Free Iron Hearted Violet by Kelly Barnhill

Councillors called emergency meetings; magicians, mages, and holy men and women led prayers; and scribes worked aroundthe 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.
    And then she heard it.
    “That one,” a voice said. “There.”
    Violet sat up and opened her eyes. She was alone. Who had spoken?
    “Hello?” she said, peering up at the leaves, then down to the undergrowth and the shadows. No one was there.
    A second voice. “Are you sure? You’ve thought that before, you know.”
    “No,” the first voice said with a bite of exasperation and annoyance at the center of the sound. “No, that is not what I said at all. Before I said
maybe
. There is a great difference between
maybe
and
definitely
. Now I know for sure. Definitely.”
    The second voice snorted. “Tosh!” it said.
    “Who’s there?” Violet asked, scrambling to her feet. “What do you want?”
    “Ooooh, look at that, loudmouth,” the first voice said. “She can hear you. Now you’ve done it.”
    “She can
not
,” the second voice said. “None of ’em can. Big’uns are as deaf as iron.”
    “Hush up, featherbrain.”
    “I
can
hear you, you know.” Violet took a step back to look at the roof, when she heard a gasp and a clatter and then nothing. Only silence.
    “Hello?” she called.
    The yard was quiet. Even the field and the trees and the undergrowth hushed, though it was a brittle and uncomfortable silence, as though the whole world was bracing itself. But for what? Violet did not know.
    Her skin prickled and itched. It grew hot, then cold, then hot again, and she knew, as sure as she knew that the sky was clear and the day was cool, she
knew
that she was being watched.
    “Fine,” she said, more loudly than before. She turned on her heel in a huff. “Please yourself.” She began walking across the gravel yard. But just as she rounded the corner of the stable, she heard the first voice once again.
    “See? I told you she’d be able to hear us. And I told you she was the one—the right one. Or one of them, anyway.”



CHAPTER NINETEEN
    The King and his hunters did not move. And though the blade upon the good King’s throat pressed cruelly into his flesh—so deep that a tiny bead of blood, bright as a ruby, shone at the top of the blade before oozing lazily downward—the King’s face remained implacable and detached. Demetrius couldn’t take his eyes off the bead of blood. Indeed, the redness of the blood, and the horror of it, were all he could see. They eclipsed the world. Very slowly he balled his hands into fists.
    “Well then,” said the Captain of the Guard. A cruel smile creased his face. “My dear friends. Look what I have caught. A lowland rat scurrying into our fair kingdom. What was it thinking?”
    The soldiers of the Mountain King laughed.
    It was more than he could stand. Demetrius (oh, that good boy! and, oh,