Heir of Thorns Read online

  It didn’t take long for Hedley to get the lay of the land. He knew these gardens like they were his own name, and he spotted the first instance of blight even before I did.

  He crouched and yanked the daffodil out of the ground. Its petals were fading from yellow to a sick gray, and it drooped like all the life had been siphoned out of it.

  “It’s like root rot and mold and whiteflies all put together,” I said. “Can’t find a cause, can’t find a cure.”

  “Can’t cure a curse.”

  “I still don’t think it’s a curse.”

  Hedley straightened, the dying flower in his hand. “What do you know about your arrival at the palace?” he said. “When you were an infant?”

  I raised an eyebrow, but Hedley was busy examining the flower from every angle and didn’t see my expression. He waited, and finally, I shrugged.

  “Some woman brought me to the palace,” I said. “Perhaps my mother, perhaps not. No one knows who she was.”

  Hedley poked his finger down the daffodil’s bell and peered inside it as if the secret to the blight might be hiding down there with the pollen.

  “The king and queen could have sent me to an orphanage, but they took me in.” It was a kindness that still surprised me. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if someone showed up on my doorstep with a babe in arms. But from the way Queen Rapunzel told it, they hadn’t thought twice. “You know the rest. I was schooled alongside Lilian and tried my hand at different career paths until I ended up as a gardener.”

  “Have you ever tried to find your real parents?”

  “Once or twice. There was no paperwork. Didn’t seem to matter much in the end.”

  I’d been curious about where I’d come from, of course. Nobody could help that. But whoever my parents had been, they hadn’t wanted or been able to care for me. The king and queen and Hedley had stepped in and been there for me in every way that mattered. It felt almost ungrateful to look for more.

  “You think I had something to do with all the flowers blooming brighter?” I said. “Like maybe I was part of it somehow?”

  Hedley made a noncommittal noise and bent to examine the healthy daffodils that had been closest to the blighted one. His movements were slow and methodical, and I suspected his eyes saw more than mine, trained as they were by decades of experience.

  “Maybe whoever brought me left some magic in the kingdom,” I said. “I don’t have magic myself, but you said the gardens do. Perhaps it’s wearing off.”

  He made another noise, which was as impossible to decipher as the first.

  “Or maybe—”

  I was cut off by the sound of raised voices. I paused, listening. They seemed to be coming from the palace—or, rather, from the other side of the nearest tower. I took off at a jog toward the noise, and Hedley followed.

  When I rounded the tower, it took a moment for my eyes to make sense of the nightmare in front of them. People, swarms of them, were walking all over the palace grounds, spilling off the paths and into the flower beds on every side. They walked across beds of petunias and through rows of seedlings. They climbed over low garden fences and leaned against tree trunks. A man wearing a navy blue hat picked one of my flowers, smelled it, and tossed it on the ground.

  Hedley came to a stop just behind me. I didn’t have to hear his sudden stream of curses to know he was angry; the rage fairly crackled from him.

  It was nothing against mine.

  I strode forward into the crowd. A number of them had cameras, and those who didn’t were clutching notebooks and pens. I grabbed the arm of the nearest person.

  “What in blazes is going on?” I growled.

  He blinked as if he couldn’t fathom why someone would ask him such a question. “We’re here to report on the blight.” He scrabbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper. “Here, here’s my press pass.”

  “I don’t give a damn about your press pass. Get off this flower bed.”

  He glanced down and started. Clearly, the imbecile hadn’t realized he was standing on a flower bed.

  “Sticks and stones,” Hedley muttered behind me. He yanked a couple of journalists out of a bed of irises. I’d never seen him this angry; his face was red, as though it was taking everything he had not to deck them across the face.

  I looked around for guards or tour guides or anyone who might have a semblance of authority over this mob, but the journalists and photographers seemed to be utterly without supervision or basic human decency. I whirled on a woman in a trim violet suit.

  “The palace grounds are closed,” I said. “Get off this property.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me and raised her notebook. “And you are?”

  “Deon Gilding, Head Gardener,” I snapped. “These are not the public grounds, and press passes were never used for this kind of… destruction.”

  She didn’t even hesitate. “And what can you tell us about the blight spreading from the castle grounds?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Not one thing. Get out.”

  “This press pass gives me access to the palace grounds until six this evening,” she said, flipping her notebook to show me the pass clipped to her page. “Do you have a response to the accusations that your gardeners are the ones who spread the disease from the palace to neighboring farms?”

  I shouldered past her. They were turning the garden into wreckage faster than the blight, and I needed someone with the authority to get them out of there.

  I didn’t bother trying to see the queen. That was a lost cause. Instead, I wasted ten minutes trying to track down the king before finally learning from a housemaid that he was visiting with the queen and wasn’t to be disturbed.

  I balled my fist to keep myself from driving it into the nearest tranquil landscape painting and thanked her with gritted teeth.

  “Sorry,” she said, offering an apologetic smile.

  The disaster area outside wasn’t her fault. I forced myself to smile back and made a beeline for the front doors.

  “I know,” the palace guard standing at the top of the stairs said before I could open my mouth. I knew him, at least in passing. Kale had worked at the palace almost as long as I had, and we’d always been friendly. “I sent a few guards over to deal with the problem.”

  “They have press passes.” I couldn’t get the sarcasm out of my voice.

  Kale nodded, jaw tight. “So they told us.” He jerked his chin out toward the palace driveway, which was unexpectedly light on reporters who thought the rules of civilized society didn’t apply to them. Only a couple of journalists stood out there, talking to each other and glancing around the driveway with vaguely lost expressions. “I made it clear that press passes can be revoked at the palace’s convenience and that vandalizing the palace’s grounds was certainly cause for termination. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them, they’re tenacious, and we can’t use any significant force on the press without the royal family’s permission.”

  “I’ve already tried to find the king.”

  His jaw twitched. “I didn’t bother.”

  “What about Princess Lilian?” I said. “Couldn’t she do something?”

  He gave it a moment of thought, then let out a sharp sigh. “I’d be willing to risk acting on her orders,” he said. “You’re not going to have any luck reaching her, though. Her Highness’s schedule has her doing engagement photos all afternoon.”

  “Where?”

  “Throne room,” he said. “I can’t imagine they’ll take kindly to an interruption, though.”

  “Well, I don’t take kindly to people destroying the grounds.”

  I spun on my heel and marched inside. Lilian and her entourage were easy enough to find; the lights from the flashbulb bounced off the wall in the corridor opposite the throne room doors. I paused in the entryway. Lilian and Duke Remington stood together in front of a window. They were locked together in a half-embrace, facing toward one another with their hands on each other’s arms. The ph
otographer danced around them, snapping pictures from different angles, then nodded at them.

  “Now, Your Highness, I want you to turn around,” she said. “Your Grace, put your arms around her waist like so, and now look up and smile.”

  They followed her instructions like obedient puppets, and the photographer lit up the room with another series of flashes. Lilian blinked a few times, and the duke leaned forward a little to say something to her. She replied and laughed a little. Jealousy flared inside me.

  I slipped inside the room and caught Lilian’s eye. She narrowed her eyes in question, and I waved her toward me. She held up a hand and asked the photographer to wait a moment.

  The duke caught her arm and murmured something to her, and she smiled up at him and nodded. He disengaged from her arm and came toward me, and before I could say anything to stop them, Lilian, the photographer, and the photographer’s two assistants all bustled off to another room.

  “Lilian is terribly busy today,” the duke said. “Did you need something?”

  His voice was cooler than it had been the last few times we’d spoken. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, a silent caution I didn’t know how to interpret.

  “I need to speak with her,” I said. “There’s a situation outside, and only Her Highness has the authority to help.”

  “I daresay I might be able to assist.” Everything about him seemed civil. Still, unease prickled across my skin. “After all, I’m about to become Lilian’s husband.”

  “To tell you the truth, I need the king,” I said. “But Lilian’s the next best thing.”

  His eyebrow raised, and I realized I’d called her Lilian instead of by her title. My face heated, but I stood tall.

  “There’s an absolute mob of press outside,” I said. “They’re all over the grounds destroying things. The guards won’t use force to remove them without the approval of someone in the royal family, and these journalists aren’t going to go anywhere without force.”

  The corners of Duke Remington’s mouth tightened. “You would seek to restrict their access to the palace? I’ve always been opposed to censoring the press.”

  “I don’t want to censor them; I want them off my tulip beds.”

  Immediately, I regretted the way I’d spoken. My tone was too loud, too sharp—too much to have come from a gardener toward the future king of Floris.

  “Sir,” I added, much too late.

  The duke frowned at me. “It seems that the palace guards shouldn’t need the princess’s command to handle so simple a disturbance.”

  “As I said—”

  “Princess Lilian is having photographs of her engagement ring taken now,” he said. “She has a very busy day, and I’m certain palace security doesn’t need her assistance with such a simple matter. Keeping rabble-rousers from the grounds is their job. I suggest you stop over-involving yourself and let them do it.”

  I stared at him, my brain sputtering at the accusation. How could I over-involve myself in my gardens? It was my job to nurture and protect every blade of grass in these forty acres, and part of that included pest management, whether that meant beetles or snails or reporters who thought they were important enough to go trampling all over the plants they claimed to be reporting on.

  The duke leaned in toward me. His voice remained polite, but there was an edge to it now. “I understand that the king and queen have allowed you a good deal of freedom to impose on Lilian’s time and good graces. But you’re not children anymore, and Lilian’s attentions are on more important matters now. You’re a good man, Deon. Let her enjoy her engagement and don’t bother the princess with such petty concerns.”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. More important matters? Petty concerns? I couldn’t tell whether he was joking or had just taken leave from his senses.

  He seemed to take my silence as agreement. He offered a smile and clapped me on the arm.

  “Your hard work is appreciated, Deon,” he said, as if he had any right to make such a statement on behalf of the crown, and strode away before my mind could put any of my confused disbelief into words.

  3rd April

  The guards never did get the journalists to leave the palace grounds. Instead, after they’d all but destroyed several flowerbeds and torn up the grass in a rose garden, the reporters and photographers appeared to have gotten what they’d come for and filtered out.

  Their spoils were on full display in the next morning’s papers.

  BLIGHT OVERTAKES PALACE GROUNDS, read one headline, above a series of pictures of gray flowers, trampled tulip stems, and glowing burn barrels. PALACE GARDENER DENIES ALLEGATIONS, read another, above an unflattering article that painted me as a liar and a buffoon. This one was accompanied by a spread of photographs of dying crops, and the article was loaded with claims from anonymous sources that insisted that the blight had been carried from the palace to a nearby tomato farm by an unnamed apprentice gardener.

  The articles were full of lies and misinformation and wild assumptions, and it would have been impossible to filter truth from guesswork if I hadn’t been the most well-informed person in the world on the subject of the blight at the palace.

  I stabbed a sausage and turned the page of the paper in front of me. A housemaid across the table glanced up at me and went back to the sports section of the paper.

  They all knew what was going on. None of them were foolish enough to bring it up.

  Like a fool, I hoped that the next few pages might contain other news—an update on the construction of the new luxury hotel on the coast, a human interest story about a dog that had rescued a bunny, a scandal featuring one of the opera singers who always seemed to be falling in and out of love with each other. I scoured the page for anything that might brighten this morning, and my eyes landed instead on an enormous photograph of Lilian and Duke Remington smiling up at each other with Lilian’s enormous new ring winking on her finger.

  Stinging nettles.

  Reed dropped into the seat next to me before I could turn the offending page. He pulled a pitcher of strawberry juice toward us.

  “She doesn’t look too happy, does she?” he said.

  It took me a second to realize he was referring to Lilian. He nodded down at the paper, and I realized with a start that he was right.

  She was smiling, but the smile was the one that usually graced her face during boring dinners or tedious diplomatic affairs. Her lips were drawn into a perfect expression of happiness, but her eyes were dull as they gazed up at the duke.

  It was a wonder I hadn’t noticed it before.

  Then again, I wasn’t in the best of moods this morning.

  “Her lady-in-waiting’s ladies’ maid’s assistant said the same thing,” one of the housemaids, Daisy, said. It took me a second to make sense of that particular chain of command, and then I tilted my head at her, asking for more.

  She didn’t need convincing.

  “Word among the ladies’ maids is that Princess Lilian isn’t too excited about her upcoming marriage. Some of them think she’s not looking forward to having his parents as in-laws. A few people think she doesn’t like him, but that doesn’t hardly seem possible. Personally, I think she’s worried about her mother.” She glanced around the table and lowered her voice. “You do know the queen is ill, right?”

  Murmurs rippled among the servants at the table, some of them surprised and others smug at having already been in on the gossip.

  Daisy cleared her throat and buttered a slice of toast, her movements grand as she happily held court. “It’s nothing serious, or at least, that’s what the king and queen say. Only no one’s seen the queen in absolute days now, and isn’t that odd?”

  “It’s true,” one of the kitchen maids piped up. “Willow and Hazel both took food to the queen’s rooms recently, and neither one of them was so much as allowed in.”

  “That doesn’t mean the queen’s doing all that poorly,” another kitchen hand objected as he poured himself another
cup of coffee. “Just that maybe she doesn’t want to be bothered by a bunch of gossipy serving girls.”

  Daisy gave him a severe look. “Be that as it may, it’s odd that she’s hiding away and odder still that the king is joining her.”

  I glanced up. “What do you mean?”

  She raised an eyebrow at me. “You can’t tell me you haven’t noticed His Majesty is nowhere to be seen lately. And meanwhile, the Duke of Thornton is swanning around the castle like he owns the place, meeting with the Horticulture Council, and volunteering to step in for the opening of the new paper mill over in Rootstock. It’s like he’s trying to take over as the king before he’s so much as married the princess.”

  “He met with the Horticulture Council?” I blurted.

  “Day before yesterday,” she said. “His valet’s laundress’s apprentice said he’s likely to start meeting with them regularly in the king’s place.”

  I felt Reed’s eyes on me, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I stood instead, scooped up my dirty dishes, and marched out of the servant’s dining hall, leaving the papers behind.

  I was barely out of the dining hall when Lilian almost ran into me. I grabbed her shoulders to keep us from colliding.

  “Lilian.” I hesitated, taking in her pale face and wide eyes. I let my hands drift down her arms. “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t spend a lot of time in the servant’s quarters these days. It was odd to see her here now, dressed in one of her calf-length dancing dresses and with pink ribbons in her hair.

  “I left my dancing class early,” she said. “I had to see you.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing. Everything. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

  I pulled her in for a hug, and she buried her face in my shoulder. She smelled of magnolias.

  “What’s going on, Lils?”

  “Mother is sick,” she said. “I mean, really sick, worse than I thought. I don’t know what to do.”