Arris could not leave the boat fast enough. His sister had her own assumptions, which weren’t entirely false, but the truth was that Arris was never good in a crowd. He found it hard to focus in large settings. Everything drew his attention: the shimmer of fabric, the pigment of rouge, the bubbles in fizz wine and the glorious music. He could hardly catalog those sensations alone before adding conversation to the mix. It wasn’t that Arris disliked conversation, but tonight every word would be weighed and dissected and he, in turn, would have to weigh and dissect every interaction. The day had already required too much of his energy and if the quiet he longed for came with an amorous girl thinking that her kisses might turn her into a queen, well, Arris was only too happy to be exploited.
As he stepped off the boat and onto the path that led to the palace orangerie, Arris pried off his shoes. The grass underfoot was freezing and crunched with ice, but Arris didn’t mind. He found it hard to think unless he was barefoot. With the ground beneath him, he felt solid. Connected to something other than his lineage to Enzo the Fool, which stained everything about him.
Arris had been raised knowing that the price of power meant that his first life might be brutally cut short. There was nothing to be done about it, and so he had turned hisattention to discovering who he was outside of his death sentence. When he was thirteen years old, he began trailing after the cooks, fascinated with the art of cooking, which seemed so much like alchemy. Eventually, the cooks let him assist. All year they praised him. They praised him for how he chopped vegetables, combined flavors, arranged a plate. As an anniversary gift to his parents, Arris proposed that he would cook the entire feast and the cooks heartily agreed.
Arris spent a whole week thinking of the order in which he would serve the dishes. Glimmerian quail for his mother. Trifle with glass berries for his father. A cake with alternating layers of sugared roses and singed lemon. Once he had made his decision, he prepared a list of ingredients and ran straightaway to the kitchens to share his thoughts. Along the wall of ovens, Arris heard his name and stopped short.
“A royal feast! We’ll be up all night fixing any mistakes…” said one of the cooks.
“Why let the boy have a go at it, anyway?” said the second cook. “Last week he made a fish that was so raw, I was shocked it was not swimming on the plate! And I had to eat the awful thing! And then smile!”
“Oh, go easy on him… poor, doomed thing…” said the first cook.
“Aye. That much is true. ’Tis the least we could do for him.”
Arris might have thrown down his plan for the feast and gone straight to his room, but he didn’t. He entered the kitchen, watched the shock and shame cross the faces of the cooks. And he asked, simply, to be taught.
Until that moment, Arris had not known how to distrust what he was told, and now he would never forget. It was why he liked removing his shoes wherever he went. He could not remove someone’s pity or perspective. He could not take away someone’s bias or belittling. But he could slip off his shoes, and if there was anything he could meet in true honesty, it was the earth beneath his feet.
The orangery of Rathe Castle leaned off the cliff’s edge and appeared quite far from the boat where the feasting continued. From the ornamental icy lake and winter mazes to the groves of glowing mushroomlike residences that Queen Yzara had commissioned for the bridal contestants, it would appear that reaching any destination on Rathe Castle’s grounds would take someone the better part of an hour, if not more. But the cobbled pathways made all the difference. A single step on the enchanted stone pathway counted for a hundred steps, which meant that the length of time to get from one place to the next was generally no more than a leisurely fifteen-minute stroll.
In no time, Arris found himself at the wrought iron gates of the orangery, which was not aptly named, for it held neither oranges nor fruit trees of any kind. In fact, there was space for only one thing within the orangery:
A daydream tree.
No matter what the time of day, the orangery always sparkled from the light cast by the glint beetles that made their home in the bark of the daydream tree, which was thevery last of its kind. It was said that the witch who loved—and cursed—Enzo the Fool had cultivated the trees long, long ago. When she realized her beloved’s treachery, her dreams died and all but one of them withered to ash.
The daydream tree was a strange thing. It was surrounded by nothing but white marble stones, a vaulted glass ceiling and dozens of arched window panes that looked out over the Famishing Sea. The closer one approached, the larger the tree grew, the trunk soaring and the branches shooting out and groaning beneath the weight of every dream the viewer had ever cherished. Each dream appeared as a crystalline sphere the size of an apple. Sweet dreams, ripe for the taking. But in the absence of someone to behold it, the tree was no bigger than a common weed.
This was how Arris knew that he was not alone in the orangery. For the tree appeared as a massive weeping willow, and the daydreams of the scarlet-haired girl who had beheld it chimed softly as Arris stepped inside.
Immediately, Arris was hit with the fragrance of the girl’s dreams. With each of his doomed betrotheds, he had brought them to the orangery and watched the dream tree change form beneath their gaze. With Roxana, he had smelled candied desire and with Calantha, he knew the iron tang of bloodlust. From Orellia, he knew the burning cold in one’s nose before the snow starts to fall and from Zelva he knew the charnel sweetness of a whale’s carcass falling apart in the sea.
But he had never known dreams to possess a fragrance like this—
Such wildness. A harsh wind scented by roses that were more thorn than petal. The hum of wings.
“You came,” said a soft voice. “I didn’t know if you would.”
A figure emerged from behind the willow’s swaying boughs. The scarlet-haired girl. It was too dark to pinpoint the color of her eyes but Arris could feel the intensity of them.
She was no longer covered in brambles and had changed into a plain linen shift. Her hair, so red it looked as if it might scorch him to touch it, fell in a braid over her shoulder.
“I wanted to see if you were all right,” said Arris.
“I am now,” said the girl, moving closer.
Arris’s heart beat faster. He cleared his throat, gesturing at the delicate daydreams. He glanced into one of them and saw what appeared to be a massive nest. In another, he saw a library with thousands of books.
“I have never known dreams like yours,” he said.
The girl frowned. “My lord?”
“The daydream tree,” said Arris.
“Oh is that what this is?” asked the girl, shaking her head. “When I came here, I was overwhelmed to find it. One could get lost in these boughs.”
Arris paused. Wouldn’t she have noticed the tree taking shape before her?
