by Emma Savant
“Sure seems like the kind of garden that wouldn’t look like this on its own.”
“These grew quickly,” I said. “But I grew every plant myself. Unless some pixie is sneaking in at night to sprinkle enchanted dust on my flower beds, the magic is either native to this garden or is nothing more than Floris’s climate and dumb luck.”
Hedley tapped his suspenders again and gazed up at a pink magnolia flower as big as my face. “I don’t believe in dumb luck. Do you?”
I sat on the edge of one of the raised beds. “Honestly, I don’t know what I believe.” I wiped my hands on my trousers; the ever-present film of soil on my hands left faint earthy smears on the brown fabric. “Everything I thought I knew has gone by the wayside these past few weeks. So sure. It’s magic. It’s just not mine.”
He waited, in that quiet way of his that made it clear he expected more. I let out a sigh. Embarrassment warmed my face.
“Trust me,” I added. “If it was magic, I’d know. I already tried.”
This interested Hedley. He examined my face, and I let him look, red flush and all.
“I tried to perform a spell on one of the flowers,” I said. “When the blight had just appeared, but after I came to see you and Hyacinth. You said you thought it might be a curse, so I found a charm to remove curses from growing things.”
“And?”
I shrugged. “It didn’t work.”
“Not even a little?”
“Not at all,” I said. “The petals didn’t so much as twitch.”
“And yet,” he said. He turned around in a slow, thoughtful circle. “There’s not a sign of blight here, Deon. Not a sign. You know what the rest of the kingdom looks like.”
I nodded. On the one hand, joy suffused me. My garden wasn’t dead. There was still a spot in Floris, however small, where life and color still flourished. On the other hand, all this beauty made me sick. If my beloved private garden still looked like this, why didn’t the rest of the kingdom?
“I want you to try something for me,” Hedley said.
There was something in his voice: a challenge, or maybe a question. I couldn’t tell what he was getting at, not exactly, but it was clear I ought to be cautious.
“You’d better tell me what it is first.”
His mouth cracked into a grin. “You never used to be so suspicious.”
I had to acknowledge the truth of it, if only to myself. Perhaps watching the blight destroy years of hard work and threaten our future had done it. Maybe it was the way Duke Remington had turned from a decent man to a power-hungry monster all but overnight. Maybe I was just all grown up.
Or maybe I was just bitter from losing Lilian. That sting would take a long time to fade if it ever did.
“I’m willing to try anything you think will help the gardens,” I finally admitted.
He gave me a brisk nod and pointed toward a tall bearded iris, pale blue and in the fluttering shape of a wave that had just reached its crest.
“There’s a trick I learned from a magician once,” Hedley said. “I was never able to get it to work, not properly. You might have better luck.”
“You’re like a dog with a bone.” I slipped off the raised bed wall anyway and came over to the iris, which sat in another raised bed so that its flower was on level with my eyes. Its sugary, arresting fragrance rose up to greet me.
Stars, I missed these scents. I hadn’t noticed it until now, not really, but the world outside these walls had lost some of its sweetness. Even in the depths of winter, the air in Floris had always carried a slight memory of growing green things. Even the scent of decay that came with autumn leaves had seemed bright and alive like the trees were only sloughing off their old foliage in order to make room for the new buds rising to burst underneath. Now, the air smelled like nothing at all--nothing, or the sickly odor of gray rot.
I breathed in the iris’s perfume.
“All right,” I said, squaring my shoulders. “What do I do?”
Hedley shifted a bit away as if to give me room, though room for what, I couldn’t imagine.
“Hold your hand over the flower,” he said. “Touch the plant. Give yourself a sense for it.”
I did as he instructed. The iris’s stem was glossy smooth, almost like rubber, and the moisture inside pressured the stem into an upright, proud position, strong enough to hold its enormous bloom. The edges of the leaves, pointed blades like those that belonged to tulips, scraped against my skin as I skated my palm across their sharp surface. The flower itself, I handled with delicate fingers, cupping the blossom and tracing my fingertips along the edges of the curving petals.
I glanced up at Hedley. “Is something supposed to happen?”
“Focus on the center of the plant.”
I frowned. “What does that mean?”
“If you have magic, you’ll be able to figure it out,” he said.
The spell books I’d looked through days ago had been full of those kinds of cryptic comments. Spells were just scaffolding; a true magic-worker should be able to sense the subtle energies that flowed through all things and manipulate them in a way that couldn’t be taught.
That sounded like a load of pretentious bunk to me, but I tried to feel into the center of the iris anyway. After a while, although I was pretty sure it was just my imagination, I got a sense for something running through the plant like a thread. It was like the bright core at the center of a young onion, or the green life that lived in the branches of rose bushes that someone who didn’t know the ways of roses might have assumed were dead.
“I think I found it?” I said. Hedley ignored the uncertainty in my voice.
“Trace that core down to the roots.”
“All right,” I said, although I suspected I was just picturing roots in my head. Still, I could almost feel them under my fingertips, the firm bulb with its many tendrils creeping out into the damp soil around it.
“Now, draw life up through the roots and into the stem through the core.”
“Draw life?” I couldn’t keep the edge from my voice. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just do it,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, you can mouth off after.”
His slight smirk annoyed me, but I couldn’t give up, not without giving this my best try. I reached out in my imagination, coaxing water and air from the soil and up the body of the iris. That was all life was in a garden, after all, water and air and nutrients and sunlight. Those simple elements were all it took to feed this world, transformed by the awe-inspiring power of the plants around me.
“I think I’ve done it?” I said after a while.
Hedley grunted softly. After a moment, he said, in a low voice, “Now pull it toward you.”
The effort of imagining all that life trickling upwards toward the flower took enough attention that I didn’t have any left over to give Hedley the skeptical look I thought he deserved. Instead, I tried to pull the energy in my direction. Without my ordering them to, my fingertips twitched inward, as if the stem were under my fingers instead of in front of me.
The flower twitched.
Startled, I lost concentration and jerked backward. I glanced up at Hedley, whose eyes were bright with what looked like victory.
“Look at that,” he said, more to himself than to me.
“Did you see that?”
I looked down at my hands, then at the flower. It was swaying gently as if it had just been bumped.
But I hadn’t touched it. No one had.
“It worked.” I squinted at the flower. Had that been me? Or had it just been a breeze? But no wind stirred the garden, and the other irises rising around mine remained still. “It did work, didn’t it?”
Hedley scrutinized the flower for a long moment. The wheels in his head were turning, the evidence of his thoughts clear in the way his gaze darted around the flower, examining its every dip and curve.
“Aye, it worked,” he said. “A bit. The way beginner’s magic might. But it did w
ork.” It was clear he was suppressing a smile, either because he was deep in thought or because he was trying, generously, not to gloat.
“So that means…” I trailed off. The thought was there, but the words wouldn’t form. They were ridiculous. I thought I’d already proved them wrong.
“It means you have magic,” Hedley said. “Magic, you might be able to train. And I’d bet my striped calendula collection that your abilities have something to do with why this garden looks the way it does.”
I stared at the iris. It had stopped bobbing and returned to its proud, upright position.
“Do you think I could use this to stop the blight?”
Hedley pursed his lips and seemed to be chewing on the inside of his cheek. “I don’t rightly know, to tell you the truth,” he said. “Still, we know more than we did an hour ago.”
“Do you think I could do it again?” I was already focused on the flower, reaching out with my mind for the core of life that flowed through it.
“I daresay you could,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt to try.”
I disembarked from the carriage. The palace driver nodded at me, and I offered a few coins, which he accepted politely.
This part of the city felt different from the rest. It was home to artists and fortunetellers and other Florians who lived slightly outside the margins of ordinary society and clustered together with others of their kind. Magicians lived here, too, and it was these I had come to see.
“Have a sweetie?” asked a short woman in a blue dress. “Half off today only!” She held out a large rainbow-colored lollipop worked into the shape of a daisy.
I shook my head with a smile and moved on. The homes and shops were bright here, their wooden siding painted in vivid shades that seemed so Florian as to have almost gone too far. The rest of the city liked bright colors well enough, but elsewhere there seemed to be an unspoken agreement that shades ought to at least coordinate. Here, all thoughts of visual harmony had been thrown out the window. Sunflower yellow trim marched across a fuchsia house, and the door flared with a bright orange that put me in mind of marigolds and pumpkins. The next building was apple red accented with seven different shades of green, all of which clashed horribly with the house that came after with its striped cerulean and royal purple siding.
As in the rest of the country, every home and shop had window boxes. They were empty, aside from one, which held flowers cut from cardboard and colored with a child’s untidy scrawl.
My stomach twisted.
I ducked down a side street and checked the address on the paper in my hand.
“Learn about your future?” asked a woman sitting on the stoop of a navy-blue shop painted with silver stars. “I’ll scatter the seeds and tell you who you’ll marry.”
I already knew who I wouldn’t marry, and that was quite enough knowledge of the future for me. I shook my head and hurried on.
The office I eventually reached was more understated than I’d anticipated. The two-story building, which looked as if it had once been someone’s home, was a reasonable shade of butter yellow, ornamented only by a few white window boxes, which stood as empty as all the rest. A sign on the tiny graying lawn read Hemlock & Cypress: Magicians for Hire.
They were two of our best magicians--not just in Tulis, but in all the country. Rumor had it that the king had tried several times to engage them at the palace full-time, but they preferred to run their own private practice and had been working out of this same little office for decades.
I went inside, expecting to find a secretary and a sitting room. Instead, the door opened directly onto a stunning room full of waterfalls and coiling vines. It was as if they’d built a forest in the center of an old house. Water cascaded lightly down from the walls, and the only seats were large boulders that were set on walkways that wandered over rippling pools.
Aside from the profusion of plants and water, the place was empty.
But there was a profusion of plants. Hope rose in my chest. These magicians, whoever they were, had managed to keep their plants from dying.
If our experiment earlier in the day had been right, I had some of that same magic, and perhaps the two greatest magicians in Floris could teach me to wield it.
“Do you have an appointment?”
The voice next to my ear was high-pitched and almost buzzing. I jumped and spun around, but I was still alone.
“Watch it!” the voice said.
Motion caught my eye, and a second later, I realized a tiny pixie was buzzing through the air. Her translucent skin was the same shade of pink as her gossamer wings, and she glowed with a faint light of her own.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t see you.”
“Clearly.” She was not impressed by my inattention. “Do you have an appointment?”
“No,” I said. “I was hoping they could squeeze me in. I’m from the palace.”
“Oh, if you’re from the palace, then,” she said.
I suddenly wished I’d kept that part quiet.
“Are either of them available?”
“Perhaps,” she said. “I’ll let them know you’re here.”
The pixie zipped away, under a hanging philodendron leaf that was twice as big as she was and through a door on the other side of the strange room.
A few minutes later, an elegant woman in a moss-green tunic and trousers the color of fresh soil entered the room. She wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Most magicians I’d seen who had come to the palace were grand--the kind of people who wore velvet robes and arrived with large chests of strange tools and herbs. This woman looked nothing like them, except for a strange sharpness around her eyes that all magicians seemed to share.
“You’re from the palace?” she said.
“You must be Madame Hemlock.” I bowed deeply.
She stopped in front of me and held out her hand. I took it, expecting to kiss it as I usually did to women who outranked me, but she only gave mine a firm shake.
“You can tell the king I have no news for him,” she said. “Moreover, you can tell him I’ll let him know if we have a breakthrough. I’m not holding out on him, and he ought to know that by now.”
I frowned. “The king didn’t send me.”
The tiny lines at the corners of her eyes eased.
“What are you here for, then?”
“I came for,” I started. I fell silent, then waved my hand around vaguely at the vines that surrounded us. “Well, I came for this. Your plants are alive. I think I have some magic, and I want to learn how to keep mine alive, too.”
Her lips thinned, just barely, and I realized I’d come at it from the wrong angle.
“My name is Deon Gilding,” I said. “I’m the palace’s head gardener. I’m trying to stop the blight.”
Understanding passed over her face, and her shoulders fell as she sighed.
“I see,” she said. “In that case, I’m sorry to tell you you’ve wasted your time.”
“I can pay you,” I said quickly.
She shook her head. “I mean, there’s nothing I can do.”
She waved a hand as if to swat away the heart-shaped leaf that dangled near her ear. Her hand passed straight through it as if the leaf had been a ghost.
“It’s an illusion,” she said. “That’s all we can do anymore. Did the king not tell you?”
My heart sank, and I fought back the annoyance and disappointment I was sure must be visible on my face. “His Majesty hasn’t communicated much with me of late.”
This seemed to strike a chord. She pursed her lips as if she wanted to laugh or scoff. Whatever the urge was, she didn’t give in to it.
“Perhaps we’d best communicate, then.” She gestured toward one of the boulders. “Have a seat. The rocks are solid enough, at least. I’ll order tea.”
She turned and put her fingers to her lips. She whistled, two bright, distinct tunes. From elsewhere in the building, two other whistles sounded back.
“Cypress will join
us in a moment.”
Cypress turned out to be a delicate, willowy man dressed in a similar tunic, although his was deep blue. He needed very little explanation from Hemlock to get caught up to speed.
Each of them sat on boulders not far from mine. It was an unusual sitting configuration--unusual, but comfortable, and I preferred it to the formal desks and stiff chairs I’d expected to find here.
Cypress crossed his legs, his back straight but relaxed. Behind us, the pixie zoomed in, carrying teacups that had to have been dozens of times her weight. She dropped the cups from the sky, and we caught them. She lugged in a teapot next and poured the steaming mint tea from what seemed like an impossible height. The streams landed with precision in each of our small cups, creating a head of refreshing foam.
“Anything else?” she asked as if she had far better things to be doing.
“That’ll be all,” Hemlock said, then added, in a singsong voice, “Thank you, Apple.”
Apple zoomed away without a backward glance. Cypress watched her go with an indulgent shake of his head.
“We tried to heal the plants,” Hemlock said, without further preamble. “When that didn’t work, we tried to stop them from getting any worse. We failed. Utterly.”
“We’re not accustomed to failure,” Cypress said. The way he spoke, it was clear this wasn’t a boast. It was a fact, just like it was a fact that my plants had usually flourished before this blight had descended over the land like a funeral shroud.
I sipped my tea. It was sweet and strong and strangely comforting.
“We have messengers throughout the kingdom,” Hemlock said. “Pixies, mostly. A few birds. They report that almost a third of the flowers in the kingdom are without color, and the curse is spreading out fast from the palace.”
“It is a curse, then,” I said.
Hemlock inclined her head. “No ordinary blight would resist our magic like this.” She glanced at Cypress. “In truth, no ordinary blight could damage our magic, but this one has.”
“It’s weakened us,” Cypress clarified. “Our knowledge is every bit what it once was, but our skills appear to have withered.”
