Garden of Stones

The garden woke before the palace did, and Queen Cosima of Avenrose woke before the garden.

That was the arrangement. Dawn belonged to her the way the rest of the day belonged to everyone else, and she spent it where she had spent a thousand dawns: on the gravel walk behind the summer wing, with a basket over one arm and the light coming up grey-gold through the yew hedge, doing her rounds.

Mellani's stone first. Always.

The stone was small, at its own insistence (she'd left instructions, of course she had, in a hand so neat it could have notarized itself), and the motto cut into it read SHE COPIED NO ONE, which was a lie so magnificent that Cosima laughed at it, quietly, most mornings. Mellani Trishwell had copied everyone. She had copied gowns and greetings and once, memorably, a laugh, syllable for syllable, until the court ran out of things to invent and had to start copying her back. Cosima swept the night's leaves off the plinth with the flat of her hand and told the stone, silently, what she told it most mornings: you would have hated the new fashion in sleeves, and you would have been wearing it within the week.

Then the rounds. Castor Bridges lay beside his grandfather, the late Chancellor Serin Bridges, two tidy stones in a tidy row, the old fixer and the young one, as if death were a filing system and they had been shelved correctly at last. Castor had died at his desk, mid-lesson, teaching his granddaughter which drawer held what. There were worse sentences to end on. Kaitlyn Levinn's stone stood beside her noble husband's and two of their line, and hers was the one you could never see for flowers: the court still brought them, all these years on, which would have delighted her and not surprised her in the least. Wilton Norfolk kept to plain soldier's granite, name and post and nothing else, squared off even in the ground.

She knew every stone the way she knew her own hands. That was not a griefs-of-the-queen performance for anyone's benefit; there was no one awake to benefit. It was bookkeeping. You kept what you could not keep the only way left to you, which was carefully.

At the heart of the garden, where the walks met, stood the grave they all bent toward like a compass error.

It was grander than the rest because the realm had insisted (she'd have made it plain granite, and been wrong, and knew it), and it was kept like a chapel because the realm insisted on that too. King Consort Pariston Haffer. Fresh flowers lay against the gate of its little fence every morning, left by strangers at the garden wall's public side, passed through by the gardeners with the solemnity of men handling state papers. The realm had loved him like a good summer: easily, and afterward, forever.

She did not tidy his stone. It never needed it. She stood before it and read the name, all of it, every letter, the way other women prayed — and then, because he would have found the chapel business unbearably funny, she told him about the fish tariff dispute currently paralyzing her council, and let him not laugh at it, and moved on.

Past his fence, off the axis of the walks, lay a plot with nothing in it.

The grass there was kept cut. Nothing was planted. No stone stood on it and no path led to it, and in the whole ordered geometry of the garden it sat like a held breath. The gardeners had learned, across many years and two dismissals, that it was not to be asked about. It was not to be mulched, improved, bordered, or — this had been the second dismissal — suggested things for. It was to be mown, and left.

She did not look at it this morning. Some mornings she didn't.

What she had instead, this morning, was the seventh.

Her new Lady of the Bedchamber came down the gravel walk with the basket of shears and twine held out in front of her like something that might spill — Lady Maudy Stokes, three weeks in post, young enough that her curtsies arrived early and left late. She was the seventh to hold the office since Mellani had held it, a fact Cosima tried not to visit on the girl, though the office rather visited it on everyone. The role had gone half-cursed in the court's imagination. The last one had lasted a month. The one before that had poured a full pot of scalding tea down her queen's arm, watched the skin knit closed before the pot had stopped steaming, and resigned by letter that same hour — to the court's delight and the tearooms' eternal profit. Nobody of ambition wanted the post now. Maudy Stokes had wanted the wage.

"The shears, Majesty," Maudy said, presenting them.

They were the hedge shears. Cosima regarded them, and then the yew hedge, twelve feet high, and then the girl.

"For the roses," she said.

Maudy stared at the shears. A small war happened in her face. "I'll fetch the — other ones."

"The rose shears."

"The rose shears." She fled, and came back with the rose shears and the wrong shawl over her arm, the heavy winter one, folded as tenderly as if it were the right one, and Cosima let it pass because the morning was mild and mercy was cheap. What she could not let pass came third: the girl, reaching to steady the basket one-handed, set the queen's breakfast cup down on the nearest flat surface.

The nearest flat surface was Mellani's plinth.

Wine, this early, was only warmed and watered and mostly ceremony — but it was wine, and it tilted, and Cosima moved before she had decided to, and caught it standing, and the garden went very quiet.

"Majesty, I—" Maudy began.

"Stop."

It came out in the other voice. Not loud. She was never loud. It was the voice from underneath the queen they got in the miniatures — the one that had closed harbors and emptied halls, the one this city had heard exactly once from its gates and never forgotten — and she watched it land on a girl of twenty who had been alive for none of that and still, somehow, knew it by instinct, the way lambs know weather. Maudy went white to the hairline. The basket did not drop, which was, Cosima would think later, its own small proof of spine.

"That stone," Cosima said, one clipped and even sentence, "has held more of this court's secrets than the archive, and it will not now hold the breakfast wine."

"No, Majesty."

"Go and stand by the gate."

The girl went and stood by the gate. Cosima finished the roses herself, unhurried, letting the quiet do the rest of the sentence for her, and was aware the whole time of the small stubborn figure at the gate who had gone white, and stayed, and did not cry, and did not resign by letter.

Good, she thought, surprising herself. The seventh stays.

The palace at her back was bright now: every window catching the morning, the flags up for the Rising, the whole east front loud with gilt. She had made it that way on purpose, years ago, on an ordinary Tuesday she could still point to, when she had risen and decided that grief had gotten enough of her mornings. She'd had the shutters taken down before noon. The court had wept with relief somewhere discreet, she assumed. She had planted the year's bulbs herself, badly, that same week, and the gardeners had quietly replanted every one of them at proper depths, and everyone had agreed to say nothing, which is a kind of love.

The dreams were the one thing the shutters hadn't touched.

They had never stopped. That was the plain fact of it, and she no longer expected otherwise. For years it was a boy — a boy she couldn't find, in rooms she didn't know, growing at the speed of dreams, which is to say unfairly. Lately it was a man. He stood always a little turned from her, lamplit, his shoulders set like someone listening to a far-off sound, and the dream never once gave her his face. She had four hundred years of practice at reading what a thing withheld. The withholding was the message. Not yet.

She kept them in her journal — the same journal, the old one, behind its panel; the dreams had their own pages at the back now, entries brief as tide-marks. Most mornings there was nothing worth the ink. This morning, in the garden's grey-gold light, with the roses done and the seventh released from the gate and sent in to breakfast, she sat on the cold bench by the wall, opened the dream-pages, and wrote four words.

He has a beard.

She read it back. Somewhere under her ribs a thing happened that she declined, professionally, to name.

Then Queen Cosima of Avenrose, four centuries old, widow of the realm's beloved, keeper of a garden of stones and one empty plot, sat alone on a bench at dawn and laughed — really laughed, the disgraceful kind, the kind you hide in state dinners — because the man in her dreams had grown a beard, and it suited him, and after four hundred years the world could still do a brand-new thing to her before breakfast.

The bell for the household's rising went. She closed the journal on the ink while it was still bright.

At the morning audience, between the fish tariff and a petition from the chandlers' guild, she said, without looking up: "Open the summer wing."

The chamber went so still she could hear the chancellor's pen stop.

The summer wing had been shut since before half her court could shave. Opening it meant airing, staffing, provisioning; it meant garden parties and guest apartments; it meant — and every soul in the room arrived at this at the same instant; she could feel them arrive — that the queen was keeping spring again.

"Majesty," the chancellor said, with heroic evenness. "All of it?"

"All of it." She signed the tariff unread, stood, and gathered her correspondence, and if there was a beard-shaped reason in her chest she filed it where she filed everything the court could not have. "And send someone to the Gilded Ewe to find out what odds they gave on sooner than you think. I should like to know who in my city is rich this morning."