Iron Hearted Violet (20 page)

Demetrius turned, stood at attention. “Yes, Captain!”

“Come down and grab a shovel. I need fresh eyes above. You strong enough to dig?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Good. There are twelve teams going out to dig a trench
around the city. You’re not going for depth but breadth. Don’t leave anything that could burn.”

“Don’t go down there,” the old woman’s voice commanded. “We are running out of time. By the time that fire reaches the line, all will be lost. Are you listening to me?”

Demetrius shook his head, but instead of clarity, he only felt the lack of sleep and the worry and the fear rattling around his head. Something small and strong latched onto his leg, and the poor boy froze.

The Captain’s voice shot out of the dark. “Are you coming to me, boy?”

“Yes, sir,” Demetrius said. “I mean, ma’am. I mean, Captain. My foot’s just caught on—there, that’s better.” With one quick jerk of his leg, the invisible—
something
—dislodged and disappeared, with a cry, into the smoky gloom. Demetrius swung his body onto the makeshift ladder and clambered to the ground. He grabbed a shovel and a rudimentary hunk of wood that he supposed was to act as a hoe, and ran to the outside of the city wall.

The fire was closer. So was the fighting, from the sound of it. Demetrius tied his kerchief around his face to block out the smoke, and began to dig.

On the top of the wall, Auntie, Moth, and Nod sat at
the outer edge, their shoulders pressing close to one another as they shook their heads and sighed.

“Well,” Auntie said, clucking her tongue again and again, “I suppose it’s better than nothing.”

“Don’t see how you could think that,” Moth said, spitting prodigiously into the dark. “Looks like we’re pretty well—”

“Language, Moth.”

“In any case, looks to me like we’ve failed. Billions upon billions of days and nights with the Greater Sun rising and setting as peaceful as anything, and in one fell swoop the three of us ruin it beyond repair.”

“Uncle Moth,” Nod said reproachfully. “That’s a bit much.”

“It would be perfectly fine to say it if it were true, Nod. But it isn’t. Not yet, anyway. The chaos down there can do us some good, since he won’t come willingly.”

“I told you we should have talked to the two of them,” Moth said.

“You never said any such thing,” Auntie said, giving the old man a smack on the back of the head.

“Well, I thought it anyway.”

Auntie ignored him. “You two,” she said, “head down and stay close to that boy. There’s a raiding party getting
close, and we can’t afford to lose his head or ours. Wait for the fighting to start. When he’s knocked unconscious—”

“But Auntie,” Nod said, “how can we be sure that he’ll only suffer a blow to the head?”

“Right,” she said, standing up and straightening her heavily patched apron. “I forgot to mention. Bring a shovel. Make sure you don’t miss.”

Violet never knew how long she remained inside the mirror. Indeed, she did not have any recollection of it at all, and while the image of that dear child pressing her palms to her cage and begging for rescue will haunt me until the day I die, for her there was no time elapsed at all from the moment she made the wish until the moment she tumbled, head over feet, out of a mirror in a forgotten room on the eastern edge of the castle and fell to the floor. She had been gone for thirteen days, and the castle had fallen into mourning.

And, what’s worse, the war had begun.

But she didn’t know that yet.

What she did know was this: the sensation of
something
transforming to
nothing
transforming again to
something
. Since neither you nor I have ever had the experience of
nothing
—how could we, as we are
something
—Violet explained it as similar to the sensation one has when dreaming. The action occurs, the world exists, but
you are not in it
. Conscious, yes; aware, yes; but as a nonbeing.

Her first sensations in her new body were in her hands—pricking fingertips, cracking knuckles. Then eyelids that blinked. The pull of hair on the scalp. Sweat on the back of the neck. As she felt the associations and amalgamations of a body forming itself in limitless space, she had the unmistakable feeling of the stomach pulling suddenly into the throat and the mouth spreading wide into a scream.

Violet was falling. Fast.

In a tangle of limbs and hair and heavy clothing, Violet crumpled against the stone floor.

“Ugh!” She sighed as she unscrambled her splayed arms and legs and wobbled herself toward standing. But something was different. Though she was able to move hands, feet, arms, and legs, each movement felt alien and strange—
and the
not-rightness
of it made her light-headed and nauseated. She looked down at herself, and though she could move each toe, each finger, and bend each knee, there was nothing that she saw that looked even vaguely familiar: Violet was in a body that was not her own. She ran to the mirror.

A new face. Amber skin that glowed. Wide-spaced black eyes. Black hair, shiny as oil, falling in heavy coils and snaking down her back all the way to her knees.

Lips like rosebuds.

Tiny feet clad in shoes made from the petals of lilies dipped in gold.

A dress made from velvet spun from silk and shot through with silver.

The calluses on her hands were gone, as were the scrapes on her knees.

A real princess.
Violet squealed and spun around, but her hair was so heavy and her feet so small that she quickly lost her balance and fell. She checked the long hallway to see if anyone was watching. The hall was empty. (Did it strike her as strange, my dears? It should have, of course, but it didn’t.) And the Princess righted herself unobserved.

She returned to the mirror, but her reflection lasted only
a moment. The image rippled before her eyes, and something very different appeared. A woman—golden eyes, golden skin, golden hair—smiling through the glass. Diamond teeth glinted through parted lips, their edges sharp as knives. Violet shuddered.

DO YOU LIKE IT, DARLING?
the golden woman said—though her voice seemed to come not from the mirror but from the stones and the floor and the air. It was
inside
Violet. It crawled and wormed under her skin.

“I do,” Violet said fervently, unconsciously rubbing at her arms. “I love it. I’m…” She paused. “I’m the way I’m
supposed
to be.”

YES, MY DARLING! OH, YES!
The golden woman’s smile broadened. Her thin tongue flicked across her lips again and again.
NOW, THERE IS THE SUBJECT OF PAYMENT.

“Of course,” Violet said absently, admiring the soft flesh on her reedy arms—noting the lack of muscle and wondering how she would climb and ride with her new body.
Perhaps
, she thought,
I shan’t need to
. And a knot began to form in her stomach.

DON’T SHOW YOURSELF TO YOUR FATHER—OR ANYONE ELSE. NOT RIGHT AWAY
, the golden woman said.
THEY WILL HAVE TROUBLE UNDERSTANDING WHAT HAS HAPPENED,
AND I DARESAY THEY WILL NEED MY ASSISTANCE. WHICH MEANS THAT I NEED YOU, DEAR, TO ASSIST ME IN FREEING MYSELF FROM THIS MIRROR. WICKED DEMONS TRAPPED ME HERE EVER SO LONG AGO.

Thick tears welled in those golden eyes. Golden lips trembled with manufactured sobs.

“That’s terrible,” Violet said. “Though you really shouldn’t—”

GO TO THE STABLES AND GET YOUR HORSE. BRING A MIRROR. THE MOUNTAIN KING HAS AN OBJECT THAT BELONGS TO ME. HE HAS KEPT IT SAFE UNTIL THE DAY IN WHICH MY HEART’S BELOVED PRESENTS HERSELF AS MY CHAMPION. HE WAITS FOR YOU JUST WITHIN THE BORDERS OF YOUR COUNTRY—ONLY TWO DAYS’ RIDE! PERHAPS NOT EVEN THAT. PRESENT YOURSELF TO THE KING, TAKE THE AMULET, AND RETURN IT HERE, AND EVERYTHING WILL BE WONDERFUL.

Lies, my dears. The Nybbas lied.

“That’s it?” Violet asked, her neck straining against the weight of her hair.

THAT’S IT.

“Well, that’s easy. And I’m happy to help. I’ll get my mirror—I’ll be but a moment.”

And Violet ran down the empty hall.

And if the Nybbas had been just a little bit less successful with Violet’s transformation, perhaps all would have gone according to plan. If Violet had been less delicate, perhaps, or if the details of her body were not as true to the stories, she may have made it to her room and to the stables without ever being seen.

But the load of thick black hair falling in waves down her back (a line, I must admit, I was rather proud of when I said it) was abominably heavy and pulled painfully at her scalp. And her tiny feet were much too small for her increased height, and she wobbled to and fro, unable to fully right herself. Her velvet gown weighed half as much as she did, and with her new delicacy, her lack of muscular agility, she hardly had the strength to walk, much less run, weighted by hair and dress. Though it wasn’t far to her room, Violet was forced to stop no fewer than six times, catching her breath and regathering her strength.

And it was while she paused that she heard her father crying. Violet was a compassionate child, and loving. It was not that she disobeyed the Nybbas’s instructions intentionally. Indeed, at the sound of her father’s grief-stricken voice, the Nybbas no longer existed for Violet. Neither did her
new body, her new dress, her new hair. In that moment, Violet
did not remember
that she looked different.

She simply ran into the room.

“Father,” she said, rushing to the astonished King, “don’t cry. Please don’t cry, Papa!”

The King stood in one of the castle’s many parlors. His face was gray, his eyes darkened by worry and lack of sleep. Three generals, two ambassadors, and a hunting party all presented their news to the King—none of it good.

I was in the far corner of the room, ready to assist. Violet had been missing—in our time—for days upon days, and all searching had ended. We were now a nation at war. We were a nation in mourning. And my duty was to the King.

Still.

There was something strange in the simultaneity of our twin disasters—and whatever it was wormed under my skin like a parasite.
I should know this
, I told myself.
I should know what’s going on.
A good teller, you see, prides himself or herself on the ability to draw on our history and myths, to provide perspective and context for those with more power than ourselves. It is our duty to our countries and our kings and queens, and I fulfilled it gladly. But of course
now, now I understand that I, too, was under the spell of the Nybbas. I, too, was intentionally obfuscated and misdirected.

Or perhaps I was simply too cowardly to voice my true concerns.

Or perhaps it was both.

In any case, when I heard the child’s voice coming to her father, my heart leaped within me. I rose to my feet, feeling as though I might be able to fly. I have no doubt that the King felt the same way, and so I understood how he responded upon seeing a girl (beautiful, shockingly beautiful!) come running into the room. A girl with Violet’s voice. A girl who was not Violet.

“Please, please don’t cry, Papa. I’m sorry I went away.”

The King, seeing this foreign face that spoke with the voice of his child, recoiled in horror.

“
Don’t touch me!
” he hissed. “Who do you think you are?”

I saw the girl jerk back as though slapped. Then she looked down at herself and appeared to relax slightly. “Papa,” she said, “I know it’s strange, but it’s me. I swear. I… I made a wish.”

“Guards!” the King called.

“No! Father, surely you can tell it’s me. I was supposed
to be a real princess. A proper princess. So I fixed it, and now it’s all right. No… excuse me! I am the Princess! Don’t touch me!” Two guards took Violet’s arms. She struggled and quickly lost her balance as two other guards grabbed her feet and carried her into the hall and toward the dungeons. She cried and pleaded and screamed for her father—her mother, too, though her mother was dead and gone, and no amount of beauty was ever going to bring her back.

The eldest general shook his head.

“How many fake princesses has that been, General?”

“That’s the fifth one today, sir.”

“Then, twenty-four in total since Violet disappeared.” The general rocked back on his heels, pressing his fingers to his chin. “What has gotten into these people?”

And it was true—even from the first hour that the Princess disappeared, girls presented themselves to the King, claiming to be the Princess Violet. Then it was girls and women. Then girls, women, boys, and men of all ages. They ordered the guards about and tried to break into her bedroom and generally made a bit of a ruckus and nuisance. But there was something different about this one. While her indignation and surprise were not unusual—indeed, all twenty-four seemed to me to truly
believe
that they were,
indeed, the Princess Violet—it was her voice. That
voice
! It was
her
voice. And how that voice came to be in the throat of a girl who certainly
looked
like a princess but was not
our
Princess, I had no idea. A spell, perhaps. Could the girl be a magician? Could she have stolen the voice but not the face of the Princess? Was such a thing possible? Surely, she was too young to be a magician—an art that required decades of study before the most basic spells could even be attempted.