Heir of Thorns Read online

She didn’t pull away from our embrace. I didn’t, either.

  I couldn’t pretend to be entirely surprised. It was strange for the queen to stay abed with illness, and stranger still for her to refuse visitors. No matter what King Alder said, somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d known that things couldn’t be all right.

  Still, hearing it from Lilian made my stomach lurch.

  “What’s happening?” I said. “Tell me all about it.”

  I glanced behind me. No one had followed me out, but it was only a matter of time. I didn’t need Daisy or one of the others witnessing Lilian and me together like this.

  “On second thought, let’s go somewhere we can talk. Let’s go walk in the gardens.”

  She shook her head. “My rooms. I don’t want to be around people right now.”

  We slipped up a back staircase that was usually reserved for the housemaids. When we were safely in Lilian’s sitting room, she dropped onto the sofa and curled up with her legs underneath her. One of her small dogs jumped up from where it had been sleeping on a cushion and leapt onto Lilian’s lap, aware that its mistress needed comfort. She pulled the pup in close and buried her nose in its fur.

  I sat down next to her, a bit closer than I probably should have, and waited for her to be ready to talk.

  “I went to go see Mama,” she finally said. “Father told me not to bother her, but it’s been days and…” She swallowed, and her eyebrows drew together in consternation. “I just wanted to see her,” she finally said. “It’s not as if I was trying to force her to go riding with me or anything like that. I just wanted to visit and make sure she was all right. And Papa wouldn’t even let me in the door! I’ve never seen him act like that, Deon. He was angry with me. And then the court physician arrived, and Papa wouldn’t let him in, either. If he’s not even letting Mama’s doctors in now, what does that mean? I don’t think it can be plague. It wouldn’t be plague, would it? Only if it were plague that would explain why Papa wouldn’t let doctors in, since they can’t really do anything against plague and it’s horribly contagious and--”

  She burst into tears.

  I would have moved heaven and earth in that moment to stop those tears. But they were unstoppable, and I remembered Hyacinth Hedley’s lecture from a few years ago that one should never try to solve a woman’s problems if he could listen to them instead. That didn’t make sense to me, but Hyacinth understood women a sight better than I did. So I slid across the couch and took Lilian in my arms. The dog, annoyed at being displaced, shifted and pawed at her skirts.

  “I’m so sorry, Lils.” I rubbed her back as she cried into my chest. I felt utterly useless, just sitting here while I could be out murdering her problems instead, but she clung to me and seemed to be taking something from my presence.

  When her sobs slowed to hiccups, I finally ventured to speak.

  “I don’t think it can be plague,” I said cautiously. “Last time there was a plague scare, the different parts of the palace were quarantined, remember?”

  “Now, Mother’s being quarantined.” Lilian took a deep, shuddering breath, and it seemed she was on the verge of another wave of tears.

  “Doctors put quarantines in place,” I said. “This one sounds like it’s just being enforced by your father. He gets overprotective of the queen. He told me that.”

  She sniffled and looked up at me. Her eyes were red, and her eyelids were puffy, and the sight of them triggered an overpowering urge to protect her from the world. I settled for tightening my arms around her.

  “Papa does tend to hover when either Mama or I are sick,” she admitted. “It drives Mama crazy.”

  “There you go,” I said. “Most likely, she’s got a bad cold, and your father’s taking it too seriously.”

  She patted her skirts and muttered something about pockets. I reached into mine and dug out a handkerchief. She took it with a grateful sniffle and blew her nose.

  “You don’t think anything’s really, truly wrong, then?”

  I hadn’t said that. But I wouldn’t have told her as much, not for the world.

  “I think if it were serious, your father would tell you.”

  Did I believe that? I wasn’t sure. I bit my lip and dropped a kiss on Lilian’s head.

  “I wish he’d collect himself, then,” she said. “Ever since Mama started feeling under the weather, Papa’s been avoiding everyone and everything, even his duties. He’s letting Garritt be in charge instead. Garritt says they spoke about it, and Papa agreed it would be a good opportunity for him to develop his leadership abilities. He’s going to be king someday, after all, and Papa thinks he ought to get a little practice in. That’s what Garritt says, anyway. I think Papa just doesn’t want to be bothered now that Mama’s ill.”

  She wiped her nose on the handkerchief, and her dog jumped up to lick at the tear marks that still streaked down her face.

  “Things are going to be all right,” I said as if I had the power to promise any such thing. “I’ll bet the queen is up and back to normal within the next week. In fact--”

  I was cut off by the sitting room door opening. Duke Remington looked at us, from Lilian’s tear-streaked face to my arms tightly around her, and his jaw hardened.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  I let go of Lilian and scrambled to my feet. I bowed to the duke, my face hot and my stomach churning.

  “Your Grace,” I said. “Forgive me, I was assisting Princess Lilian with a…” I trailed off and glanced at Lilian, whose face was as red as mine felt.

  “He was talking me through something,” Lilian said. The dog on her lap eyed the duke with caution and kept looking back at Lilian’s face as if to be sure she was all right. “I asked him to come up here. I didn’t want to make a scene in front of the servants.”

  “All but one, it seems.” The duke tried to play the comment off as a joke, but there was no disguising the coldness in his face as he glared at me. “I don’t think I need to tell either of you how inappropriate this looks.”

  Lilian set her dog aside and stood, still clutching my handkerchief. “I’m worried about my mother,” she said. “She won’t see me, and I’m afraid her condition is worse than my father will admit. Deon was just trying to help.”

  The duke gave me a dirty look and then smiled gently at Lilian. “My love, I hope you know you can always come to me for comfort.”

  Lilian hesitated just a second too long. “Of course,” she said. “I should have done that first. I’m just so accustomed to turning to Deon for things. He and I have been friends for such a long time. You understand.”

  “I do.” The duke stepped toward Lilian, and she seemed to tense. He wrapped an arm around her shoulder, his limb taking the place where mine had just been as easily as if he owned her. “With all due respect to both of you, and to the apparent depth of your, ah, friendship, I think it’s time that we all establish some boundaries around what’s appropriate and what isn’t.”

  “We weren’t doing anything--” Lilian started, but he interrupted her.

  “I’m sure you weren’t. And yet, I’m also sure you understand how it might look if, say, one of your housemaids were the one to walk in on that scene instead of me?”

  I bowed to him again. “My apologies, sir. I’ll excuse myself.”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” the duke said. “In fact...”

  He let silence hang in the air for a long moment. Dread rose up inside me, thick and heavy.

  “I think it might be best if you were to stay outside the palace for the next little while,” he said. “Clearly, you can’t stop yourself from taking liberties with your princess, and it appears she’s too good-natured to stop you. A little distance would be good for everybody.”

  I took a step toward him. “I’m the Head Gardener.”

  “So, perhaps that’s where you ought to stay,” he said, the coldness in his voice turning to ice. “In the garden. Guard!”

  The sentry outside Lil
ian’s quarters appeared in an instant, tense and ready for action.

  “Remove Mr. Gilding from the palace,” he ordered crisply. “See that he doesn’t set foot inside this building except on my orders.”

  “Garritt!” Lilian cried. She rushed out of the duke’s embrace and grabbed my arm as if she had the strength to pull me away from the guard if it came to that. She turned to her sentry. “Leif, don’t touch him.”

  The guard bowed, lips tight. “Forgive me, Your Highness, but His Majesty made it clear we’re all to follow Duke Remington’s orders.”

  “I’m your princess!”

  “And your father is my king, Your Highness,” he said with another apologetic bow.

  He grabbed my arm. I wrenched it away from him.

  “I can walk on my own, thanks,” I said.

  “You’d better do it, then,” the guard said, although his voice didn’t carry much of an edge.

  “Garritt, don’t you dare,” Lilian said, turning back to him with a scowl that would have stopped me in my tracks.

  He only smiled. “You’ll thank me for this later,” he said. “After all, I’m about to become your husband. Our marriage will be happier if we don’t have a gardener between us.”

  The guard nudged me, and I marched out of Lilian’s quarters with my head held high.

  “He talked to her like she was a child.” I stormed across the room and slammed a terra cotta pot onto the worktable. It shattered into three large shards. I swore and threw the pieces in the bin. “And then he ordered me marched out of the palace like a criminal. I’m not even allowed back into my bedroom without his say-so. Where am I supposed to sleep, a garden shed?”

  “He did find you cozied up with his betrothed,” Hedley pointed out from his seat on the edge of a raised bed. His calm, reasonable tone set my teeth on edge.

  “She was crying.”

  “That might have made it worse.”

  “It’s not my fault she came to me for comfort!”

  “That definitely made it worse,” Hedley said. “He’s a man, Deon. He’s not going to take kindly to the realization that his bride might prefer another.”

  “We weren’t doing anything wrong,” I snapped, setting another pot down on the worktable with slightly more care. “It wasn’t as if he caught us in the throes of some passionate embrace. She was sad. I was patting her back. Someone alert the presses.”

  Not that the presses wouldn’t have had a field day with that. They’d found enough to yammer on when it came to the palace grounds. Anything that happened in the princess’s chambers was likely to send them into hysterics.

  “I can’t just stop being friends with Lilian,” I said.

  “Are you friends?”

  There was too much truth buried in the question. Lilian and I weren’t friends. Or, rather, we were friends, but we were more, too. Companions and confidants and playmates and everything but lovers, and that hung between us so heavily, it might as well have been strung up in lights for all the world to see.

  “I’m not going to abandon her.” I dumped a spadeful of light, chunky soil into the pot. “Especially not when Duke Remington has turned out to be such a colossal…” I trailed off, trying to find the right word. Nothing I could come up with felt insulting enough.

  Hedley stood with a soft grunt and came over to me. He pulled down a second pot and began filling it with the same thick soil, full of bark and little white pearls of perlite.

  “I don’t like to be the one to tell you this, but you have bigger problems than those of love.”

  I snorted. “Trust me, I don’t need the reminder.”

  “What are you planning to do about it?” he said.

  I sighed and pulled on some thick leather gloves. “I was hoping you would have some ideas. I’m at dead ends everywhere I turn. I don’t suppose you’ve had a breakthrough on this blight?”

  “No breakthroughs,” he said. “Which suggests it might be time to confirm an earlier theory.”

  “Oh? And what’s that?”

  I picked up a tiny, prickly cactus from a tray filled with them and set it atop the soil. A few more, and this would be a beautiful arrangement, ready to sell at the Festival to anyone with a penchant for exotic greenery.

  “I think you need to go see the queen.”

  I laughed, entirely without humor. “You’re funny, Hedley. You really are.”

  “I’m serious is what I am.” He arranged a small, prickly cactus into his pot. He didn’t look at me, and I had a feeling that was intentional. Hedley had never looked straight at me when he’d been delivering important advice, whether it had been on how to handle an aphid infestation in my herb garden or just him telling me that I needed to gather up my courage already and speak to my apprenticeship supervisor before the man worked me into the ground.

  “Out with it,” I said.

  He continued to pack dirt around the base of the cacti, his movements measured.

  “The thing is, nothing you’ve tried so far has worked,” he said. “When that’s the case, best to change course, eh?”

  “I would love nothing more,” I said. “But she won’t see me. She won’t even see Lilian. That’s half of what Lilian was crying about, in fact, which His Graceless might have learned if he’d bothered to listen instead of throwing me out on my ear.”

  Hedley stayed silent. It was a long pause, full of unspoken disapproval, and I finally sighed.

  “What are you suggesting, then?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” he said. “Only pointing out that you need to see the queen pretty badly. You can’t get past her guards and through her door, so perhaps it’s time to consider other approaches.”

  “What, you think I should climb in through her window?”

  I was joking, but again, Hedley paused for a long time. I tucked a succulent into my arrangement and turned to him.

  “I’m not climbing into the queen’s rooms through her window.”

  Another long silence. “Of course not,” he finally said.

  “Hedley. I’m not.”

  “That would be the act of a desperate man.”

  “I’m not that desperate.”

  4th April

  I paced the wall of the castle, eying its various ornaments and ledges and staggered roofs. There was a path, lit by the bright waxing moon. There were handholds and gaps small enough to jump, and there, on the third floor, stood the windows of the monarchs’ quarters.

  “You’re mad, friend,” I muttered to myself. “Absolutely stark, raving mad.”

  The other part of myself--the part that was desperate, that was willing to try anything--ignored the insult.

  At least, if I died trying to see the queen, Hedley would take care of the gardens until a new Head Gardener could be chosen. He’d promised he’d stick around at least that long. He’d also told me I was being melodramatic and that his services wouldn’t be needed, but now, looking up at the distance between the ground and the queen’s windows, I wasn’t so sure.

  Still, scaling this castle wall would be a far sight easier than living with myself if I let the gardens die without doing everything in my power to stop the blight. It was visible around me, even now, in the moonlit darkness—great patches of bare soil and gray, drooping plants that wouldn’t be collected until morning. We didn’t have enough apprentices to keep them going around the clock in every part of the garden. That, at least, was working in my favor. I’d reassigned everyone on duty in this part of the grounds to go keep an eye on the seedlings in the greenhouse and the king’s prized rainbow tulip garden. Both were far enough from the queen’s quarters that, I hoped, no one would see me trying to scale the wall like I was some kind of incompetent lizard.

  I propped up the ladder I’d dragged across the gardens and shifted it until the top nestled in a crack between the great stone blocks that made up the castle. The feet sank a few inches into the damp earth, and I carefully climbed onto the first rung, then the next. This ladder was tall
enough to let me step sideways onto a thin ledge that marked the top of the first floor

  A very thin ledge.

  I balanced my weight on the narrow strip of stone and pressed my body against the wall. My stomach swayed. I’d never been scared of heights, not like some people were, but I’d also never been this far above the ground with less than a hand’s width of shelf separating me from a broken leg--and there were two more floors to go.

  I grasped a drainpipe that carried rainwater from the roof to a collection barrel cleverly hidden behind a lilac bush, then pulled myself hand over hand up toward the nearest window ledge. Halfway there, the pipe creaked, a horrible sound that made my heart skip several beats. I froze, but no one inside seemed to have heard the noise, and the pipe didn’t tear itself from the palace wall.

  “Good enough,” I muttered. The sound of my own voice was strangely comforting. Unlike my current predicament, it was familiar and predictable.

  “All right, you’ve got this,” I said under my breath as if I were encouraging someone else. I almost believed the lie.

  The window ledge above me looked like nothing more than a thick shadow in the moonlight, but I’d seen it from the ground and knew it would hold me. I grasped the stone windowsill with both hands and heaved myself up. Years of hard work in the gardens made the movement easy, if not smooth, and I scrambled up onto the ledge.

  The window was dark and curtained, which, in addition to its proximity to the drainpipe, was why I’d chosen to come up this way. From here, there was another climb up a stone carving of a rose vine, then another heave up onto the queen’s windowsill, and then--

  I couldn’t think past that. Every time I tried, I wanted to run in the other direction. Violating the queen’s privacy was a horrible thought. Intruding late at night, when she was unwell enough that even her daughter had been banned from her chambers, made me feel sick. The most comforting thought I could reach for was that she was a queen and had access to dungeons if she happened to want to throw me in one. It would be well within her rights, and I might feel a little better if I was properly punished for what I was about to do.