Heir of Thorns

by Emma Savant

  She sat up straighter. “You’ve talked to Hedley?”

  “He’s here,” I said. “Hasn’t he seen you?”

  She shook her head. “Garritt has been keeping me from seeing anyone or doing anything useful. He claims I ought to be focused on my dancing lessons and on going to fittings for my wedding gown.” She grimaced. The thought of her wedding dress, which I’d noticed women often liked talking about even if they didn’t have a wedding in sight, seemed to fill her with dread.

  The constant spark of anger that had glowed inside me over the last few days grew into a small flame. It was a good thing Duke Remington had kicked me out of the palace. If we passed each other in the hall now, I was liable to tell him exactly what I thought of his treatment of Lilian, and everyone else--and I had a feeling it would be my fists rather than my mouth doing the talking.

  “Well, Hedley’s here,” I said, fighting to keep my tone calm. “He came to see how the blight was affecting the grounds, and he’s staying through the end of the Festival. The Head Housekeeper gave him a room in the servants’ quarters, so he didn’t have to pay for lodgings in the city, and Hyacinth’s going to join him before the Festival starts.”

  “Oh, I can’t wait to see Hyacinth.” Lilian’s body softened a little under my arm. “She was always so kind to me when I was little. Remember when she caught us playing in the flour bin?”

  It was a memory I hadn’t thought of in years. I snorted. Lilian and I couldn’t have been more than four or five years old, and one of us had somehow figured out that flour was even more fun to play in than the sand in Lilian’s sandbox. Hyacinth had caught us in the pantry, covered head to toe in flour, and proclaiming that we were now cloud people.

  “She wasn’t even mad,” I said.

  “She was mad! She warned us that she’d never bake raspberry jam tarts ever again!”

  “She was laughing while she said it.”

  Voices sounded outside the shed. I froze, and Lilian held her breath. They were too far away for me to make out what they were saying, although I was fairly certain one voice was Chervil’s. The voices grew closer, then faded as they walked away.

  I turned to Lilian and slipped my arm off her shoulder, the mirth from a moment before gone.

  “We probably shouldn’t stay here too long,” I said. “Someone might come looking for you.”

  “I told my maids to tell Garritt I’d gone riding along the willow walk if he asked,” she said. The winding dirt path was on the other side of the gardens, as far from the palace as one could get without leaving the grounds. “He’s too busy being a domineering brute to come looking for me.”

  The acidity in her voice was too pronounced to ignore, and I choked back a laugh. Few things in this world were quite as satisfying as knowing Lilian disliked the same people I did.

  It would have been more satisfying if she hadn’t been engaged to marry this one.

  “What did Hedley say?” she said. “Before I go, what did you mean? That things are connected?”

  “The flowers and everything else that’s happening,” I said. “He’s got this hare-brained theory. I mean, I don’t know that it’s hare-brained--Hedley doesn’t usually go in for that sort of thing--but it seems like he’s reaching for magical solutions when the real problems are much more ordinary.”

  “What’s his theory?” she said. “I’m open to hare-brained ideas.”

  “He thinks it’s magic,” I said. “That someone maybe cursed the gardens, and that the curse is what’s making the flowers die.”

  She furrowed her eyebrows. “Go on.”

  “That’s it, really. He thinks the flowers are somehow connected to everyone’s happiness, and so, if somebody cursed the flowers, they basically cursed everyone. The other possibility we’ve floated around is that the gardens were charmed eighteen years ago, and now that charm is wearing off. He thinks that’s why things got so much better for the kingdom back then. Personally, I think your father is just a good king.”

  Lilian’s lips drew to a thin line. “I’m rather reconsidering my view on that subject right now.” I’d never heard her voice quite that icy; whatever her father’s reasons for handing the reins of the kingdom to Garritt and disappearing, Lilian wasn’t having it.

  I hesitated before saying my next words. I would rather do anything than cause Lilian pain, but this next bit was important, and it had to be said.

  “He also thinks whatever’s happening has something to do with your mother’s illness.” I bit my lip and straightened my shoulders. “And I agree. They’re connected.”

  “Why?” She narrowed her eyes. “How? What do you know?”

  “I don’t know anything.” Goosebumps rose on my arms at the memory of the gray death creeping up the queen’s hair. I knew I should tell Lilian. But I couldn’t force my mouth to shape the words. I tried, but they stuck in my throat. I couldn’t be the one to tell her that horrific news, not without knowing for sure what the queen knew. “You need to see your mother.”

  “I told you, she won’t see me.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” I said. “You need to see her and ask her what’s going on. I don’t know what’s going on, but the queen--I think she does.” Perhaps more than the image of the queen’s graying hair, the way she hadn’t seemed upset by whatever was happening to her had stuck with me. She had been reading in bed, cheerful and calm. It didn’t make sense. “Your mother knows something, and someone needs to talk to her. You’re the only person who might be able to force their way in.”

  “I tried.” Lilian’s eyes flashed. “Her guard took my arm and almost forced me away from her door.”

  The palace guards might have been braver than I gave them credit for. There was no power on earth that could have compelled me to push Lilian anywhere against her will.

  “Then maybe don’t go in through the door.” My ankle twinged at the memory of my clumsy fall from the castle wall, and I hastily added, “Don’t go in through a window, either.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You think I’m the kind of girl to go through windows?”

  I hadn’t been the kind of guy to peer through windows, but then, here I was.

  “I’m just saying, maybe there’s another way,” I said. “Could you send her a letter? Claim you’re horribly sick and need to see your mother before you die a dramatic death from, I don’t know, a sudden walnut allergy?”

  The corner of Lilian’s mouth twitched. “Have a nervous breakdown the next time a harp string breaks?” Her eyes twinkled. “Throw a tantrum because Cottonpuff keeps having accidents on the carpet and demand the queen use her monarchial powers to order a public puppy execution?”

  I grinned. “Insist that you can’t entertain the Duchess of Silverseed without your mother there to take on half the burden of her long-winded stories?”

  “Refuse to eat or drink anything unless Mama is there to enjoy it with me?”

  “Stand outside her door and scream like a banshee until she has to come outside just to shut you up?”

  “That one might work,” she said. “I’ll try.”

  “Maybe try the letter first.”

  She winked. “Where’s the fun in that?”

  The world might be crumbling around my ears. But even in the midst of it all, Lilian shone. I tucked a strand of golden hair behind her ears.

  “I love you, Lils.”

  “I know.” She gazed at me as if looking deeply enough could somehow compensate for the endless divide between us. “I love you, too. I just wish it did us any good.”

  6th April

  Ahead of me in the garden, voices shouted at one another, the argument escalating by the moment. I quickened my pace and ducked through the arch cut into a tall, graying hedge just in time to see Linden step forward and scream into Reed’s face.

  “Maybe you should back up and let me do my job,” he shouted. “I don’t have time for your attitude, and I don’t have time to argue about water lilies with you.”

  R
eed held his ground. “It’s not about water lilies, and you know it. Mr. Gilding ordered us to destroy infected plants. If you can’t follow orders, you bet I’m going to step in and do something about it. I’ll pick up your slack, but I won’t let you treat me like garbage for it.”

  “I’ll treat you like garbage if I--”

  “I’ll let you do your job if you do your job,” Reed snapped. “If you’d rather just mope around the gardens being pissy because you somehow think you’d handle the biggest crisis Floris has ever seen better than your boss, you’d better go do that and get out of my way.”

  “Touch my gardens again, and I swear I’ll have your head.”

  “Oh yeah?” Reed said. He took a step closer, not that there was much room between them. “You try to stop me from taking care of these gardens, and we’ll see who has whose head.”

  “Knock it off.”

  The volume of my own voice surprised me. I wasn’t much of a yeller and never had been, but my body seemed to think otherwise right now.

  I stepped toward them and gestured at them to break it up. Linden glared at me.

  “You’d better get your staff under control,” he said. “If you can’t take care of your gardens, you owe it to those of us who are professionals to keep some semblance of order around here.”

  I held up a hand. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s going on: He’s being a real--” Reed started.

  I cut him off with a sharp gesture.

  “Take a deep breath, both of you. What happened? Reed, you first.”

  “Of course, friends always come first,” Linden muttered.

  I folded my arms. “Fine, then. You go. I don’t care so long as you talk one at a time.”

  “Reed here has been taking liberties in the water garden,” Linden said. “As you know from the last round of assignments, I’m in charge of that area until the Festival. I told my staff there to stop worrying about destroying the blighted plants and to move the healthy ones into tanks until we can transport them to the Festival. We only have so many hours in a day, and burning the plants clearly isn’t a good use of our time. And then he decided he needed to spend the entire day pulling up infected plants instead of rescuing the survivors as I ordered.”

  “We can’t just let it spread,” Reed started.

  I shook my head sharply at him, and he folded his arms and glared at the ground, breathing hard.

  “Did the healthy plants get moved?”

  Linden scowled. “Not fast enough. We lost three to blight today because Reed was too busy wasting his time disobeying my instructions.”

  I turned to Reed. “That true?”

  “You said to burn the infected plants!” he said. “You’re Head Gardener, even if some people can’t seem to accept that. Your instructions are the ones I’m following.”

  I took a deep breath. Reed looked to me for support, while Linden narrowed his eyes and waited for me to side with one of the only people in the garden who had been civil to me over the past few months. I bit the inside of my cheek.

  “I am Head Gardener,” I said.

  Linden rolled his eyes, and I cleared my throat.

  “However, Linden is in charge of the water garden. And frankly, he’s got a lot more experience than me with both water plants and tulips. We hadn’t thought of rescuing and quarantining the healthy plants. It’s a good idea. Besides, he’s the boss in that garden, and these grounds can’t run smoothly if we don’t respect each other’s authority.”

  Reed frowned at me as if trying to decide whether I meant anything I was saying or was just trying to stay in Linden’s not-wholly-despicable graces.

  “If you’ve got a problem with a supervisor’s orders, bring it to me. Otherwise, I think it’s best if we assume we all know what we’re doing. Linden, keep quarantining. Reed, do what he tells you to do. You’d want the same thing from your apprentices in the stone fruit orchards.”

  Reed pressed his lips together, and his shoulders stayed tense, but he nodded sullenly at the ground. Linden observed me with skeptical, narrowed eyes.

  “Linden, does quarantining seem to be working?”

  He nodded, just barely. “We haven’t seen blight affecting the plants we moved into a greenhouse, but it’s also too soon to tell.”

  “Keep going with that, then,” I said. “Anything you think might save the plants.”

  He jerked his chin at me in acknowledgment. “Thank you, sir.”

  He’d never called me sir before. I couldn’t tell if it was sarcastic.

  “Reed?”

  “Fine,” he muttered. “Sorry, Linden.”

  He held out a hand, and, with visible reluctance, Linden shook it. Linden strode away, and Reed watched him with a dark expression.

  “He’s a self-righteous thorn in my side,” Reed said, quietly enough that Linden couldn’t hear him.

  “Yeah, I know. He’s right, though. Sorry.”

  “Nah, you can’t take sides just because we’re friends. I’m just sick of listening to them all act like you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s not like any of them have managed to save the kingdom.”

  “I’m afraid that might be beyond all of us.”

  I looked out across the gardens. Every morning over the past week had been worse than the last, but today’s sunrise had illuminated a whole new level of devastation. The gardens were gray. The apprentices would never be able to keep up with the spreading death, even if we hired twice as many and kept them all busy around the clock.

  Linden was right. We were going to have to stop burning plants entirely. The only thing to do now was try to rescue what was left.

  Including my entry to the Festival competition, if it was even still alive.

  “I need to go deal with something,” I said.

  Reed nodded. Gloom darkened his face, and I recognized the expression. I had a feeling I was wearing it, too.

  I clapped Reed on the shoulder. “You’re doing everything you can. That’s all we can do.”

  My words didn’t seem to make him feel any better, and why should they? The stupidity of them echoed in my head as I walked to my private garden alone.

  I didn’t have hope. No one who was paying attention could possibly have hope, not when the gardens looked like this. Even the grass was beginning to turn, the once vibrant blades fading to soggy, colorless mush on either side of the path. Above me, the sky shone blue and bright, mocking the devastation below.

  I hesitated outside the door to my private garden. Memories of the last time I’d seen Lilian here flooded my mind. That had been a moment of hope. I hadn’t dared set foot inside since. There was too much to do elsewhere, and I didn’t think I could bear to see the blight grip the sacred space I had created for myself.

  But I had to rescue my competition flowers if they were still alive.

  I closed my eyes and uttered a silent wish to whatever distant powers might be listening. Then, heart in my throat, I opened the door and gasped.

  “It doesn’t make sense.” I turned around, taking in the dazzling green vines that swung overhead.

  Hedley stood in the middle of my garden, his arms folded, and his eyes taking in every last fluttering leaf and arching stem. I’d left the garden at a fast hobble and dragged him back here, partially because whatever was happening in here seemed important and partially because I needed someone else to confirm that my eyes weren’t playing wild tricks on me.

  “The garden walls aren’t that high,” I said. “And it’s not like walls help anyway. The blight comes into the greenhouses just as well as anywhere else. Did you use some kind of special fertilizer in here when it was your garden? Something that might still be having an effect?”

  “Nothing I used could do this,” he said.

  We stood, marveling at the life around us. Everything here was green--green, or green accented with the bright colors of blooming flowers. More than that, everything was ali
ve. No hint of gray death crept along the branches of the rose bushes or spoiled the delicate white flowers of the trillium patch. Even the moss that oozed up between paving stones was vibrant.

  “This is magic,” Hedley said at last. “These flowers were grown from magic, and it’s magic that’s keeping them alive.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but what evidence did I have against his theory? This garden certainly wasn’t thriving thanks to my efforts.

  “Why here?” I said. “If magic is affecting the gardens, why is this the only place the blight hasn’t touched? Do you think one of the old head gardeners was a magician? Before you?”

  Hedley tapped his fingers against his suspenders. “No, Juniper was no magician. Nor a witch, either. And it’s as I told you: The magic I sense in the kingdom didn’t arrive until after the king and queen were wed.”

  I squinted at him. “You’re not a secret wizard, are you?”

  He laughed. “I daresay I’d have done more to stop the spread of this blight if I were.” He focused on me, his smile fading to a look of speculation. “I daresay you might be one, though.”

  “We’ve already been through this.”

  He nodded and clucked softly to himself, like a clock marking seconds. His silvery brows drew together in thought.

  “You know lemon daisies don’t usually bloom at this time of year?”

  I remembered having this same conversation with Lilian only a couple of weeks ago. This shouldn’t be blooming yet, she had said about a cluster of metallic blossoms that sparkled like gold dust. Goldenrods don’t come on until autumn.

  I told Hedley the same thing I’d told her. “Everything in this garden thrives. I don’t know why.”

  “You don’t think you have magic about you?”

  “The rest of the gardens wouldn’t look as pitiful as they do now if I did,” I said. “Whatever’s happening here, I didn’t do it.”

  Hedley didn’t seem convinced. He walked slowly down the paved path, taking in the cascading blossoms of the sweetspire and the odd, spiky blooms of the bottlebrush shrubs. Every single flower seemed at its peak; even the blooms that were fading were doing so with graceful elegance as if a painter had designed them that way.