20
B etween the four wings of the palace was a sprawling square of space with trimmed lawns and flourishing flower hedges. It was there we gathered the next morning beneath a large gazebo.
“Now, I want all of you to pair up,” Lady Hortensia said, projecting her high-pitched voice. “There are eight boats, so only sixteen can go at a time.”
In the center of all the greenery was an enormous man-made pond, bordered by tastefully arranged rocks and willow trees. A row of canoes bobbed near the edge, awaiting pairs of debutantes and young men for a morning of rowing and mingling.
“Actually ma’am, there are twelve boats,” Edward Thornbrush piped up, his cheeks as red and freckled as ever.
Lady Hortensia smiled at him, an expression that did not flatter her heavily powdered face.
This morning she was dressed in a gown of gauzy fabric, not unlike Miriam’s shawls, embroidered with iridescent butterflies. It was almost blinding in the dappled sunlight. I glanced behind her shoulder and caught a glimpse of Ash standing in the shadows.
“The pond is only so large, Edward,” Lady Hortensia said with a girlish giggle. “If we use all twelve there will be no semblance of privacy.”
Olivia whimpered next to me. I couldn’t blame her. The woman was making a chaperoned event sound like an excuse to canoodle.
“Don’t worry. I’m sure your brother will go with you if you’re nervous,” I said. Cedric was also in the crowd of young men, made obvious by his height and lack of gold ribbon. Though from the glances he was throwing at Genevieve, he may have regretted not having one.
Tori stuck her head out from behind my stepsister. “But you’ll deprive the poor man of Genevieve’s company,” she said, voicing my thoughts.
“Tori!” Genevieve said, her face pink.
“She’s right,” I said. “I’ll go with Olivia instead.”
Tori pouted. “But what about Princey? You’ll leave him all alone.”
“His name is Ash, Tori.”
“Oho! You’re on first name basis?”
I resisted the urge to bury my face in my hands, lest Lady Hortensia ask me what the matter was. Olivia giggled. At least she wasn’t nervous anymore.
“Eight young ladies and eight young men, come with me to the boats,” Lady Hortensia said, gliding down from the gazebo. Her face stretched into another smile as she passed Ash, fluttering her fan before her face. I was surprised he wasn’t blinded by the erratic flashing of her gown. “Your Highness has the first pick, of course. ”
Ash walked over to me and offered his arm. “Amarante?” he said.
Lady Hortensia’s smile dropped.
I was about as embarrassed as Olivia was when I took his arm. Tori made one of her pulsing hearts again, which I tried very hard to ignore. Genevieve was bombarded by Edward Thornbrush before Cedric could move. I tossed him a sympathetic glance.
When everyone paired up, Lady Hortensia brushed brusquely past and marched down to the pond. The group followed. Narcissa walked behind me at the arm of a blushing youth. Her stoic expression and his flustered one was quite a match.
“Any progress with the case?” I asked Ash in a low voice. I thought I felt Narcissa’s glare at the back of my neck, but brushed it off when I found her looking elsewhere.
“Not yet,” Ash said, his brows furrowed. There were dark circles under his eyes. “I’ve been thinking...”
We walked further, but he didn’t continue.
“Yes?” I prompted.
Ash sighed. “The duchess knows you’re suspicious of her. What if something happens to you?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “She can’t possibly do anything to me without raising suspicion.”
For all Her Grace knew, I was merely a nosy debutante who posed no real threat. And if things went favorably, it would stay that way.
When we lowered ourselves into a canoe, Ash paddled us to a secluded area shaded by the foliage of a willow tree. A couple of swans floated in our midst. One of them hissed at us. I shifted away.
“As long as you’re safe,” he said, giving me the slightest of smiles .
I felt a little breathless. The rocking of the canoe, no doubt. “Any updates?” I managed to ask.
“Ah.” His smile melted away. “The physicians are worried their cure isn’t working.”
I swallowed, desperately wanting to tell him to use Lana’s antidote. But my tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth. “How bad is it?” I said instead.
“Heaven knows what that poison is. A week ago, my mother started having nightly fits. They only pass when the sun rises,” Ash said, his voice wavering.
“What?” I sat straighter. “What kind of fits?”
“It’s awful. She keeps screaming and clawing at nothing. We had to restrain her from hurting herself and—”
I shook my head. This pained him to talk about.
“How many people know about this?” I said.
“Just me and the physicians. And now you. My mother didn’t want my father or Bennett to know the severity of her condition just yet,” Ash said, furrowing his brow. “If Erasmus can’t figure out what the poison is, I don’t know if we’ll ever find a cure. And Captain Greenwood will still be blamed. It’s a whole mess.”
Dread settled into my stomach like a lump of undigested potatoes. I wondered if the queen’s symptoms were the same as Erasmus’s mouse. I almost wanted to tell Ash everything, but I stopped myself. “Have you talked to the captain yet?”
Ash shook his head. He tugged at his ribbon, nearly unfurling it from his wrist. “No. But I will soon,” he said, exhaling. “Will you join me?”
“Am I allowed?”
“I understand if you don’t want to,” he said quickly. “I’m sorry you got tangled in all of this in the first place. You’re just a debutante— ”
“Of course I’ll come,” I said. I knew how important it was to him. After all, he was in charge of the case and there was so much on the line: his father’s respect, his mother’s life, and of course, the innocence of witches. But the last was for me to worry about.
“Thank you,” Ash said, gaze softening. He leaned forward and gripped the sides of the canoe. I blinked, startled at his sudden proximity.
What a lovely deep brown his eyes were.
A flush appeared on his cheeks, as if he had heard my thoughts. “Amarante, I’ve been wanting to—”
Then, the boat flipped over.
Icy water knocked the air out of my lungs. My knees hit the bottom of the pond and I scrambled to stand, my nose barely out of the water. Before I could get a lungful of air, something white and feathery smacked my face. A bevy of swans had surrounded us, hissing and beating their wings. A few nipped at my hair.
“What the—” A mouthful of pond water choked me as I lost my footing. Ash grabbed my waist and I clung to his sleeves, gasping for breath. The swans kept beating the water.
“Good heavens, what are they feeding these birds?” Ash exclaimed, shooing away the animals. Miraculously, they scattered, except one who wouldn’t let go of my hair. I shut my eyes, willing it to go away. It eventually did, but not before ripping out several strands from my scalp.
Ash’s laugh rumbled in my ear. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of swans.”
I retched at the taste of pond scum in my mouth. “I am now,” I said, rubbing my head. “They flipped the boat over!”
Our fall created quite a splash, in multiple senses. Lady Hortensia looked almost scandalized as we pulled up with a pool of water in our boat and both of us drenched from head to foot. I was ordered to clean myself up while someone was sent to fetch towels and a change of clothes for His Royal Highness. Lady Hortensia began fussing over Ash before he could speak.
I decided to make my escape, lest the lady blamed the disaster on me. Tori rushed over as I wrung my skirts out under the gazebo.
“Can’t you attend one of these events without something disastrous happening?” she said, picking off a sopping piece of moss from my hair.
I sighed. “It appears not.”
From the east entrance beyond the pond, a squire ran toward us, evidently in a hurry. I thought he had come with Ash’s towels, but he was empty handed besides an envelope tucked in his sash. I was all surprise when he at last approached me.
“Miss Amarante Flora?” the squire asked.
At my affirmation, he handed me the envelope and departed before I could ask him any questions.
Tori peered over my shoulder. “What’s that?”
I began to shrug until I recognized the name scrawled on the corner of the envelope.
Erasmus Lenard.
No doubt it was the results of our manbane experiment.
“It’s nothing,” I said to Tori, tucking the letter into my pocket. I hoped it wouldn’t be destroyed by my damp skirts. “I should go inside and clean up.”
“You need any help? I happen to be very good at wringing out water—”
“No thanks, Tori,” I said, already up and running. Tori was a small figure when I considered myself a safe distance away. There was a wall of hedges behind the pond, a section of which there was nothing but a charred stump. I figured it was the hedge Ash said he set fire to. Wedging into the gap, I opened the letter .
The water from my skirts made the ink bleed, but it was still legible.
Little flower,
The symptoms of the manbane are as follows:
Irregular pulse
Shortness of breath
Feverish fits during the night
No severe symptoms during the day
It has come to my attention that the queen’s symptoms are similar, though from what the physicians have told me, the nightly fits are worse than they appear. They say it causes hallucination. This is solid evidence that manbane is what poisoned Her Majesty. Only time will tell how deadly this poison is, unless you ask your instructor what it does. At this moment I cannot fathom the queen recovering without a magical antidote.
Remember what you promised. Destroy this note. No one can know this is a witch-made poison.
E.
I crumpled the note and stuffed it back into my soaking pocket. Erasmus hadn’t explicitly said it, but I knew he wanted me to ask Lana to make an antidote for manbane. Queen Cordelia had no chance of recovery if the physicians didn’t know it was a witch-made poison. And if they did know, there was no saying what could happen to witchkind.
I bit my lip, both fear and thrill churning in my stomach. Could the recovery of Queen Cordelia be on my shoulders?
“Amarante?” Ash emerged behind my hedge, staring at me curiously. It took my all not to yelp. “What are you doing here?”
“Getting...dry,” I said. I inched into a patch of sunlight.
There was a towel around his neck and another on his arm, which he offered to me. “Sorry about all this. I should have paid more attention to the boat.”
I took the towel gratefully. “It’s not your fault. It was the swans.”
Ash laughed. I was reminded of how his chest rumbled with mirth when we were submerged in the pond. I blushed.
“They were acting strange,” he admitted, “but I really don’t think they could flip over a whole boat.”
I decided not to contradict him. It was an irrelevant detail compared to what sat in my mind now. There was no doubt about it—I had to ask Lana about manbane and convince her to make an antidote.
A swan’s bugle blared into my ear as one swooped down from the hedges and flew past me. I screamed and stumbled backward into Ash, knocking us both down to the grass.
“What is wrong with those creatures?” I bemoaned, too distressed to be annoyed at Ash’s cackling or embarrassed that my back was flush against his chest. He had taken the brunt of my fall.
“Perhaps they like you,” he teased, sitting us both up. “That one followed you all the way over here.”
“It did? And no one thought to tell me? ”
“It’s a swan, Amarante. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“Well, I—apologies!” I jumped up to my feet, realizing that we were in a most compromising position. I cringed to think of what Lady Hortensia would say if she saw me practically sitting on the second prince’s lap.
Ash looked relatively unbothered as he stood.
“Never mind that. Come,” he said cheerily, offering his arm. “I think we’re both overdue for a change of clothes.”