The Eyes of a King Read Free

together like any family anywhere. Then it was no longer silent; close by, people were shouting.
    The castle gate fell with a loud explosion. Suddenly on their knees, the king and the queen stared at each other. “Don’t move,” the man told his son. Rebel troops were shouting below. Over the edge of the balcony, the boy could see them swarming into the castle yard like ants. The family clung together. The king drew a knife from his belt and it glinted red in the sunset. There was a sudden burst of gunshots in a room below. “They have guns,” the man breathed into his wife’s ear. “They have guns; is this possible? Who has been making guns?” She caught his hand; the small click of their two rings touching was harsh in the quiet.
    Heavy footsteps were coming closer below the balcony door. The king stood up, and the queen followed. His eyes never leaving the door, the prince clutched at his mother’s hand and found it. She moved between him and the doorway. The footsteps came closer.
    The door shot open, the king ran forward, and two gunshots echoed suddenly around the towers and rooftops of the palace. The knife fell from the king’s hand and clattered to the ground, and the king and the queen landed hard on the stone of the balcony. No one had resisted the attack. It had been too sudden.
    There was silence. One minute the man and the woman had been living; the next they were not. The blood crept quietly over the stone, and no one moved.
    The prince’s tears stuck in his throat, and he picked up the knife and threw it at the soldier who had shot. It sliced into his eye and the side of his face and stuck there for a moment. The man dropped the pistol and fell to his knees, his hands clasped to hisface. Blood spilled between his fingers, thick and dark, and spattered onto the stone. Another soldier raised his gun. “No!” cried the injured one, his hands still over his face. “Remember the prophecy! Do not kill the prince!”
    They were on their way home. The girl—now five years old—and her grandmother. The radio was playing and the woman sang a few lines and turned it up louder. The little girl waved her arms like a dancer. Her grandmother laughed. “You’ll be dancing on a stage one day.”
    “I hope I will, if I practice hard,” said the girl, so earnestly that her grandmother laughed again. The bird charm still hung around the girl’s neck, and her eyes had sharpened to a bright blue now—the same blue as the jewel in the center of the necklace, as though it had been made for her.
    The lines of traffic moved fast. On the other side of the road, the cars stood in long queues, crammed close to each other. The girl began to doze in the evening light, rocking with every slight turn. Sandy shells and pebbles clattered on the dashboard. The woman reached across and touched her granddaughter’s cheek as she slept.
    Suddenly horns blared through the music. A lorry swung across the road, rocking. The girl woke, confused and already screaming in the swerving car. The last thing she saw before darkness was her grandmother struggling to turn the wheel one way then the other, while lorries loomed over the car and tires screamed somewhere close. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” said her grandmother desperately, though the girl did not know why she was saying it. Then the car turned over and everything vanished.
    The girl cried all that night in her mother’s arms, in a cold white hospital with the dark close outside. They could have gone home, but neither of them thought of it. The little girl had been here many times before. This was the hospital where she had been born; a year later she had been carried here every day for three weeks while her father was dying. She had been here many times before, but this was the time she would remember.
    The boy cried too, suddenly alone in a strange country, with only a stranger who could not comfort him. He looked out at the evening star, the star that was the