A serrated blade slips between my shoulder and the pack strap, and the comforting weight of my supplies from Zareen slides off my back.
As they push me forward, I look over my shoulder toward the camp. My heart bleeds knowing the horrors that lie ahead. I can feel Rayce’s presence, warm and kind, from the direction of camp like a beacon in the dark. How much will he break in the morning when he finds the man who practically raised him and the girl he asked to stay with him have both disappeared? My gut twists.
Something shimmering in the moonlight catches my eyes, and my gaze snaps to my pack. Peeking out from the opened lid is the small book Oren lent me.
Marin will recognize the silvery lettering on the front, and that’ll give them a clue.
I just hope we’re both still breathing by the time they stumble upon it. I close my eyes, knowing our nightmare is just beginning.
Chapter Thirty-One
It takes us two days to get out of the forest. We stop often under the pretense of Oren’s injuries, but it’s the Gardener who always lags behind, his long-sleeved silk shirt sticking to his body and sweat glistening on every inch of him from exertion. On the first night, one of the lackeys attaches a small note to the leg of a falcon and lets it loose. It flies west with a purpose that sets my skin on edge. That same night, they extract the arrow sticking out of Oren’s side. His scream sticks with me as I try to lie comfortably on a bed of dead leaves near the Gardener’s smelly feet.
The next day I glance behind my shoulder every few moments, the shackles eating into my flesh with the movement, hoping to see the telltale green and brown uniforms of the Zareeni rebellion peeking through the birch trees. And every time I look, a little piece of the hope I dared cultivate withers.
Maybe Rayce won’t be able to justify coming after us.
When we break free from the trees, a familiar sight greets me, sending bile rising up my throat. Breaking the early-morning sunrise are the silhouettes of the traveling carts of the Garden. Still suspended high above my cart are the heads of Star and Sickle. Two other heads have joined them, though we’re too far away to decipher who else paid for my absence.
The Gardener pushes us faster. I wade through the tall grass of the plain that separates Imperial City from its wall, parting the thin blades like water. The sun beats down on my chapped lips and unprotected head, and my vision blurs sharp edges into a misty haze.
We arrive at the Garden with little fanfare. Only Shears waits for us in the center of the half circle our carts form with a small piece of parchment in hand. The moment he lays his dead eyes on me, a smile splits his face.
“I was wondering when I’d see you again, pretty little Flower,” he says, holding out the parchment to the Gardener. “Message for you, boss.”
The Gardener slaps the parchment away. “Read it aloud for me.”
Oren stops next to me, his shallow breathing rocking his entire body. Sweat sticks his long hair to his pale face, and blood stains the hasty bandages thrown around his wound. My hands long to reach out and steady him, but my long years in the Garden still them. Any amount of kindness I show him could be reflected in his skin. It’s best if I seem detached.
Shears frowns at the order and unfurls the tiny scroll. “Just says the big guy will meet us in two days’ time on his journey to the wall. He also gave a small map on where to go. Oh…” Shears looks up from the paper, a smile returning to his face. His eyes flit up, combing across Oren’s tall frame. “And we’re to have an execution when he arrives.”
I lunge out at him, straining against the manacles around my wrists. Shears laughs, pushing a hand against my forehead. The lack of water and sleep sends my brain spinning, and I nearly topple over.
The Gardener looks me in the face and speaks in a perfect Delmarion accent, not the fake exotic one he uses for show. “You’re about to give me everything I ever wanted, my precious Rose.” He turns to the lackeys standing behind us. “Lock them up. We have someplace we need to be.”
White-hot anger sears my veins, and I narrow my eyes at the Gardener’s back. He snatches the parchment from Shears like it’s a piece of rare chocolate and waddles over to his cart, studying the map.
“See you in a few days, Flower,” Shears says, waving his fingers slowly as a lackey tugs me backward.
The three lackeys that have kept watch over us lead me at sword point toward my old cage. Four streams of blood now coat the outside of my cart, and though I try to avert my gaze, all I can see are Star and Sickle’s faces, fixed in shock. Now on pikes in the back are Holly and Thyme, adding to the gruesome scene in front of me.
The man in front wrenches open the door to my cage, the familiar squeaking sound embedding into my bones. Darkness opens up its deadly arms, waiting to devour me. The lackey on the left shoves Oren inside, and the one in front pushes me into the yawning mouth. The sharp wooden edge bites into my knees as I tumble forward. The stench of stale hay and years of desperation fills my lungs.
I swing around as the light fades from the slamming door, locking me back in the hovel I used to share with Fern. Crawling across the splintered wood, I slam my bound fists into the door. The hollow sound of my bones hitting wood fills the room as laughter echoes from outside.
How are we going to escape?
My mind searches through everything I know. It took me ten years to find a way to escape last time, and now I only have two days. I have no weapons unless I want to burn myself up with the vial of Zarenite Oren handed me.
Rayce flashes before my eyes in the darkness, stinging my heart.
Zareen might be en route to help us, but there’s no guarantee they’ll come for us. Arlo’s words haunt me in the dark as they have a thousand times before, teasing me about not being important enough to risk everything for. Besides, even if they are coming for us, we can’t afford to wait for them, especially if Shears was telling the truth about an execution.
No time, no way to defend myself, and likely no help.
Oren’s sputtering cough breaks through my hopeless thoughts.
I turn and narrow my eyes in the swirling darkness. In my absence, someone has covered up my peephole with a spare piece of wood, sealing us in this false night. In the right corner of the cart, the shadows seem a little thicker.
Crawling on all fours, the crunchy sound of hay the symphony to my stilted dance, I scurry to the corner.
Oren leans against the wooden wall of the cage, his long legs nearly touching the opposite wall. Leaves and hay stick out of his long, ruffled hair and beard. His hands lie slack by his sides, and beads of sweat cling to every patch of his skin that I can see.
I reach out and pull a leaf from the front of his beard. He winces.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
His voice nothing more than a whisper, he starts to say, “No,” but a coughing fit cuts it off. The way those hacking noises rack his body makes me wince, and I push him up farther on the wall so he can catch his breath.
“Take it easy,” I say. “I’m going to try to redress that wound.”
Grimacing, he nods.
With trembling fingers, I pull at the knot holding together the shoddy wrapping around his middle. He sucks in air as I take my time unwinding the cloth. The closer I get to his wound, the stickier the dirty makeshift bandage becomes. Pulling it off, I find the puncture near the edge of his abdomen. The skin puckers up on the incision, and the wound hasn’t started to scab over.
I yank the bottom of my long tunic out of my pants and rip off a piece. I place the clean fabric over Oren’s wound, wishing for the stinging brown bottle Rayce had when he helped me with the cut on my palm, and wrap it so it stays shut.
I pull back my shaking hands, now smeared with Oren’s blood, and stare down at them, tears stinging my eyes.
“What are we going to do?” I whisper aloud, no longer able to contain the fear pulsing through me. “I’m so sorry. This is all my fault. If I had just been strong enough to tell Rayce the truth, then we wouldn�
�t be here. If I hadn’t been leaving the camp, if you hadn’t been out there to stop me, then you wouldn’t be here and—”
Oren’s large hand covers mine, stopping my tongue, and his grip is strong enough to pull me closer to him.
“No,” he whispers. “It’ll be okay. Tru—” Another cough interrupts him. “Trust in them.”
“Okay, okay,” I say, nodding through my tears to keep him quiet. I can’t believe in his words. Hope died the moment the shackles were thrown around my wrists.
He coughs again, his head rolling to the side, but his grasp on me doesn’t loosen.
“Trust…in…Rayce,” he says, each word stunted, like he’s pulling them out of the deepest places in his mind. “Faith.”
He pats my hand and I lay my head on his chest, letting my tears soak his filthy brown robe. We sit like that as the cart lurches forward. I listen to the sound of his heart pounding faintly through his chest and pray to whatever Delmarion god that’s listening to let it continue on that way.
In the silence, I hear Fern laughing, feel her hands weaving through my hair as she spins tales of her life before the Garden. Her words were the only thing to get me through those long nights. The first day we were locked in this very cage together, she told me the only way we could remember what it was like to be alive was to talk. The moment we stopped talking, stopped believing, we let the Gardener win.
“Why don’t I tell you a story?” I ask, shaking Oren to keep him awake.
He doesn’t answer, so I close my eyes and start to talk as our cart bumps along, blocking out the sight of the four heads strung up just above us and the panic filling my lungs. The words bottled up inside for years come spilling out. The true story he’ll never get to add to the pages of his book.
“The night before my father’s kingdom fell, he kissed me on the forehead and sent me away with the woman who raised me after my mother died. We were to head for Delmar. My nanny told me everything would be okay once we got here. I was nine and I believed her.”
All I remember about her are her soft hands and the way she screamed when the Gardener broke into the home where we were staying. Rain and darkness and small spaces have robbed me of her face and our shared jokes and her voice.
“We were staying in a small farmhouse on the border of Delmar the night we were attacked.” I blink back fresh tears as Zara’s sleeping face appears before me. “I trusted a boy a little older than me, and I shouldn’t have. He told the Gardener where we were hiding. The girl I was sharing the room with was just a few years older than me. When the Gardener broke in, they found her first. She—she never stood a chance. They found me curled underneath a cabinet with my mother’s necklace. When the Gardener came in to examine what they’d found, he recognized it. He knew I was a prize. Then he kept me hidden for four years while I practiced day and night to perfect my routine, and when I had finally blossomed, he made me his star.
“My birthright has kept me safe, but it’s also kept me gagged. He told me people would use me to get what they want, and after the betrayal from that boy I thought I could trust, I believed him. That it’d be safer to keep it to myself.”
Even though Oren doesn’t have the strength to respond, I imagine what he would say. I can almost hear his rough voice asking, “Why on earth would you do that, child?”
“I know I was wrong now,” I say. “But after so many years here, his reasoning had to be true. Otherwise, how could good, honest people let something like the Garden exist? Either everyone was bad or no one cared. And that’s why I couldn’t trust any of you at first. Especially Rayce. Last time I let a boy get close to me, I lost everything. But I was so wrong this time.”
Oren would have the perfect thing to say to that, too. The thing that would blow back the walls and bust the top off this hellhole. I don’t know those words, though. Could never even conjure them up.
With no more secrets to reveal, and too many problems to solve, we fall asleep to the jerky rocking of my old cage bumping its way toward an execution I’m powerless to stop.
…
The pounding in my head can’t be real. It builds like the slow rise of a tightly wound drum, and each hit shoots a wave of pain down my body that vibrates to my fingers and toes. My field of vision has shrunken down to a tiny speck of white, glowing high and fuzzy above me like a pinprick through a black veil. I stare at the light, trying to figure out where I am. I pretend my head lies on a pillow and the breathing next to me is Marin’s, but in my gut I already know. The dim lighting, the wooden walls adorned with scratches and smudged with dirt, the stale hay and heat pressing down on me like I’m baking in an oven…
It’s the place I’ve been running from.
I’m back in the Garden.
That thought weighs on me as if the Gardener sits on my chest. I turn my head to the left and see Oren still leaning against the wooden wall. Sweat drips down his forehead, his pale lips cracking from lack of water. The only thing that brings a tendril of comfort to my heart is the way his body moves up and down with each breath.
Sometime during my restless slumber, the cart stopped moving.
The sound of wood grinding against metal echoes in the darkness. I scoot up as bright sunlight pours into the cart. A silhouette fills the opening, but it’s too bright to see anything.
“They’re up!” one of the lackeys calls out.
Oren’s hand finds mine. His long fingers wrap weakly around my palm as if he’s trying to comfort me. Trying to say things with his hands that his mouth can’t utter.
We stay there, frozen, in this single second of solitude, tucked away in the darkest corner of the earth, and his touch tells me nothing can break us.
Several dark silhouettes block out the blinding light, their weight shaking the cage. Whatever else Oren wanted to say is cut short as two pairs of hands wrench us apart.
They drag Oren out into the blinding sunlight.
“Where are you taking him?” I rush for the opening, meeting the sharp end of a blade. My eyes fight to focus in the bright light, but I can’t make out anything in the glare.
“Tell me!” I yell at the lackey holding me at bay.
He chuckles in response, pointing the end of his sword deeper into my cage before he slams the door in my face, locking me alone in the darkness. I lean my forehead against the rough wood, trying to calm my shaking limbs. I go over my options in my head once more: Rayce and the others are too far to reach. Oren is gone. There’s only me.
Alone.
In the dark.
Without even a shred of deceiving light to give me hope.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The sound of a hammer beating wood rouses me from sleep. My eyes flutter open, and I expect to be met with darkness, but a splash of white sunlight beams down a few inches from my head. I lie still, waiting for my vision to change. Surely this is a trick of my mind. My dry throat burns as I try to swallow, and my head swims.
Yet the light remains through the pain. Turning toward it, I see light pouring in from the old peephole Fern and I used to share. But how is it uncovered again?
I sit up on my hands and knees, the banging outside pounding through my small space.
Scooting to the peephole, I peer out. Light attacks my raw eyes, casting everything white. I blink, my vision slowly adjusting to the brightness.
The side of a crumbling white building greets me, a giant chunk of the wall propped up against it. Beams hang off the wooden ceiling, and dark holes loom where the wood has split and caved in from decay. Part of a rickety wooden fence stands next to the dilapidated building, and the remains of brown dirt where a road once stood have been claimed back by the tall grass of the plains. A rusty ax sits embedded in a pile of rotting chopped wood, waiting for someone to come by and claim it from its state of disarray. Whatever this place used to be, it has long since been abandoned.
The lack of people makes it even stranger to see the top of a grand dark blue tent peeking out from over the ruined
houses. This is the type of place the Garden would never go. It’s poor, dilapidated, abandoned. We aren’t here for a show.
Our carts have been placed in their usual formation in semicircle around the large tent. Bang!
The sound that woke me echoes in the air again. I follow where the noise is coming from to a shirtless man slick with sweat, pounding a large hammer into a wooden platform he’s erecting between two ruined houses. The newly chopped planks of the small platform are jarring white next to the rotting houses surrounding it.
Bang!
The hammer hits the wood.
Bang!
And I realize they’re building a stage for the impending execution. My chest seizes.
Oren!
I can’t stand by and let them hurt him. There has to be something I can do. I place my shaking hands against the wall to steady them and take a few deep breaths. It’s hard to tell how many hours it’s been since they took Oren. I pull my hand back and see his blood dried onto my skin and clench my fist.
Please be okay.
What can I use? I peek out the open slot again and come face-to-face with a dark brown eye peering inside my cage. My heart slams in my chest as I jump back.
Laughter assaults the air, crawling up my skin. Shears.
“Preparing for the big show, Flower?” he asks. “I thought you might want a room with a view as your friend paints the grass red, so I took down the patch for you.”
I ball my hands into fists, grabbing onto the stale hay to steady them. Shears flashes a smile, showing his large white teeth. Everything inside me longs to punch his face until my hands are bloody and every one of his precious teeth falls out of his mouth. Even though I know I should keep my head down and stay silent, anger breaks my vow of silence.
“You aren’t going to succeed,” I say. “I’m going to stop whatever it is you’re planning.”
“And I’m going to enjoy watching you try, little Flower,” he whispers into the cage.
The wistful note in his voice slithers up my limbs, slicing into my resolve. The heat from outside presses down on me like the ceiling is growing gradually lower.
Garden of Thorns Page 27
