Iron Hearted Violet (14 page)

Demetrius couldn’t see it at first. Violet pulled him forward, leading him to where two large trees stood an arm’s length from the old stone wall. There, at the bottom, was a gap large enough for the two of them to fit side by side and look in.

“Is this safe?” Demetrius asked, crouching down and crawling into the gap.

“Probably not,” Violet said, crawling in after him.

The walls were thick—so thick as to swallow up the entire length of their bodies and still stretch beyond their feet and ahead of their faces.

“Don’t go all the way to the opening,” Demetrius said, laying his hand on Violet’s shoulder. “The guard might see you.”

“The guard can boil his head.” Violet shrugged off her friend’s hand. “I didn’t come all the way out here to see nothing. I already saw nothing last night in the dark.”

She crawled ahead, bringing her face right up to the opening, resting her chin on her fists. Demetrius inched forward while keeping himself well in shadow. He needn’t have bothered. The guard, well spooked by now, was on the far end of the platform and out of view. The two children peered out of the gap, directly into the cave on the other side of the enclosure. Two thin ribbons of smoke curled out of the darkness.

“Is that it?” Demetrius asked. He hadn’t laid eyes on the dragon since it was captured, but in his dreams of late, the image of the dragon had enlarged to grotesque proportions. Large enough to swallow the whole of the mirrored world in its jaws.

“Yes.” Violet fanned her fingers over her mouth. “It’s in there.”

“Has it moved since last night?”

She shook her head. “It’s an old, decrepit, useless thing. And my father is an idiot.”

Demetrius laid his hands on the ground. He squinted toward the darkened cave. The ribbons of smoke stopped abruptly.

“Did it stop breathing?” Demetrius asked.

“We can only hope so,” Violet said.

Demetrius kept his hand on the ground, trying to call up an image of the beast in his mind. To Violet he said, “You don’t have to be unkind. It’s hurt and old and frightened and probably sick. You don’t have to—”

But Violet interrupted him. Her body shook, and two thin tracks of tears blurred her eyes and oozed down her cheeks.

“I hate it,” she said, her voice rasped and ragged with anger.
“Hate it.”

The ground shook slightly—just the tiniest tremor—but Demetrius felt it. Smoke erupted in a round puff from the mouth of the cave. The dragon was moving.
Come on
, Demetrius pleaded silently.
Come out.
But the dragon stayed in the cave.

“If it weren’t for that stupid dragon,” Violet said, “my mother would still be alive.”

“You don’t know if that’s—”

“Oh yes I do. I
know
it. I wish it were dead.” Her mouth twisted and churned, and she looked away. “I wish
it
were dead and
she
were alive.” She turned to Demetrius. “And I want you to wish it, too.”

Demetrius blanched. “What?” he said, and Violet’s face darkened. “But… Violet…”

“Are you my friend or not?” she said.

“Of course I…” He paused, pressed the flop of curly hair out of his face. “Death doesn’t work like that, Violet. Surely you know that.”

“Never mind,” she said, turning her back to Demetrius and scrambling out of the gap. “You wouldn’t understand.” She struggled to her feet and ran away.

“But Violet,” Demetrius called, though he didn’t go after her. “Of course I understand,” he muttered. “Does she forget who she’s talking to?”

PROBABLY.

Demetrius gasped. Was the thought his own? Was it the dragon’s? He wasn’t sure.

The dragon, Demetrius could feel, had stopped moving. Demetrius kept his eyes on the black mouth of the cave. And in the darkness, a single eye—bright and hot like an ember—blinked once, twice, and glowed open.

Nod ran down the empty corridor looking for Violet, his mouse-leather slippers making no sound on the stone floor. He leaped behind potted plants and velvet drapes—sometimes going so far as to pose as a figurine on a shelf—hiding from servants and advisers, hurrying from room to room. He needn’t have bothered. The whole castle had fallen into a tizzy of distraction. No one would have noticed him even if he had sauntered down the center of the long table at suppertime. Such was the growing discontent in the castle.

Still. Auntie had said,
Follow the girl
. And Auntie had said,
Mind you are not seen
.

And so Nod watched Violet. A lot. And he hid.

All the time.

Nod crept into the library and found Violet at the far end of the room with books piled into crooked stacks and papers scattered across the table. She hunched over a particularly large and dusty volume. Nod stood in the leaves of a potted plant and observed.

Violet spent the rest of the morning copying out passages from the books onto small pieces of paper, just as she had done for the countless days prior. Or at least Nod thought they were countless, because they had extended beyond the limit of his own fingers. He had noticed that as the days passed, the Princess seemed thinner, paler. She hunched and ducked and scurried. He noticed that her fingers were ink-smudged, that the skin under her eyes was stained with exhaustion. The girl read and wrote and wrote and read. She was a thing obsessed.

The more Nod followed the girl, the more he guessed that the things she was
reading
and the things she was
writing
were terribly important. Nod understood that
reading
and
writing
were profoundly connected, in the same
way that rain and rivers were connected—one flows ever into the other. Nod couldn’t read, but Auntie could. And since Auntie wanted him to find out what the girl was up to, Nod thought to snatch a bit or two of what the girl was writing.

It was, Nod thought, a particularly good idea, and he was frankly astonished that he had come up with it at all.

Now, Nod had a knack for mimicry. In fact, he was quite excellent at it. After spending weeks following Violet around, Nod had found himself
also
following a boy called Demetrius, and thus had acquainted himself with the exact rhythm and cadence of the boy’s voice. He could match it perfectly.

Nod climbed carefully to the open window and slid outside, hanging on to the mossy stones for dear life. Then, throwing his voice as far as he could, he called, “Violet!
Vi-oh-let!
”

Violet looked up, turned toward the open window. “I’m busy.”

“You’ve got to come out here, Violet,” Nod said in his very best Demetrius voice.

“Can it wait?”

“Can anything?”

Violet sighed, shook her head, and closed the book with a dusty thud. “Fine,” she said. “But it had better be good.”

The moment she left the room, Nod swung his body onto the sill and dashed to the book-covered table, where he grabbed three pieces of paper. He rolled them up and tucked them under his arm and ducked into one of the many tunnels that his people had built into the castle centuries earlier.

Later, Violet returned in a foul mood. Games were all fine and good, she thought, when she was the one playing them. The very idea that Demetrius would interrupt her work and run off and hide—well, that was more than Violet could stand. She sat down at the table, closed her books, and gathered her notes into a pile.

If Nod had stayed in the library, if he had watched her as she replaced the books (as, Auntie later pointed out, he had been
instructed
to do), then he would have seen her trudge from shelf to shelf, hefting heavy books into their gaps. He would have seen the shelves sigh dusty breaths each time a book was replaced.

He would have also seen this: a small book—thin, worn, and old—that remained in Violet’s hands after the rest of the books were replaced. He would have noticed her furtive glances over her shoulder, and the way she clutched
the book to her chest as though it were a treasure in danger of theft.

But Nod did not see this. Nod had already run off to Auntie to report on what he had seen. “
Reading
,” he told Auntie, inclining his head knowingly. “The girl is reading.” And he handed Auntie the three pieces of paper.

They said: “There is a magic in storytelling when the story is bigger than the teller. This is important.”

And: “The dragons, I believe, were in league with… something terrible. Father should kill that thing when he has a chance.”

And: “Once upon a time, a good King and a good Queen gave birth to a girl who was not a real Princess. And then everything went wrong.”

If Nod had grabbed the note that said “The Nybbas knows. The Nybbas will help me. The Nybbas knows what to do,” then perhaps we would have avoided catastrophe.

But Nod could not read, and he did not grab the right paper, and catastrophe was, as sure as snow, on its way.

“Thank you, Nod,” Auntie said, patting the boy on the back. “This is terribly helpful.”

And from its prison the Nybbas grinned its yellow grin.

NOW
, it crowed.
NOW, NOW, NOW.

The Princess Violet sat on the edge of the dragon’s enclosure, her legs dangling down the stone wall. She had a tall stack of books teetering next to her, and one of her father’s journals open on her lap. The book from the hidden library remained in her satchel.

Thus far she had resisted leafing through the pages (
So old!
she thought.
So fragile!
) and had kept it primarily hidden in her leather bag, preferring to let her fingers slide along its edges from time to time. If she had been truthful with herself, she would have had to admit that she was
afraid of the thing. But now she grasped it, pulled it out of its hiding place, and held it in her hands.

It was warm, almost alive—its cover more like skin than leather. Its paper insides whispering like a breath. The book seemed to respond to her touch, settling into the curve of her hands.

The dragon sniffed at the ground and cautiously moved through the broad green space. Since the enclosure was terribly old, it was also overgrown with shrubs and sapling trees, which the King hoped would be reminiscent of home for the displaced dragon. There was a mud pit, a sand pit, and ample foliage for munching. (Dragons, if you didn’t know, dears, are carnivorous; however, they do chew on leaves and grasses to settle their stomachs, much as house cats do. And if you’ve ever seen what a house cat does with the remains of its chewed-up grass, you have an idea of what a dragon does as well. Except that dragon vomit is much, much nastier than cat vomit. Additionally, it is often on fire.) The dragon sidled up to the low-hanging branches of the raginaw tree and sniffed at it suspiciously.

“It’s not poisonous or anything,” Violet called down testily. The dragon jerked its head and snorted. It didn’t look up at the girl on the wall, though she could tell it
wanted
to.
Still, it stretched its telescopic neck to a higher branch and pulled off a jaw’s worth of leaves, and, turning its rump toward Violet, settled down in the shade to chew in peace.