My voice trembled, and I looked at Rosalin. She was staring resolutely away from me, her jaw tight.
“My sister and I will search the main floor,” I said. “The two of you should go upstairs.”
I expected Rosalin to object—in fact, that was half the reason I had said it—but she didn’t react.
“Good idea. We’ll be fine,” Varian said firmly. “Don’t be afraid.”
I bit back my instinctive retort. After all, nobody’s perfect.
“Thanks for the advice,” I said. “I’ll try.”
It took us a while to track everyone down. As we searched the castle, we saw the Thornwood everywhere. Branches snaked through every window and every crack, clinging to the remaining tapestries with their sharp thorns, breaking through flagstones and knocking over the occasional piece of furniture.
The only place free of them was the royal gardener’s workshop, which was the last room we went to. The gardener was sitting at a table by the window, making notations in a ledger, squinting in the moonlight that streamed through the window.
She was a very old woman; I didn’t know how old exactly, but in my earliest memory of her, she was yelling at me to get off the rose beds in a high, quavering voice. Rosalin had told me the gardener had that same creaky voice, and the same wrinkled skin, the first time she’d yelled at Rosalin to stop playing with her seed packets.
Her greatest feat—which she talked about on those rare occasions when she wasn’t yelling at children to get away from her flowers—was creating roses with alternating pink and blue petals. They were, I had to admit, very pretty.
I waited for her to acknowledge us. When she didn’t, I walked across the workshop—a small round room lined with shelves—and looked out the window.
Here, the Thornwood had halted several yards away from the walls. It formed a semicircle around a small patch of dirt that, I remembered, had once been a garden, covered with roses whose various colors and designs depended on the gardener’s current ambition. Last I remembered, she’d had her heart set on creating a polka-dotted rose.
Her attempts usually failed—in fact, the blue-and-pink rose was her only success—but in the process of trying, she had filled the garden with a random explosion of colors and scents. It had always been the most beautiful spot in the castle.
Now it was a patch of mud, dark and dank, spotted only with ferns. The air was tinged with warmth and wetness, as if it were spring, but the trees around the patch were all bare branches decorated with thorns—no leaves, no buds, not even any moss.
Inside the castle walls, it was easy to pretend that things were normal, that despite the years we knew had passed, everything was the same. But outside the castle, in that patch of mud, I could see how the years had flown by and left us all behind.
“The flowers couldn’t survive,” the gardener said without looking up from her ledger. “Too much shade, and those thorn trees draw all the water and nutrients from the ground. My poor roses never stood a chance.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. Too late, I realized that was just as stupid as saying Don’t be afraid. “We’ll plant new flowers once the Thornwood is gone.”
Her eyes were small and deep in her wrinkled, papery face, and she was wearing the same grass-stained dress I had always seen her in. “And when, exactly, will that be?”
I looked again at the patch of mud. There were thorn trees sprouting through it near the castle wall, but they weren’t nearly as high as the ones around the rest of the castle. Their branches were only clinging to the windowsill; they hadn’t even touched the inside walls.
“What are they afraid of?” I said.
“What?” Rosalin said.
“The thorn branches. They’re advancing into this room more slowly than anywhere else in the castle.” There were tiny white crystals scattered along the windowsill. A thin, fragile hope sprang up in me. “Do you keep something in this room that you use to kill weeds?”
“Of course,” the gardener said. “My own concoction. A mixture of olive oil, hemlock, and sulfur.”
“Where is it?” Rosalin said. “I command you to hand it over!”
I sighed. “If you are willing,” I said, “it would be very helpful. We can use it to fight the Thornwood.”
“No. You can’t.” The gardener’s jaw clenched. “I’ve used it all. I threw it out the window. It kept the thorns off for a little while, but…”
One of the branches snapped at me. I jumped back and it retreated, scoring a line across the windowsill with one extra-long thorn.
“What’s that, then?” I said, pointing to the crystals.
“Salt. I dumped some on the ground, too, to keep the Thornwood from growing.” The gardener’s shoulders slumped. “That didn’t work for long, either. Nothing I’ve tried has worked. I am sorry, Your Highnesses, but I believe we are doomed.”
I took a deep breath. “That’s actually what we’re here to talk to you about.”
The gardener took the news of the fairy’s bargain better than most people had, but her expression was extremely dubious. “The fairy queen? Isn’t it impossible to defeat her?”
“My sister’s fairy godmother has defeated her,” I said. “Or at least, she kept her asleep for hundreds of years. Even now, the fairy queen must be in a weakened state. Otherwise, she would already have killed us all.”
The gardener snorted. “Is this supposed to be an argument against my saying we’re all doomed?”
“Anyhow,” I said, “the vote will be held in the ballroom. If you want to—”
“I’ll think about it,” she said shortly.
I scurried back to Rosalin’s side. My sister edged away from me.
So far, Rosalin had been deep in
