The Squire Has Eleven Lines and One of Them Is His Last

Says you're spoiling the ending.

I have been called a great many things by a great many authors, mostly in private messages I screenshotted, but I have never been accused of spoiling an ending by the book itself, to a gardener, at midnight, through the medium of roses. I file the sentence somewhere behind my sternum, next to the other sentences this place keeps handing me that I will need later, and I do the thing a critic learns to do when the work surprises her: I shut my mouth and let it.

"You're Mirren," I say.

"I'm Mirren." She wipes one earth-black hand on her apron, which does not make it cleaner, and considers me the way I consider a debut novel, looking for whether there is anything real under the blurb. "And you're the Vossberg girl, who is not, lately, the Vossberg girl. Sit down before you fall down. You've the look of someone walking on a leg that isn't hers."

(That is, I will note, the most accurate description of my entire situation that anyone in Vaelmoor has produced unprompted, and it came from a woman the book intends to hang in three chapters for the crime of being nearby when a flower dies. I sit down. On an upturned bucket, because she gestures at it, and because my borrowed knees have opinions.)

"She talks to you," I say. "The lady in the walls."

"She talks to everything." Mirren goes back to the vine, working a knot of root loose with her thumbs, gentle, like she is freeing a snared bird. "That's her trouble, see. She can't do. She can only say. So she says, and says, at the roses, at the maids, at the old fool with dirt under her nails who's been listening to this garden long enough to tell the difference between a flower complaining about frost and a flower complaining about a lady." She glances up. "Lately it's all you. That one's spoiling it. That one won't stay where I put her. That one keeps touching things." A dry sound that is almost a laugh. "You've made yourself very unpopular with the management."

"Good," I say, before I can swallow it, and mean it more than I expected to.

This is the moment I have walked through three kitchen passages and one walled garden to reach. I have a speech. I built it on the way down, the recruiting speech, the you and I and the maid upstairs are all written to die so a worse book can keep being itself, and I mean to stop it, and I need you. It is a good speech. It has a structure. And looking at her, hands in the dirt, entirely unsurprised by the voice that has been terrorising a fourteen-year-old on a staircase, I understand the speech is for me, not for her, and I put it down.

"In the story I come from," I say instead, plain, the way I told Briony, because plain is the only weapon the book hasn't read, "a rose withers in the Queen Mother's chambers. An omen. And because somebody has to be blamed for an omen, and whoever wrote this couldn't be bothered to invent a guilty party, they hang the gardener at dawn." I make myself hold her eyes. "They hang you, Mirren. In about three chapters, by my count. Two sentences. The second one is about the flowers not missing you."

I have told two people now that the world means to kill them. Briony wept and then forgave me. I do not know what Mirren will do, and the not-knowing sits in my chest like a held breath, because I am beginning to understand that this, this, telling the extras out loud that they are extras, is the single most off-script thing a person can do in a book, and the book is standing right here in the draught at the edge of the candlelight, listening.

Mirren does not weep. Mirren snorts.

"Course they do," she says. "A rose can't wither in this castle without it being somebody's fault, and it's never the rose's, and it's never the King's, so it's mine. I've known I'd hang for a flower since I was younger than your maid." She tucks the freed root back into the soil and tamps it. "What I didn't know was the when of it. Three chapters." She tries the word like a fruit she's never eaten. "You measure time in chapters."

"It's a bad habit."

"It's a witch's habit." She says it without heat, a diagnosis. "Knowing the when. That's worth more than the Bloom and twice as dangerous." She sits back on her heels and looks at me properly now, the clear sharp eyes doing inventory. "So. You hear her, you know the when, you came down here to warn an old woman instead of saving your own neck, which the Vossberg girl would sooner eat glass than do, and you want something. Out with it. The garden's patient. I'm not."

(There is a particular vertigo to being read correctly by a character you were prepared to recruit with a speech. I rate it four stars. Briskly humiliating. Would be seen through again.)

"I want to know how to fight her," I say. I nearly say what's her weak point, the way you'd talk about a boss in a game, and the word game is so wrong for a girl on a staircase hearing how she drowns that I bite it clean in half. "The lady in the walls. You understand the Bloom better than anyone in this castle. I thought, if anyone knew where she's weak"

"Weak." Mirren tastes that one too, and finds it sour. "She's not weak anywhere, girl. She's a current. You don't find where a river's weak. You find where it's busy." She points, suddenly, with one filthy finger, up and back, in the direction of the castle's looming dark bulk, the towers, the rose courts, the bright wing where the court keeps itself. "Right now she's busy three places. She's busy in the King's hall, still cross you walked out of it. She's busy on the wine stair, where she's lost her little errand-girl and doesn't know yet why." The finger swings. "And she's busy down on the practice yard, because there's a boy down there she means to spend tomorrow, and you've gone and made her so distracted with you that she might just fumble him early."

The cold bright editor thing in me, the part that has not stopped working since I died, goes very still.

A boy. The practice yard. Spend.

"What boy," I say, and it does not come out as a question, it comes out as the sound of a page turning under my own hand.

"Squire," Mirren says. "Drathmore boy's squire. The prince's. Sweet thing, useless with a lance, mends my trellis-twine when nobody's looking and pretends he didn't." She frowns at my face. "You've gone the colour of a turned page. You know him."

I do not know him. I have read him.

(In the book he has eleven lines. I counted, because I count, because counting is how I keep from feeling. Perrin. He is the squire who dies in the lists tomorrow, run through in the third pass of a tournament joust that exists for one reason, to give the cold prince a brooding moment over a dead boy so the reader will understand that Lucian Drathmore Feels Things Deeply Despite Being Cold. Perrin's whole life, his sweetness, his bad lancework, his secret kindness to a gardener's twine, all of it is a wick the author lights to make the hero look soulful for half a page. Eleven lines. The eleventh is "My lord, I'm glad it was me and not" and then a dash, because the author couldn't even be bothered to finish the sentence of the boy he was killing.)

"Tomorrow," I say. "The joust. The third pass."

Mirren has gone very still herself now, watching me, and behind her the low honest roses have stopped their friendly humming, all at once, the way a room goes quiet when someone important enters, and the draught at the edge of the candlelight is not a draught anymore. It has weight. It has attention. I have learned what gold light feels like at the corners of a scene, and this is more than that, this is the whole garden holding its breath, because I have just said the name of a death out loud, in the one place the book thought it could work in the dark, and the book has heard me hear it.

The candle does not gutter this time.

The candle goes out.

Not blown. Pinched, the way you pinch a wick between wet fingers, deliberate, and the dark that drops on the lower garden is total and close and smells suddenly of cold water and wet stone, the smell of a staircase, the smell of a place I have never been but Briony described in a whisper, and out of that dark, warm and fond and delighted, very near my ear, much too near, the lady in the walls says, in a voice that has clearly said this to a great many girls in a great many gardens:

"Oh, no, dear. Not the squire too. You may keep the maid. You may keep the gardener, even, the roses do go on so. But the boy dies in the lists at noon, because the prince has to grieve something to be worth grieving over, and that, my darling, is load-bearing."

A pause. The dark leans in.

"Run if you like. He's a long way up, and you've borrowed legs, and the yard locks at dawn."

Then the roses come back, faint and friendly and innocent, and the candle is cold in my hand, and Mirren is gripping my wrist hard enough to bruise, her dry voice not dry anymore.

"She's never spoken in my garden before," the gardener says. "Not once in forty years." Her grip tightens. "Girl. What did you do to make her stand that close."