Chapter Twenty-Six Kian
The day we’re assigned to the community gardens at the edge of the Poyhia neighborhood, I practically bounce through the streets of Insborough.
The gardens of Insborough are one of the few efforts where the order actually does good, growing fresh produce for the neighboring communities. And this particular garden is my favorite.
“Why are you so peppy?” Adela asks, still blinking away sleep.
“Kian has a great love for strawberries, no doubt,” Ulric teases.
“Strawberries?” Adela’s sleepiness disappears almost instantly, replaced with wary curiosity. “This early, the most you could hope for is some wild garlic or maybe asparagus. Or your magic apples, in the courtyard.”
She hasn’t seen the gardens of Insborough yet. My step grows even lighter in anticipation. “You’ll see.”
She glances at me with suspicion when we come to the dilapidated tenements surrounding the garden.
Like most places in the city, where fashions come and go quickly, this was a wealthy neighborhood at one point, and the buildings’ bones still have the echoes of their former grandeur.
But now their paint is peeling, their large windows are broken, boarded up, or missing, and their gabled roofs are caving in.
Adela looks around, open-mouthed. This is a different kind of desperation than what she’s grown up experiencing. “What happened here?” she asks, her voice thick.
Her feelings live so close to the surface.
“Corruption. Greed. Abandonment.” I try to box up the burgeoning hope that she also sees the truth of the orders, and could understand my actions.
Ulric joins the others already in the gardens, but Adela pauses in front of a crumbling stoop where children with matted hair and dirty faces sit huddled together.
Their clothes are rags, and they shiver in the brisk air.
She moves closer to the youngsters. I reach forward and put a hand on her arm, gently holding her back.
She pulls out of my grasp. “They need help.”
“They’ll pick your pockets if you get too near.”
She scoffs. “And what would they possibly want from my pockets?”
I blink at her naivete. We grew up in two very different worlds.
“Whatever they can find. Money, ideally. If not that, things they can sell or use.”
She frowns, but I turn and go through the garden gate, willing her to just follow.
I want her to understand, but explaining the complexities of poverty and agency in the city without revealing who I truly am is too delicate a task for me to attempt at the moment.
And revealing who I am—and what I’ve done—is not something I’m ready for. I cannot risk her hating me.
She follows, thank fuck. In an instant, she goes from concerned to awestruck.
I love the way her flawless mouth drops open into a perfect pink O, the little noise of delight she makes.
I look around the gardens, imagining seeing them for the first time.
I consider how wonderful it must seem to Adela, someone has who has grown up with a dying valley that produces so little.
The air is warmer inside the fence than in the surrounding streets, the moisture levels consistently balanced, and the soil is rich with all the appropriate minerals, all thanks to the workings of Sibling Emi and their wife, Sister Evelyn.
They’re not bonded in the way the gytrash or phoenix are, but as a pegasus-wearer who influences the weather and a cath-palug-wearer who encourages growth, their powers work well in tandem.
The other part of the garden’s charm is plain biological abundance, the scents and colors of the garden’s produce. Much of it doesn’t share seasons, or even continents, typically—tomatoes and corn and jicama grow alongside mangos and sugar beets and berries.
I’m so busy taking in the gardens myself that I don’t notice the moment her mood shifts.
When I turn back, her teeth are clenched as tight as her fists. The hairs on the back of my neck raise as I anticipate a rising pressure.
But no. She’s been so careful not to let even a sliver of magic through since Etana.
She won’t even pretend to practice with us most days, preferring to wander the halls of the temple, learning its layout instead.
It’s an act of defiance that shocks and impresses me, that she would risk the ire of the high priestess she admires so much.
But that’s how deeply her fear of herself goes. Surely, she wouldn’t let herself lose control now, over something as insignificant as a garden. The phoenix shoots a warning through me. This is not my imagination at work then. I truly can feel a buildup of pressure.
I have to calm her. Not only is the garden necessary to the community that uses it for sustenance, but she will hate herself if she loses herself here.
“Adela?” I reach out and take her hand. She turns to me, glowing with rage. I flinch at the anger blazing in her eyes. “Adela, beauty. Talk to me.”
She lets loose a torrent of words. “You have access to this sort of magic, and keepers—” She stumbles on the word, and it comes out like a sob.
But she is too angry for tears. “Keepers make do with bark tea and wrinkled root soup in the dead of winter and in the stretches between order visits. And now that the skulls are gone and there is no matcher, they will be even hungrier. And meanwhile, you have this.”
She gestures at the heavy-laden fruit trees, at the vegetables that are so abundant some of them have gone to rot.
At least the pressure of her magic has ebbed with her outpouring of words.
I’m an idiot. Of course this would be enraging to her, a woman who grew up hungry and dependent.
And it should. I grew up with so much compared with my neighbors and friends.
My family had resources—many of them stolen, but still.
We did not hunger. We did not have to grovel and pay for the “kindnesses” of corrupt religious orders.
Or, at least, no more than most in the city, and significantly less than the keepers.
I should have known this would be painful for her to see. I try to say something—anything—but can’t manage to squeeze even a word through the shame.
Her breathing grows ragged; the phoenix pressure builds again. She points to Ulric, working alongside barefaced Svena. They are pruning the large apple trees, making a pile of discarded branches beneath them, all with fully ripe apples still hanging amongst the leaves.
“Pruning should happen when they’re done with their production for the season. You do not just throw them away.” She flings an arm towards the fence, where the children reaching through the fence to snatch blackberries from snaking brambles. “Especially while children hunger.”
I need to say something, but all I can think to say is how I intend to fix it.
How I’ve taken drastic steps to lessen the order’s power so that there isn’t such disparity and waste, and how I take small ones as well.
And while I don’t know exactly how the valley fits into all of that, now that I’ve seen the keepers’ circumstances—and have so drastically impacted them for the worst—it’s something else I want to work on fixing.
Her anger sparks hope that I can share all that. In time. Maybe, just maybe, she would embrace me and thank me for my efforts instead of hating me for what I’ve taken. But I cannot risk it. Not yet.
I stay silent.
That silence breaks her. She closes her eyes, trying to contain the rising anger.
I reach for her, but it’s too late. The frenetic pressure releases in a quick, short burst. The entire length of blackberry brambles shrivels instantly, and there is a chorus of small, high-pitched screams. Her eyes pop open, horror clear.
The children run back to their stoops and stairs and watch, wide-eyed and a little bit shaken, but also intrigued at the display of a new magic. “They’re safe,” I say. “All safe.”
Sister Evelyn hurries over and cuts into a thick part of a vine, checking the raw stem. It is totally brown; there is no green tinge of life left in it. Her lips press into a thin line. “You’ve killed the blackberries.”
Adela trembles, no longer with rage. She doesn’t hear Sister Evelyn; she doesn’t care about a bush. Her eyes are on the children. Whether she’s imagining Etana’s death rattle or the keeper children’s screams as they were attacked by the cath palug, she is not here with us.
“We’ll have to dig this up,” the priestess says matter-of-factly, pointing at the shriveled vines. “And take a start from another garden.”
Her spouse leaves the work they were doing, picking thick worms off the potato plants, and joins the rest of us.
Their voice is affected. “No wonder High Priestess Sarai adores you.” They reach out and snap their fingers in front of Adela’s face.
Finally Adela’s eyes focus on the here and now.
“The gardens are an important source of nutrition for this community, so let’s use our hands for the rest of the afternoon, yeah? No magic.”
Adela turns as red as the tomatoes in Jasmyn’s wicker basket. She nods meekly.
When we are alone, she asks me if I can bring the blackberries back. I try, but like Etana in the valley, I’m not able to. Maybe because her anger was too great, or my will too small.
Whatever the cause, I’m not able to do this thing she asks. Instead, I kneel beside her in the garden. We do not talk, but work in silence, pulling weeds and hacking away at overgrown vegetation. We collect coconuts and shuck corn.
At dusk, the rest of them leave, but Adela stays on her knees, toiling. I remain with her, digging in the dirt late into the night, atoning.
When it has grown too dark to see, Adela finally agrees to return to the temple.
Rounded shoulders, arms wrapped around her soft middle, she stands hunched in front of our door waiting for me to unlock it.
When I open it, she shuffles in without a word, her eyes staring into the middle distance, haunted.