by Emma Savant
“We’re not alone,” Hemlock said. “Magicians throughout our community report the same effect. Whatever this affliction is, it’s a poison to our magic just as it’s a poison to the flowers.”
“Can I train my magic anyway?” I said. “I think I have some. Just a little. Do you think learning your craft could be enough to help me keep the palace gardens from dying completely?”
They exchanged glances, a wordless conversation passing between them. Hemlock turned back to me with an encouraging smile, but I’d seen enough of their silent exchange to know she was only being kind.
“You never know,” she said. “Perhaps you’ll have better luck than us.”
It was the kind of maybe people gave to children when they claimed they wanted to be unicorns or ogres when they grew up. I swallowed the last of my tea and tried to be gracious.
“Thank you for your time,” I said. “I’m sorry the blight is affecting you.”
“Likewise,” Hemlock said. She searched my face, her expression suddenly cautious. “Tell me, how is the queen?”
I searched hers right back. She knew something, perhaps more than me, but I couldn’t risk it. Telling Lilian she needed to see her mother was one thing; revealing palace secrets to a virtual stranger was another entirely.
“I assume Her Majesty is well.” I set my teacup on the boulder next to me. “I don’t see her often. She’s busy with the upcoming royal wedding.”
“Of course.” Hemlock glanced at Cypress, who met her gaze and looked quickly away. “Of course, and no doubt you spend most of your time in the gardens. How silly of me. Still, if you happen to speak to one of her maids, do pass on our best wishes, won’t you?”
7th April
“You should know better than to read the news by now,” Reed said.
I glanced up from the morning paper, which I was reading in the gardens while I ate the plate of eggs on toast one of the maids had brought out to me.
“Knowing something and having the self-discipline to follow through are two different things,” I said.
He sat on the bench next to me and reached for the section of the paper I hadn’t read yet. I finished the last few bites of my egg while I skimmed an article on the blight. It confirmed what the magicians had told me: The disease was continuing to spread, radiating out from the palace like the unfurling petals of some poisonous bloom. Farmers’ crops were beginning to fail in large numbers, and the Agriculture Office was scrambling to arrange the importation of grain from other countries. Food prices were set to skyrocket, and an Agriculture Office representative encouraged people to begin preserving food, however they could. Bottling produce was best, he said, as there was no guarantee the blight wouldn’t find some way to infect apples and potatoes being stored in cellars.
At least we were more or less an island. Our northern coast connected with the continent’s capital city of Urbis, but other than that, ocean separated us from other kingdoms. It would be foolish to hope the blight would never find a way to cross the waves, but perhaps, if all the botanists and magicians and farmers and gardeners worked together, we could find a way to fight this plague before it took hold in other lands.
“Grim news on the Festival front,” Reed said. “Looks like another kingdom is predicted to win first prize in just about every competition we’ve got. Smart money is on Elder for best sapling, and it sounds like Enchantia and Skyla might be neck-and-neck for best flower.”
I scoffed. “Enchantia always thinks it’s going to win best flower, and it never has. Floris owns that title.”
Reed glanced at me. A rose petal fell from a blossom on the topiary next to the bench and fluttered onto his lap. “Floris is dying. What flowers are we going to bring? Linden’s last fringed tulip just turned gray, and I’m sure you know Briar had to withdraw her entry after her lily hybrids died.”
“There are still Florians entering the competition,” I said. “Florians from farther away, near the coast. We’ll still win.”
“That’s not what this says.” He shook the newspaper, and the pages rustled with the movement. “Apparently, two of the greenhouses that were supposed to be in stiff competition both closed down this week.”
I grimaced. “I hadn’t heard that.”
“It’s not looking good out there. Still, at least, people are coming to the Festival.”
I nodded as if I agreed, but it was a small consolation. I’d already received a note from the Horticulture Council this morning, informing me that they were going post inspectors at all the docks to make sure plants leaving the country weren’t carrying blight. Their presence was going to be an embarrassment, a sign to the rest of the world that Floris had fallen, but it was a necessary embarrassment.
The Festival was always the highlight of the year, and I’d spent my whole life looking forward to finally being old enough to enter my own flowers into the competitions. This year, not only was I old enough, but I was also the head gardener of the Palace of Floris. It should have been a triumph.
Now, it sounded like Floris would be lucky to have any flowers to show at all.
Still, I had my entry. My blooms, secreted away in my private garden, remained impossibly untouched by the curse that had devastated the rest of the country. I would take them to the Festival. I wouldn’t win the first-prize trophy, of course, but at least Floris would be represented.
“We’ll do the best we can,” I said, with far more resolve than I felt. “That’s all we can do.”
Reed nodded, most likely more to reassure me than because he believed it himself. He was a good friend.
I kept looking at the paper even after Reed left. The articles all had the same tone, a blend of hysteria and gossip that sold newspapers but was justified even so. This article warned about strawberry shortages; that one theorized that a new weed-killing potion was to blame for the blight; a third cautioned readers to stop growing plants altogether.
I shouldn’t keep looking at the stories. There was work to do, even in a garden that was a shell of itself. I had blighted plants to destroy and carefully watched seedlings to label. There were seeds from last year’s harvest, tightly stored in glass jars in the hopes that would save them from infection, and they all needed to be packaged for sale.
Part of me wasn’t sure we should even try to sell our seeds and plants anymore. Even if they didn’t carry the blight with them to the other kingdoms, there was a good chance they were all we would have left by the time this sickness had ravaged the land.
On the other hand, maybe it was for the best that we get all our healthy plants safely away. Perhaps, in a year or a dozen years or maybe a hundred, whenever this curse was lifted, we would be able to buy back our seeds and start again.
Stinging nettles, the thought depressed me.
I bundled the newspaper and got up from the bench to throw it away. The roll of newsprint settled atop the other waste in the bin and unfurled itself, revealing part of the headline, FESTIVAL GROUNDS SHOW EVIDENCE OF BLIGHT, and the accompanying photo of empty dirt lots where thriving floral displays should have been.
Reed was right. Reading the papers only frustrated me, and it was rare that they provided any news I didn’t end up hearing five minutes later from the housemaids and stable boys. Still, I craved those stories. What if one of them held the bit of information I needed to solve this thing?
I cut through a topiary garden on my way to the seed storage shed. I hadn’t wanted to come here, but my ankle still hurt with every step and putting weight on it longer than necessary seemed like a fool’s decision.
I hadn’t spent much time in the topiary garden in the past year, and not at all since the blight had begun to creep its way across the palace grounds. These shrubs and roses had their own team of specialists, who cared for them and kept them trimmed and trained into fantastical shapes, and they hadn’t needed my attention.
I remembered running through this area when I was a child, either with Lilian or on my own when Hedley hadn’t given
me enough chores to do. I remembered towering moss elephants and laurel umbrellas and boxwood bubbles rising from enormous glazed pots. The garden had seemed like a playful menagerie, then.
Now, it was a graveyard. The arches of climbing roses hung like corpses from their frame, the gray blooms heavy and damp on the rotting vines. The shrubs that had once looked like giraffes and unicorns and playful bears were now skeletons. Even the great dragon, once covered in a dizzying array of red mosses and creeping yellow flowers and firetongue sprays, hunched over as if all its flame had gone out.
“I followed you in here,” a voice said behind me. “I wish I hadn’t.”
I held out a hand to Lilian. Running in the other direction would have been wiser, given her future husband’s feelings about me, but here, surrounded by the gloom of whimsy turned to rot, I needed the warmth of her palm against mine.
She laced our fingers together. “I hadn’t seen this garden yet,” she said. “I think I’ve been avoiding it.”
“Me too.” I’d examined almost all the others by now, if only in passing. This one, though, hurt me worse than the rest, if only because it had once been a place of such safety.
“How are things?” she said.
I laughed, mostly so I wouldn’t end up yelling or crying. “About the same. Which is the problem.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
Of course, she did. She always knew.
“I discovered I might have a bit of magic after all, though.” The delight of the discovery had faded out a little. It was hard to stay excited when the world around me looked like this. “It’s not enough to matter, but Hedley thinks I might be able to train it up eventually.”
“That’s brilliant.” Interest illuminated her face, casting out some of the unsettling aura that permeated the garden. “How did you find out? What did you learn?”
I started to speak, but she quickly shook her head.
“Stars, Deon, I’m acting like things are normal,” she said. “I’m sorry, I want to hear everything, but we haven’t got time.”
She was right. Even here at what felt like the end of the world, we didn’t have the luxury of ordinary conversation. Not when she was a princess, and I was a gardener, and I’d been banished from the walls of her home.
“I found something out,” she said, hesitating over the words like she wasn’t sure she wanted to say them. “About Mama. I’m supposed to be writing thank you notes for the engagement gifts people have sent, but I had to come tell you.”
I tensed. Here it was, perhaps: the key to the blight and the elusive piece of information that might give me the power to solve it.
“I went to go see her,” Lilian said.
She was interrupted by a booming voice.
“My love,” Duke Remington said, striding around the corner of a limp hedge and into the garden.
I flinched and jumped away from Lilian. But it was too late; he’d already seen us and had been, perhaps, watching us for a while.
“Garritt,” she said, with a composure I envied.
My face reddened; my palms began to sweat. I balled my hands into fists and tucked them quickly behind my back. I stood at attention like one of the palace guards, pretending an innocence we all knew didn’t belong to me.
“I thought we discussed this, dear,” the duke said, giving Lilian a look that chilled my blood.
She stood up straighter, her posture ramrod-straight and incongruent with her lacy blue dress.
“I need to speak with Mr. Gilding,” she said. “No one has told me a thing about the situation in the gardens. I’m tired of being kept in ignorance.”
“You simply don’t need to be bothered with such troubles.” His tone was sickly sweet.
My skin crawled. The thought of him being alone with Lilian filled my mind, and I tightened my hands behind my back, gripping one of my wrists in a vain attempt to shackle myself.
“I can see what’s happening in the garden with my own two eyes,” Lilian said. “Preventing me from speaking with my gardener is not going to somehow shield me from the reality of what’s happening on my grounds. It’s only going to irritate me.”
She had never used a voice that cold with me, not even when we’d been in the middle of our biggest arguments. I never wanted to be on the opposite side of her.
It didn’t even seem to faze the duke.
“Such things are not for princesses to trouble their heads with.” He took her arm and twined it with his, a posture that suggested tranquil evening strolls and entrances at grand balls. She tried to jerk it away, but his limbs were like iron. “Now, let’s go back to the palace. I’d hate for you to catch a chill.”
All this time, he had barely so much as looked at me. Now, his gaze cut into me like a knife.
I shuddered inwardly. Forget being allowed in the palace. I needed to watch my back, or I’d end up on the streets of Tulis--or worse.
He strode past me, Lilian’s arm shoved firmly up against her side. She glanced back as he dragged her from the garden.
Don’t, she mouthed.
I was too angry to listen.
I followed after them, but at a distance, ducking behind walls at every opportunity. The duke only checked behind himself a few times before he seemed assured that I’d remained in the topiary garden like a good little servant.
He was in for a rude awakening.
I crept up the walkway where the duke marched Lilian, still resisting, toward the palace. He walked her around to the front of the palace, perhaps thinking that the eyes of the guards would be enough to dissuade her from making a scene. She yanked her arm free from his grasp and said something to him. I couldn’t make out the words from this distance, but her demeanor made clear exactly what she thought of him and his behavior.
I couldn’t imagine Lilian being married to such a brute.
And then, horribly, I could imagine it. She would hate being tied to this man. He would force her into a tiny box, make decisions without consulting her, tell her that she didn’t need to worry her pretty little head about things like plagues and crop failures. He would creep in on her authority until the crown princess of Floris was forced to take a back seat to her consort unless she was willing and able to fight him every step of the way and then some.
And Lilian would fight. But it enraged me that she would have to.
King Alder and Queen Rapunzel should be here. They should know the kind of man their daughter was about to marry. The king and queen I knew would have never encouraged this kind of alliance, but now, even if Lilian decided she wanted to break off the engagement, it seemed her parents were nowhere to be found.
Anger burned inside me. That Lilian should be in this position, that I should be so unable to help, that the love of my life was a princess and therefore a prisoner to the constraints of class and duty--it was enough to make the edges of my vision cloud until the only thing I could see was the duke, smiling calmly down at Lilian as she told him exactly what she thought of his behavior.
I wasn’t going to murder him. I was a gardener, committed to creating life, not destroying it.
But sticks and stones, I was going to make him regret he’d ever laid his hand on her.
My sprained ankle throbbed in pain as I hobbled toward them. I wasn’t trying to conceal myself anymore, and it didn’t matter, because the duke wasn’t paying attention anyway.
He reached for Lilian again. He wrapped an arm around her shoulder in a gesture that should have been loving but instead looked like a prison.
“This kind of behavior won’t do, my love,” he said. “You are a princess, Lilian. A future queen. You can’t be seen cavorting with your filthy gardener plaything. It’s uncouth. How do you think your father would feel if he saw what I just saw?”
Lilian wrenched herself away. “My father trusts and respects Mr. Gilding, as do I. As will you if you want to be part of this family.”
He leaned forward. “Is that a threat?”
“It’
s a warning. You’d do well to take it.”
Her face flushed. This conversation was taking courage and anger and dedication--it was taking everything she had, at a time when worry for her mother and her kingdom had already consumed her strength.
Perhaps I would kill him after all.
“If you feel the need to manage the affairs of the garden yourself, perhaps we could compromise,” he said. “Marriage is all about compromise, is it not?”
She folded her arms. “What do you propose?”
“Regular meetings,” he said. “Ones, we both attend.” He sneered, the ugliness twisting his face. “It would be a shade more productive than seeking out his company in the gardens like some common harlot.”
Lilian’s eyes flew open in outrage, and she stepped back. “Were I a harlot, you can rest assured that there would not be enough coin in the world to tempt me to be with you.”
Stars, I loved that woman.
“Our engagement is over,” she said. “I refuse to be tied to anyone who would disrespect me as you have.”
I expected anger, or surprise, or outrage, or perhaps even sudden apologies and a subdued tone, but the duke leaned in toward Lilian with smugness all over his infuriating face.
“I think you’ll find that decision is no longer up to you.” He put a gentle hand on her shoulder, and she swatted it away. “I’ve already spoken with the court physician. He’s a reasonable man, in spite of all those troublesome gambling debts. He agrees with me that you’ve become hysterical with worry for your mother. We all know the queen is sicker than anyone outside the palace would like to believe. You’re in no condition to abandon such a long betrothal, especially not when you’ll be happiest if you seek the company of your devoted future husband.”
Lilian’s face drained of color. “You can’t do that.”
“I already have, my dear. You’re to be confined to your room until you feel better. We all believe you need good care and a firm hand right now.”
“I want to speak to my father.”