Throne of Enchantment Read online

  Throne of Enchantment

  Kingdom of Fairytales Rapunzel book 3

  Emma Savant

  J. A. Armitage

  Contents

  1. 8th April

  2. 9th April

  3. 10th April

  4. 11th April

  5. 12th April

  6. 13th April

  7. 14th April

  After the Happily Ever After…

  A NEW FAIRYTALE ANTHOLOGY

  Join us

  A note from the author

  About Emma Savant

  About J.A. Armitage

  The Kingdom of Fairytales Team

  Copyright © 2019 by J A Armitage

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Edited By Rose Lipscomb

  Cover by Enchanted Quill Press

  Created with Vellum

  Kingdom of Fairytales

  You all know the fairytales, the stories that always have the happy ending. But what happens after all those storybook characters get what they wanted? Is it really a happily ever after?

  Kingdom of Fairytales is a new way of reading with one chapter a day and one book a week throughout the year beginning January 1st

  Lighting-fast reads you won’t be able to put down

  Read in real time as each chapter follows a day in the life of a character throughout the entire year, with each bite-sized episode representing a week in the life of our hero.

  Each character’s story wrapped up at the end of every season with a brand new character and story featured in each season.

  Fantasy has never been so epic!

  8th April

  I threw a shovelful of thick, aromatic mulch onto the ground. It landed with a muffled thump, and the mulch was quickly raked into place by one of the apprentices.

  We’d stopped trying to pull the blight from the gardens. It had been no use; the disease that was quickly destroying every green thing in the kingdom spread like fire, jumping from one flowerbed to another with a speed that made me dizzy.

  Instead, we’d resorted to removing the healthy plants, few and far between though they were, and storing them under domes of enchanted glass. This had been Hedley’s idea. My old mentor had been the first one to suggest the plague tearing its way across the kingdom was magical, rather than biological, and I’d stumbled back to the shed that passed for my bedroom last night to learn he’d already started the apprentices working on saving what they could.

  “I hoped you wouldn’t mind,” he had said, as I’d tumbled onto my makeshift bed, my wrists aching from where the palace guards had yanked them around and my sprained ankle still throbbing in pain. “Not trying to step on any toes.”

  I’d told him to do as he liked. Nothing I’d tried had so much as slowed the blight. I had a few plants yet that were thriving, but whatever magic was keeping the flowers in my private garden alive clearly wasn’t strong enough to rescue the whole of Floris.

  Now, a few apprentices walked past, each drawing a small wagon along the brick walkway between the poppy field and one of the palace’s many tulip beds. Each cart held as many glass domes as the apprentices had been able to cram inside, and each dome held a single bright, precious flower.

  Hedley had only been able to obtain a few hundred domes, although he’d promised me he was working with some magicians to create more. They would all end up at the Spring Flower Festival, which was approaching with an alacrity that terrified me.

  This annual festival was everything to this kingdom.

  And while we might not have the kind of displays the world usually expected, we would have something. I couldn’t save Lilian from her upcoming marriage to a power-hungry brute. I couldn’t save her mother from the gray plague that was creeping up her hair like the approach of Death himself. But I’d do what I could to save her kingdom’s reputation, at least, for this one year.

  “Beds fifty-four and fifty-six are cleared,” a voice said at my elbow.

  I stopped shoveling and turned to face Linden, who was standing stiffly next to the cart of mulch.

  “Thank you,” I said. “How many flowers were you able to save?”

  “One hundred and seventy-two.”

  The number made my heart sink. Most years, we had thousands and thousands of tulips on display, raven wings, and silk flutter reds, and the iridescent purples the rest of the world loved so much.

  This year, we’d be lucky to have a thousand flowers in total.

  “Are we really going to spread mulch on the grounds and leave them like this?” Linden asked.

  Ordinarily, the question would have been a criticism, coming from him. Now, he just sounded sad.

  “Unless someone comes up with a better idea,” I said. “There’s no point in wasting seeds when we know they’ll just die.”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t even nod. His shoulders just fell.

  “How are we on bulbs?” I asked.

  “We have enough,” he said. “As many to sell as most years.”

  “At least, the blight doesn’t seem interested in bulbs.” I drove my shovel into the ground and leaned on the handle. My body ached, mirroring my bruised soul. This curse, whatever it was, only seemed interested in things that were actually growing. Our seeds and bulbs were safe.

  For now.

  “I’d like to hold a few extra crates back,” he said. “Just in case someone finds a way to fix things. I want to be sure Floris has enough bulbs to replant this fall.”

  The rest of his words remained unspoken. If the blight is cured by autumn. If this nightmare can be solved. If there’s any hope of the future looking like the past instead of like the wasteland it’s turning out to be.

  There was no point holding extra bulbs in reserve. The blight wasn’t going away any time soon. But the grief on his normally cynical face wounded me.

  “That’s a good idea,” I lied. I might as well pretend I still had hope. The apprentices helping with the mulching were listening to every word we said; I wouldn’t be the one to tell them everything was doomed. “Let the other supervisors know they can keep however many seeds or bulbs they think reasonable. Just remember that this festival brings in money for the kingdom.”

  My words remained unspoken, too: Make sure we sell enough, in case we lose everything of value and have nothing to sell to the rest of the world. Make sure we save enough to get us through what’s sure to be a long, dark winter. Don’t let us starve.

  He touched the brim of his straw hat in acknowledgment and walked away, his narrow shoulders still drooping.

  The people in this garden were starting to look as bad as the plants.

  I went back to spreading mulch over the earth. It went on like a blanket, and I hoped, like a blanket, that it would protect the ground underneath until it was safe to plant again.

  If that day ever came.

  I could only try to break my back with mulching for so long. Eventually, the cart was empty, and the apprentices had to go refill it. I watched the cart go, and then I turned on my aching heel and went in the other direction, toward the seedlings greenhouse where I knew Hedley would be waiting.

  My mentor was standing over a tray of delicate seedlings, peering at them through a magnifying glass.

  “No sign of blight,” he said as I entered the room.

  He spoke as if this was a good sign, but I knew better.

  “It doesn’t usually show up until the first true leaf appears.” I gave the tray a dirty look it didn’t yet deserve
. “It’s like this blight wants to make sure to give you hope, just so it can destroy it.”

  Hedley straightened and set his magnifying glass down with a clank.

  “Who blew on your dandelion?” he said.

  I scowled. I couldn’t help it. The anger bubbling inside me had to go somewhere, and a grumpy expression seemed like a better outlet than trying to poison the future king of Floris might have been.

  “Lilian’s marrying a monster,” I said.

  Hedley’s lips thinned just a bit. “I thought we decided you needed to spend a little more time focusing on your gardens and a little less on the princess’s love life.”

  “It’s not a love life,” I said. “She’s practically been imprisoned by that overgrown flea beetle.”

  His bushy silver eyebrows drew together. “How do you mean, imprisoned?”

  I sighed. I hadn’t had the heart to tell him all about it last night, but now, the story poured out of me: How Duke Remington had found Lilian and me speaking in the topiary garden, how he had manhandled her away, and how I had ultimately done everything in my power to knock him unconscious before the guards had leaped to his rescue.

  “He’s going to fire me after the wedding,” I said. “Which is now in just over a week.”

  His eyebrows jumped up like surprised caterpillars. “When did they move the wedding up?”

  “Right after I landed one on his jaw, I assume,” I said.

  Guilt roiled in my stomach. I had tried to save Lilian and only succeeded in moving up the date of her lifelong imprisonment.

  “And the king is in Urbis,” I said, unable to keep the frustration out of my voice. “When we need him most right here.”

  As usual, Hedley refused to get worked up. He picked up his magnifying glass and moved to the next tray of seedlings. “I imagine His Majesty is searching for solutions like the rest of us.”

  It was likely the truth, but it didn’t soften my anger. Hedley raised a hand and gestured at me to come stand by him.

  “Come redirect your thoughts, if you can,” he said. “I’m curious as to whether this magic of yours can help these seedlings.”

  If this mention of my newfound abilities had been a ploy to get me to stop raging and sulking, it worked. Hope lit in me whenever I remembered the iris I’d managed to make move, real hope that seemed untouched by the blight or the duke. I gave Hedley a begrudging smile and leaned toward the tray.

  “What should I do?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” He touched one of the seedlings with one broad, calloused finger. The tiny green plant yielded, then sprang back the moment he moved his finger away. “I wonder if you might make those true leaves grow a little faster.”

  It was a worthwhile test; these seedlings were still a day or two from the growth that would mark them as real, viable plants rather than delicate babies. I held my hand out and tried to feel into the core of the plant, as Hedley had coaxed me into doing before.

  The magic that ran through these seedlings was easier to find than it had been last time, either because I knew what I was feeling for or because the seedlings, full to bursting with the energy that had been stored in their seeds, were somehow louder than the iris had been. I focused on one seedling, the one that seemed smallest and furthest away from any kind of growth spurt, and reached out with my thoughts into the fountain of life that pulsed at the center of the tiny green thread.

  I thought about leaves, as if thought was all it would take to bring a thing into reality, and tried to sense the potential in these plants.

  “Lilian said she learned something about her mother,” I said abruptly.

  The connection between the magic and me dropped, the brightness I’d sensed inside the plants disappearing as if I’d blown them out like a candle.

  Hedley folded his arms. “You have a one-track mind that would astound even the most reclusive scholars.”

  “Sorry.” I glanced up at him anyway. “Still, you’re the one who told me the queen might have answers. That’s why I was with Lilian in the topiary garden, by the way. She was trying to tell me something that might have stopped the blight. That’s what His Gracelessness interrupted. For all I know, we could be halfway out of this mess right now if he’d minded his own business.”

  “Deon,” Hedley said, warning me.

  “I’m just saying.”

  “I doubt she learned anything from the queen that could have changed the fate of the nation overnight.” His voice was a study in exaggerated patience. “Seedlings. Please.”

  I turned my focus back. The line of magic was still easy to find, but controlling it--that was something else. I could imagine leaves. I could feel the way the energy within the plants might help them form. But I couldn’t make it happen.

  The thought of Lilian trapped inside her own palace didn’t help. Even as I tried to focus, a chattering voice in the back of my mind warned me she was in danger and urged me to rescue her. Perhaps I could climb the palace wall. I’d done that before, and I hadn’t died even if I did only have a sprained ankle to show for the attempt. Or maybe I could bribe a guard.

  “Focus,” Hedley said.

  I tried. I stared and sensed, and finally, for the slightest moment, I felt something spring to life inside the seedling. I held my breath, ready for a leaf to uncurl, or even to bud.

  Nothing happened. The hint of possibility faded away. Perhaps it had been nothing more than a lingering shred of optimism buried somewhere inside my otherwise battered soul.

  Finally, Hedley sighed and drummed his finger on the top of the worktable. In front of us, the tray of seedlings sat, stubborn and still.

  “It was a good effort, Deon,” he said. “At least, we tried.”

  We worked in silence for a while, tending the seedlings that would be sold at the festival and placing each tray back under a dome of enchanted glass when we were done.

  There was no guarantee the glass would work. We’d only been trying it since yesterday. Still, nothing under glass had met a horrible, moldy death since yesterday, which put its success rate far higher than any other intervention we’d tried.

  “I would like to know what Lilian found out,” Hedley said eventually. He spoke quietly, as if to himself, but I caught the words. The princess’s name always captured my attention.

  I watered a fragile crystal bell seedling with an eyedropper, carefully wetting the soil but not allowing water to so much as touch the plant’s stem. These were delicate, enchanted flowers, usually grown only by fairies. If we could have a few of them for sale at the festival, the world would know we still, at least, had the skills to grow some plants of note.

  "I couldn't tell if she saw her mother or just learned something," I said. "The queen's maids have barely been allowed into her chambers, and none of them have seen her, but maybe one of them noticed something anyway?"

  Hedley didn't answer, and I let out a sigh I felt like I'd been holding for days.

  "What do you know about the queen's past?" Hedley said after a while.

  I shrugged. "Same as anybody else, I guess. She was a lady from near the coast. The king met her while he was touring the kingdom, and they fell in love and got married. I heard the king's father was a little annoyed she wasn't a princess but gave his blessing anyway."

  “That’s all true,” Hedley said, in a way that made me think that perhaps it wasn’t.

  He wasn’t forthcoming.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “It’s all true,” he repeated, then added, “on a technicality.”

  I gave the crystal bell its last few drops, then examined Hedley’s expression. He was thinking about something, and thinking hard if the little lines between his eyes were to be believed.

  “What is it?” I said. “You may as well tell me if there’s anything to know. I can keep secrets.”

  He unspooled a length of fine twine from a ball and clipped off a piece, pondering all the while. He removed the glass dome from a tiny elfin climbing
rose and tied its newest tendrils to the diamond-patterned trellis behind it, and I watched. There was no way on earth to hurry him up; the best I could do was to avoid distracting him while he considered.

  He replaced the dome, and, decision made, looked seriously at me.

  “This isn’t to leave this conversation,” he said.

  I held up a hand as if he’d asked me to swear an oath.

  “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “It’s not that you strictly can’t,” he said. “It’s just that the way King Alder and Queen Rapunzel did things…when it came to them being wed… Well, it’s not how things are done.”

  This intriguing pronouncement made, he leaned back against the worktable and laced one of his thumbs behind his suspenders.

  “The royal family of Floris has always married within the nobility,” he said. “Or within royalty from other nations.”

  I nodded. Everyone knew that.

  “What you said before is right, the queen was a lady. But only in the sense that she’s a woman, and she has a fine, mannerly way about her.”

  I set the dropper down. This was too interesting for any half-listening.

  “And the king did meet her on a tour, but her family home wasn’t exactly one of the prescribed stops. As it happens, His Majesty was going on an unattended ride through the forest when he met her. You know how the king values his private time,” he added. “He’s always been one of those quiet family-man types, even before he had a family of his own. The ribbon-cutting and baby-kissing that comes with being a prince wore him down, though you’d never know it from the polite way he behaved, and he used to go off a lot to think about things and just be on his own.”

  I listened, utterly silent. It was rare to hear anyone speak about the king as a young man, and rarer still to learn things that wouldn’t have been obvious to anyone who knew their history books.