Free Iron Hearted Violet by Kelly Barnhill Page B

thundered their way toward home.
    Slowly, quietly, they whispered to their horses. Slowly they breathed courage to one another. And as they looked at the Captain and his men with an expression of unabashed contempt, they thought this:
    Just wait.



CHAPTER TWENTY
    There was little the physicians could do. They could only wait. Both the Princess Violet and I were called back to the sickroom and took turns sitting next to the feverish Queen. A nurse laid a pallet and blankets on the floor, where we could catch an hour or two’s rest from time to time. We whispered story after story after story to the failing Queen. Tales of mages and deadly spindles and true love transformed yet undeterred all rasped from our dry mouths, our lips chapped and cracked from worry and weeping.
    Some of our stories might be familiar to you, my dears,did you know? Stories have a tendency to seep across the shining membrane walls separating the universes. They whisper and flutter like the feathers of birds, from island to mainland and back again. They fall into dreams like rain.
    Do you know, for example, the one about the broken-hearted maiden, cheated out of marriage by a false youth, who goes to live on a remote, rocky shore and swears off love forever—only to win the heart of a fearsome leviathan that lurked in the dark, treacherous reef?
    Or the one about the young man who, after refusing the attentions of a very persistent and very powerful goddess, chose to transform himself into a tree rather than submit to a marriage without love?
    Or perhaps you’ve heard of the king who grew tired of the world and shut himself inside a tall tower with a single window from which he could gaze at the stars—and of his patient wife, who waited for his beard to grow long enough to allow her to climb up and fetch him home?
    If not those, I assure you there are others that have drifted back and forth from time out of mind.
    As we told our stories, the Queen’s fever deepened. She gasped and sighed and moaned, and whether she was vaguely awake or vaguely asleep, she was always imprisonedby her strange and desperate dreaming. She sweated and shivered and went pale to flushed to pale again. And Violet—poor Violet!—did her best to soothe her mother. She tenderly dipped the cooling cloth into a silver bowl of fresh-drawn water and dabbed her beautiful mother’s fevered face. She applied salve to the Queen’s blistered lips, ice to her palms, and scented oil under her nose.
    Toward the end of the sixth day, the Queen’s ravings began to clarify into words.
    “The dragon is the least of your worries,” she said in midafternoon.
    “The hunters are hunted,” she said as the cook brought in tea, and the grim-faced physicians listened to her breathing and pulse.
    “
Run!
” she screamed in the waning light, her body thrashing nearly out of the bed.
“Run, my love!”
    And then: “The King has been taken. They’ve taken the King!”
    Violet and I—along with the nurses and midwives and magicians—told her again and again that what she saw was merely a dream, but the Queen couldn’t hear us.
    But of the four riders sent to fetch the King, only one returned. And the King was not with him. Instead, he wasaccompanied by two trappers and the Mistress of the Falcons.
    Within the quarter hour, they stood before the Princess, the High Chancellor, the four generals, and the Council of Scholars. I was there, too, though by rights I should not have been. But Violet insisted, and no one had the heart to refuse her.
    During the meeting, the escaped members of the King’s hunting party ignored the senior members of the council, with their grave voices and their pompous ponderings. Instead, they kept their eyes on one person, and that was Violet. Imagine, my dears, the child Violet! She would not release my hand, and I was therefore privy to information far above my rank and station. And
oh
, it was terrible! The grim faces of the men and women of the hunting