Free 1416940146(FY) by Cameron Dokey

the catastrophe was brought.
    In the midst of the dance I felt a strange ripple pass through the ballroom, like an unexpected changing of the tide. A moment later, I heard a woman scream. My father spun toward the sound at once, thrusting me behind him. Before he could do anything else, the dancers parted to reveal a man dressed in the livery of the palace guards, his chest rising and falling as if he had just run a race for his life.
    And his clothes . . . his clothes were covered in . . .
    "Your Majesty," he gasped out. "Your Majesty, I must report—
    " Here his breath failed him. He collapsed to his knees and his voice choked off. At once, father knelt to support him.
    "What is it?" he commanded. "Who is it that attacks us? Tell me swiftly, for Gods sake, man! You are covered with blood."
    At this the guard began to weep, his tears making flesh-colored rivulets down his red cheeks.
    "I do not know who attacks us, Majesty," he whispered. "Or what. The blood . . . it is falling from the sky."

Chapter 7
50

    How shall I tell you of the days that followed, of the strange events that seemed to come upon us from all sides, threatening to tear the very fabric of our land asunder?
    It rained blood for five full days, after which the sun came out but refused to go back down. Day and night it burned in the sky like a torch, till those crops that had not already drowned burst into flames in the fields where they stood. And any that survived the sun were knocked down in the hailstorm that finally put the sun's torch out, for the hailstones were as large as grown men's skulls.
    Nor was that all.
    Cook's favorite white cat gave birth to a red-eyed raven, then flew away with it. One of the noble's hawks hatched a litter of mice that devoured it on the spot. Wolves roamed the streets of the town at midday, their great tongues lolling from their open mouths. Flocks of larks lined the boughs of trees and sang their hearts out at deepest midnight. Stars streaked across the heavens and fell to earth. Bolts of lightning shot from clear blue skies.
    The royal soothsayer was kept so busy with dire predictions that he ran out of adjectives to describe how bad things had become. And would become.
    Then, as unexpectedly as they had begun, the terrible events that had plagued us stopped, and there began a series of days when nothing happened. Nothing at all.
    I probably don't have to tell you that those days were the worst of all. For though things seemed normal again, none of us believed it in our hearts. We knew it for what it was. The calm before the storm that might carry us all before it.
    But it is hard to do nothing when you have been doing something. You can work to put out a fire. Smother it with blankets. Carry buckets of water from the well. If it floods, you can build a dike to hold the floodwaters in check. But how do you protect yourself against an enemy you cannot see? How do you combat a thing that only threatens but never really comes?
    And so it came to pass in those days of quiet that we ceased to fight an outside foe and began to fight ourselves.
    It was the nobles who caused trouble first, for they had the most time on their hands and on their minds. Time to place blame and to hatch plots. And I'm sorry to say that Papa and I 51

    may have made things easier for them, for we were both away from the palace for long periods of time. For Papa saw, as the nobles could not (or would not), that it was the everyday people who were our country's true lifeblood. If they should fail, so would we all. And so he was much among them, and so was I.
    And so was Oswald, somewhat to my surprise, though it was impossible to predict just where or when he would turn up.
    Repairing buildings, furrowing and planting the fields for a second, even a third time.
    It was after a day of working in the fields until my very bones ached, a day on which Oswald had not put in an appearance, cleverly, I thought, when I had the energy to think at all. At the