. “I wasn’t born yet.” He gave the old man what he hoped would be a significant look. He paused. “So I am not at fault,” he added, driving the point home.

“And we can all thank the gods for that. If you’d been a part of it, we would’ve been cooked long ago. Oh, come now! Don’t hang your head like that. We all have our own gifts.” Though his tone suggested that he had deep doubts as to the existence of any gift possessed by the boy. Nod shoved his hands into his pockets and let out a low, sad whistle.

The older man rubbed his stubbled chin and curled his lips around his toothless gums, grunting all the while.
Finally: “Well, it doesn’t do to sit around all day.” He clapped a hand on Nod’s shoulder. “Go fetch Auntie. Tell ’er the Queen’s right poorly again, and she’d better do something before she makes a turn for the worser.”