Page 229 of Golden Queen
Papa was the newly appointed Chancellor of Windemere, the second most powerful position in the kingdom. It was a duty Franca knew both honored and terrified him since they were facing the greatest war in living memory.
She knew he would have been excited for the soldiers to bring him news of the capital or word of the queen who was on her way to Nightfall to bring them help.
Franca had not seen him, though. She had been half drowsing with her head leaned against the carriage window.
She heard her mother's scream. It ripped through the air, lancing straight through her middle with alien terror. She had never imagined such a sound could come from her gentle lady mother.
Gierta grabbed her arm and tried to hold her inside the carriage, but she jerked away and leaped down to the Godsway. She saw her father's head, still in motion rolling across the cobbles of the road.
His sightless eyes and open mouth, the way the severed flesh at the end of his neck looked so horribly wrong, the color dreadful and world-endingly final. The memory of that red blood streaming, twirling out around his head in a graceful arc…and the raw, fragile pink showing against his lovely brown skin would haunt her dreams for the rest of her life.
But the images that followed would haunt her every waking moment as the guards turned their blades on the Mandelians, one by one. They exterminated her family, even her tiny baby sister, who was ripped violently from her mother's shrieking arms and thrown onto the ground.
Franca did not see her mother die except to note her body falling lifelessly to the road; the pale blue linen of her traveling dress crumpling at the corner of her vision.
She did not even catch a glimpse of her grandmother who had been clawing across the road, her spine severed by the guard who was laughing as he watched the old woman pull herself to her daughter on fingertips mangled by the sharp edges of the road.
Somewhere in Franca's mind, she heard that laughter, registered the desperation of her grandmother, the finality of her mother's slack expression, and the blood that was absolutely everywhere.
But Franca had been watching Talia. She had been raging, screaming, her voice the only weapon she had to wield as they held her arms behind her and kept her away from her sister.
Anger was Franca's only emotion—the only one she had left in her shattered heart. She thought it would consume her as she saw the guard's big boot rising above her baby sister's fragile head. Her sweet cherub's face set in a scream of terror, little round mouth open, showing the single white tooth that had erupted from her pink gums the day before.
Franca screamed, “No! No! No! Please dear gods, no!”
She fought the hands holding her, dug her fingernails into flesh until she felt them break.
She threw her head back, trying to hit the guard with it. She threw it back so hard she expected her skull to crack on the man's helm—fully willing to beat him to death with her own head if that was what it took.
But the guard leaned back and laughed at her. Laughed while she fought and cried and raged.
The boot had come down, and Franca could only be glad that her mother's eyes had already gone vacant and empty before the sound of that boot striking Talia's head echoed through the godsgrass. It was followed by a deafening roar and a pressure inside her head that made her think her bones would splinter.
Franca closed her eyes and remembered the way Talia's head had smelled so sweet and how her dark curls tickled her nose as she held her squirming little sister on her lap.
She wanted that memory in her mind when her own turn came. So she closed her eyes and waited.
But the sword did not come. The boot did not come.
Instead, she was roughly pushed aside while the soldiers argued. She fell, striking her chin on the road as they debated whether the regent would care about her honor or whether he just wanted her back in the capital as window dressing for the Penjani king. She did not even register until later that their argument had been about whether they might be allowed to rape her.
In that moment, all Franca knew was anger. Her fingers dug into the Godsway, rocks and dirt embedding themselves into the raw flesh at the end of her fingers where her perfectly manicured, pale-pink lacquered fingernails had been just a few moments ago.
She would die killing as many of them as she could. She pulled herself along, thinking of getting to her father’s sword, tucked away beneath the carriage seat.
The thought of her father brought her to a stop. She remembered the worry he’d felt for his family. What he'd wanted them to do; to hide. She imagined him across the veil, looking down at her, the only one of them left.
The rage bled away to steely resolve.
They were not even looking at her, so Franca climbed to her feet and ran. Two long strides had her off the Godsway and into the grass, the pale golden stalks bending and swishing past her as she cut through the field.
Franca was fast. She had always been fast. Much faster than all the boys in Mandel. Even when she was much too old to still be racing them across the yard of her family's estate, she loved to see the looks on their faces when she left them in her dust.
She saw her maid as she passed the carriage. The pale face and wide, startled eyes peering from the window where Gierta was still cowering.
Franca didn't hesitate though. Didn't spare a single thought for whether she should wait for her—try to help Gierta. Franca used her long legs, the ones her mother had compared to an ocelon, whose powerful jumps could carry the deer over the tops of the godsgrass stalks.
She ran and ran, leaving the terror behind her. She kept going until she was in the godsgrass so deep that it covered her head. She didn't stop to listen, didn't stop to look. She didn't even stop when her lungs screamed out in agony and her sides cramped.
