Page 26 of Grave Flowers

Back in my chambers at the Acusan palace, I sat on my bed.

I’d learned much.

Too much.

I thought about Aeric’s play. A King Betrayed. Was that his true play? No one seemed to know of it. Fear clouded my thoughts, especially as I reflected on the three costumes, each embroidered with a name across the chest like a brand.

The prince’s costume for Prince Lambert.

The queen’s costume for Queen Gertrude—and he’d taken it down because she’d died.

The red dress.

For me.

Or, more accurately, perhaps for a character set to play me.

No wonder he was so consumed with the play.

It wasn’t amusement; it was an indictment of us, hidden within a reenactment.

All the court would be there to see it.

Yet how would it be enough to secure his power? If he had indeed poisoned Inessa, he must’ve used poison from the Oscura to do so. Maybe he planned to use another. I knew which one I would use in this instance: mad minds. They grew in Aeric’s own garden now, and were docile due to their mistreatment—yet possibly still potent enough to loosen tongues and liberate their transgressions.

I could see it.

The play revealing King Claudius’s murder and forcing the court’s hand.

Those who didn’t support Aeric would quickly realize that they must, and those already on his side would be enraged and swift to act on Aeric’s behalf.

Mad minds made you recount wrongs you might have done at any point in your life, but after seeing the play, King Claudius’s murder would be at the forefront of Prince Lambert’s mind.

Aeric would expose us to mad minds. We would babble our sins before the court, confirming that the play was not fiction but rather recent history. Aeric planned to run Prince Lambert through, but I would be arrested. Tried. And then executed.

In a way, it was genius.

Montario coin was a convincing bribe, but not in the face of such accusations.

What was gold in the face of death? Those who’d pocketed it would realize their necks were at risk.

Somehow, no matter what, I’d have to be certain I wasn’t exposed to mad minds and incriminated before the Acusan court. If Aeric lay a trap, I’d slip around it so he might fall into mine later. No matter what, I had to kill him. Otherwise, Inessa would never be free. Prince Lambert might go down, and perhaps it’d serve me to let him do so. If he saw a reenactment of King Claudius’s death only, his focus would be upon that, and he’d rant about it. As long as I avoided exposure to the mad minds, I’d survive. Aeric could run him through—if he had the stomach for it. In the chaos after, if I might get near Aeric, I’d prick him with my ring to save Inessa. Then Father and I would flee home.

It would be difficult not to have the Montario coin to save us from the coming famine, but Aeric had mentioned Acus needed rocks.

Perhaps I might arrange a trade agreement with them and get us the money we needed to buy food.

Still, more mysteries abounded.

Who was the figure who had revealed King Claudius’s murder to Aeric? Certainly, ghosts plagued the palace.

Inessa.

Yorick. They, though, were only themselves. They sent no messengers. If I closed my eyes, I could revisit the shade in my mind. I could hear it. Oddly, familiarity came over me. The figure was cloaked but … but … it was my height. I knew, because I’d been on the palace roof before and had stood by the same guardians. And the voice … if I imagined it speaking aloud instead of in a whisper, I could pinpoint it.

Once upon a terror tale.

My blood went cold.

That’s what I’d heard it say before.

It was Inessa’s voice, the one she used in her feral states.

Had Inessa been pretending to be a spirit sent from King Claudius to tell Aeric to kill Prince Lambert? But it made no sense.

None.

Prince Lambert and Queen Gertrude, before she died, were our allies.

What was Inessa’s plan? I tried to take a breath, but the air snagged in my throat.

If I didn’t learn what it was before tomorrow night, I’d be doomed.

But how might I? I’d already searched in her quarters and cut apart her red dress.

A thought flashed in my mind.

The plaque that the grave flower had spat out.

Alifair had said Felys put prayers in their plaques.

If prayers might be tucked within them, other things could be as well.

I fished it out of my pocket.

My hands shook and I nearly dropped it. Gripping it, I held it so tightly that my fingers turned white. The plaque was narrow and light, so much so that you wouldn’t think it had a hidden compartment unless you knew. I turned it on its side. Dovetail joints, nearly indistinguishable because they were so precise and perfectly aligned with the grain, ran around the edge. I pushed. A thin, narrow drawer released from the bottom, thrust out violently with a spring mechanism. Parchment, folded into tiny squares, scattered across the bed.

Desperately, I gathered up the squares, undid them, and spread them flat.

The crisp edges and sharp corners caught on my fingertips.

There were letters signed by Alifair, dating back a year.

Others were notes written by Inessa. I read as quickly as I could, slipping in and out of sentences. Alifair had written about the invocations she’d inquired about, ones in the mainstream writ and then others solely used by Felys. I found the letter where he expounded on Mother’s plaque, telling her, as he’d told me, that it featured an image of the immortalities.

The immortalities are a tricksy grave flower, he wrote.

There’s a Fely invocation called a roundabout that can be used with them.

It lets you add time to your journey—just in case you need it.

It can even postpone death if you say it as you crush immortalities. However, they often get you stuck places or put places you don’t wish to be.

Here, Inessa wrote, ANY TYPE OF JOURNEY?

He wrote the roundabout invocation, and Inessa had circled it several times:

Left, right, up or down,

Let me use a roundabout so I may in right time be found.

I remembered Mother saying those words in the garden as she died.

It made me sick.

She’d been asking for a roundabout, a circling, a stalling for more time.

But it’d been too late. She hadn’t the strength to finish it and no immortalities to crush. I didn’t know if the thought comforted me or made me feel worse—the fact she’d wished to stay, just a little longer, with us even though we didn’t truly know her. I turned to the notes drafted by Inessa herself. They were scratched so heavily with her quill that it snagged the parchment, tearing tiny holes in it.

Immortalities—they are not extinct as we presumed.

According to Alifair, they grow underground.

The book Alifair guards is written by King Llyr, a Radixan king from long ago.

He notes that King Llyr did not wish to die and prepared himself to say the roundabout invocation by always having immortalities’ petals in his possession so he might crush them while saying the invocation.

The invocation has a will of its own, Alifair says.

In your hour of death, if it deems you worthy, it might forestall your going in some way.

Perhaps for a minute.

Perhaps for a year. Perhaps for decades. If it doesn’t deem you worthy, it’ll send you to Bide. Some prefer that option in hopes they might return or for fear of meeting the Primeval Family after a life of wrongs. Should the soul end up in Bide, another may bring it back by burying their likeness with the immortalities while saying the roundabout invocation. It’s a crossbreeding of invocations and grave flowers.

Alifair sent me the locket with the portrait of the king, which I was most happy to receive.

What an odious face.

He looks like a boiled egg dropped in dirt.

I’m glad to have it, though.

It’ll let me implement a grave flower experiment of my own.

x

Grave Flower Experiment: Immortalities

I, Princess Inessa Sinet, heir to the Radixan throne, continue the work left behind by King Llyr Sinet to learn the nature of the grave flowers and their possibilities.

At midnight, I snuck out to our royal garden with the sketch of King Llyr in my hands.

Sea fog and salt filled the air.

I dug deep around the immortalities’ flower bed and, as Alifair said, I found them thriving within the soil.

They are beautiful, as delicate as butterflies’ wings with translucent petals and thin scaffolding holding them together. How ironic that they were there all along, just under our feet. They quivered as I set the sketch among them and carefully patted the dirt back in place.

Then I said the roundabout invocation.

The dirt around the immortalities lifted.

It hung in the air, delicate particles that startled the moonmirrors.

Then it sprayed forward as though it had been sneezed.

It splattered across me. I watched. Waited.

First, blossoms burst from the dirt.

They were the immortalities.

As they crested through the soil, their translucent petals fell open as though the dirt had bound them closed.

They twirled on long, thin stems, and a peculiar feeling came upon me. It seemed to come from outside me, like a draft drifting over my skin. I had the sense that I did not want this sort of immortality, even as beautiful as the grave flowers were.

A strange, groaning jellylike substance pushed up underneath the immortalities.

The blossoms crowned it, and its roots stretched around the blob, forming a cage around it.

Some of the roots stabbed right through the mass, causing great streams of fluid to leak from it.

Lesions floated on its surface, and it shook and shivered. It sat like a fat raindrop before me.

“Please!”

Its voice was whistly and faint.

There was no mouth or place for the voice to come from—it seemed to come from every part of the globule.

“Bring me not here any longer! I may have done wrong in my mortal life, but please do not torture me so.

Send me back, send me back, send me back.”

I picked up a stick and poked it.

The whistling moans grew louder, and it seemed to be in great pain.

“I’ll stomp you out shortly.

First, I have some questions about Bide and how it works.”

Conclusion of experiment: The roundabout invocation and burying a person’s likeness among the immortalities works to bring a soul back from Bide … but how might one avoid the liquified condition?

x

Grave Flower Experiment Part 2

Perhaps the immortalities simply haven’t been used to their full capacity and we are supposed to use them to keep our bodies so when we are brought back, we may enter them and not be… so amorphous.

Remedy: I’ve done hundreds of secret tests trying to preserve the body postmortem.

Finally, one has worked.

I tested it on a bird who’d been slashed by the starvelings and lay dying.

I soaked seeds from the immortalities in its blood and then let the bird ingest the seeds prior to its death. The bird died. The immortalities took root within the bird and eventually grew from the ears, eyes, and beak, surrounding the body and keeping it from decay due to their magical properties. And given the connection to the blood, I was able to use the bird’s blood to mark certain places, and the immortalities returned to those spots, carrying the body. I imagine it’ll work similarly with a human.

The blossom in Inessa’s chambers held a body.

If she’d poisoned herself after swallowing the immortalities’ seeds soaked in her blood, her corpse would’ve looked normal … until the grave flowers sprouted inside her.

But if they hadn’t flowered until after her corpse had been examined, no one would know when the immortalities slipped free of the casket, taking her body with them before the casket was shipped to Radix.

Royal caskets were exceptionally heavy on their own, which masqueraded whether a body was in them, and we Radixans had no tradition of displaying the deceased in the way Acusans did. A splotch had stained Inessa’s ceiling. If her test with the bird was any indication, she’d swathed the ceiling with her blood to guide the grave flower to hide there until she needed her body again. My mind swam as though it were panicked and trapped within my skull. I made myself keep reading, even as I wished to dissolve.

The next portion didn’t have any words.

It was simply an illustration featuring a crude outline of a girl lying on a bed.

Several limbs were circled, with notes about which scars were there.

My scars. Not just the one I’d gotten at birth, but long after. Every scar was accounted for, from childhood scrapes to cuts from the starvelings that had required stitches. Inessa must’ve snuck into my chambers while I slept earlier last year. The thought elicited a sound from me, one much heavier than a mere gasp, a respiration of horror and shock. I had slept while she’d stood over me, making notes of every marking and then … replicating them on herself?

Inessa was dead, yes, but she was going to return, and … I almost dropped the parchment.

There was only one reason why she’d need to note and replicate my scars.

In returning, she wished to switch with me.

I thought about everything she’d suggested.

She told Aeric to kill Prince Lambert before the wedding and then instructed me to kill Aeric after it, in our bedchamber, as Father had planned.

Queen Gertrude was already dead—likely through Inessa’s orchestration.

One by one, she was eliminating everyone in power in Acus from the safety and secrecy of Bide. If all three were dead, then only I would be left, queen consort of Acus.

And she would switch with me, tomorrow night, after I’d killed Aeric.

I didn’t know how she would switch with me.

There were many complications.

How might she get me to say the roundabout invocation? And how might she cement power in Acus, considering she didn’t have a legitimate claim to its throne? Despite it all, I knew, deep inside, she had a solution for those problems and her ambitions would be fulfilled.

She’d have her crown, throne, and kingdom to rule.

Alone and in control of Acus and Radix.

Setting the parchment aside, I stumbled to my armoire.

I took out my Radixan dress, the one I’d worn when I arrived in Acus, and tore open the hidden pocket deep within its thick layers.

The vial sat within the fabric.

I stared at it, heart racing. If I poisoned Aeric, I would fulfill Inessa’s plan, and she would move to the next phase and switch with me. If I didn’t, he’d be alive and well to arrest me. Then there was Father and Prince Lambert, figures whose wills were also woven into my future.

I picked up the vial and clutched it tightly.

It was cold in my hands, so cold that it felt as though I held my own fear in my palms, that it was made from glass and ice and would shatter at any moment.

My mind raced in tempo to my heart, the two spiraling from my control and speeding headlong away from me.

I thought my heart might explode or my mind would incinerate, simply from the agony.

I tried to take long, slow breaths so I might reason because, no matter what, I needed a plan before morning.

Dawn came quickly, spilling bright light into the sky.

Aeric would be coronated at the ninth morning hour, our wedding would be at midday, and the play would be at the eighth nighttime hour.

As dictated by tradition, I wouldn’t see Aeric until the wedding, which meant I wouldn’t attend his coronation.

Rather, I’d see him as a king moments before taking him as my husband.

I was subjected to a retinue of treatments, thoughts racing as my body was slathered, combed, and perfumed.

Face cream—reeking of sesame seed oil, beeswax, and honey—was applied to my cheeks and forehead.

A burning concoction of rose water, lemon juice, eggshells, alum, and mercury were daubed onto the freckles I’d acquired from the Acusan sun, the sting serving only to emphasize my frazzled and fearful condition.

My hair was washed, raked with a comb made from bone, and brushed till it shone. I relished every tug and jerk, anything to sharpen my focus and draw my panic into submission.

Gwenllian and her fellow sewists arrived to help me into my wedding dress, their faces glowing with excitement.

Undergarments were placed on me first, and under the guise of fetching a handkerchief to dab my nose, I went to my vanity and discreetly tucked the poison vial into the corset.

I was glad I did because after that, I was under too much attention to have done so at any other point.

One final stitch was made in gold inside the wedding gown’s hem, where none would see it.

Myth said the stitch was blessed by the Primeval Family and that, as you were wed, it became true gold from their celestial halls.

Then prayers to the Daughter were said as the gown was placed upon my body.

The prayers were soft and gentle, a severe contrast to my agony.

I tried to remain strong and plot, but despair seeped through my will, weakening me from the inside out, so much so that I wobbled as the gown was laced up.

Eventually, I found my mind drifting as the prayers continued around me.

Maybe I was delirious, all the terror unbinding my mind and sending it somewhere else. The past mixed with the present.

Inessa cared not for our sisterhood.

Aeric was poised to arrest me.

Prince Lambert strove to wed me.

Yorick … Yorick hadn’t cared for me at all. I wished to flee to our garden in Radix and curl up among the grave flowers.

I understood nothing, and even more so, I didn’t understand Inessa.

I was alone.

Truly alone.

Why would she ever wish such a thing for herself?