Violet Made of Thorns (Violet Made of Thorns #1)(11)

The demand for my magic and my favor with King Emilius protects me, like Cyrus’s favor protected Dante, but it will never be enough. Feelings can change, after all. Kings change. It’s easy to lose everything you’ve built through no fault of your own, like lordly scuffles or princes with inflated heads taking offense. I don’t have the luxury of being nice. The only people who are nice are those who have never had to claw for anything they’ve wanted.

There are kind people, like Dante, who know how unfair life is and somehow hold on to their compassion. I’m not kind either.

Kind people get eaten alive in this world.

Dante and I finish our turn about the gardens, talking about anything but Cyrus or the future, but the prince’s sharp gaze when he confronted me lingers in my mind, too assured for my liking.





In the evenings, I like to perch on my tower’s balcony, legs swinging through the iron railings. My robe is shrugged from my shoulders, blushed with the purple-pink of sunset.

Here, I have the best view in all of Auveny.

The river fog is rolling through the emptying streets of the University and Arts Districts. In the lower portions of the city, red buildings mark the Moon District, where many lower-class immigrants from Yue settle in Auveny to live and work, including the mother I never knew. Those labyrinthine alleyways are where I spent the first eleven years of my life.

Back then, I could barely read the Yuenen signs that swung from the windows of offal restaurants and secondhand shops. I thought every treasure could be found at the marketplace, where a kind busker bought me honey sweets once. I thought the world ended where I met walls too tall to climb.

I’d seen stranger lands in my dreams, but my mind hadn’t learned how to hold fast to the images yet. The mountain-sized forests, the endless horizons, the laughter and war cries of other eras—my days were so narrow and dusty in comparison. How could these glimpses be anything but a fantasy, some other-lived life?

When I was old enough to understand the gift I had, I knew I was destined for greatness, but I’d have to prove myself in order to get there. Being Sighted didn’t hold any weight if I couldn’t convince anyone of it.

Mad beggars were plenty. Prophets were not.

Who was I to claim that my mind was special? A coinless orphan on coltish legs, tented in ragged castoffs, with a face that was more dirt than skin. People only know what they can see and only see what they believe, and I was just another matchstick child of the alleyways. Indistinguishable as vermin.

My chance to escape the streets arrived in a dream.

The buildings of the Moon District rose tall and too bright in my mind, as if some lens over the world had been lifted. A horse-drawn pearl of a carriage, white as the walls of the palace, rolled through the district’s arches with horns trumpeting.

Doors swung open from the carriage’s carved sides. Two children leaped out: a brother and sister, dressed in purple-and-gold finery. They had matching noses and dimples and hair that shined amber under the dazzling lights in the sky—a dreamed sky, filled with more stars than I’d ever seen.

The children escaped into a maze of shop stalls ahead of their guards. In a blink, the image blurred. A shattering, wet crunch silenced the marketplace.

The vision dragged me through the stalls, their piled wares, the witnesses clustered in the street…to the rubble of a pottery cart where the boy’s broken body lay, his skull crushed under the hooves of a draft horse.

The horse had torn free from its load, and its master reacted only a second too late to catch its reins before tragedy struck. The magnitude of the mistake hardly mattered; the boy was dead.

Would be dead.

I didn’t know who he was, but I saw his clothes, the carriage, the horror. He was someone important.

He was exactly who I needed.

When I awoke, I went to the marketplace. Stood in the shade of a towering apartment, a few paces from a cart double-stacked with painted urns, and waited. I did this day after day, until one morning, when the air was sweet as ripened fruit and just as sticky, I heard the horns of the carriage.

The boy came skidding around the cart laughing. He saw me, with my feet planted in the dirt and my arms outstretched, and met my eyes like he knew I was there for him.

Before he could shape a question, I yanked him forward. The cart burst into a mist of wood and porcelain. A horse came crashing down on the spot where the boy had just stood.

When the boy’s shock ebbed into a manageable trembling, I told him everything about my visions and how I knew to save him. He asked for my name, and I gave him the one I made up for myself: Violet. He asked for my family and I said I had none, so he called me Violet Lune, Violet of the Moon, after the district I called home.

He gave me his name in return: Cyrus Lidine.

I’d saved the crown prince.

In that moment, I saw my future clearer than ever; not through my Sight, but in the way he looked at me, as if I were a miracle. I could ask for anything and he would grant it.

I pointed to the tower at the center of the capital, the one that looked tall enough to pierce the sky. I asked about the witch who lived there and whether it was true that she saw the future like I did.

I asked, Could I live there too?

Cyrus brought me to the palace, where I knelt before the king and swore to serve him. Each day afterward was a whirlwind, removing me further from the life I knew, into a life I’d only ever imagined. Necessities were no longer questions of if but what kind? I learned I liked sweets, well-steeped tea, and pillows that weren’t too soft, and I could have them brought to me at any hour. I grew my hair down to my waist and twirled in front of mirrors wearing dresses picked out by the princess, who was eager to have a new playmate in the palace. People saw me. They sought me. The world unfurled, and so did my ambitions.