The Gardener

There are two hundred and forty windows in the east face of the Valdoré palace, and Aurelie had learned, by the age of nine, which of them could not be seen into. It was a small kingdom of knowledge and entirely her own. A princess owns very little that is truly hers; she had decided, long ago, that she would at least own the angles. This morning she was at the window of the disused music room, third floor, which looked down into the kitchen gardens, and she was watching a stranger argue with her roses. Not argue, exactly. The man was crouched among the old climbing roses along the south wall, and he was doing something to them with a pair of secateurs and an expression of pure, unhurried disagreement, as though the roses had said something foolish and he intended to wait until they took it back. He wore no coat. His sleeves were pushed up. He did not move like a servant — there was none of that careful smallness palace people learned — and he did not move like a courtier either. He moved like a man who had simply never once in his life wondered whether he was allowed to be where he was standing. Aurelie went down to find out who he was, which was a thing princesses were not supposed to do, and which she did anyway, by the servants' stair, in shoes that were wrong for the gravel. "You're cutting them back too hard," she said, from the garden path. The man did not startle. He finished the cut he was making, unhurried, and only then looked up — and Aurelie watched him take in the morning visitor, the careful dress, the particular way she held her hands, and arrive, without apparent alarm, at the correct conclusion. "Your Highness," he said. He inclined his head. It was, technically, a bow. It was the most economical bow she had ever been given, and there was nothing rude in it at all, which was somehow more interesting than rudeness would have been. "I'm cutting them correctly. They've been cut too gently for years — that's why they flower at the top where no one can enjoy them and go bare and woody at eye level. They've been treated like something to look at. They'd rather be treated like something alive." "They're three hundred years old. My great-great-grandmother planted them." "Then she'd be glad someone finally meant it." He stood, brushing his hands, and she saw that he was younger than the gardener's confidence had made him seem, and that his eyes, when they met hers directly, did not do the thing every other pair of eyes in the palace did — that small downward flinch, that handing-back of attention. He simply looked at her, as if she were a person standing in a garden. "Lucas Harrow. The new head gardener. I started Tuesday. I'd have been presented to the household properly, but it seems the household didn't expect a princess in the kitchen gardens before breakfast." "The household never does." She came closer, against her better judgment, and looked at the rose he had been working on — and saw, beneath the alarming severity of his cuts, the logic of them. He had not been wounding the plant. He had been arguing it back toward the ground, toward the height where a person walking past could actually have it. "You think they should flower where they can be reached." "I think most things grown only to be admired from a distance end up lonely and half-dead at the bottom," Lucas Harrow said. "Roses included." And then, because he was either very brave or simply did not yet understand the place he had come to, he added, mildly, "Forgive me. That came out closer to your situation than I intended." Aurelie should have had him reminded of his position. There were words for it; she had heard her father's chamberlain use them. Instead she stood in the wrong shoes on the gravel, three months from a marriage chosen for her by a treaty she had not been allowed to read, and she found that she was, for the first time in a long and beautifully scheduled while, interested in what would happen next. "Cut them however you like, Mr. Harrow," she said. "I'll come and see whether you were right." "You'll have to come closer than the third-floor window, then." He picked up his secateurs. He did not smile, quite, but something passed near it. "Your Highness." Aurelie walked back up the servants' stair in her ruined shoes, and did not tell anyone where she had been, and added a new window to her private kingdom of angles — the one in the music room, third floor, that looked down on the south wall, where someone was teaching her great-great-grandmother's roses to be reachable.