Free The Glass Castle by Jerry B.; Trisha; Jenkins Priebe Page B

now—including his plan to marry—is because he needs an heir. Time is of the essence. If he dies with no legitimate heir, his name will die with him.”
    “There are worse things,” Avery whispered.
    “Not for a king.”
    A question burned on the edges of Avery’s mind, and she wasn’t sure she had the courage to voice it. She had already made a fool of herself so many times in Tuck’s presence.
    “Tuck, what if the king’s first son didn’t die?”
    “Then he’d be next in line to the throne.”
    “No,” Avery pressed. “What I meant is—what if the king’s son is alive?”
    Tuck didn’t respond, but it was clear he was thinking about it as they moved from game to game, following the tournament well into the night. When Avery finally excused herself to go to her room, Tuck asked, “Did you notice the queen is the most powerful piece on the board?”
    She smiled but did not turn around.
    In chess, at least, it’s because the queen never rules with her heart.
She, however, did not have that luxury.
    She knew it was time to find the courage to talk to Tuck alone.

Chapter 19

    Pinned
    Avery sat in the bunk room with her slender reeds of charcoal and blocks of colored chalk, staring at blank sheets of sketch paper. They were the nicest tools she had ever been given. Yet for days, she had been unable to draw.
    Once she had no supplies with an endless source of inspiration.
    Now she had the very best supplies with no vision.
    It had been too long since she had breathed fresh air, heard leaves crunch, or smelled the smoke of a crackling bonfire. She wanted so badly to hear the snap of clean laundry on a clothesline or to see the face of her silly, dumb dog.
    She was beginning to forget her mother’s voice.
    She wondered how much older Henry looked. Little boys could grow up overnight.
    Give her the perfect spot under one of her trees and she could create a dozen sketches by evening. But on a borrowed mattress in an empty room in a cold castle—
    She threw her sketch paper into the air.
    I want to go home.
    Her small house had a wide cobblestone walk in front and an unreliable garden in back where her father spent his evenings tending his vegetables obsessively and training his carrier pigeons for who knew what purpose. Wherever her father and brother were, she prayed they were safe. She prayed, too, that God would help her complete the crest. For whatever reason, Tuck believed in her, and she didn’t want to fail him.
    She picked up a piece of sketch paper and tried again.
    “There is a shield in every family crest,”
her father had told her.
    Avery had been bored by his random history lessons back then, but now she wished she had asked more questions.
    She drew the shield with small, careful strokes.
    “Every crest represents what the family loves,”
he had said.
    So she drew green and yellow butternut tree leaves—dozens of them—sprouting from the shield. In the center she outlined the perfect dark cherry tree, the kind her father used to build clocks or shelves or furniture in his shop.
    Next, she drew swirling ribbons through the leaves that extended from the shield, representing her mother’s love of sewing. She could still hear the whisper of the fabrics she brought home, could see her mother in the corner late into the evening hand-stitching a work shirt for her father or a dress for one of her father’s customers.
    “Every crest has a motto.”
    At the base of the shield, Avery drew a thick, swirling sash on which she wrote,
Viam inveniam aut faciam.
“I will either find a way or make one.”
    She added a few more swirls of color, protected the drawing between two blank pages of parchment, and made her way up to the sewing room where she would ask Kate to sew it for her.

    Late that night, after observing another adrenaline-charged chess tournament, Avery changed into her nightgown. She tore twelve eight-inch strips from cloth Kate had given her and tied sections of her hair against her