Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore by Emily Krempholtz - 27

The facade of Violet Thistlewaite had begun to grow tattered, and the thorns of her past were beginning to snag on the weave. The truth was that her conversation with Nathaniel had shaken loose something she normally kept screwed tight. It didn’t take much to understand that he’d allowed Violet to see a part of him he showed to few people, and she wanted to return the favor.

He would understand.

He would still care for her if he knew.

Wouldn’t he?

Her doubt hovered over her like a storm cloud all day. Whether he knew what he asked for or not, by trying to get close to her, Nathaniel was asking for her truth. She wasn’t sure she could act on her feelings without giving it to him. But could he be trusted with her past? Could anyone?

Another of Guy’s aphorisms came to her. Even secrets told at a whisper grow wings, petal. We must clip their feathers by never letting them fly from our mouths and shoot down any birds that take to the skies.

She couldn’t help the part of her that still believed him to be right.

“You’re distracted today,” said Jerome. “More’n usual. Mind, you’re not the most attentive shopkeeper I’ve met even on a good day.”

He’d shown up bright and early with his toolbox to fulfill his promise to fix her door.

“Tea with milk, and I like me eggs scrambled, not fried,” he’d said by way of greeting.

Violet hadn’t argued, just gone upstairs to make him breakfast. The ache in her hands was growing worse, the sort of raw, chapped feeling that made every movement uncomfortable, especially magic, so doing something as mundane as making eggs and toast for Jerome was a welcome distraction. Violet liked the old gnome; his blunt gruffness was a respite from some of the others in Dragon’s Rest—as kind as they could be, Violet wasn’t used to their friendly drop-bys or kindly invitations to get-togethers (or Pru’s recent plans of breaking and entering at Shadowfade Castle on a “book rescue mission”). Her instincts insisted they wanted something from her, but Jerome was about as direct and undiplomatic as a person could be, and she found that strangely comforting.

“Just thinking,” Violet replied now. “Have you ever had a secret?”

He took a leisurely sip of his tea and studied her carefully. “Sure.”

“Is there ever a right time to share it with someone?”

“S’pose that depends on the secret, and what’s at risk in the telling.”

“Quite a bit,” she admitted.

“And what’s the cost of keeping it to yourself?”

Violet slumped against the wall. “Also quite a bit.”

Jerome turned back to his work, measuring out where to realign the hinge in the jamb. Violet almost thought he’d abandoned the conversation when he said, “Everyone’s got secrets, just as everyone’s got a past.” He held a mouthful of nails between his lips so it came out slightly garbled. “We’re none of us the people we once were, but it’s still scary letting others through that gate. But those that’re worth it, they’ll let you know. Might be in different ways than you expect, but they’ll show you that they’re worthy of your trust.”

“How?” Bartleby snuck a vine into her hair; she only caught him seconds before he hacked off a sizable lock with the pruning shears he’d stolen again. “I will prune you until you don’t have vines anymore,” she warned him, and he retreated.

Jerome spit out the rest of the nails, chuckling. “I s’pose trust comes from the way they make you feel part of their circle. The way they make you feel safe.” He eyed the pothos with mild, almost-amused derision. “Safe like leaving your hair be and not hoarding weaponry.”

“You can imagine why it’s difficult for me,” she said dryly, gesturing to Bartleby, who froze at the attention, trying desperately to look like he wasn’t in the process of pilfering a few fallen nails. She sighed, mentally tasking herself with disarming him later, and massaged her hands.

Did Violet feel safe around Nathaniel? She wasn’t sure she really knew the meaning of the word or if it was something she felt around anyone .

“I’ll take another cuppa if you’re just going to stand there,” said Jerome, jerking her from her thoughts. She took his empty mug and went upstairs to fetch him some more tea.

Long after he’d left, her door now hanging straight and proud on its hinges, the conversation swam in Violet’s head. Violet wasn’t sure she’d ever had cause to truly trust anyone.

Your mother saw who you truly are and she abandoned you , Guy had told her.

You are so lucky I found you, petal.

The rest of the world may fear you, but you will always have a home with me.

It had taken her nearly all her life to realize that he had orchestrated all of it that way.

Her memories pressed into her consciousness like ivy climbing a wall, finding any hole, any foothold where it could stick.

Funnily enough, it was Sedgwick who had lit the spark that burned her relationship with Shadowfade. He had spent years trying to get under her skin, to unseat her and take her place as his favorite. None of it had worked until the day Guy sent her to the city of Silbourne.

“They’re amassing a militia against me,” Guy explained when he summoned her to his study, “led by some ‘great warrior’ or other who wants to make an impression upon the Queen.”

“What would you like me to do?”

“Go to Silbourne. Take care of the problem,” he told her, flicking his ring-laden fingers as if sending a child off to play. “I will follow in three days’ time.”

“Of course,” she said, and he dismissed her.

As Violet mounted her horse, Sedgwick had strolled into the stables, a folded piece of paper in his hand.

“What’s this?” she asked haughtily when he offered it to her.

“A little parting gift, Thornwitch,” said Sedgwick, winking.

“I want no gifts from you.”

His eyes glittered with mirth. “Believe me, you’ll want this one.”

Violet had rolled her eyes and shoved the paper into her pocket, riding away. It wasn’t until she made camp that night that she remembered it, unfolding the creased paper carefully as though it might explode—with Sedgwick, one could never be sure. And as her eyes scanned the letter there, her life changed forever.

She’d heard Sedgwick brag about his connections, of course—anyone who was in a room with him for more than five minutes had heard him boast of his ability to procure information—but he must have been exaggerating, never mind that Shadowfade trusted his network. He must have been a liar because this couldn’t possibly be true.

No, because if the letter before her eyes were true, the one that contained words like Captain Marigold Thistlewaite and missing daughter and kidnapped and still searching , then it would mean that Guy had lied to her about everything. It would mean she’d done terrible things because the man she trusted told her she was evil—and all the while there had been a ship somewhere in the Stained Glass Sea with purple sails called the Violet and a captain at its helm who had never abandoned her on an island after all.

It had been a long time since the Thornwitch cried, and when she noticed the hot moisture that tracked down her cheeks, it only made her angry. Sedgwick was lying. He had to be. She couldn’t trust him, not when he was so openly trying to replace her. Her thorns shredded the letter until nothing was left but a few scraps drifting in the wind.

And so the Thornwitch had ridden to Silbourne, the swirling vortex of emotion forming into a cyclone of anger. As she drew closer to the city, she announced her presence as she always did, by desiccating whole fields of crops, her smile growing as cries of dismay and fear rose around her.

They shot at her with arrows, as they usually did, but the Thornwitch simply opened her saddlebags, laden with soil, and grew strong vines that wove around her like tentacles, pulling arrows from the air and breaking them to pieces until they littered the packed dirt road behind her horse like a carpet of rose petals beneath a queen’s feet.

To either side of the road she grew tall, thick hedges, their wicked, long thorns just as toxic as their vivid purple flowers, and the armed men who rushed at her drew back just as quickly when they were overtaken by hacking coughs from the poison. It was a performance she had played out countless times, and she knew each line of the script by heart.

Her mouth curled in a wicked smile; this was what she was made for. As her purple cloak whipped around her, she—

Purple sails. A ship with purple sails.

No.

Violet snarled, and her thorns grew. She was the Thornwitch, fearsome and powerful, and that was the truth. That was what she’d been taught, and Guy wouldn’t lie to her. He’d taken her in. He’d protected her from those who would have called her a monster and punished her for the evil that was inherent in her. He’d cared for her, given her a home when no one else wanted her.

Hadn’t he?

Violet wavered, and her hesitation was enough for someone to get lucky. An arrow knocked her from her horse; a sword she barely dodged sliced open her lip. And by the time Guy found her, three days later as promised, and fought his way through the city to free her from the dungeons, she’d had time to let her thoughts fester.

“What happened , petal?” His voice had been a low hiss, and there was a shallow gash on his temple that dripped blood across his brow. He was still a man, she remembered thinking. For all that he had become, he could still bleed. The sounds of fighting had stopped; she imagined he must have won, as he always did. He wanted Silbourne, and Guy Shadowfade got what he wanted.

Like Violet.

“My mother,” she said, tucked back into the farthest reaches of the cell where she’d been kept. Cuffs on her wrists stopped her from accessing her magic, and the skin beneath them felt just as raw and angry as she did. The cut on her face had grown infected, and while it was agony, it wasn’t the worst pain she felt. “Did my mother abandon me?”

“Why are we reliving the past?” he said smoothly. “You know she did. I found you, and I took you in because I knew no one else would. I gave you a home, petal.”

“Tell me the truth. Did you rescue me? Or did you take me from her?”

He was a good liar, one of the best, but he hadn’t been prepared for this conversation, and in the instant before his mask settled into place, Violet saw it—alarm. Just how much truth there was to the story Sedgwick’s informant had shared remained to be seen, but there was truth to it.

“Let me get you out of here,” Guy said soothingly. “We’ll destroy this place, raze it to the ground for what they’ve done to you, and then we’ll go home and I’ll get one of the healers to fix that dreadful wound on your face. Really, petal, how did they manage to get the better of you? Frankly I’m a bit disappointed.”

She let him remove the cuffs from her wrists, but the second he did, she let her thorns grow long and vicious, forming twisted horns at her temples and vicious, spiky pauldrons at her shoulders. The wound on her face was torture, but this was armor in the best way she knew. Before she could think twice, she’d reached for Guy’s throat.

“You lied to me,” she growled. “My entire life , you lied to me.”

He gasped for air, pawing at her hands. “Petal, let go.”

She found she was crying, for the lies she had been told, yes, but also, for the first time, for the person she could have been if he hadn’t taken her and raised her to be a monster. If she’d been allowed to grow up on that ship in the Stained Glass Sea. If she had been loved instead of used.

“Violet…” Guy got himself together then, and his skin grew red-hot beneath her fingers until she was forced to let go. He coughed and collected himself quickly, and when he spoke again, his voice was a growl, his eyes lit with the threat of more magic. “That is quite enough.”

She shrank back from him like a dog who had been beaten.

“Those idiot sailors didn’t know what they had in you,” Guy snarled. “Born under a Convening . You were made for so much more than they offered. You would never have reached your potential if I hadn’t taken you in.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Of course I do!” he roared, and when she winced at his anger, he schooled himself back under control. Just like that, he was her father again, the man who’d raised her. Beseechingly, he said, “The past is the past, Violet. Haven’t I loved you well enough? Everything you are, you owe to me. Me , not some merchant nobody on a floating death trap. I made you.”

A monster , she thought, smelling the smoke of destruction though the tiny window of her cell. You made me a monster. The realization broke something within her, though she was careful not to show it.

He searched her face, and whatever he found there, he was satisfied. After all—as he said—he had made her. He swept from the dank stone corridor, leaving her to follow at his heel.

Guy had done more than destroy Silbourne’s militia that day. He had destroyed nearly the entire city, leveling buildings and allowing his minions to do as they pleased. Violet hated him. She loved him. She wasn’t sure what to think, what to do, where to go from here.

When they finished, Shadowfade stood above the destruction before his team of assembled villains, handsome and charismatic, and said, “All of this thanks to your Thornwitch.”

They took it like a celebration, but Violet knew it then for what it was: a warning. She came home to Shadowfade Castle to all the accolades she had yearned for, but they felt hollow now, a snakeskin from an animal that had already shed. Guy celebrated the sack of Silbourne by giving her full rein over the southwest lawn. That seed of something inside Violet had taken root, though, and she found she couldn’t enjoy the act of growing as she once had. She hadn’t been abandoned, and the man who raised her wasn’t her savior. What would her life be like now if he hadn’t taken her? Would she have drifted toward dark magic anyway, or was that affinity, so lovingly nurtured by Guy, just another lie?

A complicated hedge maze grew on the southwest lawn from Violet’s tattered thoughts, unnavigable by anyone but her unless she wanted them to find their way through. The vivid, tropical-looking flowers were carnivorous and toxic, and the thorny hedged passageways often shifted, trapping unwary visitors inside the maze until they had no choice but to crawl out through its wicked thorns. Guy thought it hilarious whenever one of his cronies emerged into the hall radiating fury and covered in scratches, their clothing torn. Before long, everyone learned to treat the misleadingly beautiful new garden like any other danger on the grounds of Shadowfade Castle.

As for Violet, the cut on her face never quite healed, and she learned never to trust anyone again.

Now, as she tidied her shop, cleaning soil and leaves from the counter, straightening the displays, Violet marveled at what that day had brought. The very worst of her reputation, yes, for Silbourne would follow her and haunt her for as long as she lived. But another seed had taken root as well.

The next time Guy had asked her to become the Thornwitch, Violet had said no.

He had not liked her answer. He’d threatened her, burned one of her gardens, and, after she’d refused to change her mind, locked her in her room. But he had not replaced her, hadn’t given Sedgwick or any of the others the seat at his side.

“The Thornwitch is indisposed,” he’d told the other villains of Shadowfade Castle. He hadn’t wanted them to know she’d disobeyed. After weeks in her tower room like a princess of legend, with only Bartleby for company, Violet had stopped moping and decided enough was enough. She couldn’t get rid of Shadowfade herself, but she knew of someone who could.

She’d written a letter and sent it before she could think twice.

Violet did not know it at the time, but it had been the beginning of the end.