Epilogue
Lark
W e strolled through the garden, and Aunty Lora swung my hand happily, pointing out everything that was in bloom. Fall flowers were my favorite.
“Did you remember all of your texts this time?” she teased.
“Yes,” I sighed, unhappy that Papa seemed to have gotten to her too.
I could never tell if he was truly angry with me, and Mama often called him many things that I wasn’t allowed to repeat. She said he was far less grumpy than he used to be, but that was hard to imagine.
Schucks.
There was one book I’d forgotten. I’d left it in the boathouse by the pond. It was a spell book that Aunty Asterie had gifted me. I had wanted to see if I could turn a toad into a prince like in the storybooks. Turned out, there wasn’t a spell for that, and all I’d ended up with was seven unhappy toads.
There had only been boring enchantments in the book. Like how to light a candle or move an object from one side of a table to the other.
“I forgot one—I’ll go get it!”
Auty Lora released my hand. “Hurry back. We’ll be leaving soon.”
I ran down the winding path to the pond. “Hello!” I shouted to two guards, both of whom saluted me.
“Hello, Princess.” Their words whistled away as I ran, feeling faster than the wind Aunty could control. Soon I’d have all of Papa’s Shadows—they kept telling me that as though it should mean something important to me. I hadn’t yet learned how to travel through them like he could.
Out of breath, I opened the rickety door of the boathouse. A rowboat bobbed in the water, and the book was exactly where I’d left it on the dock. I snatched it up and was about to run back up the path when something caught my eye in the tree line beyond the pond.
Someone was watching me—a boy . He ducked back behind a tree, hiding. No one else was allowed in the gardens. I stomped over to the tree.
“ You are trespassing. Who are you?”
The boy’s tawny cheeks reddened—he looked a couple of years older than me. He didn’t answer and stepped away like he might flee.
His hair was a mop of black curls, and his eyes were the prettiest shade of blue—like a watercolor painting of the sky. “I said , who are you?”
“Please, don’t tell anyone I was here. It can be our secret.”
Before I could yell for the guards, he opened his palm. Light and fire bloomed there—I gasped.
“For you, Princess,” he said.
In his palm, from a spark of light and fire, a single red rose formed and glistened as though lit by flame from between the petals. It reminded me of the roses that often appeared outside the sleeping man’s door. The same man Mama was so adamant about me never meeting.
Aunty Lora always seemed so distraught when we found the roses, and the maids would not admit to leaving them.
I took the rose from the peculiar boy with a smile.
“Our secret,” I agreed.