Rizu slapped his broad shoulder. “Tell us you didn’t enjoy it.” To Sandry, she said, “Be careful of this one. A few jokes with him and you’re in a secluded little nook with his hands where they shouldn’t be!”
“Pershan fer Roth, this is my friend, Daja Kisubo,” Sandry said, introducing them. Deliberately testing them and him, she added, “Daja, Shan says it’s the empress’s will that I marry one of those young men who hovered around me in the Hall of Roses.” From the cynical smiles of the courtiers, she saw that Shan had told her the truth, and that the empress’s plan was common knowledge.
Daja clasped Shan’s hand, smiling. “I hope the empress has some years to wait for that marriage,” she said lazily, turning her face up to the sun. “Sandry’s made up her mind to go home before the mountain passes close. She’s just here to inspect her estates and return to Emelan. Unless your bucks mean to chase her to the border?”
The young ladies around them cried aloud at this, protesting that Sandry would never see the best of Dancruan if she didn’t stay for at least one winter’s social season.
“Then she wouldn’t have to worry about going home,” Rizu announced with a broad smile. “She’d be frozen to this place!”
Once inside the main greenhouse, Briar expected the empress to drift along, pointing out this sight and that, attended by bowing gardeners. And I’d’ve been dead wrong, he thought.
It was true, the gardeners in sight had looked up when the door closed behind the lady and her guest, but they immediately returned to their work when they saw who had come in. Next, the empress had opened a drawer in a table that stood against the outside wall and pulled out a worn pair of gardener’s gloves, which she then tugged onto her hands. Briar watched as she briskly walked over to tables that held pots and boxes of flowering plants.
“Most of these are for gifts,” she explained to Briar, inspecting potted lilies for mites on the undersides of their leaves. “The guild heads, ambassadors, and my fellow monarchs claim to prize what comes from my garden, so from time to time I gratify them with a plant. Coleus is always popular. The leaf colors go very well with the colors favored by those who live in east Namorn and Yanjing, and it brings cheer during wintertime. The same with cyclamen.” She caressed samples of each with gentle fingers, pinching off a wilted leaf here and there. “My goodness. What on earth ...”
Briar sighed. The greenhouse plants had noted his presence. At first the ones closest to him began to move, bending toward him or turning their flowers toward him as if he were the sun. As he watched, the more distant plants began to shift as if they could crane to see him. They reached out with leaves like hands, wanting his touch and his influence. “Sorry,” he told the empress, thinking to the plants, Slop that! Before you get me in trouble!
The plants began to bristle, turning sharp edges outward and stretching out thorns if they had them. If anyone tries to trouble you, they will soon learn you have friends, their quivering stems seemed to say. They will learn the world can be filled with green enemies.
Now, enough! Briar told them impatiently. Is that how you would treat this nice lady, who gives you rich earth and water and helps her people keep the itching things from your leaves and roots? It’s because of her that you sit warm in here when the cold wind makes your house rattle. She saves you, her and her friends, from the white death of snow and ice. She ties you with cloth when you get too heavy for your stems, and she gives you good things to eat. It’s her that gives the others their instructions to look after you and care for you, too.
One after another, the plants that surrounded them lifted the surfaces of their leaves and the positions of their stems. Flowers turned their open faces toward the empress, who watched them all without giving away her feelings.
She smells like us sometimes, said the roses and gardenias. She is quick with the clippers and the fork. She has touched each of us, often. She handles us gently.
“It’s all right,” Briar said gruffly. “They just needed reminding of who they owe this soft living to.” He suddenly remembered to whom he spoke. “Your Imperial Majesty.” He glared at the plants within his view. “They didn’t mean to distress you. They like you.”
“I’m grateful, Viynain,” Berenene replied. “This is the first time I ever had to wonder what might happen to someone they dislike. Actually, I had no idea they had thoughts or feelings.”
“Not like we know them, Majesty,” Briar explained. “Your Imperial Majesty” was just too much of a mouthful to use each time he spoke to her. “They don’t have brains, exactly, but their bodies remember things like who waters ’em, who clips ’em, and so on. They just were so excited, feeling me come in, they forgot themselves a bit.” Now calm down! he ordered them silently. Act like I’m just another person! He glared at the vine that had reached out to twine around one of his hands and insert its tendrils up his baggy sleeve.
The vine released him and returned to the trellis it had adorned before Briar had come into the greenhouse. Berenene watched it go. “I take it this happens to you fairly often,” she commented wryly.
“Only till they get used to me being around,” replied Briar. “They’re like kids—children,” he explained. “They get all worked up, and they need time to calm down. You should see them around my teacher, Rosethorn. They can’t not touch her when she’s by. It’s like she’s the sun, except then the moss and funguses would stay clear of her, and they don’t. Are those potted palms?” He wandered over to the stand of large, tree-like plants, hoping to distract her from thinking about plants on the move. In his travels he had discovered that some people reacted oddly to it. Stopping next to the nearest one, he ran an appreciative hand over its trunk.
“It’s vanity, I know,” said the empress. “But it’s so satisfying, knowing I have a bit of southern warmth when winter shrieks down off the Syth.”
Briar smiled. “Winters are always hard if you like seeing green things about you,” he admitted. “I tried to get my teacher to visit Dedicate Crane’s greenhouse—he was my other plant teacher, back at Winding Circle—but she’s old-fashioned. She growls how plants are supposed to have their own season, then surrounds herself with potted plants all winter long. She just can’t get the tropicals to thrive in her workshop.”
“I’ve read Crane’s book, you know,” Berenene said, leading him farther back into the greenhouse. As they walked, the gardeners continued to work. When the empress moved inside the palace she was followed and preceded by bows and curtsies. Idly, Briar wondered, how long do you s’pose it took her to break her gardeners of the habit?
There was a wave of motion here, but it was directed at Briar, and it came from the plants. He called some of his power up and let it trickle away in the tiniest of threads, running to every plant and tree in the building. He did the same in the next greenhouse, and the next, and the next. The empress had a complex of them, each closed by its own doors and connected to its neighbors by wooden halls.
“The things you learn,” Berenene said as she led the way into yet another greenhouse. “Mites. I had two greenhouses that connected, and the treacherous little nalizes got into everything. Once again I had to start from scratch. That’s the problem with gardening. One mistake will do more than just teach you. It can wipe you out.” She stood back and smiled. “I understand you have an interest in shakkans, Briar Moss. Would you care to grant your opinion of mine?”
He had seen bigger collections in the imperial palace in Yanjing, but nowhere else. This greenhouse had been divided in half with glass and yet another door. In one half, miniature trees and the gear to care for them were arranged with an eye to the light that filled the greenhouse. A number of the step-like shelves on Briar’s left were empty, but the marks that water, earth, and light left on the unstained wood indicated that upward of twenty plants were missing. “Your pines?” Briar asked, nodding toward the empty spots.