A Garden of Wilting Roses
***
At her age, it was almost meaningless to keep the desire to be a princess secret. All the young fillies her age wanted to be one, and that she should pretend like she didn’t want the same made it appear that she was acting needlessly suspicious. In casual conversation, she might suddenly go silent if she thought the topic was becoming treacherously princess-related. Her engagement stopped as soon as it was clear she couldn’t stay unbiased; interject too excitedly, or let a stray word loose, and she’d risk spoiling her secret.
Granny Smith and Big Mac both knew, but they let her relish the private joy of a well-kept secret, and didn’t shake Applejack’s confidence by suggesting she dress up as a princess for Nightmare Night, or offering to collect Celestia’s autograph for her at the Summer Sun Celebration. When she was eight years old, (confident her mouthwriting was good enough) Applejack wrote letters to the Sun Princess, asking what it was like to be a princess, and if she, an earth pony, could become one herself some day. Big Mac had discovered a draft of one such letters, crumpled and discarded in a wastebasket, and this was how he discovered his sister’s secret. He’d shown it to Granny in private.
“Don’t you go teasin’ yore sister about it, y’hear?” Granny had warned. “Or I’ll tan yore hide so good I could use you for a set of boots!” She’d known that by Big Mac bringing this to her attention, he didn’t intend to use this information against Applejack. She still had an image to maintain, however.
***
Those who knew about the Apple family—and few in Equestria didn’t—said that the Apples were the lifesap of the soil, the rich foundation that nurtured the land as their family grew. Everypony who knew an Apple knew a security and comfort in life that couldn’t be matched.
The death of Gala was felt deeply by Equestria. Applejack took the loss of her favorite cousin especially hard. She sat in the orchard brooding for several days after the newspapers arrived with the announcement. Everypony in the family had felt the shock of her murder within a day of it happening—Granny claiming she’d felt a weakness in her bones and the dawning of a black sun. The papers reported on it the following day under the grim headline: “Saddle Arabia Mourns the Passing of Beloved Princess. Killer Still at Large.” There was a picture of Gala beneath the headline, dressed in her full Saddle Arabian regalia that was so un-Apple, with a smiling, calm dignity on her face. A picture of the suspected killer interrupted the text in the following article: a rough affair with a dark beard and dark eyes. He also had no smile, which Granny explained to Applejack was because he had a sickness in his soul. Big Mac told her it was because the newspaper didn’t want to use a picture that made the villain seem relatable, that a smile would blur the lines between us and him.
There was a private place behind the hen coop where Applejack would steal away to wash out all the feelings building up inside her. Her soft weeping would get lost under the clucking and scratching of the chickens. Gala had only been a few years older than her. Applejack used to bring her here and share her deepest secrets, meant for only her and the chickens. She knew Gala wouldn’t tell a soul.
“Gala is an Apple of a different orchard,” as the family phrased it. “She’s a Golden Delicious in a Honeycrisp tree,” Great-Aunt Applesauce had put it in a dubious whisper during one of the family’s titanic reunions. Gala bore an uncommon grace and beauty that set her apart from the Apple clan. She carried a sway in her body and speech, both expressing the allure and guile of a fox’s shadow. Even so, the family adored her and she them. It was this beauty that captured the heart of a Saddle Arabian prince, and moved him to court Gala, and eventually take her as his wife.
Applejack sat with her back to the coop. The tears on her cheeks had dried.
“Come here, Winona,” she said, calling her faithful companion to her side. She leaned over to let Winona’s damp muzzle reach her ear so she could hear the kinds of secrets dogs tell in snuffles and sniffs. A painful moment of her sacred place rose out of her memory—the moment when her dream was stolen from her.
“He asked me to marry him! I’m going to marry a prince!” Gala said. Her face had lit up in a way that made the sun look pale when she’d told Applejack the news. Bitter and hurt, Applejack had run off crying into the woods. How could she, the one pony who knew her secret, do something like that to her?
But that was years ago, and the flavor of that moment had become one of regret. She tore at the memory in her head, scraped it with brushes and paint, begging it to change its complexion. She couldn’t take it back now. She couldn’t forget how quickly the light had left Gala’s face as she watched Applejack flee.
***
There was so much heat and sand in Saddle Arabia, it seemed miraculous to Applejack that ponies could actually live here. Unbelievable that they even wanted to. Gala had somehow done it. She managed to get past the harsh, dry winds that sandblasted your face to an ashen texture of parched earth. All the dust that choked your lungs and the sun’s ceaseless bombardment, robbing you of what scant energy remained in your body to be taken. There was a beauty in the design of their buildings, the ornate domes and spires, courtyards that took every advantage they could to extract visual delight from bland, earthy colors. Their aqueduct systems were particularly impressive to Applejack. She admired their ingenuity for cheating water away from the hot grasp of this desert land. Not much else stood out to her throughout her tour of the city.
“She planted flowers in a garden within the palace walls,” the prince told her. He and Applejack walked side-by-side along the aqueduct leading back to the palace. “Wild Prairie Rose,” he continued, “is what I believe you call them in your native land. Nothing so showy as some of the flowers in my country.”
Applejack’s eyebrows raised slightly while the rest of her expression remained mute. She wore a shawl beneath her Stetson that was crusty from having alternately been soaked with sweat and dried soon after in the heat.
“We Apples are known for our green hooves,” she said.
The prince stopped. He looked at Applejack’s hooves curiously.
“But yours are orange.”
That made Applejack chuckle.
They continued alongside the aqueduct mostly in silence.
“I think it is because she put such love into their care that they ended up being the most beautiful flowers in the garden,” said the prince. There were tears in his eyes as they approached the steps to the palace. Applejack couldn’t find any words to console him. She had cried most of her tears, and now she was scraping the bottom of an empty well. The sorrow had gone out of her, leaving a vast dryness like the desert.
The prince looked into Applejack’s face and smiled. He was a young, handsome stallion, attractive in his foreignness to Applejack. She saw many reasons why Gala had loved him, but that was not enough.
“Tell me more stories of yourself and her tonight, during dinner,” he said. His tears had already dried up in the evening desert sun.
Applejack nodded. “And you can fill me in on more of your customs.”
The prince leaned in and gave Applejack a hesitant kiss. Applejack remained rooted in numbness when the prince drew his head away.
“P-Perhaps we should get used to that,” he said, letting himself slip from sorrow to shyness. It was an uncomfortable transition that made an itchy warmth rise on the back of Applejack’s neck. They lingered in motionless discomfort for a moment before the prince let his eyes fall. He led them up the stairs to the palace in silence.
Applejack dwelt in her thoughts on this prince, his kingdom, his world. She did not love him, not as Gala had loved him. He was technically family, and family came before anything else in her world. Somehow, these two worlds would have to fill in the gap left by Gala’s absence.
Later that evening, the prince showed her the flower garden Gala had tended. Already, he said, some of the pink roses were beginning to wilt, and the gardeners did not know how to bring them back.
He asked if Applejack could do anything for them. She said she’d try.
***
In the end, Applejack knew she’d betray somepony through her actions. Would it be Gala, by being wed to her widower? Would it be the prince himself, by feigning love for him in accordance with her duty? Would it be the prince’s family and her family, by refusing to take up her cousin’s mantle and admit she could not love the prince?
She agonized over these thoughts in her airy palace bedchamber. Unable to sleep, she stepped out onto the balcony and embraced the chill of the night. It grew much cooler at night, as is the nature of deserts. She watched the stars and interrogated them for answers to her troubles. According to Saddle Arabian customs, if a royal mare died, her husband must take one of his late wife’s sisters as his new wife. Lacking a suitable sister—which, Gala did lack—the role fell to the next closest eligible female relative.
Applejack had studied her extensive family tree dozens of times. She just so happened to be the closest female relative to Gala who was unwed and of the right age. Refusing to marry the prince would be a terrible insult to the royal family and, technically, their family was part of hers now.
That whole night she lay awake, deliberating until she had the answer.
The next morning, she told the prince to join her in the flower garden.
“I’ve wanted to be a princess ever since I was a little filly,” she began, sitting herself on the edge of a fountain in the center of the garden. “Only pony I ever told this to, besides yourself, was Gala. We used to share all kinds of secrets with each other, and pretend nopony would ever know what we knew.”
The prince sat beside her and listened. He gazed at Applejack with a distance and a few deliberate nods.
“When I told her what I just told you,” she continued, “Gala flat-out laughed in my face. Said she’d never want to be a princess as long as she lived.”
Applejack paused again. The prince nodded as if to say, “Go on.”
“When she told me that you and she were gettin’ hitched, I thought she’d gone back on her word. I thought she’d stolen my dream from me, and lied to me all those years ago. For a time I was angry with her…” She took a deep breath.
“...But I knew she loved you. Deep down I knew it. You shared something with her that no number of wishes and dreams could make true for me. I wanted a prince. She wanted love. I can’t marry you and lie to you the rest of my life, not even for the sake of our families. Not even for the sake of a worn-out dream. I owe Gala at least that much.”
A gentle silence blanketed the garden, tickled at the edges by a faint trickling that came from the fountain. The flowers around them seemed to absorb the water’s sound, pushing it back out cleaner somehow. Applejack looked around her. Even though some of the pink roses had begun to wilt, they still maintained their enchanting color and fragrance, like the smell of a dear friend lingering on the backside of a door after they’d departed. It brought fresh grief to Applejack’s eyes, which she struggled to contain.
“I think…” said the prince slowly, standing to his hooves. “I think that we shall both bear our families’ dishonor together.”
He looked at Applejack, and for a moment there was a flash of radiance reflected in his smile that Applejack knew had come from Gala.
She broke into sobs and embraced the prince.
***
For a time there were murmurs that the royal family had broken customs. Maybe it had something to do with the prince getting involved with a foreigner, or maybe he had been so stricken by his wife’s murder that he could not go through with another marriage. For a time, the Apple family was split on their sentiments regarding Applejack’s rejection. After she’d explained her reasons, some wondered whether matters of the heart should take precedence over matters of family. On occasion, the prince would come to Apple family reunions, where he and Applejack would have long talks—some of these, oddly, behind the hen coop. Then she’d show him the farm, the Everfree Forest, and where the Wild Prairie Rose grew naturally. He always liked seeing the roses most of all. Applejack would send him a fresh bouquet every Spring.
And Granny and Big Mac sometimes wondered to themselves secretly whether Applejack was trying to ignite some flame, to re-awaken some old dream. Applejack knew how she made them wonder, and though they were incorrect, she let them relish the private joy of their well-kept secret.
***
