Iron Hearted Violet (3 page)

He shrugged. “You probably could, too. If you ever learned. You just have to
feel
with them.” He wrinkled his eyebrows and thought a minute. “Or,” he clarified, “they just need to feel you caring about them. Lots of people can do it. If they bother to. It’s not hard.”

“Will you show me?”

So Demetrius took her to the stables. He pointed to his house right next door, where he lived with his father, the stable master—a man Violet had met many times. Her father often called on the stable master to assist in his research. The two men would have lengthy and, Violet thought, ponderous discussions on the history and biology and physiology of dragons—though neither man had ever laid eyes on one. No one had for a hundred years. But Violet never knew that the quiet, gentle man had a son. She did know, though, that he had no wife. Or that his wife had died a long time ago. Violet knew that the subject of dead mothers was likely not polite conversation, but she wondered about it all the same.

The stable master, upon seeing the child Violet engrossed in a lesson on the care of horses, which was interrupted
every once in a while by a game that consisted of the two children running and screeching around the yard, sent a message with one of his apprentices that the Princess had been found and was safe, and where she could be fetched. Within the hour she was dragged back to the castle, protesting loudly, by her mother, two nannies, and a rather embarrassed tutor.

Still, in the midst of her howls and pleading and threats, she shot a look at the boy Demetrius, and the two shared a quick and meaningful grin.

I’ll be back in a bit
, Violet’s grin said.

I’ll be waiting
, Demetrius grinned back.

After that, Violet and Demetrius saw each other nearly every day. They found excuses and schemes to leave their studies and their chores behind, to slip away from the adults who minded them, and to set off on their own mad adventures.

They made an unorthodox pair, but the King and Queen were of a modern view.

“They are only children, after all,” the Queen said often.

“Why hamper them with the burdens of social class?
They shall have to trouble themselves with such foolishness soon enough!” the King agreed.

The court advisers argued against the friendship, voicing worries about
dangerous precedents
and
political implications
and the
prerequisites of propriety
. Violet’s parents had the final say. “We simply don’t see the harm,” they said. And that was that.

Together, the children explored nearly every inch of the castle—or at least they thought they did. Every day the castle revealed new secrets, and every day it kept its most important secret cleverly hidden. Castles are tricky that way. The pair explored the castle grounds as well—its grazing fields and broad gardens and parks. They explored the twisting streets of the capital city and followed the wall that snaked around the city’s edge, hugging it tight, and their fingers grazed against the ancient stones. And later they ventured farther out into the fields and forests beyond the city, exiting through the four gates that opened in the four directions. Those gates let the world inside. Or kept it out. Gates sometimes have a mind of their own.

Violet learned how to care for the horses and the goats and the falcons and the dogs. Demetrius taught her how to
search for illness, how to communicate calm, how to listen to the voice coming from the animal’s heart. Though he never, Violet noticed, taught her how to stop a raging bull, which, she felt, would have been a useful thing to know. (For his part, Demetrius assured her that it was a skill that
could not be taught
, and it was only in the moment when a person discovered whether he
could
or whether he was dead. Privately, the boy’s dreams screamed with pounding hooves and pointed horns and a pair of livid, bloodshot eyes.)

Inside the castle, when we gathered for our nightly songs and stories and dancing, Demetrius proved to be nearly as clever a storyteller as Violet herself. And neither
alone
was quite as remarkable as the two of them
together
.

Together
, they were a marvel.

“Shall we play at stories?” Violet said one day as they once again used my quarters as a hideout from the watchful eyes of the adults in the castle. I indulged them. How could I not? After all, someone would be here soon enough to fetch them.

“All right,” I said, pouring steaming water from the kettle into the teapot and swirling the fragrant leaves in the water. There never was a story that didn’t go down better with tea. “Give me a story about the beginning of the world.”

“Which world?” Violet asked. “There are thousands of worlds in the multiverse.”

“More than thousands,” Demetrius said. “Millions.”

“Millions of thousands of millions,” Violet crowed, throwing her hands in the air. “They are endless.”

“Fine,” I said. “That is all very fine, but I, for one, am not impressed by the wonders of the other worlds in the multiverse. What care have I for wonders that I can neither see nor will ever visit? Tell me a story of
our
world, our twin suns, our mirrored sky. What use do I have for anything else?”

“Once, long ago, before the Old Gods formed the multiverse,” Demetrius began, ignoring my request, “before the multitudes of worlds and worlds and worlds bubbled and foamed like a sea, there was only one world, one universe. And it was a
terrible
place.”

(I
might
mention that the boy stole this story from me, but that would be terribly petty and small of me, so I shall let it pass.)

“The Old Gods breathed the same air and walked the same paths and bathed in the same rivers,” Violet continued. “They tried their hands at creation. They placed bets and held challenges and produced unlikely creatures and
forms. But they were foolish. Their ideas piled on top of one another, thick and fast, and the One World became jumbled. There was chaos and misery for its creatures. Reality jittered.” She wiggled her fingers next to her face, and her mismatched eyes shone.

Demetrius jumped in. “Finally, one of the Old Gods went for a walk. He was a runty thing—stubby legs, stubby arms, and a merry smile—but he was agile and strong and low to the ground. He didn’t mind so much when the land buckled and bubbled under his feet. He leaped from boulder to boulder and dodged the things that wobbled from
there
to
not there
as though they were shadows.”

“The runty god is my favorite,” Violet said fervently.

“He’s everyone’s favorite,” Demetrius agreed.

“The runty god leaned down and took a handful of dirt from the trail and looked at it for a moment.” Violet held her fist in front of her face and imitated as best she could the god’s expression. “He had been walking a long way and was tired. And lonely. And cold.
A chair
, he thought.
A friend
, at the same time.
A fire.
All in one moment.” Violet held up her hands, fingers splayed, and made a sound like the roaring of a fire, followed by a terrific BOOM.

“Oh dear,” Demetrius said, laughing. “Oh dear, oh dear.
A clump of dirt in the hand of a god can become…
anything
. But it cannot be three things at once. The fabric of the One World trembled. It buckled and split. And where there was one, there were now three—a world with a chair, and a world with a friend, and a world with a crackling fire. The runty god shook his head. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘The others aren’t going to like this one bit.’ ”

“That wasn’t
our
world,” I said. I could hear one of the nannies calling from down the hall.

“Close enough,” Demetrius said. “You can’t talk about a beginning unless you talk about
before the beginning
.”

“Impertinent boy,” I chided.

“But we’re missing part of the story, aren’t we? It’s incomplete,” Violet said.

The nannies were growing closer. I resigned myself to having those dear children shooed away once again, and thought it all the pity. If it were up to me, the children would spend all day telling stories with me and not be shunted off to suffer through arithmetic and translations and chores. But it was not up to me. “What do you mean, ‘incomplete’?” I said. “There’s no such thing as complete when it comes to stories. Stories are infinite. They are as infinite as worlds.”

“Oh, I know,” Violet said. “But there was one book that
said in the One World there were thirteen Old Gods. But in the stories we
tell
, there are only twelve.” She counted them off on her fingers. “There’s the runty god, the goddess made of wheat, the god with the fish’s tail, the blue goddess, the goddess of beauty, the god of giants, the Dark Lady, the god with wings, the stone goddess, the god of fire, the Great Ox, and the god who was a spider. Whatever happened to the thirteenth god? Did he vanish?”

I thought:
We don’t ask about that.

“Did he do something bad?” she pressed.

I thought:
No questions! There are things we do not question and things that we dare not know!

Instead, I said, “I don’t think I have ever heard of a thirteenth god. Perhaps the book you read was in error.” I couldn’t look at her. My breath rattled in my chest. My hands shook.

Which book?
I thought desperately.
It must be found and destroyed. I’ll destroy all the books if I have to.

Demetrius’s black eyes twinkled at the edges. His burnished cheeks swelled with a knowing grin. “You have,” he said. “You’ve seen it and read it, or you learned about it along the way, but you don’t want to tell us. I can see it in your hands.”

I harrumphed. “You can see no such thing,” I sputtered, hastily sliding my hands under my knees.

“Why does he not want to tell us?” Violet faced her friend and raised her eyebrows.

“It’s a mystery,” Demetrius said. And they both turned and stared at me.

My teeth chattered. “There is nothing,” I stammered. “Nothing to tell. The Old Gods were twelve in number, but it was so very long ago that whether there were twelve gods or twelve thousand or none at all is irrelevant. We live in
this
world and
this
time and nothing else matters.” I took a deep breath. “And that’s that.”

The children were quiet for a long, long moment.

“Beloved Cassian,” Violet said as she folded her arms across her chest. “I do believe you are lying and hiding things from me. How dreadfully sneaky of you.”

“Never, Princess!” I cried. “Never would I lie to you!”
I lie to protect
, I shouted in my heart, and I believed it.
Mostly.
Violet and Demetrius faced each other, their mouths mirrored in a thin, grim line.

But before Violet could question me further, three nannies burst in and shooed her back to her classroom.

“Until next time, dear child!” I called, and then
collapsed in my chair, covering my face with my hands and expelling a sigh of relief through my fingers.

When I finally removed my hands, I discovered that Demetrius had remained behind. His black eyes peered mercilessly through the fringe of black hair hanging over his brow, and his mouth puckered to one side in a half-smile. Was I only worth half a smile? My heart shivered in my chest.

“Do you have something to say, young man?” I snapped.

“Nope,” Demetrius said. He was infuriatingly unrattled. His large black eyes were as implacable as two polished stones.

“Well then,” I said, doing my best to affect a grown-uppish look of dignity. “Off you go. Your chores and such.” My hands trembled. My voice caught. Did he notice?

Very slowly, the boy’s half-smile began to fade. He shook his head and left without a word.

The children ignored me for a long time after that. It nearly broke my heart to pieces, not that they cared. Neither Violet nor Demetrius gave two figs for my heart—broken, unbroken, or missing altogether. There was a castle to explore. And both boy and girl were keen to do so.

Indeed, ever since my little outburst, they were keener than ever.