Page 1 of Grave Flowers

Two babies lay on stained sheets like overripe prunes in a dirty napkin, baggy skin puckering their brows, elbows, and knees.

If King Rychard Sinet hadn’t seen them delivered by his wife moments before, he might’ve doubted the revolting little monsters were human.

After Queen Agathine’s curses during labor, the silence was so thick, he swore he could hear it.

He cocked his head to the side, trying to clear his ears of it in the way he might clear them of water.

There wasn’t supposed to be silence.

There was supposed to be the crying of newborns.

“Alive?”

Queen Agathine rasped.

She managed to prop herself up on an elbow.

“Healthy? Male or female?”

Everything hung on the three answers.

King Rychard, who’d been alarmed by his twins’ aesthetic deficiencies, bent over them to assess.

One was bigger than the other.

It’s the stronger twin, he thought. Tend to it first—hit it on the back like the physician would. He grabbed the baby under its arms and lifted, hoping it would show an indication of life, a whimper or a cry.

But he was the one to let out a cry.

“What is it, then? Rychard! What is it?”

Few things startled King Rychard.

Other monarchs did things a certain way: Expectant queens entered confinement and, when their time came, allowed access to physicians who would ensure the health of a newborn heir, along with monastictes and nobles who would bear witness to a royal birth.

But King Rychard had needed to make sure everything went just right first, and so only he, the queen, and the babies were in the room—along with grave flowers, which had snooped their way into the room uninvited through the cracks in the walls.

But though he’d tried to think through every possibility of the birth and prided himself on having a plan for each outcome, he hadn’t anticipated this.

When he’d picked up the strong baby, the other one had come with it as though they were links on a chain made from mottled baby skin and twiggy bones.

Roughly, the king dropped the first baby back onto the sheets.

“Attached.”

The word tasted metallic in the king’s mouth, like a rusty coin no one wanted.

“The babies are attached at the hand.

They’re female and have all the beauty and vigor of a rotten tooth.”

A drop of water landed on King Rychard’s forehead.

He let out a half sigh, half hiss.

The grave flowers prying their way into the room were waterveins.

They were a leaky sort, always weeping pinky-red liquid. Their drips added insult to the grevious injury he had just suffered: his twins failing to meet a single tittle of his heir requirements. Not only were they ugly, unwell, and not male, but they were attached.

With great effort, he forced himself to stay calm.

It wouldn’t do to upset Queen Agathine after all she’d been through.

He wiped the drop off.

Waterveins were harmless at first touch, but continuous exposure led to weakening bones and watery blood, making one bruise and bleed at the slightest friction.

“May I see them?”

Queen Agathine asked.

Her black hair was shinier than usual due to sweat.

She looked cautiously at her husband.

“In a moment.”

The twins hadn’t made a sound, even as their limbs flailed haphazardly about, seeking the walls of the womb that had released them.

Death was lurking, waiting for the mysterious secret permission to snatch them both.

Death, though, hadn’t met King Rychard.

Others might be able to count these babies as a loss and start over, but it’d taken too long for the queen to even fall pregnant.

He’d heard the rumors.

They always danced just ahead of him, slipping into ears before he could execute the lips whispering them.

In a way, it was his own fault that the country doubted the strength of his line.

He’d married a Fely woman, to the horror of his council.

Felys, the only minority in Radix, had paid higher taxes and had fewer rights—until King Rychard had married Agathine.

Upon second reflection … no, King Rychard thought, the situation isn’t my fault.

It’s the council’s fault.

They had tried to force him to marry the daughter of an uncomfortably powerful baron.

To prove they couldn’t control him, he picked the unlikeliest wife of all and then had to stick with her.

Of course, infertility always stemmed from the woman, and the court spent the past ten years begging him to abandon her for a more fruitful queen.

Their pressure had only made King Rychard resist more, though it was frustrating because he was most fecund.

His bastards from his visits to pleasure houses proved it.

However, he did need an heir.

With renewed purpose, King Rychard picked up the babies.

How odd it was, to hold the slimy little things and not know where one ended and the other began.

Firmly, he struck them on their backs as he’d first planned, his large hand spanning both.

Silence persisted.

Again, he struck them.

Two congested wails warbled through the chamber.

Queen Agathine smiled and held out her arms, but King Rychard still wasn’t done.

He examined their connected hands.

Only a thin bridge of skin linked them.

There was no overlap of organs, no shared musculature, bones, or veins.

Merely skin.

Finally, something goes my way, he thought.

He handed the babies to the queen and kissed her on the forehead.

She had done well, hiding the labor pains until they could slip away to one of the palace’s hidden chambers for the birth.

Tomorrow, he would announce that the queen had gone into labor too fast to call for help, but all was well, thank the Primeval Family:

Twins had been born, healthy as they could be.

“I’ll be back,”

he told Queen Agathine.

There were many secret passages in the Radixan palace, but King Rychard didn’t require any now.

It was a direct path to the royal physician’s room.

As he brushed by the halls, moonlight shone on the silver tracks snails had paved down the giant paintings of grave flowers lining the walls.

Their tracks made it look like the paintings wept.

At least it was snails and not the bloodsucking black slugs often found wedged between the damp palace stones.

King Rychard scowled.

If one paid attention, one quickly realized nothing was quite as it should be in Radix.

Everything teetered on the verge of snapping, molding, or shattering—and, if one looked even closer, one would see part of the palace had been rebuilt centuries ago, original stone clashing against brick, stucco, and wood.

No one knew why.

Radixan records weren’t so much history as love letters written by past monarchs to themselves, detailing impossibly impressive triumphs.

Most had been lost to time.

But it was evident the palace had been almost destroyed, and King Rychard resented it.

It made him feel uneasy, because what on earth might have caused such damage?

He put his hand in his pocket, fingering a thick, braided drapery cord.

It was his weapon of choice.

Slit throats bled, poisons often caused vomiting, and defenestrations made terribly messy splats below.

And grave flowers … well, they were so uncontrollable, the attacker would likely die alongside the victim.

Strangulation with a drapery cord was neat and clean.

It wouldn’t be difficult to strangle the physician after he separated the twins.

He was a thin, jaundiced fellow, always giving glowing diagnoses regardless of the patient’s state.

King Rychard’s fingers tingled in anticipation.

Nothing was quite as exquisite as strangling someone.

It made King Rychard’s blood thicken and sent euphoria racing through his veins like white lightning.

The physician will be easy to carry to the garden.

The starvelings were the one flower he’d found use for.

They were a thorny, carnivorous breed that buried their prey in their soil.

They laced their roots through the carcasses or corpses and fed off them for weeks, though they’d be disappointed the physician was so skinny.

It didn’t take long.

The physician, who’d been nearly scared out of his skin to be roused from his sleep by the king himself, separated the twins with a lancet.

He remarked on the fact that the babies must’ve faced each other in utero because their connected hands reached across to each other.

Once separated, he marveled, they’d have identical scars on the same hand.

While the physician attended the babies, King Rychard measured him up and toyed with the drapery cord in his pocket. Once the physician’s task was done, no one would know the twins had ever been born attached. The king would blame the hand gashes on a broken crib edge or some sort of thing.

No one ever questioned him, lest they too find their necks wrapped in a drapery cord.

Morning fog, tinged a dishwater hue, exhaled heavily over Radix by the time King Rychard returned to the secret birthing chamber.

The haze was accompanied by the fragrance of the grave flowers as they opened their blossoms with the dawn and spewed their perfume into the air.

“Well, I suppose we can split the name,”

King Rychard said, his arduous chore complete.

“Instead of Inessa Madalina Sinet, shall one be Inessa and the other Madalina?”

“I like it,”

Queen Agathine said, giving each slumbering milk-gorged baby a kiss on the nose.

With the names settled, King Rychard clambered into the bed with the groan of an exhausted man.

In an hour or so, he would announce the birth of the twins, but for now, he’d earned some rest.

“No, everything is covered in blood,”

Queen Agathine protested.

King Rychard looked at his wife and twins.

The babies had their mother’s dark hair.

He appreciated how the tendrils made tiny spirals around the babies’ ears, curving like the spindled shells of snails.

“I don’t mind a little blood,”

he said, and then the four of them drowsed amid the splattered blankets and sheets while the waterveins dripped nearby.

ACT I

Curtain Rises

“Natura nihil frustra facit”

Nature does nothing in vain

A Guide to Grave Flowers for Tortures and Torments

A Compilation for Radixan Monarchs

I, King Llyr from the House of Sinet, am setting forth to apply our ancestral invocations upon our divine grave flower gifting.

When my parents ruled, they lived in fear of the grave flowers and never applied the invocations to them.

I am not afraid—I am curious.

My people have been particularly unruly and unhappy since the recent famine and Great Sick, so the prisons have been bursting! Which means I have ample souls to use for my experiments.

It couldn’t be better. I’ll record the results here so my progeny may rule over the grave flowers instead of fear them. I announced this plan to my council and my wife and my son. They all said it was a most wonderful idea. And it is true, because all my ideas are most wonderful.

These experiments are being conducted in the royal solarium, where charts of the stars and paintings of the celestial bodies shall inspire my own venture into the unknown: our grave flowers.

I gave a speech to the guards and prisoners assembled to help with the process and wore my most bejeweled crown.

BEAUTIES

Grave Flower Experiment One

Appearance

Bluish petals that are so thin, you can see right through them.

Shiny silvery leaves that function as tiny mirrors, which the beauties often stare into.

Behavior without invocation

Attention seekers.

They love real mirrors and being complimented more than anything else.

They are easily upset and don’t like it when other pretty things are nearby.

They also seem to have a highly inflated sense of their own beauty because they deem all the other grave flowers as inferior in aesthetics. However, when a beautiful piece of jewelry or colorful bird is near, they turn inward to each other and refuse to turn back until the competition is gone. They seem to think their beauty is a blessing and that, by withdrawing, they are punishing us.

Invocation

O Primeval Mother and Daughter,

let us borrow your beauty

so we may do our divine duty.

Though don’t let us be too stunning,

lest we stare too long in the mirror and lose all cunning.

Results

After the invocation was said, the beauties twined their way to a prisoner and climbed up her body to her face.

They lay gently upon it, spreading their thin petals over her forehead, eyes, nose, and mouth.

The prisoner began screaming.

The petals turned red. I thought the beauties themselves were changing color, but it was the prisoner’s blood, and the beauties were soaking it up. When the petals were lifted, the prisoner’s skin came with them. The beauties seemed very refreshed and renewed.

Complications

The petals latched on to the arm of the botanist who applied them.

He tried to claw them off, but they slithered up to his face with the same results.

Applications

They have the prettiest scent of all the grave flowers, which might make for a lucrative perfume that we can export to other kingdoms.

However, all attempts to extract their essence failed.

Of course, they work well for torture … however, once the invocation is said, they can’t be controlled.

They attacked the botanist just as they attacked the prisoner. Come to think of it, the botanist was a handsome fellow. However, they didn’t show the least interest in attacking me, which was good but also … did they find my appearance lacking? That can’t be it. I know I’m handsome. I’m the handsomest king to ever rule!