by Carrie Ryan
He’d been the first person to ever seek for me past the bit of leather lashed around my throat. And now he was mocking me. I wanted nothing more than to flee, to run faster than I ever had and leave this dungeon and this man and this world.
I’d go to my father’s house and I’d put his hands around my neck and I’d beg him to finish it, as he should have all those years ago when he learned I’d been born a girl.
But I didn’t. Instead I stood stiffly as I buttoned my dress methodically and rewound the scarf around my neck. I made Rete watch as I let my emotions, any compassion I’d ever felt for him, leach out of me until I was once again as I had always been: nothing more than a tool to the Emperor.
The girl who would have strangled her father to death if she’d been asked. The woman who had killed her best friend without knowing the reason.
I was the Gardener. And I would race against Rete and I would win.
For three days, every time I stepped to the mark in the garden I expected to face Rete. Never was it him. The dungeons belched up all manner of condemned—men who’d languished underground for years waiting for their chance to run. It was as though the Emperor was punishing me, sending me into race after race as he purged his cages.
Twice I vomited from the extreme exertion, my body protesting every time the marker called for the race to begin, but never did I stop running. The days were a punishment I relished, leaving me so exhausted that I fell into sleep the moment I stepped from the platform after the last execution.
I hated how the anticipation of Rete’s race became a sort of torture in and of itself.
And then something happened that had never occurred before. I lost my concentration leaping over the Stream of Sorrow and my foot caught the edge of a rock, sending me crashing into the shallow water. Bits of gravel scored over my arms, drawing blood, and my teeth tore into the side of my cheek.
The worst came when I pushed back to my feet and tried to run: an excruciating pain that raged from my ankle up my leg. I’d dealt with pain before. I’d borne the scars left by forcing through the hedges in the maze, and I’d pushed myself through lung cramps and muscle tears and flus and headaches.
But this was pain like none other, something deep and grinding, like the shattered ends of two bones scraping against each other. I tried to limp, and when that didn’t work I resorted to crawling, not caring about the skin being grated off my knees and palms.
For the first time in my life I was second to the execution platform. A hush buzzed through the crowd as I drew near not like the champion I’d always been but like a dog, on my hands and knees. I was handed a staff to lean against as the Emperor gave the condemned his sentence of banishment, and I stood on the platform, my one good leg trembling with exhaustion, long after the man had been led from the gates and sent forth into the vast emptiness beyond the city walls.
Eventually the Emperor’s surgeons came and took me back to my suites in the palace. When they set the bones between stabilizing boards I refused any medication to deaden the agony; I needed to know the repercussions of my mistakes. Every time the dagger-sharp edges of errant bone chips sliced against muscle and flesh I thought about the moment my foot had slipped across the rock in the stream.
I’d been thinking of Rete.
The Emperor called a moratorium on the races while my bones knitted. I tried retaking my place in court, using a clever mechanism of a platform on wheels to take the pressure off my shattered ankle as I made my way through the palace chambers and gardens. But everywhere I went I was met with hushed silences, followed by tittering gossip the moment I rolled from the room.
Some were pleased to see me brought low, and I began a list of them all in my head. They might have thought me weak then, but there would come a time when I’d return to the gardens, and my tools would be sharp and searching for new plants to prune.
The one place I could not manage on my own was the dungeons, with their myriad steep and twisting stairs, and I refused to ask for help. Some days my forced absence felt like a curse and others it was a blessing. Never before had I felt even the smallest fissure of weakness, and my first thought of comfort was always Rete.
I wanted him gone from my mind, yet he was all I could think about.
For weeks I resorted to spending the days in my chambers, looking out into the gardens and watching the hedges grow ragged and the paths fill with weeds. My staff still tended to their duties as ever, but without my constant presence they had become lazy. I added all their names to the growing list of condemned in my head.
• • •
My recuperation was lengthy and my strength slow to return after the stabilizing boards were finally removed. The day the surgeons pronounced my leg healed and rehabilitated, the Emperor called for the races to resume on the next morning. His dungeon was overflowing, and his court had grown soft without the ever-present threat of the gardens.
Besides, he’d lacked entertainment throughout the dull months of summer.
I’d always thought the first place I would go after being released by the surgeons would be to Rete—after all, his was a constant presence in my thoughts—but instead I found myself standing in front of my parents’ house, staring at the bright brass knocker on the door.
My mother greeted me as she always did, placing her fingers against my head, my heart and my lips, a gesture of love and blessing. She called for spiced cakes and honeyed tea and drew me toward the solarium, but my attention was not for her.
When she could not coax me to settle and focus on her wandering conversation, she sighed softly and said, “He’s outside.” I nodded before rising and going toward the door, wincing at my slight but lingering limp.
My father stood in the middle of his personal garden, a miniature of the emperor’s. There were small hedges twisted into unnatural shapes, meandering paths and a rock waterfall that fed into a pond flashing with bright fish.
It was nothing like the grandeur of what we’d both been used to, and my father seemed to have shrunk along with his duties, as if the measure of the man were determined by the scope of his importance.
He was the first to speak. “You are to resume running tomorrow.” I couldn’t discern whether it was a question or a command.
I nodded, but with his back to me he couldn’t see the gesture. He knew the answer anyway; asking was only one more formality in the long line that had defined my upbringing. “The gardens have grown a bit wild in your absence,” he added. We both knew it wasn’t the orchards and elaborate hedges but the members of court he spoke of.
“They have,” I acknowledged, my jaw tight.
With the deliberateness so familiar over the course of my life, he stepped forward and raised a thin knife, trimming back an errant sprig from a flowering dragon.
I crouched and drew my finger across the surface of the pond, watching the ripples blur the colorful fish beneath. The moment I’d seen my father standing in his garden I’d known why I’d come to him.
“You lost races. Why?”
His blade flashed in the light as if he’d been startled. A few tender green leaves drifted from where he’d accidentally sheared a twig. He bent to collect them. “Because I was not always the fastest.”
I thought about Rete and the anxiety I’d felt over expecting to meet him at the starting mark. “Did you ever consider losing a race on purpose?”
He straightened, brow furrowed, and looked at me for several long moments. Between us was only the trickle of the waterfall and the buzzing of insects. He held out his blade, sharp and cold in his palm.
“We are the tool,” he said. “It has no thoughts, it knows nothing about right or wrong. It simply exists. It is up to the one wielding the blade to determine what should be cut and what should be left to flourish.”
I took a step forward; I couldn’t help the emotions raging through me. “But that blade just sheared a branch because the person holding it made a mistake,” I argued, pointing at his hand.
My father sighed and moved toward a nearby bench to sit, his shoulders slightly slumped. If possible, he appeared even older. He set the knife down carefully beside him. “If I regret one death, where then does it stop? There is not enough room in a life for fourteen thousand regrets.”
His gaze, when it met mine, was pleading. It set me off balance, my thoughts spinning. I had never seen my father like this—lost and vulnerable. Even when my hands had closed around his throat after I’d won the race to succeed him as Gardener, he’d seemed so sure of life and his role in it.
“You’ve never come to watch me race in the garden, have you?”
He glanced at the collar around my neck and then away. “No. I never wanted to see you like that, Tanci.”
A rage flashed through me, heating my cheeks and causing my fingers to tremble. The achievements I was proudest of, and my father never even recognized them. Without saying anything more, I spun on my heel, trying not to wince as my leg protested, and strode from the garden.
In the middle of the night, after sleep had eluded me for too long, I made my way into the dungeons. If the keeper was surprised to see me, he knew better than to show it. He merely nodded when I demanded the list of those set to race against me in so few hours and said nothing as I ran my finger along the scrawled names. There was only one that mattered, and when I saw it my jaw clenched.
I did not bother to hide my collar as I stormed through the dungeons, and while most of the condemned turned away when they saw me, others called out, an echoing riot of lascivious jeers.
Their time would come soon enough, I told myself as I ignored them all.
Rete’s cage still hung in its own corner, slightly separated from the rest of the cells. Only one torch still burned along the wall, and it cast a flickering shadow along his body. The first time I’d seen him his skin had been a rich darkness, but now, after so many months trapped away from the sun and fresh air, he’d taken on more of an ashen appearance that made me ache inside, though I struggled to keep my face neutral.
After all, the last time I’d been down here Rete had succeeded in humiliating me, and it wasn’t a feeling I wanted to experience again. But I’d made a promise to myself to visit with each condemned in the days before their race, and I would treat him no differently.
He lay on his side, curled around himself, with his back to me. Even as I approached, he did not move. I let my eyes devour him, tracing each knob of his long spine, watching the curve of his ribs rise and fall with each soft breath. He slept with his hands tucked beneath his chin and with one foot hooked behind the other.
In the end I found myself staring at his neck, the rhythmic throbbing of his pulse fluttering just beneath the surface. My hands squeezed into fists and I turned away, intending to leave.
“Tanci.” His voice was gruff from sleep.
It was the second time I’d heard my name used that day. I’d almost forgotten the sound of it; over the years I’d learned to respond to nothing except Gardener.
I faced him but said nothing.
He was kneeling now, his cage swinging slowly back and forth from the movement. “Are you okay?”
I had to press the back of my hand against my mouth to stifle the choking laughter I felt surging forward. For all the definitions of the word “okay,” I could think of none that applied to me. “How did you know my name?”
“I asked,” he said. “When I heard about your leg, I was worried.”
There was an edge to my voice I couldn’t control as I demanded, “You weren’t thinking about how it would buy you more time before your trip to the gardens?”
“I was thinking about you.” His words were laced with an emotion unfamiliar to me, something tender and burning all at once.
I shook my head, taking a step toward him. “Why would you be so stupid? Don’t you understand that tomorrow we race? There will be no mercy—the Emperor has planned this. My entire reputation will rest on this race—my future will depend on my making it to the execution platform first. The Emperor’s Gardener cannot show weakness, and that’s what you are to me.”
My words finally seemed to mean something to him; his breathing became more strained. Tomorrow, Rete would die by my hand.
“Please tell me you’re a fast runner,” I begged him softly. I reached out a finger and placed it against the ridge of his knuckles.
He twisted so that he gripped my hands in his. “You think your strength lies here,” he whispered. The cage tilted as he reached through the bars to trail his thumb along the ridge of my collar. “And here.”
My pulse thundered, each breath feathery light. He let his hand fall until it rested against my chest. I knew he could feel every crushing beat. “You silence your heart in order to run; you were not made to lead such a quiet life. Being the Gardener does not make you strong, and being Tanci does not make you weak.”
I jerked away from him, but I could still feel his touch even through the silk of my tunic, the warmth from the pad of each of his fingers. As I fled through the dungeon I remembered what my father had said the day I was born: She’ll never be strong enough.
The only way to prove him wrong was by killing Rete, the only man who’d ever looked for more behind the Gardener’s collar.
It was not enough for the Emperor to simply resume the races; there had to be pomp and circumstance, turning what had once been merely routine into a celebrated event. He wanted his people to know that his Gardener was well again, that any courtiers who grew out of line would be pruned with brutal efficiency.
The same people who had nattered behind my back as I fled ballrooms only a few months earlier now paraded through the gardens and stuffed themselves into the spectator boxes around the execution platform. They wore their brightest colors, each of them almost shining under the harsh sun.
The air had the feel of a carnival, of the whispered excitement before the curtain rises on a new opera or play. After the race there would be more displays of the Emperor’s might with battle demonstrations in the arena and lavish parties starting early and lasting late.
It made my legs jittery, my pulse uneven and my stomach anxious. There were those who had come today to see me fail. Who would delight in witnessing the Emperor’s darling Gardener being laid low so they could continue with the empty tittering.
But if that was what they were expecting, they would be sorely disappointed. I never stepped to the mark unless I intended to win, and that was exactly my plan that morning.
By the Emperor’s orders I was paraded through the gardens, flower petals strewn about me, so that his court could see up close my strength. I’d polished the leather of my collar that morning so it gleamed blood red in the sunlight, and my lips curled with delight when I saw the unease it caused those around me.
As I stood beneath the Emperor’s box I caught sight of the familiar face of my father, and that, more than anything else, caused my cheeks to burn. Why he’d come to this, of all races, I didn’t understand, and his expression gave no clues. I felt a fierce and familiar fire of determination blaze inside me, a desire to prove to him my worth and strength.
When I stepped to the mark Rete was already there. He was almost an afterthought to the day’s proceedings, a minor token in an otherwise grand exhibition of the Emperor’s strength.
I noticed how Rete shifted his weight from foot to foot in nervous anticipation, his fingers fluttering into fists and stretching straight again. As was custom, I nodded at him and he nodded back.
It looked as though there was something he wanted to say, but before he could open his mouth the marker was called and the race began. I did not hesitate and neither did Rete.
As always, I ran barefoot, but the soles of my feet had grown soft and every twig and pebble seemed to cut against the flesh. The bones of my recently healed ankle protested, but I’d been assured they were healed and could come to no more harm from the strain of sprinting.
I’d forgotten the exhilaration of movement, the wild joy of t
hrowing myself so fast and hard that my legs could barely catch my body before I fell. I practically skipped through the Stream of Sorrow, relishing the cold water kicked up behind me.
This was racing as it had never been for me before, not some duty born from a desire to prove my worth to my father, but instead a symphony of speed. I forgot everything in those moments but the song of my heart, and I followed it through the gardens that had been more a home to me growing up than anywhere else.
I didn’t know what I was expecting when I sprinted around the final curve toward the execution platform, but I knew what I hoped. I could already hear the murmuring of the crowd, and several of them gasped when I came into sight.
Everyone stared, but the only eyes I refused to meet were those of my father. I couldn’t bear to witness the disappointment that would be written so clearly across his face.
Later, I knew my name would be on everyone’s lips, but I’d made sure that the one thing they could never say was that I hadn’t run fast or hard enough. I still struggled to catch my breath as I climbed the execution platform.
The look on Rete’s face when I joined him was mostly one of confusion laced with joy and shock. He’d expected to lose and prepared himself to die by my hands. Instead the Emperor pronounced his sentence of banishment with a growl and dismissive flick of his fingers.
There would be no execution this morning, and the disappointment from the crowd was palpable. It didn’t take long for the stands to clear after that, the entire mood of the day dampened. Everyone moved quickly to the arena, placing their bets against the various warriors who paraded with tigers and other jungle cats.
I was allowed to say nothing to Rete before he was led away by the execution attendants, so I remained alone on the platform, watching their small procession wend toward the city gates.
The sun burned across the sky and the garden emptied and still I stood and watched the dark speck of Rete make his way across the barren landscape of the world outside. Eventually I reached up to my neck and began to unlace the stiff leather, my fingers trembling at first but growing surer.