SMV Chapter 3: King Emerald’s Fall
Chapter 3
Clementine (Present Day)
“Where’ve you been?” Citrine pounced on me the moment I stepped through the door. Literally. She was on All-Fours.
“Around town,” I told her, which was only part of the truth, of course. I opened my mahogany faux leather satchel and took out a book titled 1,000 Jokes to Tell that will Make or Break a Friendship, and held it out for her. “I picked up your library book for you.”
My sister Stood-Up and took it from me. “Thanks!” Her loosed, wavy, coffee-colored hair fell over her shoulders and her narrow copper-colored eyes smiled at me.
“Although, upon further inspection I hardly think that was a good idea,” I spoke with a stuffy accent and turned my nose up playfully. We laughed.
Citrine opened the book, read a few sentences, and then started giggling. “Okay okay, listen: Did you hear about the mathematician who’s afraid of negative numbers? He’ll stop at nothing to avoid them.”
I blinked at her. “I think we’re breaking our friendship, Citrine.”
“Oh, boy, this thing is great. Do you think I could memorize every single joke in this book by next year?” Citrine wondered, her eyes moving across the page at the speed of light.
“You know what? I’ll even buy it for you if you promise not to joke me to death.” I walked over to the couch and flopped onto it, curling my legs close to me so Citrine could sit down beside me.
“That would be a grave mistake.”
I snorted. As much as I wanted to be able to roll my eyes at the jokes my sister likes to tell, I physically can’t. (Sometimes, anyway.)
“Hey, Citrine?”
“Yeah?”
“I have a secret,” I whispered.
Citrine looked up from her book. “Come again?”
I motioned for her to lean closer to me so I could whisper in her ear. “I met someone-”
Citrine looked at me with raised eyebrows. “What’s his name?”
“What? No- that’s not what I-” I waved away the question and motioned for her to get closer again. “No, I meant that I went into the Black Forest and met a girl our age named Flynne.”
“Wow, I didn’t know we’ve both been going into the forest.” We high-fived. “So what’s she like? Is she nice?”
“Yeah, she’s pretty nice. She’s funny- not like ‘tells jokes funny’, but real fun-” Citrine gave me a Look. “Uh, just a type of funny. She actually saved my life, which was a little embarrassing, I have to admit, but at least I’m alive.”
I proceeded to tell Citrine everything- which turned out to be a lot less than it felt like. Citrine held her breath when I mentioned the whole aftershock of the antidote, but was also eager to meet Flynne.
“What are you girls whispering about?” Mom came down the stairs and into the living room.
“Hi Mama,” I stood up to give her a hug. “Just, you know, school.”
“Speaking of, how was school today?” Mom asked, sitting down on the couch beside me. “Was Mrs. Laurel there, or is she still sick?”
“No she was there,” I nodded. From there Citrine and I told Mom about our day, our classes, who was being a jerk, blah blah blah.
* * *
“So, Dad, what do you think it would mean if Foxes all of a sudden started coming to Moonflower Valley?” We were all eating dinner in our backyard. This was a special thing in my family, eating outside, since it’s only warm enough to do this a few months out of the year.
My dad furrowed his brow. “Um, it could mean that they’re trying to make peace with Oleander, they’re scoping out for an attack, hm… Why the sudden interest?”
“Just wondering,” I shrugged, but inside I was a little worried. What if Flynne had been scoping out for an attack? No. That’s stupid. She’s thirteen, and she didn’t let me freak out too long about my hand. If she had been up to something, she probably would’ve shoved some berries up my mouth, or just never spoken to me in the first place. Oh, right. My hand.
I looked down at my fingers on my right hand and sighed. They had weird little scars, even though I hadn’t been cut at all. My mom had seen them before I did, and she’d rubbed a salve all over and asked me how it happened. Even though I’d put the pieces together, I didn’t tell her I’d been in the forest, for obvious reasons. I wanted to ask Flynne about them the next day, see if she knew how to get rid of them.
“Dad, do you think Foxes would come near the border if they were just curious?”
“Uh, I doubt it, honey,” he said, blowing on a spoonful of soup. “That wouldn’t be smart, since Oleander accused them of murdering the king.”
I nodded. I’ve had to sit through hours and hours of history classes, learning about the rise and fall of King Emerald.
Thirteen years ago, a little while before I was born, Queen Sapphire grew very ill. She stopped making public appearances, and King Emerald hailed the best doctors from every kingdom he could think of, but it was no use. She passed away shortly after I was born, causing much grief throughout the kingdom. She was a kind and just ruler, and her people were sad to see her go.
Samara, the eldest of two daughters, began traveling to distant and nearby kingdoms a few years after her mother passed. My mother has told me what she was like, because she was the head chef back when King Emerald was ruling. Samara was the kind of girl that could never sit still during lessons, the kind that always came into the servants quarters to ask how everyone was doing. She was the kind of girl that wanted to do things for herself, and so my mom taught her to cook and bake, and the two, along with Willow, the younger princess, bonded a lot after Queen Sapphire died.
Samara longed for adventure. She would write letters to the kingdom that were put into the newspapers, telling her people of her travels. For a while, King Emerald was mourning his wife, but he was also cherishing the time he had with his youngest daughter. There were no wars, and few parties at the palace, because the king was taking a rest.
But that all changed when Samara died five years later.
She had been visiting the Eastern pack, teaching them how to advance their technology and how to make fried dough with sweet chocolate in the middle, which has been a Valley secret for hundreds of years. She was reinstating their decades old peace treaty, ensuring no wars for the next fifty years. At least, that was the plan. She had arranged a big party in Moonflower Valley, one that she would invite the entirety of the Fox Pack to. She headed home a week before to help decorate and oversee the preparations with her father and younger sister. But on her way, she was brutally murdered. At first, nobody knew. The party went on, and King Emerald was disappointed that his daughter had missed it, but it wasn’t unlike her to get distracted during her travels. What was unusual, however, was that the letters stopped. After not hearing from her for an entire week, he sent scouts out into the Black Forest to search for her.
What they found had not been expected.
Samara’s funeral was held a week later, and again, the kingdom mourned. But after grieving, King Emerald was bent on revenge. How could the Foxes kill his daughter? How could they cause him and Willow so much pain? He declared war on the East Pack and many small battles were fought in the surrounding forest. The East wrote for help, but scouts from here intercepted the messengers and… well, they shot the messenger. Still, the East put up a fight. They had to use the element of surprise since they were so much smaller than Moonflower Valley. But even that wasn’t enough.
General Hawksley, now deceased, led the winning battle. Him and his battalions stormed the East under the cover of darkness, killed the East Pack’s leaders, and drove out the rest. Finally, the war was over. The Foxes, that had once been only a long car ride away, a small kingdom bursting with different cultures and ways of life. The Foxes were… gone.
King Emerald went into the Forest to scout out his new territory with an entourage of twenty-five men and women. That evening, only three returned. They were bloodied and bruised, and they’d brought back the body of King Emerald. They had been ambushed by Foxes, they said, and they’d killed the king and the rest of the entourage. Moonflower Valley mourned again.
(That was when my mother adopted Citrine. Her parents had been part of King Emerald’s entourage that day, and… by the end of the month, my best friend was my new sister.)
Oleander, the late king’s most trusted advisor, was appointed regent until Willow was old enough to rule alone. He threw himself a big party and sent Willow to live with some servants in the Summer Palace. My mother was one of them. Us Hazelwoods all moved down to the fringes of the Valley, near where two of our cousins from our mother’s side lives. My mom cared for Willow along with the other servants, and eventually, once Willow was older, she started caring for us. Since Oleander started his “reign”, he held large parties for the nobility and rehired members for the council. I’ve heard my dad mutter about the bills before, and he’s said things like “It wasn’t like this with King Emerald…”.
Now, though, it’s clear that there’s something not quite right about Oleander’s rule- temporary as it may be.
I finished my soup and didn’t bring up the Foxes- or politics- again.
Does anybody have any ideas for the chapter title? Oh, and I wanted to say… This is the last chapter I’ll be posting for now. 😁 I hope you all enjoyed it!
