Papa was on his fourth cup of coffee this afternoon. He didn’t sleep well anymore, and sometimes I could hear him having nightmares from my room across the hall. Most of the people who had been turned into bone-eaters did. Papa said his felt like memories of things he’d surely done—of running through the wood, of tearing meat off a still-kicking rabbit, of a hunger scratching at his bones.

I never asked Wen. Not during our brief stay in Voryn after I broke the curse, nor during the week-long trek back to the Sundermount before the first snowfall, nor any time after. She clearly didn’t want to talk about it, and I didn’t want to know whether or not her nightmares were memories, too. I hoped they weren’t.

With the crown’s magic returned to the wood, the forest awoke in bits and pieces as spring came—a tree here, unfurling from its bone-white husk into a flowering dogwood, another bursting with strange pink flowers, while others still waited to thaw. I could smell it in the air, sharp like lavender. Most folks Papa’s age were still apprehensive about the Wildwood—old habits die hard—but the rest of us felt like a wall that had been up for most of our childhoods was finally gone.

The trees were no longer forbidden, and the wood no longer cursed.

All my life I had thought that I would never flourish where my roots did not grow, but I think that was just a lie I told myself.

When I first returned to the village, it felt so small. The Village-in-the-Valley had been torn apart by what had happened at the castle. Family members turned into monsters, missing, or worse yet, they returned corrupted and wrong. The villagers who had not come to the coronation, who had evaded the woodcurse and kept to their homes, had erected barbed wire around the town when the wood had come for them. They’d protected themselves. They’d fought.

And when the curse broke, most of the people who had been cursed woke up on the edge of the wood. Some of them woke up with too-pointed teeth, others with too-long nails, scars across their arms from where something else had settled where their skin had been. They woke up with a ravaging hunger, some with the taste of blood in their mouths, and nothing settled back into the way it should have been until Wen returned to the castle, her teeth a little too sharp when she smiled.

Most of Aloriya didn’t mind that we no longer possessed an enchanted crown, because we also didn’t have a cursed wood anymore, either. Anwen returned to the Sundermount with her determination and her courage, and she picked up the pieces of her fallen kingdom, and the village began to heal. We began to find a way to live without the crown.

Without the magic.

Without the curse.

Barbed wire still encircled the town, but it grew with brambles and rusted to brown, and soon the village was the one I remembered—with its smoky chimneys and brightly covered rooftops and the clock in the town square ringing noon every day, the sweet smell of cinnamon rolls and high-rising breads from the bakery, the town musician on his fiddle. Kids played in the square again while old men gamed chess on benches outside the pub.

When I returned from Voryn, Papa was waiting for me at the flower shop. “I knew you’d come back,” he said, and we hugged for a long time.

The garden in the backyard reflected our time away. The sunflowers, once bent low on their stalks, were dead on the ground, while the rosebushes grew in snarls, their flowers gone and leaves falling. The magnolias and crawling ivies and buttercups had withered in the coming frost. But the shovel was still propped against the shed where Papa had last put it the day before Anwen’s coronation, and his gloves still hung from their book by the back door. Though now spiders had roosted in the fingers.

It was as though the garden had changed with us.

Everything that I grew up believing was a lie. The stories, the history, the magic. Aloriya was far from perfect. It held poison in its roots like an elderberry tree, where you thought all it offered was wine. And this house that stood in the overgrown ruins of the garden reminded me of the girl who used to drink the wine without questioning how it came to be.

As afternoon sunlight spilled into the quiet flower shop, I leaned my head against Papa’s shoulder. All the vases were emptied, waiting for the spring thaw. “I think we should harvest your mother’s flowers this spring,” he finally said. “The ones in the corner. The ones that came from the wood.”

“I think she’d like that.” I lifted my head from his shoulder. “Can I ask you something? About her?”

“Of course.”

“Did she . . . did she come from Voryn?”

He didn’t seem surprised, but a little resigned. He scratched the side of his head and sighed. “Your mother was a secretive kind, Sprout. She never really said, but I did catch her, some nights, mumbling about a city in the wood. I thought it was just hogwash. But she said it was beautiful—is it?”

“Yes,” I replied, and as I did, my heart filled with the kind of longing I couldn’t describe. I’d felt it all winter, in this house that was small and simple and familiar. I always thought I would live here forever, but now I wasn’t so sure I wanted to.

Papa gave me a quiet sidelong look and sipped his coffee. “This is going to be a long evening.”

I groaned. “Don’t remind me. I hate these things. I’d rather face the wood again than another coronation.”

“Ah, but at least you’ve got a dance to look forward to tonight, eh?” he asked, elbowing me in the side, and winked.

A blush ate up my cheeks.

“Aha! Oh, I can’t wait to see this,” he crowed, smiling so wide he showed all his teeth—even the chipped one in the back that hadn’t been chipped before the woodcurse. He didn’t like showing it. It reminded him of things he preferred not to remember. “My little girl, dancing the night away!” He did a little jig as he went up the stairs to finish getting ready, and I wanted to bury my head under the dirt in mortification. “Now put on your dress! We’ve got a coronation to attend!”

My only proper dress was lost somewhere in an abandoned cottage, so Wen had lent me one of hers. It had to be let out a little in the sides and hemmed on the bottom, but it was a pleasant rose color with embroidered vines curling across the hems and sleeves. I rather liked it, as far as dresses went.

Papa put on his old tweed suit and combed his gray hair over the balding spot on his head, and after I helped him fix his bow tie, we were ready to go.

“Oh! Almost forgot.” I slipped back into the shop and took a crown of daisies off the counter. I had grown and laced them myself—the hard way, too. I couldn’t make flowers bloom anymore. It was like a small part of me had been ripped away, leaving room for something else to take its place. I just wasn’t sure what yet.

“Can’t go to a coronation without a crown,” he tsk-tsked as we left the shop.

“I don’t think it’s the crown that makes the ruler.”

“No, but it sure is a nice one.”

I had to agree.

Villagers emerged from their houses, carrying food and drink, starting the long hike up the King’s Road to the white castle at the top. Some of the older folks hitched rides on the backs of wagons; kids ran along trailing streamers behind them as they curled up the mountain.

As Papa laced his arm in mine and we started up the road, I remembered what waited for me at the top—and I smiled.

I wasn’t sure if the wood had changed me or if I had changed myself, but I felt it. Like a seed outgrowing its shell, a bloom unfurling from its bud. I was not the same girl I had been the last time I’d traveled up this road.

I knew better now. There were no perfect kingdoms without cost, and there were no stories that were completely true—or completely false.

Not even mine.

I always thought that gardeners’ daughters couldn’t thrive where our roots didn’t grow. But maybe we were like dandelion tufts.

Maybe we were built to catch a warm spring wind and grow somewhere new.

Soon, the bakers next door joined us on our trek to the Sundermount, and the two old men who always played chess by the tavern, and the blacksmith’s son even winked at me. Halfway up the mountain, Papa asked, “So how many kits do we have now in that burrow?”

“Three.”

He guaffed. “Three! Three more pests in my garden!”

“You enjoy the pests,” I teased, knowing that he fed them more than I ever did, in secret, when he thought I wasn’t looking.

He lifted his chin regally. “At least they’re not as bad as your fox.”

I smiled at that. “My fox is one of a kind,” I replied, and began to hum along to the baker’s brood—their three kids and their two yapping hounds—as they sang some silly rhyme about a flower in the wood that could cure death itself.

The Sundermount slowly came into view, the forest unfurling like a flower, and then there was the castle where I had spent my childhood, and Papa looped my arm into his, and squeezed my hand tightly.

This was only the second coronation I’d ever seen, but if the first one was anything to go on, they weren’t all they were cracked up to be.

Queen Anwen of Aloriya accepted her daisy crown with grace.

She smiled down at me in the crowd, her teeth a little too pointed, and I smiled back at her because I knew a secret—she would do just fine without the magic of a golden crown. No, she would do better than fine.

I couldn’t say the same for most of the townsfolk, though. When I told Anwen that inviting the entire village was a bad idea, she obviously didn’t believe me, but not even an hour after the coronation itself, Papa was on his third drink and already recounting the tale of the Great Pig Race of the Summerside Year, and was it as riveting as it was the first two times he’d told it already?

I would’ve been a terrible daughter to say otherwise.

As the party wore on, I slipped away to a quiet area of the garden and leaned against the wall by the archway I used to look in from, watching the people swirl and tumble about, laughing as the music drifted into the evening. Everything looked so much the same from the inside of the garden, I couldn’t remember why I was so obsessed with it.