My head spins from the combination of bright light and the impact of hitting the ground. One of the lackeys yanks up the chain connecting my shackles and unlocks them. Warm air attacks my chapped wrists.
I turn on my side, pain shooting up my shoulder, and see Fern’s ocean of black hair spilling out around her a few feet away. I reach for her, my fingertips brushing the ends of her hair, but another hand beats me to it, grabbing a fistful and holding her up off the grass.
Though pain must be shooting across her scalp, she doesn’t scream.
I follow the arm to the shoulder and see Shears, his unnaturally wide grin revealing a row of shiny white teeth before he turns away from me.
And I realize we’re lying like plucked flowers at our master’s feet, in the perfect position to be stomped back into the earth that we came from.
Chapter Two
My body immediately seizes as I stare up at the Gardener’s bulbous stomach, my limbs turning to rock. All the fear and anxiety swirling inside me bubbles to the surface, leaving me defenseless.
Fern’s whispered words bounce around in my head, but they slip through my fingers like sand when I try to grasp them.
I look around desperately for some kind of help, even though it’s never come before. We’ve stopped somewhere deep inside the palace walls, in a secluded courtyard.
The forty lackeys in charge of setup have already erected the largest tower of the elaborate purple silken tent that we’ll perform in tonight, blocking off all prying eyes from the north. Our carts have been positioned in a semicircle to the south, with the changing tents and housing for the rest of the troupe filling in the empty spaces. The Gardener’s brutality isn’t unknown, but it’s like death, something people prefer to step around.
“Ah, my Fern,” he croons in his deep voice. I’d recognize that accent anywhere, listening to him draw out the F sound. The Gardener’s strange pronunciation haunts my dreams. “You’re looking lovely as ever, my leetle Wilted one.”
The Gardener pauses in front of Fern, his girth jiggling underneath his tight red silk shirt for a second after he stops. He lined his tiny eyes with kohl and donned the pair of pointy-toed golden Varshan boots he’ll perform in later.
He leers down at her, his sun-spotted skin stretching tight over his chubby face as his mouth splits into a smile, revealing a crooked row of yellowing teeth. Sweat plasters what’s left of his dark hair to his face and leaves stains under his arms.
He’s as cruel as he is round. Both features grow daily.
“But you see,” the Gardener says, reaching behind his back to clasp his hands together, even though his arms are too short, “I’ve heard some distressing rumors.” He rolls each R on his tongue like a cat’s purr.
The four men that were banging on our cart with Shears tighten the circle around us, their heavy footfalls loud on the packed earth. My heart pounds in my chest. Everything in me begs to cry out, but Fern’s shoulders tense and I realize she already knows they’re surrounding us. I fight against my aching limbs to sit up, but the lackey nearest me plants a foot on my back, sending my face crashing into the prickly grass.
“One of my leetle buds has been talking to a spy,” the Gardener says. “You don’t happen to know anything about that, do you?”
The weight on my back disappears, and I lift my head, watching Fern. A spy in the Garden? Why? Questions flood my mind, and I nearly miss her answer.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Fern says. Even though I can’t see her face and her voice doesn’t shake, I catch her pointer finger curling ever so slightly. She’s lying.
The Gardener reaches up and threads his fingers around the links of his necklace as though he’s checking to see if it’s still there. It’s a habit he’s had since I was a Seedling, and I’ve come to understand it’s what he does when he’s thinking.
For his heft, he’s surprisingly quick. His tiny hand shoots underneath Fern’s chin, and he jerks her face upward at an unnatural angle so they’re staring at each other.
“You know nothing of this?” he asks.
“Of course not,” she replies, her voice dangerously low.
His lip curls into a frustrated snarl, and as much as I want to enjoy his annoyance, fear sends ice pumping through my veins. I haven’t seen him this way since a rare Varshan sapphire went missing from his personal collection and he couldn’t get anyone to confess they took it. Instead of trying to figure out who took it, the four lackeys and three Wilteds he randomly selected as culprits were slaughtered.
I’m safe, thanks to the secret the Gardener and I share that makes me his star. But Fern has nothing. The girl who got me through those first four years, who taught me to keep my head down in order to stay alive, has nothing to bargain with. She’s just a prop for his plan, a means to his end. But I can’t let him hurt her.
“I didn’t do anything!” I shout, my voice sounding high-pitched even to my own ears. “Don’t hurt her, please.”
The spine-tingling way his gaze crawls over me feels like skittering cockroaches, but I muster up the courage to look into his eyes. Everything around us has frozen with my words. Except the flute plays on.
“No?” the Gardener asks, his voice as sweet as the moment after you’ve eaten too much cake. “But are you certain she is innocent, leetle Flower?”
His question swirls around me. A few minutes ago, I would have been certain, but now… How could Fern have been up to so much without me knowing? And how could she have put her trust in a man? A pang of guilt creeps through me.
He snaps his fat fingers, and a tall lackey walks out of the tent behind us, holding a burlap sack out in front of him. Something dark drips from both corners and has stained the fabric a few inches up from the seam. He stops a few feet away from the Gardener, who gestures for him to remove whatever he’s holding. The lackey sticks his crooked nose up in disgust while reaching into the bag.
He yanks out the severed head of a man by his short black hair. That’s the man Fern was looking for! The lackey throws the head at Fern, the place where his neck was cut making a sickening squish as it hits the ground next to her knee.
“Unfortunately for you, Wilted one, this one was more willing to talk after Shears had him for a few days,” the Gardener says.
Shears lets out a chuckle, admiring his handiwork. “He was a screamer,” Shears says, tightening his grip around Fern’s hair. “But he did tell me all his secrets.”
My stomach shifts as the dead man’s lifeless black eyes stare at me from the ground, and if there were anything in it, it would have spilled onto the grass right then.
“So you see,” the Gardener says, studying his fingernails, “we already know you’ve been talking with the rebellion.”
Whispers of a rebellion fighting against the current emperor have leaked into the Garden, but why would they have a spy tucked among us? The more the Gardener speaks, the less this entire situation makes sense.
But then I remember Fern’s words right before we were ripped out of our cage. She told me not to do anything, to act scared and then run because she knew they were coming for her. She’d probably known from the moment she spoke to that headless man that she would die for anything she said, and she did it anyway, to keep that tiny seed of hope alive, even if I no longer could.
“Do you know what I do to traitors?” the Gardener asks, leaning down to Fern’s level.
“No!” I shout, grabbing a fistful of grass to try to crawl closer.
The man’s dead eyes mock me.
A silver chain around the Gardener’s neck slips out as he leans forward, the large ruby attached to it gleaming in the sunlight. The same ruby I used to wear. The only thing left of my home.
The Gardener’s lips press to her ear, washing her in a wave of his putrid breath, and he says over the rising sound of the flute in the distance, “I cleep them.”
Pruning means losing an ear or finger, something easily concealed. But clipping… Clipping means th
e whole head is severed.
I won’t let that happen to her. I swore I would protect her.
The metal handle of Shears’s cutting blades protrudes from his back pocket. With all the strength I have left, I push up from the ground and run for them, with the practiced grace from a thousand nights of performing helping me move steadily. I slip past the nearest lackey and grab for the handle.
It’s rough against my skin and far too big for my hands.
Shears’s eyes widen in surprise, and he releases his grasp on Fern’s hair to hold up his hands in some kind of defense as I snatch the weapon from his pocket.
“Should we go see the emperor?” the Gardener shouts, his voice tightening around me like ropes, stopping me. “What would he do, I wonder, if he knew your secret? Do you think he’d let you come back and see this leetle family you’ve created here?”
“No,” I whisper.
My heart nearly stops. No one besides the Gardener can know my secret. Even being stuck here in the Garden would be less dangerous than if another soul found out.
Taking advantage of my momentary panic, the lackey I dodged before slips his arms around me, and Shears rips his weapon from my fingers.
“Silly little Flower,” Shears says, scraping a fingernail across my cheek. “If you’re going to kill someone, you have to mean it.”
My gaze falls to Fern, her brow furrowed somewhere between shock and fear.
“We’ll see soon enough what the emperor decides for you,” the Gardener says to me. He flicks his hand toward Shears. “Do it.”
Shears kicks Fern, and she topples over like a rag doll. She lands hard on her back with a scream, all four limbs spread out, as the three men surround her. Shears is front and center, his tanned face pulled tight in a twisted smile.
“No, stop!” I yell, twisting against the lackey’s grip, but his arms are like iron, the muscles in them barely straining to contain me. I could have saved her. The moment was right there and I let the Gardener’s words control me.
The Gardener yanks out a silk handkerchief and meticulously wipes each of his fingers clean of Fern’s skin. My eyes fall to Fern, her face twisted in fear. I still remember her weaving me a bracelet out of straw as she told me how her family sold her to the Garden, how safe I felt when she slipped the bracelet on my wrist and told me that we had to be each other’s family now.
Shears takes a step toward her; the hedge shears gleam in the waning sunlight. I kick out, trying to free myself, but the man holding me just laughs, his chest rumbling against my back. Fern crawls toward me, a broken thing treading water until her limbs give out. “Run!” I scream to her. “Run!”
But there is nowhere to go. Nothing I do can stop this, but still I try. The only act of defiance I have left.
Before I came here, fear was a four-letter word that had nothing to do with me. My mind struggles to get back to that place where warm hands greeted me every morning and music meant dancing only when you wanted to.
Now Fern’s screams mingle with the coiling melody of the flute, challenging each other for dominance in a dance that keeps twisting over a private stage where no one can help us. The awful symphony assaults me, pouring into my skin and soaking into my bones until we are all rolled into one—the flute, Fern’s death, and me. Her screams weaken into whimpering, and finally, silence…leaving me alone in a darkness I’m not equipped to face without her.
They leave the door to our cage open after they throw me back in, and I curl into myself, trying to block out the sound of her death.
How could I let my fear stop me from saving her? Even after we promised each other.
The shame stays with me, like a thousand needles pricking all over my skin.
Several people return later, along with the shuffling sound of them dragging her lifeless body through the grass and their guesses as to what made the Gardener take action.
And they will be coming for me again soon.
Fern’s final words shift around in the darkness, her plea not to let this moment slip away lighting up the roof of our cage. Now is the only time I will ever get to escape. There’s no one left to pay for my crime. I couldn’t save her, but I will save the others.
Other thoughts buzz around me, too—who was that man Fern spoke to, and was he really on our side—but I push them aside. That doesn’t matter now. They’re both dead.
My fear hardens into something not even I could anticipate. I rest my head on the same straw Fern and I were lying in only a few hours ago and push the hair off my face. Fern’s whispered plan slides through the heartbreak of her screams and the painful realization that I let her die echoing in my head, and the thread of an idea forms. I can’t just sit still and wait to see who’s next. I have to get free and rescue the others. The Gardener might have meant for Fern’s death to keep me rooted, but she has shown me that now, more than ever, I need to fly. I wasn’t strong enough to save her, but I won’t waste this precious gift she gave me, that she paid for with her life.
I don’t know how, but I have to escape tonight. Like she told me to.
It’s night by the time they usher me out of my cage, snot stained and drained. There shouldn’t be any lights near our carts, but it seems the Gardener has left me a gift. A burning torch attached to the side of our cart casts enough light to reveal Fern’s blood watering the grass a deep red.
Chapter Three
I tremble against the night air, the breeze winding around my long hair and slithering up my limbs. But my will won’t be shaken by terror. The Gardener’s words that froze my limbs long enough for Fern to be killed stick to my neck like sweat.
But I won’t be swayed by his threats again. Not tonight, not ever. One way or another, I’m leaving, and I’m taking every single girl here with me.
After a stop in the wardrobe tent, I enter the small emerald tent tucked into the corner of the courtyard, freshly scrubbed, bandaged, primped, and clothed in a plunging top and long skirt dripping with sparkling crystals. The deep ruby fabric pops against the warm tones of my Varshan skin, the color echoing the hills of desert sand that surround my home. I’m the only one permitted to wear this color, the Gardener’s sign of “his deepest respect for my heritage,” as I’m reminded every night in his introduction before I take the stage.
While I walk, the ties holding up the layers of fabric bounce against my legs and bared stomach, begging to be tugged so the heavy clothing can fall away in pieces. I pick through the crowd—Flowers, Wilteds, and lackeys, all rushing around to prepare last-minute details before the show begins—searching for the twins, Calla and Lily. This tent barely holds us all, and stuffed in any empty places are wooden benches and long mirrors lining the side.
The longer it takes me to find them, the more I feel my earlier resolve faltering. Every ounce of my being longs for comfort, for conversation, for a second when my mind doesn’t replay my mistake over and over again. Fern would know exactly how to ease the pain somersaulting through my stomach.
My hair tickles my elbows as I search for them, falling in straw-colored ringlets down my back. The Wilteds, unlucky girls who pay for our misdeeds with their beaten flesh, left my hair down like always. The costumes and sets change, the silken drapes are switched out, and even the dance routines are scrapped for new ones, but my hair has always remained loose to accentuate my Varshan heritage.
The distinction used to bother me when I was younger, especially in the first few years when the Delmarions would look at anyone with light hair as someone who betrayed their kingdom.
And I guess in some ways, it’s true. When news of the traitor taking over the Varshan throne reached me, my caretaker and I fled west with hordes of other sympathizers for the old regime before the Delmarion gates were barred shut. We escaped persecution, but I wound up in a place much worse than where we were running from. Now I’ve grown numb to the looks thrown my way, and the whispers that used to grate against my back fall on deaf ears. Though Varsha and Delmar have been at war for hundr
eds of years, an uneasy stalemate has settled between the neighboring kingdoms. That and the treacherous desert stretching between them has reduced the war to nothing more than words.
Not that any of it matters to my sisters here. Even though I am the only Varshan Flower, the others have never treated me differently. I slip past another set of Wilteds, their heads pressed together as they desperately stitch up a small tear in Violet’s skirt. If they don’t finish by the time she is called, Violet’s punishment for wearing a tattered costume will come back onto them. All of our mishaps become bruises on the Wilteds.
Calla and Lily, clad in petal blue and purple, whisper to themselves in the middle of the room as their Wilteds, Star and Sickle, adjust the intricate silks twisting up their arms. The twins catch sight of me and wave me over in unison.
Every Flower turns to look at me with bleeding eyes as I pass. They all know the pain of hurting their Wilted, the girl who stays with them in the dark. But only Tulip, who plays with her straw doll in the back of the tent and never speaks, has felt the ache of losing her Wilted. Before today.
“You aren’t hurt!” the twins say, worry mirrored in both sets of their dark brown eyes.
Though I’ve known them for seven years, their strange way of speaking, especially in unison, never grows any less odd.
Calla grabs my right hand and Lily takes my left. Though my hands aren’t large, they feel huge clasped between their tiny ones.
“No, I’m not hurt,” I say, my voice surprisingly soft.
The concern radiating from the twins’ tight grip almost makes me smile. I know that every girl in here cares for me, even if prying eyes keep them all from showing it, but to have Calla and Lily show me this small kindness is enough.
I nod a hello to their Wilteds, unwilling to risk acknowledging them aloud. I won’t be the cause of more pain tonight. At this point, Fern should be fluffing out my chiffon skirt and sticking out her tongue when my worried eyes meet hers. The empty space where she should be knocks the wind from my lungs, and tears form.
Garden of Thorns Page 2
