Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen
Lux flew.
Past Godfrey and his pile of broken dishes. Through the morning room door and along the dark corridor. She ran onto the landing, where an immortalized Alixsander Alesso could witness her heaving breaths, and then she ran down the staircase.
Lux sprinted right out of Mothlock.
Gravel shifted beneath her boots, and an autumn breeze cooled her damp scalp. She gulped heaps of fresh air and dappled sunlight before finally closing her eyes.
“You’ll be all right. You’ll be fine.” And maybe it was the combination of sea air and sun that had her believing it.
Anxious thoughts. Panic. Sometimes her brain created alternate realities in which she’d get lost navigating. This could be like that. It could be—
Lux opened her eyes to the garden. On either side of the courtyard the brambles rolled red and wild, devouring the grounds.
The only parts left alone were the stone paths and circular drive.
Not even the iron fence was spared. She ran her tongue over her canines, then she turned and stared up at the manor.
It appeared as formidable as the day before, with its towering pinnacles and barred windows. The morning light hadn’t reached the crawling vines, and the flowers were closed and pointed like arrows toward the ground.
Her brow furrowed over trying to imagine a family here. Children here. And she snorted aloud at her own judgements, because she’d grown up breathing thick air and smoke. ‘Formidable’ did not matter so much, she thought, when one had the sea.
I don’t have to stay if I don’t wish to, she told herself. I can leave right now. But the words didn’t permeate her soul so much as they should. In fact, they didn’t even scratch the surface. It almost felt like she told herself…a lie.
She frowned up at the stonework. Lux couldn’t deny she felt drawn to it somehow. And maybe that would have bothered her, but it didn’t feel the same as when she’d been drawn to the devouring gallow trees. It was softer. More embracing, less consuming.
“I feel entirely mismatched between my brain and body,” she said to the air and brambles. “This cannot be my new normal.”
But what if it is?
Her nightmares had never manifested before. The closest she’d come to anything similar was braving her early childhood home. But even then, it was only her traumatic memories growing bold; she could still blink those away.
She’d not been able to blink away the muck in the tub. Nor the apparition from the passageway.
She couldn’t dispel the voice in her head.
Her finger reached to her neck. To where she’d once been injected with a solution that brought her insecurities to shadowed reality. But she’d not been attacked with any needle here. Had she drunk something she shouldn’t? Eaten something toxic? Maybe the pressure had stressed out her senses.
Lux’s true fear beat somewhere underneath, but she refused to dig that far right now.
Maybe she really should return to her room. Rest, as Corvin had so graciously directed. Wait for him to return for her.
The sea air urged her otherwise.
It promised a cure—albeit a momentary one—by standing at the edge again, absorbing the spray against her skin and relishing the feel of some sort of freedom.
But…there was also a second path through the brambles.
Where she’d chosen to go right yesterday, what would going left reveal now?
It couldn’t lead nowhere, she didn’t think.
What would have been the purpose of that?
Lux didn’t think anymore on it.
She set off down the path.
Though it was cool, she didn’t miss her cloak. The sun had finally severed the clouds, and now it shone unobstructed upon her head. The feel of it brushing against her temple did more than any cup of tea ever could. Out here, she thought, she might breathe every tumultuous emotion away.
Still, she kept darting glances from her periphery. The brambles shifted too much for her liking, and they were uncomfortably tall. Taller than most people she knew. Clearly, no one minded this wild garden.
And while the air did smell a little sweet, she now noticed it smelled a bit like iron too.
Like blood.
She tucked her elbows in farther when the breeze brushed them aside. Scarlet stems topped by a mimicry of teeth peeked from underneath. “Don’t even think of it,” she snapped at them. “I’m not some all-forgiving botanist—I’ll rip you out by the roots.”
The strange plants shrank back from her threat. Or it might have been the wind.
The path curved then, and a bench appeared, the seat hardly visible in its overgrown state. A short stone statue perched just beyond it. Lux slowed, stopped, and tilted her head.
The stone had been sculpted into a man, his face pulled into a grimace, the edges worn smooth.
She frowned at it. A single vine had wrapped its way around the base, up and up, until it encircled his throat with a deep-blue bloom to match the manor’s.
The mayor’s mansion hadn’t anything but busts of the mayor himself lining its rich halls; she’d never seen a fully formed statue before.
Unlike the saintlike style guarding Mothlock’s shrine to its dead founder, this one had been intricately detailed and was quite smaller.
She could see the man was made to be handsome, with a strong nose and jaw, and hair to his shoulders. But like the brambles, he was unkempt.
Forgotten, perhaps?
Lux shook herself free of his gaze before leaving it behind.
She curved immediately into a second statue and stumbled to a halt.
Her hand clutched her throat. “You scared me,” she scolded it.
Or her. The form of a woman only stared back, her eyes sad and stone cheeks drooped in melancholy.
She was not strangled like the man before, but her bare feet were covered in moss. Another bench was set beside it.
“No one is assigned to your upkeep, either, I see.” The statue only pondered her in all its pitiful sorrow. Lux couldn’t help herself. She knelt at its feet.
The moss was darkly green and soft to the touch. She pressed a finger against it to be sure, but nothing leached from it. It was regular, with hardly any scent at all. She pried it away.
The dirt beneath crumbled and blew in the breeze. What was left, Lux brushed aside. “There you are,” she said, a moment before her fingertips snagged on an indentation. “What—”
Oh…
ROSAMUND GRIMROOK
The House of Grimrook
Lux shoved to her feet, her hands limp at her sides. She stared at the woman and then at what must be laid beneath. They’d been buried in the garden, Hildred had said.
“What a way to be remembered. Who carved you like this?” Then she glanced over her shoulder at the man.
Lux hurried back to him, and while she didn’t need to clear any moss, she did need to shift the gnarled fingers of the vine. It was loath to let go, but once several of them broke, the remainder retracted. She lifted the vine above the statue’s base.
GRANVILLE GRIMROOK
The House of Grimrook
Lux dropped the plant and backed away. She stared down the path. Because the sun had shifted, and her eyes knew what to search for, she found more pale outlines dotting the way.
Graves.
She did not stand in any garden.
She stood in the cemetery of Riselda’s family.
And Corvin hadn’t told her.