Foretold (36 page)

The only time my heart ever truly raced was when I ran, but even those moments seemed bare and ordinary.

I found that what I craved was to be caught off guard. I lived my life so rigidly that even the slightest deviation from course became a thrill.

And only one person had that ability: the condemned man in the cage.

More times than I cared to admit, I found my thoughts wandering to him, and any tether I was able to keep on myself during waking hours came loose the moment I fell into dreams.

When I slept his body prowled around me like the tiger I’d first imagined him to be, muscles long and languorous. He never touched me, not once, but that didn’t matter, as his eyes seemed to know everything and promise even more.

After one such torturous night I leapt from the bed at dawn and went straight into the dungeon to his cage.

“Tell me what you have done,” I demanded. “What brought you here?”

His body was sharper than it had been the first time I saw him, bones tight against the skin where before there had once been muscle. He moved slower, still with grace, but that of an aged cat rather than a prowling tom.

When he saw me he seemed genuinely surprised and pleased, his mouth tilting into a predatory smile. The expression couldn’t hide the gauntness of his cheeks; he was being starved and was growing weak.

My stomach clenched and I tightened my hands into fists. The Emperor was ensuring that Rete would have no chance against me in the race. He didn’t trust me to win on my own.

I inhaled a sharp breath and walked away. Rete called after me: “Wait! Wait!” his cries growing more desperate with distance.

The keeper didn’t even need to ask who I was talking about when I told him, “I will not race against him weakened like that. Feed him, and do it well. He comes to the marker at full strength or he doesn’t come at all. Understand?”

“But the Emperor dictated—”

“How many?” This cut him off. “How many have you starved before sending them to the garden?”

The keeper’s eyes glistened, his loyalties torn by fear. I leaned forward and placed my hands on the podium. “How fast can you run?”

He dropped his head. “He will be fed, Gardener. From now on, all of them will be.”

The next time I saw the condemned man his skin looked less like the ash of a broken fire. “You are being fed?” I asked, though the answer was clear by the satisfied swell of his stomach.

“Is it you I have to thank for that?” he asked.

I smiled. He had a maddening way of answering my questions with his own. Never had I been treated with such disrespect, especially not since binding the red leather collar around my throat.

“The Gardener requested that you be strong when it came your turn to race,” I told him.

He lifted a brow. “You said yourself I’ve no hope of winning against her.”

“You should at least be given the chance.” I realized, as the words slipped through my lips, that I’d spoken them gently, with a certain sort of yearning coating each syllable. Immediately the sheen of arrogance dropped from his expression.

He shifted to his knees, moving toward the front of the cage, where he curled his fingers around the bars. I stared at the half-moons of his nails and remembered how in my dreams I desired nothing more than for him to trail them along the deep curve in the small of my back.

“You would care if I won or lost?” he asked. His knuckles were white, his posture held rigid.

I nodded, feeling the stiff collar around my throat hindering the movement.

He still didn’t relax. “Which would you want more?”

Our eyes locked. I catalogued every speckle of brown scattered through the amber. His pupils flared wide, and this caused something warm to begin unspooling inside me.

“Your fate is not mine to decide,” I whispered. “That is for the Emperor.”

“No.” He shook his head. “It is for the Gardener.”

I swallowed, the collar around my throat feeling too tight. After my father first laced it on it took months for me to learn to live with the choking feel of it. I had to figure out how to run all over again, taking shorter and shallower breaths. At
night I’d wake up gasping, my lungs screaming for air. The stiff leather bit deeply into the skin along my chin and collarbone, chafing me raw until calluses formed.

The collar was more than just the symbol of the office, it was a reminder of the power we wielded. As we strangled, so were we strangled. Sometimes there were days I’d forget I was wearing it. Other times, like now, every breath was a struggle.

I stood close enough to the condemned man’s cage that he could reach his fingers through and twine them around my scarf. He tugged, pulling me even nearer, until only the width of the bars separated us.

My breathing was uneven, my heart racing as it never did in the gardens.

Slowly, Rete unwound the knots of my scarf. His fingers then fluttered over the buttons of my high-necked gown until he laid bare the red leather collar around my throat.

“Which will you choose for me, Gardener?” His words caressed me as his lips could not.

I felt a welling at the base of my throat. “Neither.” And then I added, foolishly, because I could think of no other way to keep him safe, “I’d keep you here.”

He laughed and pulled away from me so abruptly that it sent his cage swinging. It bumped against me, knocking me off balance and causing me to stumble.

“You would keep me trapped down in the dungeons like a pet, then?” he asked sharply. He crouched to his feet, hands tucked under his arms to make his elbows like wings. “Your pretty bird. I can sing if you’d like.” He began to belt out a raucous tune, off-key and loud.

I felt stupidly exposed with my scarf in a limp pile on the dirty floor and my dress unbuttoned and spread wide to show my collar and a stretch of skin beneath it. Other condemned
began to join the song, their voices rising in a discordant cacophony.

My jaw clenched as I tried to control my breathing. But nothing I did could stop the stinging heat of humiliation coursing through me. He’d pulled free emotions I’d never acknowledged; he’d given them light and air so that they’d flourished and grown. Until the moment his fingers danced along my jaw, I hadn’t realized just how much I’d come to care for him.

He’d been the first person to ever seek for
me
past the bit of leather lashed around my throat. And now he was mocking me. I wanted nothing more than to flee, to run faster than I ever had and leave this dungeon and this man and this world.

I’d go to my father’s house and I’d put his hands around my neck and I’d beg him to finish it, as he should have all those years ago when he learned I’d been born a girl.

But I didn’t. Instead I stood stiffly as I buttoned my dress methodically and rewound the scarf around my neck. I made Rete watch as I let my emotions, any compassion I’d ever felt for him, leach out of me until I was once again as I had always been: nothing more than a tool to the Emperor.

The girl who would have strangled her father to death if she’d been asked. The woman who had killed her best friend without knowing the reason.

I was the Gardener. And I would race against Rete and I would win.

For three days, every time I stepped to the mark in the garden I expected to face Rete. Never was it him. The dungeons belched up all manner of condemned—men who’d languished underground for years waiting for their chance to run. It was as though the Emperor was punishing me, sending me into race after race as he purged his cages.

Twice I vomited from the extreme exertion, my body protesting every time the marker called for the race to begin, but never did I stop running. The days were a punishment I relished, leaving me so exhausted that I fell into sleep the moment I stepped from the platform after the last execution.

I hated how the anticipation of Rete’s race became a sort of torture in and of itself.

And then something happened that had never occurred before. I lost my concentration leaping over the Stream of Sorrow and my foot caught the edge of a rock, sending me crashing into the shallow water. Bits of gravel scored over my arms, drawing blood, and my teeth tore into the side of my cheek.

The worst came when I pushed back to my feet and tried to run: an excruciating pain that raged from my ankle up my leg. I’d dealt with pain before. I’d borne the scars left by forcing through the hedges in the maze, and I’d pushed myself through lung cramps and muscle tears and flus and headaches.

But this was pain like none other, something deep and grinding, like the shattered ends of two bones scraping against each other. I tried to limp, and when that didn’t work I resorted to crawling, not caring about the skin being grated off my knees and palms.

For the first time in my life I was second to the execution platform. A hush buzzed through the crowd as I drew near not like the champion I’d always been but like a dog, on my hands and knees. I was handed a staff to lean against as the Emperor gave the condemned his sentence of banishment, and I stood on the platform, my one good leg trembling with exhaustion, long after the man had been led from the gates and sent forth into the vast emptiness beyond the city walls.

Eventually the Emperor’s surgeons came and took me back to my suites in the palace. When they set the bones between
stabilizing boards I refused any medication to deaden the agony; I needed to know the repercussions of my mistakes. Every time the dagger-sharp edges of errant bone chips sliced against muscle and flesh I thought about the moment my foot had slipped across the rock in the stream.

I’d been thinking of Rete.

The Emperor called a moratorium on the races while my bones knitted. I tried retaking my place in court, using a clever mechanism of a platform on wheels to take the pressure off my shattered ankle as I made my way through the palace chambers and gardens. But everywhere I went I was met with hushed silences, followed by tittering gossip the moment I rolled from the room.

Some were pleased to see me brought low, and I began a list of them all in my head. They might have thought me weak then, but there would come a time when I’d return to the gardens, and my tools would be sharp and searching for new plants to prune.

The one place I could not manage on my own was the dungeons, with their myriad steep and twisting stairs, and I refused to ask for help. Some days my forced absence felt like a curse and others it was a blessing. Never before had I felt even the smallest fissure of weakness, and my first thought of comfort was always Rete.

I wanted him gone from my mind, yet he was all I could think about.

For weeks I resorted to spending the days in my chambers, looking out into the gardens and watching the hedges grow ragged and the paths fill with weeds. My staff still tended to their duties as ever, but without my constant presence they had become lazy. I added all their names to the growing list of condemned in my head.

• • •

My recuperation was lengthy and my strength slow to return after the stabilizing boards were finally removed. The day the surgeons pronounced my leg healed and rehabilitated, the Emperor called for the races to resume on the next morning. His dungeon was overflowing, and his court had grown soft without the ever-present threat of the gardens.

Besides, he’d lacked entertainment throughout the dull months of summer.

I’d always thought the first place I would go after being released by the surgeons would be to Rete—after all, his was a constant presence in my thoughts—but instead I found myself standing in front of my parents’ house, staring at the bright brass knocker on the door.

My mother greeted me as she always did, placing her fingers against my head, my heart and my lips, a gesture of love and blessing. She called for spiced cakes and honeyed tea and drew me toward the solarium, but my attention was not for her.

When she could not coax me to settle and focus on her wandering conversation, she sighed softly and said, “He’s outside.” I nodded before rising and going toward the door, wincing at my slight but lingering limp.

My father stood in the middle of his personal garden, a miniature of the emperor’s. There were small hedges twisted into unnatural shapes, meandering paths and a rock waterfall that fed into a pond flashing with bright fish.

It was nothing like the grandeur of what we’d both been used to, and my father seemed to have shrunk along with his duties, as if the measure of the man were determined by the scope of his importance.

He was the first to speak. “You are to resume running
tomorrow.” I couldn’t discern whether it was a question or a command.

I nodded, but with his back to me he couldn’t see the gesture. He knew the answer anyway; asking was only one more formality in the long line that had defined my upbringing. “The gardens have grown a bit wild in your absence,” he added. We both knew it wasn’t the orchards and elaborate hedges but the members of court he spoke of.

“They have,” I acknowledged, my jaw tight.

With the deliberateness so familiar over the course of my life, he stepped forward and raised a thin knife, trimming back an errant sprig from a flowering dragon.

I crouched and drew my finger across the surface of the pond, watching the ripples blur the colorful fish beneath. The moment I’d seen my father standing in his garden I’d known why I’d come to him.

“You lost races. Why?”

His blade flashed in the light as if he’d been startled. A few tender green leaves drifted from where he’d accidentally sheared a twig. He bent to collect them. “Because I was not always the fastest.”

I thought about Rete and the anxiety I’d felt over expecting to meet him at the starting mark. “Did you ever consider losing a race on purpose?”

He straightened, brow furrowed, and looked at me for several long moments. Between us was only the trickle of the waterfall and the buzzing of insects. He held out his blade, sharp and cold in his palm.

“We are the tool,” he said. “It has no thoughts, it knows nothing about right or wrong. It simply exists. It is up to the one wielding the blade to determine what should be cut and what should be left to flourish.”