Chapter 37
Gryphon strides toward me, his Guardian uniform impeccable as always, his face dark with anger. His hand rests on the hilt of his sword. “What in the Wall are you doing here?” he demands.
“A child is dead,” I say. “Another victim of the Vex. Or so it appears.” For all I know, Gryphon is in on his father’s grand plan, as much as it sickens me to think it. He did know about his father’s strange weapon and presumably the resource hoarding, too.
His expression shifts minutely—surprise, followed by concern. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says, softer now but no less insistent. “It’s not safe.”
“I need to—”
“You need to do as you’re told,” he interrupts, stepping closer. Too close. I can smell the leather of his uniform, the metal polish on his sword. “You can’t wander in forbidden areas, Rose. You’ll be punished.”
His bossiness ignites my temper. “Since when is my safety your concern, Guardian? Your duty is to your father, not to me.”
Something flickers across his face—hurt, probably—before his expression hardens again. I grimace, realizing my words came out harsher than intended, but Gryphon needs to learn he can’t order me around forever.
“Let’s go,” he says, reaching for me. “We’ll get something to eat on the way to the training grounds. Remember your orders for the day.”
I pull away. I’ve got to talk to David and get this water sample to Reatha and do the thing that feels most important of all: find out what my mother knew. V-E-X, she’d hidden in her journal, and now I have an idea why. Maybe that inkling can help me decode the rest.
“Not until I stop by the Apothecary cottage,” I counter. “I have to check something.”
“Rose—”
You catch more flies with honey, Gran has always said. “Just for a minute. Please.”
“Fine,” he relents, his voice gruff. “But I’m coming with you.”
We walk in tense silence, and I can’t help but wonder about Gryphon’s sudden overprotectiveness.
We were friends once, of course, but this feels different.
He’s keeping something from me. I’m sure of it.
Well, he can join the rest on that front.
This whole village is a spitting nest of secrets, I’m discovering.
“Wait here,” I tell Gryphon outside the Apothecary cottage.
He follows me through the back door anyway. I make an exasperated noise. At least Uncle Richard is gone, likely summoned by the Council of Elders to explain Finn’s death. Good. I don’t need him questioning what I’m about to do.
“What are you looking for?” Gryphon asks as I move purposefully toward the storage closet.
I ignore him, pulling open the heavy wooden door to reveal shelves stacked with herbs, tinctures, and medicinal supplies. My mother’s dedicated shelf is untouched. I ignore the dried roots and glass jars to slide open her drawer.
Charcoal.
Packets of it. More than any normal Apothecary would need.
“I knew it,” I whisper.
“What?” Gryphon asks, suddenly too close behind me.
I turn to face him, my voice low and steady despite the fury building inside me. “The Vex is no virus, Gryphon. It’s a poison. My mother knew. She prepared these packets in case of another ‘outbreak.’” I take a deep breath. “That’s why she was killed.”
His face pales. “Rose, you can’t just accuse—”
“The Record Keeper knows it, too, I suspect. I saw his footprints around the well.” I put my hands on my hips, eyes narrowing. “What is your father up to?”
Gryphon grips my shoulders, and I’m acutely aware of the size of his hands. “Lower your voice,” he hisses. “This isn’t safe to discuss.”
“So you do know something!” I challenge, searching his gaze.
For a moment, I see conflict in his eyes. Then he releases me, and I feel too light where his hands used to be. “We need to go to the training grounds,” he says, voice carefully neutral. “My mother is waiting.”
He’s not going to answer me. I know without asking that he won’t accept any further detours, either, not until we’ve done our Guardian duty.
Fine. Tonight, I’ll try again to crack my mother’s code.
Whatever the truth is about the Vex, about her death, about this village with its stone Wall and ancient secrets, I’m going to find it. Even if it kills me.
Which—given what I’ve learned today—seems increasingly likely.
.
True to his word, Gryphon has us stop by the Bakers’ after I drop off the day’s completed census materials at the Record Keeper cottage.
He charms yesterday’s rolls off the Bakers’ youngest daughter.
I’m surprised to see how friendly he can be with others.
We’re eating and walking, the warm sun shining down on us, when a question surprises my lips.
“Do you think your parents care for each other?”
His brow creases. “Why do you ask?”
Because I suspect Jarek was responsible for my mother’s murder, and his loving her would complicate that.
“Something your father said this morning.” I wonder if I should even repeat it, but I’ve gone too far to back out. “That he was in love with my mom when they were teenagers.”
Gryphon’s expression is pained but not surprised. “Through here,” he says, directing me down an alley I’ve somehow never walked before. The Guardian training ground is out of the way, and few of us ever have reason to visit. I’m excited to see somewhere new in the Valley.
I think Gryphon’s ignoring my question and decide I won’t press the issue, but then, “My mother loved my father. My father loved your mother. He never hid it. In fact, shortly after your dad died, he petitioned to end his marriage to my mother so he could wed Henrietta.”
My jaw drops. “End their marriage?” I’d never heard of such a thing.
“Yeah.” He sounds as disgusted as I feel.
Imagining Gryphon ending our betrothal to wed someone else elicits a sharp and sudden pang of empathy on Misia’s behalf. And I don’t even like my fiancé. Much.
I think about my mother being courted by Jarek.
Could two people be more opposite in temperament?
As far as I know, he never visited, except for the one incident he’d confessed to this morning.
The moment Mom was killed, I believed I’d seen raw grief on Jarek’s face, but he’d immediately covered it.
Of course, I’ve since learned he is a man who hides a lot.
He could have been pretending to be sad to throw off any suspicion about his involvement.
Yet it’d seemed real. “The Record Keeper denied his request?” I ask.
Gryphon spreads his hands. “Didn’t have to. He asked your mom and she said she was content to remain a Caster for the rest of her life. I overheard my parents fighting about it.”
I feel a surge of fierce pride. My mother had stood up to Jarek.
Maybe, and it’s agony to think it, he’d been so offended by her rejection that he’d arranged her death and Jonas’s setup.
The thought roils my gut. But no, I think, quickly dismissing the prospect.
It sounds like my mother rejected Jarek over a decade ago.
Her recent murder wouldn’t be related to that, right?
“Why did your father ban us from watching you train?” That restriction had come with the curfew.
Gryphon shrugs. We’ve left the village and are now hoofing it through the fields, the golden wheat surrounding us shorn as close as a haircut. “You don’t want to watch the Blacksmiths ply their trade, do you? Or the Plumbers plumb?”
“But I could,” I say. “If they were doing it in front of me. Say they came to my cottage to fix something, or I went to the Blacksmith to request a tool made.”
He shoots me a bemused glance. “You’re that eager to watch the Guardians exercise? Have our midday demonstrations not satisfied your appetite?”
My blush mortifies me, but it seems to delight him.
Before I can think of a comeback, we step onto a narrow path at the farmland’s end and are forced to proceed single file into the woods.
We’re hiking for several minutes when I hear an unfamiliar sound, like a drumbeat, right before we break into a clearing.
A huge barn stands straight ahead, whatever’s making the noise just beyond it. But Gryphon wants us to look inside the building first.
“My father’s toys.” He pulls open the double doors.
It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. When they do, I don’t know what to make of what I see.
It looks like a regular barn at first: stalls—likely to quarter the Guardians’ patrol horses during training, though they spend the night at the larger stable our Animal Farmers maintain—a hayloft, shelves for tack.
But the back wall is a veritable armory.
Some instruments are familiar, like swords, bo staffs, and bow and arrows, but most are alien. Iterations of the weapon Gryphon accidentally wounded his father with. Pairs of metal bracelets. What looks like large watering cans. And on the ground, several baskets of round, bumpy objects.
I shudder at the potential for violence Jarek has accumulated. Much of it must’ve come from that secret room below the Record Keeper cottage, because I’ve never seen weapons like this in Noah’s Valley.
Before I can speak, Gryphon slams the door shut.
He’s holding himself so still he looks like he’ll break.
“The Record Keeper found the weapons in the vault. He shared them with my father, who is tasking the Engineer House with building more. Explosives, mostly, seem to be Dad’s primary interest, but that’s the one thing the Engineer House is unable to recreate.
They require materials we don’t have inside the Wall, as desperate as my father is to obtain them. ”
He looks at me like I’m supposed to know what this means. When I have nothing, he shakes his head. “Shall we go to the training field, then?”
He takes off around the barn.
I follow, horrified at what I’ve seen.