Iron Hearted Violet by Kelly Barnhill & Iacopo Bruno

Author:Kelly Barnhill & Iacopo Bruno
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction / Fantasy & Magic, Juvenile Fiction / Animals / Dragons, Unicorns & Mythical, Juvenile Fiction / Social Issues / Friendship, Juvenile Fiction / Fairy Tales & Folklore / General
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2012-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FORTY

The first attack happened that night, along the wooded border—small scouting parties coming upon one another by accident, and surprise giving way to skirmish.

The dead were few, the injured many, and the cloud of war pressed heavily on the city.

Demetrius worked hard, avoided sleep when he could, and tried to prevent himself from thinking. Thinking, he discovered, was dangerous and led to fruitless worry that did nothing but fill him with a sense of impotent rage and despair.

Still, even in the din of warfare, his thoughts wandered.

Where is Violet? he wondered again and again and again.

What were those creatures?

And most troubling: Why now?

Indeed, my dears, why? It was a question that I myself was troubled with, and if it had not been for the necessities of our respective circumstances, perhaps Demetrius and I would have been able—but no. No. The damage was done.

By the fourth night, the fighting was still far away, but as Demetrius stood watch at the northern section of the western wall, he could see the first ripples of red light spreading across the horizon, bleeding from the land into the mirrored edge of the sky. The land was burning. And whether it was a farmhouse or a wheat field or a grain silo that was the original target, the result now was the same: a broad swath of burning earth raging as the battle raged. As though the ground under the soldiers’ feet, too, had become an adversary.

“Captain? Captain!”

Captain Marda appeared from a makeshift tent below. Her eyes flashed in the dark.

“Speak,” she said.

“Fire,” Demetrius said, pointing northward. He returned his gaze to the horizon and saw with a sinking feeling that the fire had spread.

The Captain shook her head. “That’s all we need. Stay at your post, boy. I’ll send out the alert. We’ll need a crew to dig a fire line. And this on top of everything else.” She sprinted down the narrow walkway and out of sight.

Demetrius turned back toward the widening fire. It wasn’t as though he had never seen a fire before. He had. Not two years earlier there was a terrible fire in the western wastes, and he had traveled with his father to lend their skills in the care and healing of the many displaced livestock and other animals. The fires raged while they corralled and soothed hundreds of beasts, salving their burns and tearfully easing the dead into pits, where they were buried. As a child, he was terrified of fire—it was a fire in the stables, after all, that had killed his mother—so terrified that he could hardly bear to look at his own home’s bright hearth, and even the smells of bubbling stew and baking bread filled him with horror and grief. Now, though, as a youth, his fear had been replaced with awe. Fire was, Demetrius knew, a transformative force. A fire did not destroy; it simply changed. His mother, after shooing her son, all the goats, most of the cows, and half of

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