“I think she’d like that.” I lifted my head from his shoulder. “Can I ask you something? About her?”
“Of course.”
“Did she . . . did she come from Voryn?”
He didn’t seem surprised, but a little resigned. He scratched the side of his head and sighed. “Your mother was a secretive kind, Sprout. She never really said, but I did catch her, some nights, mumbling about a city in the wood. I thought it was just hogwash. But she said it was beautiful—is it?”
“Yes,” I replied, and as I did, my heart filled with the kind of longing I couldn’t describe. I’d felt it all winter, in this house that was small and simple and familiar. I always thought I would live here forever, but now I wasn’t so sure I wanted to.
Papa gave me a quiet sidelong look and sipped his coffee. “This is going to be a long evening.”
I groaned. “Don’t remind me. I hate these things. I’d rather face the wood again than another coronation.”
“Ah, but at least you’ve got a dance to look forward to tonight, eh?” he asked, elbowing me in the side, and winked.
A blush ate up my cheeks.
“Aha! Oh, I can’t wait to see this,” he crowed, smiling so wide he showed all his teeth—even the chipped one in the back that hadn’t been chipped before the woodcurse. He didn’t like showing it. It reminded him of things he preferred not to remember. “My little girl, dancing the night away!” He did a little jig as he went up the stairs to finish getting ready, and I wanted to bury my head under the dirt in mortification. “Now put on your dress! We’ve got a coronation to attend!”
My only proper dress was lost somewhere in an abandoned cottage, so Wen had lent me one of hers. It had to be let out a little in the sides and hemmed on the bottom, but it was a pleasant rose color with embroidered vines curling across the hems and sleeves. I rather liked it, as far as dresses went.
Papa put on his old tweed suit and combed his gray hair over the balding spot on his head, and after I helped him fix his bow tie, we were ready to go.
“Oh! Almost forgot.” I slipped back into the shop and took a crown of daisies off the counter. I had grown and laced them myself—the hard way, too. I couldn’t make flowers bloom anymore. It was like a small part of me had been ripped away, leaving room for something else to take its place. I just wasn’t sure what yet.
“Can’t go to a coronation without a crown,” he tsk-tsked as we left the shop.
“I don’t think it’s the crown that makes the ruler.”
“No, but it sure is a nice one.”
I had to agree.
Villagers emerged from their houses, carrying food and drink, starting the long hike up the King’s Road to the white castle at the top. Some of the older folks hitched rides on the backs of wagons; kids ran along trailing streamers behind them as they curled up the mountain.
As Papa laced his arm in mine and we started up the road, I remembered what waited for me at the top—and I smiled.
I wasn’t sure if the wood had changed me or if I had changed myself, but I felt it. Like a seed outgrowing its shell, a bloom unfurling from its bud. I was not the same girl I had been the last time I’d traveled up this road.
I knew better now. There were no perfect kingdoms without cost, and there were no stories that were completely true—or completely false.
Not even mine.
I always thought that gardeners’ daughters couldn’t thrive where our roots didn’t grow. But maybe we were like dandelion tufts.
Maybe we were built to catch a warm spring wind and grow somewhere new.
Soon, the bakers next door joined us on our trek to the Sundermount, and the two old men who always played chess by the tavern, and the blacksmith’s son even winked at me. Halfway up the mountain, Papa asked, “So how many kits do we have now in that burrow?”
“Three.”
He guaffed. “Three! Three more pests in my garden!”
“You enjoy the pests,” I teased, knowing that he fed them more than I ever did, in secret, when he thought I wasn’t looking.
He lifted his chin regally. “At least they’re not as bad as your fox.”
I smiled at that. “My fox is one of a kind,” I replied, and began to hum along to the baker’s brood—their three kids and their two yapping hounds—as they sang some silly rhyme about a flower in the wood that could cure death itself.
The Sundermount slowly came into view, the forest unfurling like a flower, and then there was the castle where I had spent my childhood, and Papa looped my arm into his, and squeezed my hand tightly.
This was only the second coronation I’d ever seen, but if the first one was anything to go on, they weren’t all they were cracked up to be.
Queen Anwen of Aloriya accepted her daisy crown with grace.
She smiled down at me in the crowd, her teeth a little too pointed, and I smiled back at her because I knew a secret—she would do just fine without the magic of a golden crown. No, she would do better than fine.
I couldn’t say the same for most of the townsfolk, though. When I told Anwen that inviting the entire village was a bad idea, she obviously didn’t believe me, but not even an hour after the coronation itself, Papa was on his third drink and already recounting the tale of the Great Pig Race of the Summerside Year, and was it as riveting as it was the first two times he’d told it already?
I would’ve been a terrible daughter to say otherwise.
As the party wore on, I slipped away to a quiet area of the garden and leaned against the wall by the archway I used to look in from, watching the people swirl and tumble about, laughing as the music drifted into the evening. Everything looked so much the same from the inside of the garden, I couldn’t remember why I was so obsessed with it.
A laugh drew me away from my thoughts.
To the other side of the garden, where a boy with hair the color of marigolds and a smile that tugged up a little too much on one side, tricky and daring, laughed with a crowd of dignitaries. They fawned over him the longer he talked. He was very good at talking. He could make you fall in love with him with a single word.
Everyone said the newly returned crown prince of Aloriya was handsome.
He was—don’t get me wrong—but he also had a stomach the size of an endless pit, made terrible puns, fled at the first sign of trouble, and if you gave him a choice between eating meat pie and ruling a kingdom, he’d choose the meat pie.
And I think I loved those things about him the most.
“Well, he looks quite content with himself,” said a monotonous voice to my left, and I jumped, spilling my wine all over the front of my dress.
Seren leaned in the archway, his arms folded, feet crossed.
“Kingsteeth, don’t sneak up on me like that!” I mumbled, frowning down at the growing stain over my chest. “Elderberry wine is almost impossible to get out, you know.”
“Sorry,” he replied, sounding earnest. He was in dark leather armor, although on the left side of his chest, bits of strange star-shaped buds sprouted up through his collar. The dark circles under his eyes were, somehow, impossibly deeper, and his hair was washed and neatly combed back, pinned at the base of his neck with a twist of briars. He eyed me suspiciously. “Why are you over here alone? And not—say—dancing with your prince?”