by J A Armitage
I took a deep, calming breath and tried to tune in to the magic. I let my attention play against its frequency, slipping around the mushrooms’ particular strain of magic, much like I might have let my voice slip up and down a scale in an effort to match a musical note. The energy was vibrant and easy to fall into, and I slid down, through the shimmering heat of the magic, until my attention landed on the fungi’s glittering surface.
And then it stopped.
I tried to reach deep within the plant and find the life at its core, but I couldn’t. I held my hands out around the mushrooms in an effort to guide my mind, but no matter where I searched, and no matter how deeply I breathed, I couldn’t find an opening.
Not even the mushrooms’ gills would let me in. That sparkling purple skin was a shield--one so strong my energy couldn’t begin to penetrate it. I narrowed my eyes and focused, trying to force my way through, but whatever abilities I had were nothing against that delicate-looking barrier.
I leaned forward, imagining my attention as a knife that could break through that tender skin, but it was no use. The knifepoint only slipped sideways, and the mushrooms stood, totally tranquil and impossible to break.
Lilian put a hand on my arm. I jumped. My attention snapped back from the microscopic world of the mushrooms and back to the graying forest. My head throbbed, and I blinked, trying to stop the sudden swaying of the earth underneath me.
“Sorry,” Lilian said, drawing back her hand as if she’d been burned. “So sorry. I pulled you out, didn’t I?”
I closed my eyes and let out a breath. Slowly, the world steadied.
“It’s all right.” I stared at the mushrooms twinkling innocently before us. “I wasn’t getting anywhere.”
“What did you see?” she said. “You were a million miles away.”
“I…”
A warm breeze drifted through the clearing, rippling the glassy surface of the pond. The mushrooms’ reflections undulated lazily, and I stared at the movement. I could make a tulip droop or rise or spin its head around, but I hadn’t been able to make the mushrooms so much as budge.
I looked at Lilian, who was watching me with concern.
“Nothing,” I said. “I saw absolutely nothing.”
Her forehead wrinkled. “What do you mean, nothing?”
“I mean, I couldn’t get in. I couldn’t get close to them.” Gently, feeling as if lightning might strike if I touched one of their purple caps, I ran a finger across the top of a mushroom. Nothing happened. It was smooth and soft.
Ordinary.
And anything but.
“We need to get some of these back to Hemlock and Cypress,” I said. “Or maybe we should bring them here. Is it the mushrooms or the clearing?”
I looked around wildly, the possibilities suddenly spinning through my head so quickly I couldn’t keep up. Lilian put her hand back on my arm, but that wasn’t enough to steady me.
“It’s the mushrooms,” I said after a moment. “It has to be the mushrooms. The rest of the clearing is all gray. But we should take some of the soil, too. Mycelia can cover vast distances. We need to be sure whatever’s happening isn’t just at the surface.”
“But what’s happening?” Lilian said.
I stared at her, my heart fluttering wildly. “They’re immune to the blight,” I said. “Or… not immune, I can’t say that, but…” I gestured at the ruffled fungus closest to us. “The skin. It’s a shield.”
Lilian met my gaze, and her eyes lit up as if she was reading my mind. “We could use this.”
“Maybe.”
“We could at least research it.”
“Absolutely.”
“Do you think we could use these to stop the blight?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea. But we should definitely try.”
Suddenly, I knew what I was going to do after the wedding. These mushrooms were a gift--a promise, like my Gilded Lilies, of work that could save me from the grief of losing her.
And they were a gift from her to me, a blessing that might save the kingdom and might just save my heart.
“I really love you,” she said. “Your face when you get excited is one of my favorite sights in the world.”
Her voice was light and cheerful, but mine, when I spoke, seemed barely louder than the whispering of the brook that fed into this pond.
“Memorize it,” I pleaded.
The enormity of the moment--of what she’d found, of the wedding that was about to cleave us apart, of the knowledge that something, somewhere in Floris, was strong enough to fight the curse--flooded me with pain, and with hope.
I reached out and brushed my fingers against Lilian’s cheek. Her face was as soft as a peach, as warm as a rose on a sunny day, as bright as the light from one of my lilies, the ones that should have been named for her. I searched every curve and corner of her face, from her dark brown eyelashes to the lightest dusting of freckles across her cheeks to the luscious pink curve of her lips. I explored the gentle hollow below her bottom lip, the tiny mole on her right cheekbone, and the tiny, almost imperceptible scar above her left eyebrow from a long-ago fall down the stairs.
I memorized her, storing every bit of her I could gather, praying this moment would somehow be enough to last me a lifetime.
“I’m not going to forget you, Deon,” she promised. Her hand settled over mine, as light as a butterfly. “We’ll still be friends.”
“We won’t,” I said. “We can’t. You’ll be a married woman, and me? I’ll be well and truly banished from your grounds.”
“My parents won’t let that happen.”
“What good would their protection do?” I said. “Do you really think we’d be able to stay away from each other? I won’t be the reason you break your wedding vows.”
She scowled. “Some vows. I’m marrying him for his money, and he knows it. Whatever we say at that ceremony tomorrow will be a sham.” Her face flushed, and she swallowed as fear descended over her features like a shroud. “I don’t want to marry him.”
“I know.”
“But I have to feed our people.” Her gaze fluttered away from mine and down to the glittering mushrooms. “These might be a solution. But we don’t know yet. We won’t know fast enough. Our stores of grain will last another season, and then…”
“I know, Lilian.”
“I can’t let people starve on my watch.”
“I would never ask that of you.”
“You’re really going to leave, then?”
“I don’t have much choice.”
Her eyebrows furrowed. She couldn’t meet my eyes. “Please don’t tell Mama and Papa why. Papa’s already so worried, and Mama…” Her lips trembled, and she pressed them together and took a long, steady breath. “Mama says she feels well. Maybe she does. But...”
“But she would never stay in her rooms like this if she was at her best,” I finished gently.
“You know her. She can’t stand to be cooped up. Even when she’s ill, she always has visitors going in and out to keep her mind off things.”
“Maybe she really is just hiding her hair,” I said. “She seemed healthy enough last time we saw her together.”
Lilian stared at me, and after a moment of that intense blue stare, I stopped pretending.
“I know it’s more than that,” I said. “I know it is. I won’t tell her anything.”
She frowned up at me. She was so young, but the strain of these past few weeks and the enormous responsibilities she held weighed on her, giving her the look of someone years older.
“You want food?” she said at last, dejected.
I shifted on the blanket to kneel facing her and took both her hands in mine.
“I do want food,” I said. “And I want to spend the rest of this day eating and talking together just like we always have. And then tomorrow, when everything changes, you can go into the future with today in your pocket. Today we are ourselves. Today is how I will always feel about you.”
<
br /> Lilian spread the blanket out on top of the flat boulder, and I unpacked the picnic basket. We didn’t bother with the plates someone had neatly folded inside cloth napkins, and instead ate together from the same dishes of fried potatoes and egg salad and spicy roasted pigeon.
“How did you get all this out here?” I asked, scraping the bowl for the last creamy bits of the egg salad.
“You can thank Lady Iris. She brought it during her morning ride.” Lilian reached into the basket for a paper-wrapped parcel I hadn’t yet touched. She untied the string and unwrapped the package to reveal a napkin full of fluffy pastries oozing with strawberry jam. “And you can thank Lady Camellia for these. She’s becoming an exceptional baker.”
“Were all your ladies-in-waiting in on this?”
Lilian smirked. “Every single one.”
I accepted one of the pastries, which immediately shed flaky crumbles onto my fingers. “You’re not worried one of them will tell the duke?”
“I may have a dreadful fiancé, but I have excellent friends.” She raised a bottle of lemonade, the cook’s special brew flavored with mint leaves and orange rinds. “To friends. And to best friends. And to boys, I’d rather marry in a world where I wasn’t a princess, and you weren’t a gardener, and the entire kingdom wasn’t being threatened by a blight that’s turned a forest into...” She glanced around and waved her bottle generally toward the gray canopy overhead. “Well, this.”
I laughed and raised my drink. “To friends, best friends, and girls I’d rather marry.”
We clinked bottles, and I downed a long swig of the sweet lemonade. Lilian sipped hers, watching me, and then said, looking over the top of the bottle, “You know, it really is too bad that you ended up a gardener. Not that you’re not brilliant at it, but… Goodness, if only whoever left you at the palace had left you at Thornton manor instead!”
I snorted and almost coughed on my lemonade. “You think the duke’s family would have adopted me?”
“All right, well, not Thornton manor,” she said. “But some other noble house. They could have adopted you, and we could have met at a ball or something, and then I could just marry you instead of awful Garritt.”
There were a thousand ways that plan could have gone wrong, from my being sent to an orphanage to my adoptive noble family not being rich enough for Lilian’s present circumstances to the simple possibility that she might not have loved me so much if I hadn’t been raised under Hedley’s love and discipline.
None of them mattered. If we were doomed to take separate paths from here on out, I was glad that at least we’d had eighteen years of walking side-by-side.
I grinned. “Your mother said she should have adopted me.”
Lilian tilted her head and smiled a little as if she found this sweet, and then her eyes widened in horror.
“Oh,” she exclaimed. “Oh, no. No, that would not have been good.”
I cracked up, and she turned bright red and shook her head. A golden ringlet that had escaped her ribbon bounced against her cheek.
“You don’t want me as a sibling?”
She shuddered, laughing. “Stars, no. If we have one blessing in all this, you not being my brother has got to be it.”
Crinkles danced at the corners of her eyes, and the blush faded slowly from her skin. Watching her was like watching a sunset, each second slightly different from the last and every change beautiful.
The day slipped away too quickly for me to track. Every second with her seemed shorter than it should have been, and before long, the shadows of the gray-laden branches overhead had shifted clear across the little clearing.
Off in the distance, bells chimed. It was time for the daily moment of gratitude, where every Florian took a moment to feel thanks for the blessings in their lives.
The bells had struck me as ironic some evenings during this past week. What with the blight and the duke and all the hubbub around my lily, there had been days when I hadn’t felt as if I had much to be grateful for.
Today, though, I was full.
Lilian knelt up on the blanket and offered me her hands. I took them. Tradition sat with us like an old friend.
“Know what I’m grateful for?” I said.
“Let me guess.” Lilian pulled her hand away long enough to wipe a stray crumb from my cheek. She held it up, the telltale red of a strawberry pastry on her finger. “You’re grateful for strawberry preserves.” She wiped the crumb on the blanket and took my hand again.
“Correct,” I said. “I’m eternally grateful for strawberries.” I ran my thumb gently across the back of her hand. I secretly preferred the taste of raspberries, but strawberries were Lilian’s favorite, and that made them mine, too. “And I’m grateful for horses.” I glanced at the mounts we’d brought with us. One had wandered a ways away and was still nosing among the undergrowth for anything that hadn’t turned gray. The other seemed to be dozing while standing. “And I’m grateful for puppies.”
A dimple appeared at one corner of her lips.
“And dimples,” I said. “And I’m grateful for picnics, and lessons in your schoolroom, and eyes the color of the sky.”
She laced her fingers through mine and lifted one of my hands. “I’m grateful for dirt under fingernails,” she said quietly. “And the way some people’s hair runs wild when they sleep.”
“I’m grateful for gardens.”
“I’m grateful for lilies that cast light onto tent ceilings.”
I inched closer to her. Evening birdsong sounded in the distance, followed by the rustling of the few surviving leaves. “I’m grateful for forest clearings.”
“And purple mushrooms.”
“And you.”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. I watched her soak in the moment and said a silent prayer that it would stay with her always.
I pressed my forehead against hers, and she sighed and leaned against me.
“And I’m grateful for raspberry tarts,” I said.
Her eyes flew open. “You’re always grateful for raspberry tarts, Deon.”
I kissed her, and I tried, hopelessly, to make it last forever.
18th April
The next morning, I watched people scurry to and from the palace, readying the final preparations for the wedding ceremony. I watched a crowd gather outside the palace gates, silk flowers on their hats and colorful flags waving in the air. I watched wedding guests arrive in decadent carriages and clattering Forge vehicles.
I watched it all, and it all meant nothing. It was as if a curtain had been drawn between me and the world, rendering it distant and me numb.
“You all right?” Reed asked, coming up beside me in the staff quarters’ bathroom, where my reflection stared grimly back at me from the long mirror over the sinks.
I’d been allowed inside the palace for the day to make myself presentable before I sat in the area of the throne room that had been reserved for heads of staff. The one suit I owned was stiff and smelled of the cedar chips it had been stored in. The last time I’d worn it had been almost a year ago, at the palace’s annual servants’ ball. My shoulders must have grown broader since then, judging from the way my dress shirt strained across my chest and the small of my back.
I ran a damp hand through my hair and tried to tame it with a comb, aware of Reed’s gaze on me through the mirror.
“I’m fine.”
It was such an obvious lie that Reed didn’t bother to call me on it.
“I know you and the princess have always been friends,” he said, a little awkwardly. “You knew she had to get married someday, right? And it’s not as if she can marry her gardener.”
“I’m aware, Reed, thanks,” I said tightly.
“Sorry,” he said. He shifted from foot to foot and gave me a clumsy clap on the arm. “I just… You know I’m here for you, right?”
I ran the comb through my hair one last time and gave up.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “You always are. I apprec
iate it.”
“We still have the gardens,” he said. “And the enchanted glass. Just look ahead to that, maybe.”
I didn’t have the energy to pretend everything was still all right and under control. I felt like one of the lingering plants out in the garden, drooping and with a gray stem that couldn’t hold my head up. “I’m not going to be here after this week,” I said. “Remington fired me.”
Reed was silent for a moment, then burst out with a furious, “What?”
“Or he’s going to fire me,” I said. “I’ve got until they get back from the honeymoon to clear out.”
He sputtered. “That’s just nonsense. The gardens can’t get along without you, and the king and queen would never--”
I stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “I know,” I said. “But I’ve already thought it through. It’s all right. I can’t stay here anyway. Not with…”
I trailed off. The image of Lilian standing at the altar with that monster flashed through my mind, and I winced in physical pain.
“I just can’t,” I finished. “But I’ll stay in Floris for a while. We can still work on the glass together. It’ll be fine.”
He stared at me, but finally, he gave me a slow nod. “Whatever you say, boss.”
I gave him an impulsive hug. I clapped him on the back, and he held on tight, for longer than he might have normally.
I wiped my eyes as I pulled away, quickly, before he could see.
“That’s that, then,” I said, forcing myself to be brisk. “Guess we’d better take our seats.”
Reed frowned, still taking in the news. “Guess we’d better.”
We went our separate ways outside the throne room door, me to the pews that had been set aside for heads of staff and Reed to the balcony that had been erected in a crescent at the back of the room for servants.
Most royal weddings, at least in other kingdoms, didn’t include the presence of the palace’s entire serving staff. But including the help in weddings and christenings had been a long-standing Floris tradition, and it seemed fitting for someone like Lilian, who had always treated her servants as friends.
