by J A Armitage
“Is it that obvious?”
I shoved my hands in my pockets and rocked back on my heels a little. “Not obvious. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t presume.”
He dismissed the remark with a single, economical shake of his head. “You’re attuned to the living things around you as ever, Deon,” he said. “Forgive me, I hope my preoccupation didn’t affect the meeting. I imagine that was a significant event for you.”
“It’s not that. I just wanted to be sure you’re feeling well.”
King Alder sighed. “I am. Unfortunately, my wife is not.”
I pushed my hands further into my pockets, like that could somehow keep me from fidgeting. “Queen Rapunzel?” I said. “What’s wrong?”
My thoughts immediately darted to Lilian. Was she all right? Did she know?
“She’s ill.” King Alder glanced at the ground and up again. “It’s not serious. The palace physician is attending to her, and she’ll be quite all right. The timing is just unfortunate with Lilian’s wedding approaching and our guests at the palace.”
This wasn’t the truth, or at least not all of it. I waited, and the king gave me a rueful smile.
“In truth, I just don’t like it when she’s uncomfortable,” he admitted. “I’m fond of that woman. I start climbing the walls when she’s doesn’t feel well.”
A memory flitted through my mind of the time Lilian had caught nettle pox. I had tried to help with the itching by bringing her a salve, but she’d quickly ordered me out of the room and told me, Stop hovering, Deon, you’re making me madder than the blasted spots!”
I smiled at the king. “I can understand that. We all love Queen Rapunzel. Give her my best wishes for a quick recovery.”
“I will,” he said. “And Deon? Best not to mention this to anyone else, if you please. I’d hate for everyone to start panicking, what with the wedding so close. Especially to Lilian. I don’t want her to worry.”
“Of course, Your Majesty,” I said.
I bowed, and he climbed into his carriage. The wheels clattered against the cobblestone streets as he drove away.
Water bubbled down the sides of a dozen fountains and splashed into the enormous pool. The evening air was chill and smelled fresh and clean.
I hopped lightly from one stone lily pad to another and paused to nudge Reed’s shoulder. He looked up, startled, and his face broke into a grin.
“Shouldn’t scare people like that, they might throw you in,” he said.
Reed was one of the youngest gardeners and one of the few who still seemed to like me. I crouched next to him and poked the compact bloom of a pearl lotus floating on the pond. The shimmering white petals seemed to sneeze, and a soft cloud of sparkling pollen floated up, carrying a light sugar scent into the air.
“They seem healthier than last time I checked,” I said.
“If we’re not careful, they’ll end up taking over the whole area.” He gestured at a soft purple water hyacinth flower fluttering a few feet away. “Don’t think those will be happy.”
“You’ll keep everyone playing nicely,” I said. “I managed to hire an extra wagon to transport the water garden elements to the festival, by the way.”
“What a hero,” a voice drawled behind me. “The head gardener did his job. Round of applause, everybody.”
I didn’t need to look. The sudden tension in my shoulders identified the newcomer for me.
“I put the seedlings you asked for in the tea garden,” Jonquil said, addressing Reed. “And I brought over a bag of compost.”
“Thanks.”
Reed’s gaze darted to me, and he seemed on the verge of saying something, but I shook my head. He was friendly with almost everyone on staff; I didn’t need him to ruin his comfortable position.
“Jonquil, don’t be an ass,” Briar said, coming up behind him.
She could talk like that: She was an attractive, confident young woman, and Jonquil was the kind of man who acted differently around attractive women. I shot her a grateful look, which she ignored.
As far as I could tell, she was as unhappy about my promotion as any of them, but she never let it affect her behavior. I wished some of her professionalism would rub off on Basil or Chervil or any of the others.
Jonquil pressed his lips into a thin line and retreated, his nose in the air ample evidence that his opinion of me hadn't changed, even if he didn't choose to voice it again.
Briar acknowledged me with the briefest of nods, then went to the farthest end of the garden and began checking the water lilies for signs of the beetle infestation we'd only just gotten under control.
"Don't take it personally," Reed said.
He was right, but it was easier said than done. Even here, in one of the most relaxing gardens in all the palace grounds, Jonquil had a way of getting under my skin.
I clapped Reed on the shoulder and walked away. Jonquil's bad attitude didn't have to affect me. I had earned my place here. I’d just had a meeting with the King of Floris and the Horticulture Council. If that wasn't evidence that I was doing all right, nothing was. I was fine. I was better than fine. I was—
"Who stole your seedlings?" Lilian asked dryly.
I started, then spun around. I'd walked right past her without noticing, and now she was watching me from a bench with an amused smile.
I ran a hand through my hair. "How long have you been sitting there?"
She rose, her warm pink skirts rippling like poppy petals in the wind.
"The whole time," she said. "From Jonquil leaving the water garden, to you leaving the water garden, to that grumpy look settling all over your face. I can talk to him, you know."
That was just what I needed, for the princess to come to my aid and make it clear to all the gardeners exactly what kind of palace pet I really was.
I shook my head. "I can deal with him."
"I know you can, I'm just not sure you will," she said.
As usual, Lilian had seen more deeply into me than I had planned.
She laced her arm through mine and started walking. I fell into step, matching my strides to her shorter ones.
"Papa said your meeting with the Horticulture Council went well," she said.
She glanced up at me, and my heart skipped a beat at the sight of her blue eyes shaded by the long lashes she'd inherited from her mother.
The king clearly hadn’t told her about Queen Rapunzel's illness. That was for the best. Lilian was the kind of person to fret if any of her loved ones so much as stubbed their toe, and she worshipped her mother.
Now, she'd seen my frustration with Jonquil and wanted to cheer me up, so I let myself be cheered.
"It did go well," I admitted. "A few members of the Council seemed unsure about me, but Minister Blackwood was encouraging. And I think our festival displays will impress even stuffy old Minister Balsam."
"You're going to dazzle them."
There was absolute confidence in her voice. I wished I could bottle her faith and dab it on like a flower essence whenever I doubted myself.
"And what about you?" I said. "What have you been up to today?"
She bit her lip as if trying to suppress a smile. “I went boating,” she said as if she was sharing a great secret. "Garritt took me out on the lake, and we fed the swans and had a picnic."
"Garritt did, huh?" I nudged her shoulder with mine and wiggled my eyebrows at her.
She flushed a pretty pink. "He is my future husband, Deon," she said. "You didn't think I was going to call him Duke right up to the wedding, did you?"
A small, private part of me had hoped she would. But that was a selfish corner of my soul, and I couldn't give in to those impulses. Not when Lilian's happiness was at stake.
"It sounds like you had a wonderful time," I said.
“I did.”" She flushed again. “Deon? I really like him. He's kind to me, and he seems really eager to do what’s right for Floris.”
“I'm glad.” I squeezed her arm gently with mine. “You deserve the
best, Lils. I hope he's everything you ever dreamed of.”
I walked Lilian through the garden to the private door that opened straight from the rose beds to a flight of hidden stairs that ended in her chambers. The urge to kiss her goodnight gripped me, but I resisted it and gave her a warm smile instead. She disappeared through the wooden door, leaving me alone in the deepening dusk.
There were shortcuts I could take to the servants' chambers, but I didn't want to take them tonight. I could still smell Lilian's magnolia perfume, and I knew I wouldn't sleep so long as her scent clung to me. Instead of cutting between rose bushes or across grassy lawns, I made my way to one of the wide paved paths that connected the gardens. This was a longer walk to my chambers. I needed the time to cool down.
The path meandered through the tea garden and past a showy display of ornamental cabbages, then wove around the enormous blueberry patch the king had commissioned for his wife as a wedding gift. Finally, I broke off to the secluded path that led along the castle walls to one of the servants' doors.
This part of the garden had been created years ago by Hedley, who thought servants' areas should be just as beautiful as those meant for royalty, and I slowed down to breathe in the early night air and enjoy the dazzling display of tulips that surrounded this path. The blooms were closing up for the night, the petals shielding the pollen and keeping it safe and dry.
Most of them were, anyway. A few near the palace walls were still open.
Open, and gray.
I stopped in my tracks and squinted. Dusk often played tricks with my vision. But this was no trick. These blooms were dying.
I cursed under my breath. I didn’t have time for a proper round of firehead blight or bulb rot. The Spring Flower Festival required the attention of every gardener, every moment of every day, and disease in these beds would demand the total focus of at least one tulip specialist.
I couldn't begin to imagine whom I'd pull from their festival responsibilities. Jonquil was the best at coaxing unhappy plants back to life, but he’d likely murder me if I tried to put him on this job. Myrtle would probably take on the task but be resentful, and rightly so; she had seniority over the others and shouldn't be stuck at the palace doing damage control when she could be sharing her expertise at the festival. Olive would probably step in with a good attitude, but would it be fair to assign her just because I knew she wouldn't complain?
A frustrated sigh escaped me, and I sank to my knees in front of the tulip beds. The limp flowers indicated bulb rot, but the grayish color usually came from the mold at the heart of firehead blight. It was strange, though. I hadn't seen any of the usual indicators of blight, like stunted shoots or yellow spots. Just these flowers, as dull as if all the life had been siphoned out of them.
No matter what was causing it, I'd need to get the damaged plants out of the bed so they couldn't continue to spread their disease. I used the clippers attached to my belt to cut the tulip at the base, and my stomach turned at the squelch of the blades cutting through the soggy stem.
I held the dead tulip up to the light of the rising moon.
There was something wrong with these plants. They weren't just diseased; there was something else here, something more. The limp flower in my hand gave off the odor of rot, but it was more than a smell—it was a sense of sickness that echoed in my bones.
It would have to be Jonquil. He understood the tulips better than any of us.
This flower couldn’t go in the compost piles, not without putting the whole garden at risk, so I stood with a grimace and headed for the nearest waste bin. I tossed it on top of the other rubbish and hoped I wouldn’t end up in the same place when I told Jonquil what he had to do.
28th March
Exhaustion gripped my bones the next morning when I woke before dawn. I’d always been an early riser; the beauty of the quiet gardens before anyone awoke to enjoy them had always been motivation enough. But the festival had taken its toll, and remembering the new tulip problem I’d have to deal with made getting out of bed difficult.
The fatigue left as soon as I was in the greenhouse with a thousand spring-green seedlings on every side, lit against the pre-dawn darkness by enchanted lamps from Badalah. Lilian and I had agreed a long time ago that baby plants were almost as cute as baby animals, and being surrounded by all this new life made me breathe deeper and move slower.
I thinned the seedlings and misted them with water, turning their trays so the drooping ones would straighten themselves by stretching toward the morning sunlight when it came. I hummed as I worked, while the darkness gave way to the soft pearly gray that hinted at the coming day.
By the time I was back in the servants’ dining hall, a mug of coffee and plate of scrambled eggs and toast in front of me, I felt awake, alive, and ready to take on Jonquil and anything else the world chose to throw at me.
And then I opened the newspaper.
It shouldn’t have hit me so hard. Lilian had told me they’d gone boating; she’d confessed that she was beginning to like her betrothed. But no words could have prepared me for the smile on her face in the photograph under the headline PRINCESS, DUKE ENJOYING SPRING FLING BEFORE WEDDING.
There were three photos, which were three photos too many according to the nausea bubbling in the pit of my stomach. Lilian looked radiant in all of them, with her smile lighting up her whole face. The pictures showed them boating on the lake, walking through the rose gardens I had pruned so carefully just last month, and playing tennis at the city’s elite sporting club. Lilian’s slim-fitting tennis gown clung to all her curves, and I flushed with sudden jealousy at the thought of Duke Remington touching her while she wore it.
Sticks and stones, I needed to get a grip on myself.
She was happy. She actually liked the man she was about to marry, and from the looks of these pictures, he liked her, too. I should be over the moon for my best friend and thrilled that her life was coming up roses instead of thorns.
And I was. I wanted her happiness.
But stars, I wanted mine, too.
There was no one in all the world I could talk to about this. Lilian had always been my confidant and the holder of all my secrets.
One of the maids ambled slowly into the dining hall, her eyelids still heavy with sleep. She squinted across the room at me.
“Coffee,” she demanded.
I poured her a cup and pushed it across the table. She dropped into a seat and stared into the beverage as if it held all her hopes for the future. I bit back a smile and reached for my own drink.
Another sleepy maid followed her, and then a footman with his hair sticking up at odd ends. He was trailed by a stablehand, Pansy, who entered with her hair in two tight braids and her eyes bright.
The stablehands were up before even me most days. I caught Pansy’s eye, and we traded grins over the heads of the groggy maids.
“Morning, Deon.” She arranged herself on the bench next to me. “Get me some apple juice, would you?”
I poured her a glass while she filled her plate with eggs, toast, and bright red cubes of greenhouse watermelon. She glanced at the paper and gestured at it.
“You done with the current events section?”
I took one last, unwilling look at the pictures of Lilian and the duke.
“It’s all yours.”
She pored over the pages while I pretended to read an article about a new method of potato cultivation devised by a child prodigy in the next province.
“Princess Lilian seems to be getting along well with her beau,” Pansy said.
The comment was offhand. There was no reason she should know how deeply her words pierced me, and I silently vowed that no one would ever know.
I shrugged one shoulder and kept reading as if I didn’t find the romantic entanglements of the love of my life very interesting.
“Hard not to get along with a fellow who looks like that,” one of the maids, Rose, said with a cheeky grin.
The other maid, Daisy,
giggled. The topic seemed to have roused her better than the coffee. “He’s awfully handsome, isn’t he?”
Pansy pursed her lips to the side. “He rides a beautiful stallion,” she said as if this signaled the full measure of a man.
I trained my eyes on the page in front of me and read the same line about seed potatoes three times before the words sank in.
“Seems a nicer man than his father,” Rose said. “That’s a good omen for the princess, at least.”
I glanced up. “Is Duke Markus an unkind man? He seemed decent enough when I met him.”
Rose pursed her lips, and she and Daisy exchanged knowing looks.
“He’s a bit full of himself,” Daisy said. “Not in a way that’s justified, if you ask me. King Alder is twice the man the elder duke is in every way, but he doesn’t put on airs that are half as grand.”
“It’s not the airs that trouble me.” Rose stirred a heaping spoonful of sugar into her coffee, then another. “Only the way he speaks to his wife…”
She trailed off; her raised eyebrows telling exactly what she thought of that kind of behavior.
I leaned forward. “What do you mean?”
“It’s not that he’s not permitted to act however he pleases,” she said. “I wouldn’t presume to know how a retired duke should behave. But I’ve overheard him talking to the duchess on more than one occasion when I’ve been tidying up their chambers, and I’d slap any man who spoke to me like that. He’s all demands and insults and comments about her waistline. And she’s not much better, sniping and moaning back at him. They’re a couple of miserable birds biting at each other all day long and no mistake.”
Daisy buttered a slice of bread and observed me. “You don’t believe her.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe it,” I said. “I just—you’re sure it was the duke and duchess you overheard?”
“No question,” Rose said. “I don’t blame you for wondering. They’re sweet as apples when they’re out and about in front of other people. But behind closed doors?” She whistled.
