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anyone on the parapet waving back—he was too far away. Still, he could
feel
himself being waved at and missed. And in that moment he had half a mind to turn around and head home.
    The light shone tenderly on the stones and moss and leafless vines, and he could have sworn he caught a glimpse of something hard, bright, and glittering along the castle’s foundation. Like a thousand jeweled eyes. He blinked twice and it was gone. With a jerk of his heels and a quick whistle, he set his horse onward toward the mountains, a tight knot of anxiety curling around his heart.



CHAPTER TEN
    Violet’s birthday had been observed and celebrated in the days prior to her father’s departure, and though at the time she had felt happy and content and
loved
, she watched the retreating figure of the King and his entourage (
Including that rat Demetrius
, she thought scathingly.
Traitor!
) with a growing emptiness. She stood with her mother at the top of the northern wall as the hunting party’s horses thundered down the broad road and disappeared into the wood. The Queen rested her hand upon her daughter’s shoulder, a faintly hummed lullaby drifting from her tightly pressed lips.
    “I don’t want to sound ungrateful,” Violet said, keeping her eyes on the forest that had just swallowed her father, hoping vainly that he might change his mind and come home.
    “I know, my love,” the Queen said.
    “It isn’t that I need anything more,” Violet continued. “Because I don’t. And I had a wonderful birthday, honestly I did.”
    “I know, Violet,” the Queen said, still humming under her breath. Violet recognized the song. It was the same lullaby that her mother had sung to her as an infant. It didn’t occur to her at the time to wonder at it. “Would you like to play at stories, my love? It does so often cheer you up. We could begin with a beautiful princess stealing away from home in the dead of night, setting off on a desperate journey.”
    Violet bit her lip. “No, thank you, Mother,” she said.
A beautiful princess
, she thought, and her heart sank just a little bit deeper.
    “It’s just…” Violet hesitated. “It’s just that he’ll be gone so awfully long. And for what? A stupid dragon. I don’t understand why he thinks it’s so important.”
    “And yet he does. Your father is not one to stop learning.Nor is he one to stand aside when there are those who need his help. It’s part of who he is.” There was a catch in the Queen’s voice.
    Violet didn’t notice.
    “It’s just this—” She paused again, gesturing to the empty road, as if her father’s and her friend’s absences each had substance and mass. Each absence felt palpable and crushing. A terrible weight. A gift gone wrong. “It’s just a rotten birthday present, that’s all.” She pulled away and hurried down the worn stone steps without looking back at her mother.
    If she had paused, if she had looked back, she might have noticed the tears in her mother’s eyes. If she had turned, she might have noticed the pallor in her mother’s face, or the recent tightness of her gown around her belly, or the deepening lines of worry around her mouth.
    But Violet
didn’t
turn. And she didn’t notice.
    At the bottom of the stairs stood a mirror in a heavily polished wood frame. It was two and a half times as tall as Violet herself, and four times as wide. Carved at the top of the mirror was the likeness of a dragon, its jaws wide open, each tooth glinting with inlaid mother-of-pearl. Gnarled claws curled around the upper rim, and two beady eyesmade of cut glass gleamed over the top. All along the edges of the mirror, the artisan had carved no fewer than three hundred (Violet had counted) tiny lizards, so supple and delicate as they twisted and writhed that their wooden bodies seemed ever to be in motion. The mirror was old—more than five hundred years, people said—and had endlessly fascinated Violet from the time she was a very little girl.
    She