Chapter 15
He kept the key inside the stacked clay pots with the polka-dot pattern. Why, he couldn’t say. Perhaps because polka-dots were so singularly un-magical, and it struck his subconscious as the last place any green-eyed wardsman would think to look.
Polka-dots notwithstanding, Nigel felt the faint magical hum surrounding the key before his fingers closed around it, an unmistakable vibration to anyone of magical-sensitivity. His hand trembled a little, withdrawing the key and clutching it in his fist for the space of five breaths.
What he was about to do was . . . risky.
He hadn’t revealed the secret of Garden’s whereabouts to anyone, not even his brother, Fabian, who attempted both bribery and blackmail to get it out of him.
The Authorities of Plym resorted to even stronger measures—a dark part of his personal history, which Nigel took care not to revisit, even in memory.
They had failed to produce answers from his sealed lips, however.
In the end, the Authorities had decided that Garden was decimated in the Last Great Altercation with the Shadowbane Lady.
They weren’t entirely wrong. But neither were they entirely right.
Nigel released a slow breath. He’d spent the last three years carefully nurturing Garden back to health, a daunting task without Mister Grimm around to guide him.
The old man was the hedge wizard, after all—the one with the gift for Green Magic.
All Nigel’s expertise in sorcery had done him little good, may, in fact, have caused harm on more than one occasion.
Garden did not respond well to multi-dimensional manipulation of the essential energies.
Still, Nigel had done his best. And Garden was thriving now, if not quite on the same scale it boasted back when Old Mister Grimm was still alive.
Nigel turned to look at Miss Luna Talbot, who stood in the doorway of the storage room, watching him.
Her large eyes strained to see in the dimness.
She didn’t look dangerous. She just looked beautiful.
Vulnerable. Hungry, despite her large breakfast. Deeply concerned and wildly curious. But not dangerous.
Even so, Nigel knew he should talk himself out of this course of action. Miss Talbot may not be an actual sorceress, but the heptagram marked her as part of a sorcerous family line.
And it was sorcery which nearly destroyed Garden in the first place.
Debbie’s claws dug into his shoulder, and the bird muttered low in his ear: “Never mind.”
Nigel was half-inclined to agree. Then again, he couldn’t expect Miss Talbot to go on working at The Arcane Bouquet without revealing this secret.
She’d end up snooping it out for herself, most likely, and that could be far more disastrous.
No, if she was going to be around, he’d best take command of the situation, introduce her to Garden properly, and set some specific ground rules.
Adjusting Debbie’s seat on his shoulder with a shrug, Nigel stepped from the storeroom, key clutched in his fist. “This way, Miss Talbot,” he said and moved past her to the door at the end of the passage.
To all other eyes, this door appeared exactly like the other three: white, slatted, with a dingy brass knob. Nothing worth noting.
To Nigel’s eyes, however, it was quite another thing.
He saw old rusty hinges and flaking green paint, adorned with chipped patterns of roses and trailing vines, exactly as it had stood in the kitchen of his father’s house, back home in southern Plym.
It was his mother who had painted those floral decals long ago, before Nigel was born.
They were so faded and battered by years’ worth of comings and goings, but Old Mister Grimm had refused to paint over them or even to have them freshened up.
This door was as familiar to Nigel as the back of his own hand, a fixture from childhood.
He slid the key into the lock. It was quite a small key, barely the length of his little finger, and the lock was but a tiny slit above the knob. But the bolt felt and sounded heavy as it chonked under pressure.
The door swung open, a symphony of rusty creaks and groans.
Behind him, Luna gasped: “Green Mother have mercy!”
Nigel couldn’t blame her. Even three years post-devastation, having hardly regained a third of its former glory, Garden was a spectacular sight.
No king’s grounds ever compared to the glory that was Old Mister Grimm’s great work of hedge wizardry.
It spread before one’s feet in gently undulating green swaths: little hills and surprising valleys, an intricate network of gravel paths leading hither and yon.
Nothing pretentious or overly formal in its layout.
Not a sculpted hedge as far as the eye could see.
But graceful flowering trees offered shade to walkways, and mounds of blossoms abounded everywhere the eye chanced to look.
Nigel, though raised with Garden out his back door, couldn’t put names to even half the bounteous blooms on display.
A brilliant blue sky hung over all, dotted with drifting white clouds stained delicately pink on their edges, as though the day hovered on the fringe of perpetual new dawn.
A scent of dew filled the air, but the paths were all dry enough, one needn’t fear wetting one’s shoes.
The lawns themselves varied between carefully trimmed and overgrown, but all the overgrown patches were so brimming with wildflowers, one saw in an instant that they were intended to be that way.
It would be a spectacular sight if viewed from the back windows of a grand manner house, where such a landscape made sense. Considering this door ought, by rights, to lead to a boiler room, the view beheld was made a thousand times more astonishing.
Luna stared silently over Nigel’s shoulder for such a long while, he began to fear she’d forgotten how to breathe. He turned to her and asked in a quiet voice, “Well, Miss Talbot?”
Her mouth gaped. She tried to close it, but it simply gaped again, as though the hinge of her jaw was broken. Finally, she managed to exclaim, “Green Mother!” again, while all other words simply failed her.
Nigel stepped through the portal and motioned with one hand. “Would you care to join me for a stroll?”
“Would I?” Her eyes lit up. She started to follow him out, then hesitated, one hand gripping the doorframe. “Is it . . . quite safe? Only it looks like the sort of place one might get lost in rather easily if one doesn’t know the way.”
“Oh, no, Garden would never let you get lost,” Nigel hastened to assure her. “Not unless you offended him.”
“Him?”
“Yes, well, it, I suppose. Technically.” Nigel ran a hand through his pomaded hair, causing it to stand up oddly on one side.
“I tend to personify Garden in the masculine simply because there’s so much of my father’s essence infusing the ground and atmosphere here.
It cannot help but take on some of his personality, as it were. ”
“Your father?”
“Yes. Alfred P. Grimm.”
“You father . . . made this garden?”
“He did.”
“With sorcery?”
“Oh, no! Certainly not.” Nigel cast his gaze around the glorious grounds once more.
A bed of tulips stood close by, blooming many months out of season.
Their bright jewel tones seemed to wink saucily at him as they bobbed in a gentle breeze.
“It started out as a simple kitchen garden for my mother. But over time, it grew. And as it grew, so did my father’s affinity for it.
They sort of . . . fed each other. Garden gave my father magic, which my father gave back to Garden.
As the years went by, it was difficult to discern one from the other. ”
“Green Magic,” Luna whispered.
Nigel nodded, pleased at her recognition. Of course, she grew up with tea witches; she must have at least rudimentary training in Green Magic. Though there were few hedge witches or wizards in all the world on a par with Old Mister Grimm.
“Not sorcery, you see,” he finished.
Luna turned her gaze sharply, focusing on him. “And how exactly did this place come to be hidden in your boiler room?”
Nigel hesitated. She’d caught him there.
He’d had to hide Garden immediately following the fall of Jastira, and that had required some of the most complicated sorcery he’d ever attempted, made all the more difficult due to his sheer exhaustion following the Last Great Altercation.
In the end, he’d sort of folded Garden up and tucked it into his wallet.
Not an ideal solution, but it had enabled him to smuggle it out of Plym.
Or not out of Plym, exactly. Garden remained planted on Plymian soil, of course, only no one could find it, even with a map to the exact location.
The only door which led to Garden anymore was the one to his boiler room.
Now that had been a complicated bit of sorcery as well .
. . and very dangerous to perform, considering the strict laws of Ballycastle.
He’d exerted as much energy on deflection and protection wards as he had on the enchantment itself.
Garden, as a work of hedge-wizardry, broke no Brythonian regulations, but the establishing of this portal was against every anti-sorcery law in the book.
Were it to be discovered, Nigel would find himself behind bars faster than he could say, “But I’ve got a good excuse! ”
It was done now, however. And the spell was self-sustaining, sourcing all its ongoing energy from Garden itself, no need to draw from Dire Dimensions. It gave off barely any sorcerous heat anymore. Nigel doubted even a gallant SSSD officer would notice it, unless it was pointed out to him directly.
“Yes, well,” Nigel admitted, “there was, perhaps a little sorcery involved in the, erm, establishing of it all.”
“By which you mean”—Luna drew a long breath through her nostrils, her grip on the doorframe tightening—“you’re a sorcerer.”
Nigel looked down at his feet, rubbing a hand along the back of his neck. Then he nodded.
“Do you . . . do you have a heptagram tattoo?”
“Not on my wrist.”
“Where?”
Nigel flushed. But, figuring it best to come clean, he began to loosen his tie.
Debbie, dislodged from his shoulder by this activity, uttered a raucous cry of protest and took to the air, circling above him rather ominously.
Nigel ignored her, unfastened his collar, and undid the buttons down the front of his shirt.
Pulling the shirt open, he revealed the black tattoo inscribed over his heart.
Rather larger than Miss Talbot’s but also rather easier to conceal—a point the Plymian Authorities had failed to consider when they marked him, and not something Nigel had taken pains to mention either.
Luna whispered something that sounded like a prayer to the Green Mother.
Then, finally, she stepped through the doorway, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, her eyes very large.
She stared at that tattoo, her expression one of intense concentration.
A nervous energy sparked through her, and Nigel got the distinct impression that one stray crack of a twig or flutter of a leaf would cause her to break into flight.
But she didn’t flee. She approached him slowly, as though irresistibly drawn.
When she was close enough that she might reach out and touch the ugly mark, she stopped. Slowly her gaze lifted to meet his, her expression hard. “You know,” she said softly, “if I get tangled up with anything to do with sorcery, they’ll lock me up and throw away the key.”
“I don’t practice sorcery anymore,” Nigel said. “I haven’t practiced in three years.”
“Other than ensorcelling your boiler room door.”
“Well, yes.”
“You swear that’s the last?”
He hesitated, probably a little longer than he should, before nodding.
Luna’s eyes narrowed. “I need to hear you swear it. Swear it on something that matters.”
Nigel pursed his lips, glancing around uncertainly.
Then with a little, “Ah!” he turned and started down a garden path.
He’d progressed several paces before pausing to look back.
Luna stood where he’d left her, arms still wrapped around her body, looking deeply uncertain. “This way, Miss Talbot,” he said.
“Where are you taking me?”
“You said to swear on something that matters.”
“Yes?”
“I’m taking you to . . .” He swallowed and forced himself to finish. “I’m taking you to my father’s grave.”