A Throne of Thorns

The thorns came through the floor of the throne room at the precise moment Queen Virellia's heart stopped beating. Kassia was three corridors away when she heard the sound — not the queen's death, which was silent, but the palace responding to it: a deep, woody creak that vibrated through the marble floors, followed by the sharp crack of stone splitting. By the time she reached the great doors, the briars had already claimed the dais. They erupted from between the flagstones in thick, ropy coils, dark green and studded with thorns as long as her thumb, and they were growing with a speed that was not natural even by the standards of the Green Queen's magic.

The throne itself — that impossible construction of living wood that Virellia had grown from a single seed over forty years of patient, whispered cultivation — had burst its boundaries. Where it had once been a chair, elegant and contained, it was now a thicket, a small forest of interlocking branches that filled the space behind the dais and pressed against the ceiling. Roses bloomed along its extremities, black and red and a deep violet that Kassia had never seen before, and the scent that filled the room was sweet and cloying and dangerous.

Kassia had not spoken to the queen in seven years. She had left the palace after the argument — the one about boundaries, about the difference between cultivation and control — andhad built a quiet life in the northern provinces, tending gardens that grew at their own pace. The summons had arrived two weeks ago, written not in Virellia's hand but in the hand of the palace steward, and it said only: She is dying, and the throne knows it before she does. Come quickly. Kassia had not come quickly enough.