At first it was only a few spots on an orchid, small black rotten dots that few would even notice. I didn’t think anything of it. It hadn’t looked like any disease I could remember; still, I simply bit my first finger until I could taste blood on my tongue, then pressed a droplet into the heart of the dying flower.
It bloomed once again, pale blue petals unfurling, growing to the size of my palm. I needed a bouquet to give Lady Ganara for that evening’s coronation, after all. A little blood never hurt anything, and no one was ever the wiser, anyway. I slid the bloom back into the vase, beside baby’s breath and a few sprigs of bluebells. Papa told me to only use my talent, for lack of a better word, sparingly. A gardener’s daughter with blood that could raise entire forests? Only the royal family had magic in their blood. What would Aloriya think if they knew I had a touch of magic, too? Even if my power was small, I was quite sure I would be the talk of the town. And not in the good way.
“Morning, Sprout!” Papa greeted me, coming in through the front of the shop. He knocked the dirt off his boots at the door and hung up his coat. “It’s a beautiful day for a coronation!”
“Don’t jinx it,” I replied, making a tag for the bouque—Lady Ganara, I wrote in my tight, neat cursive.
Papa belted a laugh. “What could go wrong? The sky’s bright, the sun’s out, and there’s spring in the air—I can taste it.”
“Mm-hmm. Watch it start raining the moment Wen says her vows. ‘Oh, I would be delighted to accept this crown . . . after the monsoon,’” I said in the princess—soon-to-be queen—of Aloriya’s crisp accent, grabbing the crown of daisies I’d made yesterday from the counter and placing it on my head. I mocked the royal wave to all the flowers in the shop. “Why, thank you for coming! I am delighted to ruin all your fine clothes this evening.”
Papa laughed louder as he escaped into the kitchen just off from the shop. He clanked around in the cabinets to find a cup and poured himself some coffee. He smelled like soil and freshly clipped flowers already, in dirty brown overalls and hard work boots, chewing on a stem of mint. His sun-browned skin was spotted with age, but his gray eyes were bright—like mine. “I got a feeling I won’t be comin’ back into the village today. It’s a riot up at the castle. The seneschal’s about to lose her head, she’s so stressed.”
“Poor Weiss. I feel for her.”
“I don’t,” Papa groused, coming back to lean on the kitchen doorframe, into the small flower shop at the front of the house. The shop itself was part of our house. Papa and I lived upstairs, but the kitchen was downstairs, and out the rear door were the gardens where we grew most of our flowers. “The old crone yelled at me again this morning.”
“Probably for trampling muddy boots all over the castle again.”
“That was one time, and it was an emergency.”
I snorted. What my father deemed an emergency was showing King Merrick four-leaf clovers, or roses I’d accidentally bled on that turned strange shades of purple. I highly doubted it was an actual emergency. The late king had been Papa’s best friend—one of the reasons that Princess Anwen was mine. He had been in the room when the king took his final breath two nights ago, and we barely had time to mourn his passing, as the kingdom was to be inherited by his children—
Child, I corrected myself. Because there were no longer two.
Papa seemed to be reminiscing about the same thing. “It feels like it didn’t happen. Like he’s still here. I keep forgetting.”
“I know,” I replied softly.
He stood quietly for a moment longer and then blinked his wet eyes and cleared his throat. “Well! No use dawdling; we’ve got work to do.” He hooked his thumbs into the loops of his overalls and came around the front of the counter. He took a look at the bouquets ready to be picked up and paused on Lady Ganara’s. “Kingsteeth, those are some beautiful blue orchids.” Papa bent in to smell them—and winced.
While magic couldn’t be seen, it did have a distinct scent that lingered for a while where it had been worked. The smell was