Garden Princess

by Kristin Kladstrup

  “Here we go!” said the gardener. He stood up, holding a pair of leather gloves. He put them on, knelt down beside the rose tree, and laid the blade against the trunk. But before he could begin sawing, a tree branch swatted his arm.

  “Ouch!” The gardener fell backward. “Pesky thing,” he growled. He grabbed the branch with a gloved hand and laid the blade against the trunk again. “Ouch!” he bellowed as another branch slapped him in the face. He jumped to his feet and touched his cheek, noting the blood there. He stared openmouthed at the tree, whose branches were drawn back like arms ready to let loose in a fight.

  “Well, I never! You’d almost think it knew what I was going to do!” The gardener took a step forward, and the tree reacted, swiping one of its branches through the air so quickly that he barely had time to jump out of the way. He turned to the magpie. “No wonder my lady wants this cut down!”

  Frowning, the gardener jabbed at the tree. It lashed out with a branch, but this time he was ready. He seized the branch and sliced it off with one decisive blow of his saw. The tree lashed out again, and the gardener sliced again. “Ha!” he said with a grin.

  Now the tree picked up its attack, lashing out with two and three branches at a time. The gardener fought back, gathering the branches into one gloved hand and using the blade in his other hand to hack through them. Krazo joined in, too, flying at the tree, tearing apart the blooms with his beak and claws.

  Finally, there was only one branch left. “Take that!” said the gardener as he sawed it from the trunk. He threw it on the ground and pulled off his gloves. He took out his handkerchief and dabbed at the cut on his cheek. “She ought to give me a kiss now, for sure!” he said.

  But Krazo was already dragging aside the branches. “Time to dig,” he said.

  “Right!” The gardener picked up the shovel and looked at the spot Krazo showed him. “You’re sure this is where she wants me to do it?”

  “Yes!”

  “Because if she wants to plant something, I’d say it’s better to dig a little more out of the way —”

  “Just dig!” Krazo was beginning to worry. Though it was still early morning, Hortensia could be awake now. What if she showed up before they were finished?

  The gardener began to dig, and Krazo hopped back and forth in agitation. His worries increased as the hole deepened. Shouldn’t the gardener have found the box already? What if this wasn’t the right spot? What if Hortensia had dug it up and moved it?

  And then, Clink!

  The gardener stopped digging. He knelt down and reached into the hole. “Look at this!” He pulled the box out of the hole and shook the dirt off. “There’s something rattling inside!” He tried to open the box. “It’s locked!”

  The princess lay half buried beneath a branch. Krazo seized her by the taproot and dragged her across the grass. “Here’s the key!” he said.

  “Well, I’ll be! How did that get there?” The gardener dropped the box and picked up the princess. “It’s caught,” he muttered. He worked at the chain with his fingers, pulling it down over the taproot. “Got it!” He tossed the princess aside, then picked up the box again. “What do you know? It fits!” he marveled as he turned the key. Then he lifted the lid, and his eyes grew wide.

  “Let me see! Let me see!” Krazo demanded.

  The gardener held up a large heart-shaped stone. “Looks like a ruby!” he said, watching it catch the light. “It must be worth a fortune!”

  Krazo’s heart sank. The princess was wrong. It was only treasure.

  Then a movement behind him caught his eye. “What are you doing?” shrieked a familiar voice.

  Krazo whirled around to see Hortensia standing at the entrance to the enclosed yard. Her fists were clenched at her sides, and her face was contorted with fury. He dove under the wheelbarrow.

  The gardener jumped to his feet. “My lady!” he said. “I’ve cut down the rose tree, and I’ve dug the hole you wanted.”

  Krazo peeked out from behind a wheel.

  “Give me my heart!” Hortensia held out her hand, palm open.

  The gardener’s smile evaporated. “Wh-what?”

  “My heart! Give it to me!”

  “I don’t know what you mean, my lady.”

  “The ruby, you fool! Give me the ruby!”

  She snatched it from him. She cradled it in her hands. “How did you find it?” she demanded.

  “It was a magpie! It said you wanted —”

  “Krazo!” Hortensia’s eyes flashed. “I’ll tear his wings off! I’ll slit his throat! I’ll boil him alive!”

  Krazo shrank back out of sight.

  “I — I cut down the rose tree, j-just as you wanted, my lady,” the gardener stammered. “And I pulled up a dandelion. You said you’d give me a kiss.”

  “You fool! Do you have any idea how precious this is?”

  Precious, thought Krazo. He looked at the princess — at her wilted leaves. She was dead. Hortensia had killed her, and the only thing she cared about was treasure.

  Suddenly his brain felt hot. All he could see was red. His head was filled with fire. He wasn’t even aware that he was moving, that he was flying up in the air . . .

  “There you are!” snarled Hortensia, and Krazo could feel her fury crackling through his mind. But his own anger was greater. He attacked, flapping his wings and scratching at her face with his claws. Hortensia raised her arms, trying to fend him off. He grabbed her hand with his claws. She shrieked and cursed, trying to shake him off, but Krazo bit her wrist and held on. The gardener was shouting; his hands grabbed Krazo, but still the magpie kept his grip on Hortensia. He bit down and dug his claws into her flesh again and again until at last the ruby fell to the ground. Only then did Krazo let go. Hortensia grasped for the stone, but Krazo was faster. He didn’t want the ruby, but if this was what she cared about — if this was her most prized possession — he wanted to crush it. He would carry it high in the air and drop it in the sea. He would smash it against a rock. He would destroy it! His claws encircled the ruby —

  “No!” screamed Hortensia.

  And it shattered into pieces.

  “My heart!” she wailed.

  There are any number of things a flower can feel: the warmth of the sun, the chill of night coming on, the dampness of the soil, even the tiny nibble of a caterpillar. But it feels these things without knowing what it feels. It feels without awareness.

  That was how it was for the flower that was Adela. It felt itself being pulled from the earth. It felt itself wilting under the heat of the sun. The flower was dying, but it could not know that it was dying. It could not know anything at all.

  And then something happened.

  The flower that was Adela felt an impulse to move. In itself, this was not so unusual. All flowers are compelled to move in response to their environment. They turn their leaves to follow the sun across the sky, close their blooms at sunset, dig their roots down into the soil in search of water. But this impulse was different, because it came into being without any outside stimulus. The flower that was Adela simply felt the need to stretch. It could feel itself stretching — roots, stems, leaves, and blossoms. And the more it stretched, the greater the need became, until it was no longer a need but a desire. I want, thought the flower. I want, thought Adela, and she opened her eyes.

  “Miss Adela?” Garth was leaning over her. He looked worried. “Are you all right?”

  She tried to answer him but couldn’t. She sat up and swayed from dizziness, then leaned into Garth’s steadying arm. She closed her eyes, trying to reconcile the lingering feeling of being a flower with the familiar and yet unfamiliar feeling of being herself again. Arms and legs, hands and feet, fingers and toes! Ears for hearing, mouth for talking, eyes for seeing!

  She opened her eyes again, and her breath caught in her throat. There, looming over them, was Hortensia, her hands reaching and grasping at the air, her mouth open in an agonized cry.

  Only the cry did not come. Horten
sia loomed without moving a muscle. In fact, it was not Hortensia at all; it was a white marble statue, perfect in every detail.

  “I don’t know what happened,” said Garth, staring up at it. “She was standing there and — and suddenly she turned to stone. It started at her hands, and then it went right up her arms and into her face. It was like watching her turn into a corpse!” He shuddered. “And then the walls disappeared, and I turned around, and there you were, Miss Adela! Only it wasn’t you! You were —”

  “A flower?” she finished.

  “Yes!” said Garth, his eyes wide. “You were a dandelion . . . But only at first . . . because your head popped out of the stem, and then your arms and your legs!”

  A dandelion, Adela thought wryly. Then, “Where are we?” she wondered aloud. She remembered standing beside the fountain on Hortensia’s front lawn. Now the fountain was nowhere to be seen, and there were people — hundreds of them — chattering and clamoring, some of them even crying. She had just taken in the fact that they were all women when she heard a groan behind her. Turning, Adela saw a man lying curled up on the ground next to Garth’s wheelbarrow. The man gave another groan and rolled over onto his back.

  “He’s hurt!” she said.

  They hurried to his side, and Adela saw that he was young. He can’t be much older than I am, she thought. His hand was bleeding. She touched it, and his eyes fluttered open.

  “Princess!” he said, gripping her hand. “You’re all right!”

  Did she know him? Adela knew she had not met the young man at the garden party. And if not there, then where? His eyes seemed to look right inside her. They were brown, almost as dark as his hair. They were beautiful eyes, and she was suddenly acutely aware of the touch of his hand on hers.

  “Who are you?” she asked. She tried to pull away, but he didn’t let go.

  “My name’s Ned — Edward . . .” He tried to sit up, and she had to help him, just as Garth had helped her.

  Edward looked at the marble statue. “Is she — is she destroyed?” he asked.

  “I think so,” said Adela.

  “You were right. It wasn’t treasure in the box.”

  “What box?”

  “The one she buried. It had a ruby in it. Only it couldn’t have been a ruby, because it shattered when I grabbed it. It’s just like that flask, isn’t it?”

  Suddenly Adela knew who he was. “You’re the magpie!” She stared at him, astonished to find her speculation about its being under a spell come true.

  Edward’s expression was anxious. She smiled to put him at ease. And blushed. She couldn’t help it. He was still holding her hand, and the words enchanted prince had flitted through her mind.

  “Your Highness?”

  Adela gave a start. Her hand slipped from Edward’s, and she looked up to see Marguerite making her way toward them. Garth jumped to his feet, hurrying forward to help her through the crowd.

  “What is going on?” asked Marguerite. “Who are all these women?”

  Adela looked around, and for the first time, she fully understood all that had happened. “They’re Hortensia’s garden!” she said. “They’re the flowers.”

  The flowers had vanished. So had the walls of Hortensia’s garden. There were only several hundred extremely pretty and very confused young women to show that it had ever existed. Some of them listened as Adela told Marguerite and Garth what had happened. Edward went on to explain that Hortensia had been holding garden parties for years — inviting beautiful young women and turning them into flowers, inviting handsome young men and turning them into her servants.

  “How many years?” Adela asked, remembering the servant she had seen wearing old-fashioned clothing.

  But Edward couldn’t remember. None of the guests could. Finally, someone asked what year it was. When Adela told them, Edward turned pale. Some of the women listening burst into tears. One of them who looked no older than fifteen or sixteen revealed that she had been an amaryllis for more than twenty years.

  And so the dreadful tale spread through the crowd.

  “What a horrible woman that Hortensia was!” said Marguerite. “You were very brave to stand up to her, Garth!”

  He looked sheepish. “All I did was chop down a tree and dig up a box. And I never would have done that if it hadn’t been for the magpie — I mean, him.”

  He nodded toward Edward, who looked as uncomfortable as Garth at the suggestion that he had done anything heroic. “All I did — except maybe right at the end — was try to steal your jewelry, Princess. I’m sorry about that.”

  Edward’s apology — and his obvious remorse — made Adela like him even more than she already did. She wondered who he was and where he was from. He clearly wasn’t an enchanted prince. His accent suggested that he came from one of the poorer neighborhoods of one of the coastal cities; he slurred his words together like one of the gardeners at home. As Cecile would put it, Edward wasn’t of the gentry. Which meant, for example, that he didn’t know he should say Your Highness when he spoke to her. Not that she minded. She felt a small thrill when he called her Princess. She hoped he didn’t notice that she turned pink whenever he looked her way.

  The mention of jewelry had caused Marguerite to realize that hers was missing. “The diamond necklace. And the earrings! Where are they?”

  Adela was pretty sure that she knew where the necklace was. She jumped to her feet. “Wait here! I’ll be right back.”

  But Edward followed her. “I’m the one who took the earrings,” he said. “They’re in my — that is, they’re up in a tree on the front lawn.”

  But there were no trees on the front lawn, for they had vanished along with the garden. Hortensia’s house was gone, too. Her servants, looking every bit as confused — and as beautiful, Adela noted — as the former flowers, were wandering about in what she guessed had been its approximate location. She soon found Hortensia’s pile of stolen jewelry, lying untouched in the grass. “My guess is that you’ll find the contents of your nest on the ground as well, Edward,” she said.

  He went to look and, sure enough, returned within minutes with a smaller hoard. He handed the jewels to Adela with yet another shamefaced apology.

  “You were a magpie! You couldn’t help what you were doing,” she told him. “I can’t say the same for Hortensia.”

  Adela retrieved the diamond necklace from the pile on the ground and put it in her pocket along with the diamond earrings and blue stone pendant from Edward. She made a basket of her skirt and raked all the other jewels into it.

  Then she looked around. “People are already leaving, aren’t they?”

  Indeed, the numbers of the crowd were dwindling.

  “I don’t think anyone but Marguerite cares much about jewelry right now,” said Adela. “Perhaps the best thing to do is to take all this with us. My father can issue some sort of decree inviting people to come and claim what they’ve lost.”

  When they rejoined Garth and Marguerite, the pair of them were discussing how to get home. “What about the carriage?” Garth asked Adela.

  “I don’t think it’s here anymore,” she said. “I looked for it yesterday, but I couldn’t find any stables. I hope Axel is all right.”

  “Is that your coachman?” said Edward. “Hortensia sent him home the day you came to the party.”

  Adela was relieved. “So he’s all right! And if he came home without us, Father already knows something’s wrong. He’ll have sent someone to find us.”

  But Edward shook his head. “She put your coachman under a spell. He won’t remember a thing about anything he saw here. And Hortensia sent letters to your families about the rest of you — magic letters to keep them from worrying and to make them forget about you over time. I know because I delivered yours, Princess.”

  “But we’ve only been gone a few days,” said Adela. “They couldn’t forget about us that quickly, could they?”

  “Maybe not. You’re lucky if that’s true.”

  Ade
la had a flash of insight. “Are you worried about your parents, Edward?”

  He nodded, this time avoiding her gaze. “My mother . . .” he began. “She didn’t want me to come here. When I got the invitation, she . . .” His voice trailed away.

  Adela wasn’t surprised to learn that Edward had been invited to a garden party. He was easily as handsome as the other men Hortensia had enchanted.

  “I’m sure your mother will remember you when she sees you.” But even as she said this, Adela could see a problem. She thought of the woman they had met earlier — more than twenty years of enchantment! How long had Edward been a magpie? What if his mother was an old woman now? Why, she might even be dead! Was that the reason he looked so worried?

  “We’ll have to walk home,” said Garth, interrupting her thoughts. “That’s what everyone else is doing. We’d better hurry if we want to get down the mountain before dark.”

  “You should come with us, Edward,” said Adela, and immediately felt herself blushing.

  But he was looking up at the statue of Hortensia, which loomed over them, its expression disturbingly lifelike. “What about her?” he said.

  “She can’t hurt anyone now,” said Adela.

  He didn’t look convinced. “Are you sure she’s dead?”

  Garth reached out and touched Hortensia’s marble hand. “Solid stone,” he confirmed.

  “Still . . .” Edward stared at the statue for a moment. Then, with a look of determination, he gave it a shove.

  The statue didn’t budge.

  Adela thought she must be feeling what Edward was, because suddenly, more than anything, she wanted to see the statue knocked down. She stood next to him and pushed. Garth and Marguerite joined in. At last the statue toppled, hitting the ground with a powerful crash that broke Hortensia into pieces.

  “I can’t imagine her coming back from that,” said Adela.

  Garth leaned over to look at Hortensia’s face. “It’s a shame, isn’t it? To be so very beautiful and so very wicked?”