Page 29 of Grave Flowers
I licked my wine-stained mouth, tasting the heaviness of the drink and recalling the terrifying moment I’d shared with Aeric at the cathedral. I couldn’t tell whether talk of kissing and the sight of his open shirt and bare chest, smudged with ink, had made me feel a perversethrill or simply more fear. Whatever the case, if I didn’t think about him staring at me with sincerity, telling me he would never kiss anyone else because we were betrothed, I would be fine.Thatthought was much too mystifying.
“I slept in the carriage on the way back,” I said. The thirty minutes had been just enough to curb my dizziness. I glanced at my reflection in one of the windows as we walked toward the garden. No wonder Yorick thought I needed rest. My hair slipped free of its pins to wisp around my face. My skin, which had been flushed warm from wine and then pale with fear, was waxy and tight. The dress I’d picked so quickly clung tightly to my frame, another Acusan atrocity of too-thin fabric. The back, I saw for the first time, was cut practically to my tailbone. Thick sunlight enclosed my bare body, and I shrugged, as though I could cast it off like a shawl. No such luck.
“You’re embracing the stylish yet disheveled look,” Yorick declared, as we walked down several flights of stone steps to the ground floor. Most palace stairways were enclosed, but windows plated the right-hand walls all the way down. Acusans never missed an opportunity to erase the lines between indoors and out, it seemed. “Next thing you know, all the court ladies will be doing it too. Though I’m not so sure I’ll join.” He carefully ran his hands through his hair, also glancing at his reflection in another window. “I must look nice for my books. They feature many interesting and well-dressed characters within their pages, so they judge very harshly. Also, my sincere congratulations on your betrothal. You’re officially our soon-to-be-queen.”
I was about to saythank you,but my words left me as we exited the palace and rounded the corner to the royal garden. It stretched out before us. Most of the flowers were red in honor of Acus’s colors. There were shades of oxblood, burgundy, wine, vermilion, scarlet, cardinal, reds with oranges in them, reds with pinks in them, reds with blacks in them, every variation I could ever possibly conceive. Intermixed with them were gold flowers, gleaming like flecks of treasure amid the redpetals. The garden was laid out in flower beds shaped like sunrays, with heavily sculpted fountains serving as the sun at the centers. Though only one sun blazed above our heads, there were at least five earth-bound in the garden.
Unable to hold in my emotions, I frowned. Acus’s garden was so different from ours. Every bed was the same, every flower just like its fellows. They were inert, making me think of creatures turned to stone. My heart longed for my grave flowers. Yes, many said they were only fit to adorn the resting places of our dead, but they were more alive than these flowers could ever be.
Gold-plated signs were staked into the dirt in front of the beds. All the flowers had the same name and were differentiated only by numbers.
FLORA4.594
FLORA1.309
FLORA2.349
The method was scientific, itemized, unreflective of the vast variances between the flowers. Even where I stood, I could see the breed in the bed closest to me had tiny red styluses hanging from open buds, while the ones to the right had the most cupped petals I’d ever seen in my life. Then again, maybe the technicality was fitting. Their beauty was so perfect, it verged on uncanny, as though they had been forced into submission and lost their hearts along the way.
Closing my eyes, I pictured the lost souls, blood hearts, beauties, serpentines, starvelings, mad minds, and even the barren spot where immortalities had once grown. Those flowers demanded their names and had acquired them long ago. Their names were an oral part of our history, not marked on plaques, and we saw ourselves in them. We, too, had lost souls and bleeding hearts. We, too, were vain, serpentine, and starving. We, too, had barren spots inside us where any notion of immortality—of being remembered past our miserable lives—had died. In a way, our grave flowers were our only hope for commemoration,and even then, they told our story exactly as it was, with no canonization, no soft hue of memoriam: just a tale told over and over with thorns and dripping salt water and poison.
I forced myself to open my eyes and push aside such reflections. I must focus. This was the last place Inessa had been alive. Desperately, I hoped to find answers here, though perhaps I had another lead: Duke Cheston. He was preeminent enough to speak to the queen. He was loyal to King Claudius and, as such, Prince Aeric. In the coming days, I would arrange to speak with him.
Yorick followed me as I walked along the pathway. A smaller garden was situated near a fountain with a statue of the Mother, which was odd, since the Father was Acus’s patron. I went closer. Three pairs of white marble wings rose from bases. The wings were polished. Fresh long-stemmed flowers were carefully placed atop them. I bent down to read the inscriptions, which bore the Acusan blessing of “light everlasting.”
LIGHTEVERLASTING—LAMBERT
LIGHTEVERLASTING—CHRISTIANNA
LIGHTEVERLASTING—CLAUDIUS
Dates were etched below the names, showing that they had died as babies.
“Who are they?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder at Yorick.
He somberly surveyed the wings. Clustered together, they appeared like doves. “Prince Aeric’s brothers and sister. This is a memory garden. They are buried in the crypt beneath the palace with the royals who came before them, but this spot was where King Claudius came to sit and think.”
I turned back to the plaques. Quickly, I calculated the dates once again. They had all lived and died after Aeric. My mind turned to Queen Gertrude. She had carried five children and buried four. It was why she had spoken so confidently about whether she was pregnant. She’d experienced it several times, and every time except once, it’d ended with a pair of wings in the garden and a tiny body in the crypt.
I couldn’t imagine her cradling a baby, yet she’d held five in her arms. She’d lost almost all and, through her own plotting, was poised to lose her remaining son. My frown returned. Acus was esteemed and envied, yet it had just as much rot and heartache as Radix. Only, we didn’t hide ours.
“Now, then, I would like to see the flower berry my sister ate,” I said, stepping out of the memory garden.
“Are you certain?” Yorick asked. “It might be troubling.”
“I am.”
He nodded and led me farther into the garden, toward the public-facing gate.
I stopped, eyes widening, gasping, “What—How?”
I almost broke into a run.
Grave flowers lurked ahead, specifically starvelings.
They snarled and slashed at their fellow flowers, a blot of deep, blackish green staining the otherwise bloodred garden. The starvelings were small, but they were vicious. Around them, the other flowers turned their heads and leaves away, as though the starvelings might disappear if they were ignored.
“Those? Oh, your sister sent seeds ahead, and they were planted for her,” Yorick said. “I never knew grave flowers grew so quickly. They sprang up almost immediately, and within two weeks, they were like this.”
