Iron Hearted Violet (9 page)

Finding and stealing the key to her father’s study was
easier than Violet would have guessed—so easy that she was quite appalled that she had not thought of it before. She slipped away, darting from corridor to corridor, until at last she arrived at the polished door. Checking first behind her to make sure she was quite alone in the hallway, she slid the key into the lock and turned until it clicked. Holding her breath, she pushed open the door, wincing at the creaky moan of the hinges, and looked into the darkened room.

It was, as usual, a mess. Violet stepped carefully over the debris on the floor, walked to the desk, and sat down.

Her father had no fewer than six ledgers scrawled to the margins with notes and covered over with diagrams, drawings, charts, and figures. There were precise anatomical renderings of the insides of dragons, detailed descriptions of their musculature and physiology, lists of hormones and glands that were responsible for fire-making. There were several drawings of the heart of the dragon—both the external heart, encased in its shell for its protection, the dragon itself bending over and tending to its heart, and drawings of the heart inside the open chest of the beast. There were also several pages on the subject of mirrors. “If dragons are terrified of their own reflections,” her father had written, “if the fact of their heartlessness makes them
prisoners to that fear, then how in heaven’s name did they find themselves in our world? Of all possible worlds in the multiverse, what led them to the world with the mirrored sky—from which there is no escape? I am beginning to suspect that, ever so long ago, dragons were brought here by trickery and deceit, and discovered too late that they could not leave. But why? And by whom?”

Was it possible, she wondered, that the creatures that haunted the most fearsome stories and the most frightening nightmares would be this weak? This frightened? That the only thing they did
not
fear was a dragonling—and that any dragon, regardless of family or tribe, would fight to the death to protect it? Violet shook her head.
This can’t be right.

She continued to turn the pages, pulling out more loose scraps of paper that her father had scrawled notes or questions or drawings on and had folded several times before shoving them at random into the ledger. “Does the dragon know when its heart has been moved?” one scrap said. “Can the heart be replaced?” said another. This question had been underlined several times. And indeed, Violet found it again and again, all on its own, on other pages, scrawled in margins, scribbled on the backs of pages, and on scrap after scrap after scrap.

The question seemed to be a bit of an obsession.

“Have you gone mad, oh my father?” Violet murmured to the empty room. “And if you have, what are we to do?”

On another page there was a rough sketch showing a young woman reaching toward the chest of a dragon. In one hand she held a knife; in the other was a heart. Below it King Randall had written “Traced from the Wanderer’s Chronicles, supposedly written before the Great War. Possible?”

Violet gathered the ledgers, as well as a large stack of loose notes, and slid them into her satchel.

“Why now, Father?” she whispered. “Why did you have to do this
now
? Please, please come home.” And just as she was about to start in on the bookshelves, Violet heard something that made her heart go cold.

A bell.

At the top of the western wall hung a bell. It was huge, black, made from cast iron. It had rust along its edges. It was a call to prayer—a call to hope when all hope was gone. It had been rung once before in her lifetime, when she was only an infant, and both her life and the life of her mother hung on the tiniest thread of hope. On that day the magicians rang the bell, and the entire country hoped and
prayed as one. Violet had no memory of it but knew its ringing all the same. There was nothing else in the castle that could make that mournful boom, so deep it rattled the bones and stole the breath.

The Queen
, the bell tolled.
The Queen is in danger.

Pray, pray, pray
, pleaded the bell.
And hope without ceasing.

Violet tore out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

The Mistress of the Falcons, a tall woman with a fierce, brusque way of speaking that made Demetrius simultaneously terrified and amazed, sent forth her birds, which reported back the existence of a natural corral in the high cliff not one-half league ahead. The King ordered the wagoners to bring the transport into the rocky grotto and to hang canvases over the mirrors. The hunters gave chase, bounding after their fleeing dragon, listening for its breath, catching its scent. They could smell the beast’s panic and its exhaustion. They could smell its frustration over its broken wing,
its rheumy joints, its sense of its own diminishment. And they grieved for the dragon. Even as they hunted they grieved.

After seemingly endless days of chase, the King and his party finally had the upper hand. The dragon had no choice but to back defensively toward the grotto.

Demetrius and four hunters waited at the entrance, partially hidden in the foliage. They waited until the dragon was close, and they stepped into the clearing, holding their mirrors before them like shields.

The dragon, though old and infirm, its prime days a thousand years past, was still a terrible thing to behold. The sharp sheets of its armored skin overlapped one another, the edges glinting like knives as they skimmed the beast’s sinewy shanks. It hissed and snarled and snapped. It reared, uncurled its fibrous tongue, and brandished the yellow curve of each war-worn fang.

And yet.

Before the mirrors it trembled.

Before the mirrors, it postured, roared, and backed away, its ears pressed flat against its skull.

The hunters—every last one of them accomplished, professional, and celebrated—let their mouths drop open in surprise. Inwardly, the good King Randall rejoiced. And advanced.

Once the dragon had backed entirely into the transport, Randall gave the word, and the canvas curtains inside dropped away. The dragon, seeing its reflection on all sides, believed itself surrounded, and, with a sound that was something between a roar and a whimper, laid its great head on the transport floor and covered its brow with its forearms.

The lead tracker, standing next to the King, removed his hat and shook his head. “If I hadn’t seen it myself, sire,” he said, “I would never have believed it could be done. In fact, I’m not sure I believe it even now.”

Demetrius frowned.
Just because it
can
be done
, he thought to himself,
doesn’t mean it
should.

The Mistress of the Falcons set about securing the enclosure while two trappers checked the vehicle for cracks and weaknesses. However, both Demetrius and the King knew those tasks weren’t necessary. The dragon would not move until it must, and if the King’s research was correct, it would not require food or water for a month, at the very soonest. It was well and truly trapped. Demetrius laid his hands on the wooden doors and closed his eyes. He could hear nothing from inside, no indication of the dragon’s
voice—and whether this was from dragonish contempt or abject fear, he did not know.

The King patted Demetrius’s shoulder tenderly. “It’s unfortunate and unpleasant, I know,” he said with a sigh. “But think of what we’ll
learn
.” He rested his hand on the boy’s back as they and the lead tracker left the rocky grotto and went to their horses in the clearing. The King’s horse was stamping and whinnying, and if Demetrius were not so exhausted, he may have investigated the cause. At the very least, he would have taken the time to listen to the horse. Instead, he reached into his saddlebag and pulled out a morsel of salted meat, which he chewed thoughtfully.

“Indeed,” the King continued, “I knew that it
ought
to be done as well. But oh! My heart aches for the creature. First imprisoned by loneliness and now imprisoned by fear. It seems terribly unfair.”

And whether the trapper agreed with the King, I do not know, my dears. For at that very moment, the horsemen from the castle of the Mountain King emerged from the tangle of spring green. Their swords were drawn, their arrows nocked, and their eyes narrowed pitilessly.

“Drop your weapons,” the Captain of the Guard said, holding the tip of his sword to King Randall’s exposed throat.

Back at the castle, Violet lay next to her mother on the bed, feeling the heat from the Queen’s body radiating like coals.

“Bring him back,” her mother pleaded again and again. “Please bring him home.” And whether she was talking about the stillborn son or her husband, Violet didn’t know.

The castle physicians and midwives and magicians and apothecaries all collected in the corners of the room, conferring quietly as though to protect Violet from any harmful information. In truth, they needn’t have bothered. Violet
didn’t care much for them and instead focused all her attention on her mother, cradling the Queen’s hot, papery fingers in her own.

“I had so hoped,” the Queen said, touching her thumb to each of Violet’s fingertips and gazing vaguely at the ceiling. A midwife applied a foul-smelling plaster to the Queen’s belly to heal the infection and a pale blue poultice on her chest to soothe her broken heart. “I thought that the hoping would be enough. I should have told him before he left. I should have known that every secret has a sting.”

She then fell into a deep swoon, and a suddenly panicking—and uncharacteristically insistent—group of physicians shooed Violet out of the room.

“Just for a moment, Princess,” the head nurse said. “Just give us a moment,” and the old woman wiped at her creased eyes with the back of her hand and closed the door. Violet walked alone through the many corridors of the castle and out into the stable yards.

Demetrius should be there. But he wasn’t.
That rat
, she thought.

The castle, meanwhile, was in an uproar. Councillors called emergency meetings; magicians, mages, and holy men and women led prayers; and scribes worked around
the clock to pen notices and pamphlets and proclamations. Courtiers and ladies-in-waiting and librarians and scholars met in small groups around the castle, speaking in hushed voices as they dabbed their eyes. An elite team of four soldiers was outfitted, supplied, and sent in search of the King to gather him back home.

I, for my part, took to my room. There was something…
odd
about the Queen’s illness and the King’s absence. A strange simultaneity setting a disturbance in my soul. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on—a slippery, wily grin, ever out of reach. And I was afraid. I told myself that I was creating a comforting place of stories for whoever wanted to slip away from the grieving castle for a moment or two. But that was a lie.

So Violet was alone.

And she was miserable.

She sat down on the hard gravel and leaned against the rough boards of the stable’s exterior. The Greater Sun had dipped below the castle wall, but the Lesser Sun was high and full, its brightness thin, clear, and warming. She squeezed her eyes shut, dimly aware of the red glow under her lids, and let the pale heat sink past her skin and into her bones.