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Rachel had been so groggy from not sleeping that she hadn't been paying attention, allowing Violet's blow to take her completely by surprise. Rachel's eyes watered with the tingling hurt but she knew better than to say anything or to make a show of the pain.
"Yawning is impolite, at best, disrespectful at worst," Violet's plump face peered back over her shoulder. "If you don't behave, then the next time I'll use the whip."
"Yes, Queen Violet," Rachel answered in a meek voice. She knew all too well that Violet wasn't making an empty threat.
Rachel was so tired she could hardly keep her eyes open. She had once been Violet's "playmate" but now she seemed to be nothing more than an object of abuse.
Violet had become preoccupied with extracting revenge. At night she had an iron device fastened in Rachel's mouth. It was a terrifying process. Rachel was made to stick her tongue into a beaklike clamp made of two flat, scored pieces of iron. The jaws were then tightened down hard enough to grip her tongue.
Resisting, Rachel had learned, earned her a whipping followed by guards prying her mouth open and then using painful tongs on her tender tongue to help accomplish the task of getting it placed in the clamp. They always won in the end; her tongue had nowhere to hide. Once the clamp was on her tongue, then the iron mask that was a part of it was locked around her head to kept her tongue immobile.
Once it was on, Rachel couldn't speak. It was hard even to swallow.
After that, Violet locked her in her old iron box for the night. She said she wanted Rachel to know what it was like to be mute and in pain.
And it was painful. Being locked in her iron cage all night with that terrible device clamped down on her tongue had nearly driven her crazy. At first, terrified out of her mind by the feeling of being trapped and alone, unable to get out, unable to get that painful thing off, she had screamed and screamed. Chuckling, Violet merely threw a heavy rug over the box to mute Rachel's cries. Crying and screaming, though, only made the iron jaws pinching her tongue hurt all the more and leave her bloody.
But what finally made her stop crying and screaming was that Violet came and put her face right up to the little window and said that if Rachel didn't be quiet, she would have Six cut Rachel's tongue out for real. Rachel knew that Six would do it if Violet asked.
After that she didn't scream or carry on. She instead curled up in a ball in her little iron prison and tried to remember all the things Chase had taught her. That, in the end, was what had calmed her.
Chase would have told her not to think of her present predicament, but to keep watching for the time when she could get herself out of it. Chase had taught her how to watch for patterns in the way people behaved, and openings where they weren't paying attention. So, that was what she did as she lay in the iron box every night, unable to sleep as she waited for morning to come, waited for the men who would pull her out of the box and remove the terrible device for the day.
Rachel could hardly eat because her tongue was so raw and scraped?not that they gave her much to eat anyway. Each morning her tongue throbbed painfully for hours after the clamp was removed. Her jaws hurt, too, from her mouth being held open all night by the device. Eating hurt. But then, when she did eat, everything tasted like dirty metal. Talking hurt, too, so she only spoke when Violet asked her something. Violet, seeing how Rachel would avoid speaking, would sometimes smile in a contemptuous manner and call Rachel her little mute.
Rachel was completely dispirited by once again being in the clutches of such a wicked person, and sad beyond anything she had ever known because Chase was gone. She couldn't get the memory of him being so brutally hurt out of her mind. She grieved endlessly for him. Her heartache, misery, and utter loneliness seemed unendurable. When Violet wasn't at her drawing lessons, or ordering people to do things, or eating, or trying on jewels, or being fitted for dresses, then she amused herself by hurting Rachel. Sometimes, reminding Rachel of how she had once threatened her with a fire stick, Violet would hold Rachel by the wrist and put a little white-hot ember from the fire on her arm. Still, Rachel's sorrow for Chase hurt her worse than anything Violet could ever do to her. With Chase gone, it almost didn't matter what happened to her.
Violet needed to "discipline" Rachel, as she'd put it, for all the terrible things Rachel had done. Violet had decided that losing her tongue had in large part somehow been Rachel's fault. Violet had said that it was going to take a long time for Rachel to earn forgiveness for such a serious transgression, and also for showing disrespect by escaping the castle. Violet viewed Rachel's escape as a shameful rejection of what she called their "generosity" to a worthless orphan. She often went on and on at great length about all the trouble she and her mother had gone to for Rachel only to have her turn out to be an ungrateful waif.
When Violet eventually tired of hurting her, Rachel suspected that she would be put to death. She'd heard Violet ordering the deaths of prisoners accused of "high crimes." If someone displeased her enough, or if Six told her that the person was a threat to the crown, then Violet would order their execution. If the person had made the grave mistake of openly questioning Violet's authority, or rule, then Violet would tell her guards to make it slow, and make it painful. She sometimes went to watch, just to make sure that it was.
Rachel remembered back when Queen Milena had ordered executions and Violet had first begun to go watch. As her playmate, Rachel had to go along with her. Rachel always averted her eyes from the ghastly sight; Violet never did.
Six had set up a whole system whereby people could secretly report the names of those people who said things against the queen. Six had told Violet that people who made such secret reports had to be rewarded for their loyalty. Violet paid handsomely for the names of traitors.
Since the time when Rachel had been with her before, Violet had acquired a new fondness for inflicting pain. Six often commented that pain was a good teacher. Violet had become exceedingly fond of the notion that she controlled the lives of others, that on her word other people could be made to suffer.
She had also become acutely suspicious of everyone. Everyone but Six, that was, who she'd come to rely on as the only person who could be trusted. Violet greatly distrusted most of her "loyal subjects," frequently referring to them as nobodies. Rachel remembered that Violet used to call her a nobody.
When Rachel had lived at the castle before, people had been careful to watch themselves lest they cross the wrong people, but it was more a sense that they were just being on their toes. People had been afraid of Queen Milena, and with good reason, but they still would smile and laugh at times. The wash women would gossip, the cooks would now and then make funny faces in the food, the cleaning staff would whistle as they went about their chores, and the soldiers would sometimes tell jokes to one another as they walked the halls of the castle during guard duty.
Now there was quiet quaking whenever Queen Violet or Six were around. None of the cleaning staff, the washwomen, the seamstresses, the cooks, or the soldiers ever smiled or laughed. They all looked afraid all the time as they hurried to do their work. The atmosphere at the castle now was always charged with terror that, at any time, anyone might be pointed out. Everyone went out of their way to openly show respect for the queen, especially in front of her tall, grim advisor. People seemed to fear Six just as much as they feared Violet. When Six smiled with that strange, empty, snakelike smile she had, people would stand frozen in place, wide-eyed, sweat breaking out across their brows, and then swallow in relief after she had glided out of sight.
"Right here," Six said.
"Right here, what?" Violet asked as she gnawed on a bread stick.
Rachel eased herself back up on the rock where she had been sitting. She reminded herself to pay more attention. The slap was her own fault for getting bored and not paying attention.
No, it wasn't, she told herself. It was Violet's fault. Chase had told her not to take on blame that belonged to others.
Chase. Her heart sank yet again thin
king about him. She had to put her mind to other things lest she end up being so sad thinking about him that she start to weep. Violet was not at all tolerant of anything Rachel did without permission. That included crying.
"Right there," Six said again with exaggerated patience. When Violet only stared at her, Six drew a long finger across the face of the torchlit rock wall. "What is missing?"
Violet leaned in, peering at the wall. "Umm…"
"Where is the sun?"
"Well," Violet said in a snippy voice as she stood up straight again and waggled a finger at the yellow disc, "right there. Surely you can see that this is the sun."
Six glared at her a moment. "Yes, of course I see that it's the sun, my queen." Her empty smile returned. "But where is it in the sky?"
Violet tapped the chalk against her chin. "The sky?"
"Yes. Where is it in the sky? Straight up?" Six pointed her finger skyward. "Are we meant to understand that we are looking straight up at the sun in the sky? Is it high noon?"
"Well, no, of course it's not high noon—you know it can't be. It's supposed to be late in the day. You know that, too."
"Really? And how are we to know that? After all, it makes no difference what I know it must be. The drawing must say what is. It can't elicit comment from me, now, can it?"
"I guess not," Violet admitted.
Six again drew her finger across the wall beneath the sun. "What's missing, then?"
