30. A Garden Grows
W hile Nicodemus slept, Viola returned to the airship and collected his spoils from the dragon’s cave. She sat by his side and cleaned every piece, scrubbing out the blood and ash and polishing them until they shone. When that was done, she tried her hand at sewing his clothes back together. He was probably too vain to want them now that they were ripped, but perhaps he’d appreciate the attempt. She’d discarded his outer robe in the cave, but other bits seemed salvageable… until she sat down with his shirt and discovered it was little more than scraps.
Finally, she went back to the courtyard to look for a branch she could perhaps whittle into a new cane for him, only to find Cordelia had erected a stand for the airship using bones and bracken.
The necromancer was kneeling in the dirt beside the only flowerbed that looked in any kind of order, the one housing a few hardy medicinal herbs.
“Thank you for the stand,” Viola said.
Cordelia shrugged. “The noise of the engine was irritating me. How’s he doing?”
“Still sleeping. I was just—” Viola’s stomach rumbled loudly.
“There’s food in the kitchen,” Cordelia said, still not looking up from the bush she was pruning. “You probably haven’t eaten in a while.”
Viola went to fetch herself a plate, but came back to the courtyard to eat it. She looked around at the withered flower beds and abundance of weeds. It would have made her parents cringe. Sebastian too, although Miranda wouldn’t have minded. Neither she nor Viola had what their grandpa referred to as farm blood. They knew how to shear sheep and sow fields and reap a harvest, but they just didn’t enjoy it as much as the others.
“Nico isn’t much of a gardener,” Cordelia explained, clearly following her gaze. “And neither am I. I tried to plant food when I first came here, but things have a tendency to die when I grow them.”
“Are you sure it’s you, and not the soil?”
“What do you mean?”
“I grew up on a farm,” Viola explained. “Most of these beds aren’t getting enough light, and the soil doesn’t look good. If you like, tomorrow, I could help you with it?”
Cordelia blinked at her, as though expecting some hidden catch. “Thank you,” she finally, as though testing the sound of the words for the first time.
She threw down her shears, and stood up, brushing off her hands on her apron. “I’ll take first watch with Nico,” she told her. “You must be exhausted.”
Viola expected her mind to resist when she laid against the pillow in the room that Cordelia had called ‘hers’, but she’d barely had time to slip into one of Nico’s shirts before she was fast asleep.
Cordelia woke her in the night for her shift.
“He’s still asleep,” she told her, “but—”
“You need real rest. I understand. I don’t mind.”
Cordelia nodded, thankful not to have to explain. Waiting was exhausting. Even if you were able to sleep, you could never surrender deeply enough, liable to wake at the slightest movement.
“Keep a lantern on,” Cordelia told her. “He doesn’t like sleeping in the dark.”
Viola could understand that. He didn’t want to be severed from his shadows.
Cordelia lit another stick of incense before she went, beside a totem of Naiadon, goddess of water and healing.
“You’re a believer?” Viola asked .
Cordelia wrinkled her nose, as if Viola had just uttered some kind of insult. “No. The incense is medicinal, though. Should help with his temperature.”
“But the totem—”
“Nico likes it,” she told her.
“He doesn’t strike me as the type.”
Cordelia shrugged, as if it hardly mattered, and silently slipped out of the room. Viola closed the door behind her, keeping the lantern low beside Nico’s bed, and settled into the wingback chair nearby. He seemed cooler than before, more restful. Zazzy was curled up beside him, but seeing that Viola was awake, he hopped onto her lap instead, desperate to be petted.
She slept again, not well, not much, but she slept. Cordelia woke her in the morning, arriving with a breakfast tray and a dried fish for Azrael.
“Did he wake at all?”
Viola shook her head.
“Good. We want his body to heal as much as possible before he wakes.”
She dosed him up again as Viola picked at the food, not really hungry. After she was done, she wrote Cordelia a list.
“What’s this?”
“Stuff we’ll need if you want to tackle the garden.”
Cordelia’s eyes brightened. “You’ll really teach me?”
“Yes. Can you get everything? I don’t mind—”
“No. I’ll get them.” She paused. “Can I use the airship?”
Viola raised an eyebrow. Citizens of Auro weren’t strictly supposed to fly an airship solo until the age of sixteen and after formal instruction, although the Crown generally turned a blind eye to younger pilots in rural areas in small vessels. Viola had been learning since she was eleven to help out on the farm, proficient by the time she was Cordelia’s age… who would never be able to gain an official licence out here in the woods. “Can you fly?” she asked, trying not to sound condescending.
“A lot better than Nicodemus, that’s for sure.”
Viola laughed. “Sure. But it’s almost out of crystals.”
“Then I’ll stock up on those too.”
Cordelia headed off into Florenwall, and Viola resumed her task from yesterday—whittling Nicodemus a cane. It wouldn’t be as smart as his last one, but it would do until he could find one more to his tastes. She carved a raven, first, which she felt suited him, then a skull. Finally, on a whim, she added a sword. None of the carvings were particularly well done, but she felt you could see very clearly what each piece was. Except maybe the raven. It just looked like a generic bird.
Cordelia returned just as Viola was finishing off. She left Moon Bunny by Nicodemus’ side with strict instructions to fetch them if Nicodemus woke, before dragging Viola out into the garden to show her the supplies, as well as several skeletal creations she’d attached spades and hoes to. They were a mismatch of various animal bones, identifiable mainly by their skulls, but several parts were substituted with wood or metal. Cordelia couldn’t control those parts, but she could control the bones connecting them.
“Fascinating,” said Viola, admiring something that looked a bit like a deer. “And they all listen to you?”
Cordelia nodded, her gaze elsewhere.
“Nicodemus told me he uses gems to boost his power. Do you do something similar?”
Cordelia shook her head. “I don’t need to.”
Viola could understand why people were afraid of necromancy. She could understand why Nicodemus kept Cordelia hidden. But she also couldn’t deny the skill. What could Cordelia do if she didn’t have to live in the shadows?
Assuming, of course, she wanted to leave them.
“What would you like to be?” she asked her, as they set to work pulling up weeds. “I mean, if you can be anything.”
“Besides alive?”
“Yes, besides that.”
Cordelia shrugged. “Most of the time, I’m happy as I am,” she explained. “I like working on my potions and my creations and no one bothering me while I do those things, but sometimes… sometimes I think I’d like to share them with others. I’m not entirely sure what that would make me, but it’s fun to think about.”
“Necromancy isn’t illegal everywhere, you know.”
“I know, but… well, I can’t leave Nico.”
“What if he came with you?”
Cordelia shook her head. “He won’t leave. He loves this place and his revenge too much.”
Viola could understand his attachment to the home he’d built from rock, but she wasn’t sure about his revenge. Revenge couldn’t love him back in the way Cordelia did.
She put aside her questions for now and focused on the garden. They worked for several hours, stripping the weeds, adding the compost, replanting the bushes and herbs where best they could thrive. Viola planted some bulbs in a sunny spot she hoped would flower. At the end, they cleaned off their hands in the small fountain, Cordelia scrubbing her fingers with a brush, the bright blue thread of her prosthetics gleaming in the midday sun .
“Do my fingers make you uncomfortable?” she asked Viola, catching her staring.
“They did,” Viola admitted, knowing Cordelia valued honesty. “But not anymore.”
“What about Nico’s face?”
Viola faltered. Yes, it made her uncomfortable. It made her uncomfortable for an entirely different reason.
“I happen to rather like Nico’s face,” she admitted, filling a goblet with water. “I just don’t like liking it.”
Cordelia wrinkled her nose. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”
“It might do when you’re older.”
“Is this a sex thing?”
“Good grief!” Viola nearly spat out her drink. “What on Auro’s great green fields—you are far too young to—”
“I’m thirteen,” Cordelia reminded her, “and I read a lot. ”
“Right,” said Viola, her shock softening into a smile. “I keep forgetting that.”
It was so easy to forget her age when she was so small, or forget the things that she’d been interested in herself at a similar age. Cordelia turned her back, clicking her fingers to get the skeleton helpers to finish the last of the clearing up. Unlike Nicodemus, the task didn’t seem to tire her in the least.
She turned back to Viola as they set to work, bright and beaming, a smudge of dirt on her cheek. Viola leaned forward to rub it off, withdrawing her hand once she realised what she was doing.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Did I miss a spot?”
“Yes, just—” She gestured with her hand, but Cordelia missed it once again. “May I?”
Cordelia nodded. Viola stepped towards her again, resisting the urge to lick her thumb to smear off the dirt like she used to do with Miranda when she was little. She half expected Cordelia to squirm too, to wriggle away from her with a petulant look on her face, but she stayed still the entire time, not even her gaze moving.
“You look at me strangely sometimes,” Cordelia remarked. “I don’t know what the look means, only that I know it means something. What is it?”
Viola’s throat tightened. “I had a sister, once,” she explained.
Cordelia blinked up at her.
“A brother, too. But my sister… She was unlike you in every other way, but she looked like you. Enough that…”
“Enough that what? ”
Enough that it sometimes hurts to look at you.
“You remind me of her sometimes.”
Cordelia tilted her head. “What was her name?”
“Miranda,” Viola whispered. “Her name was Miranda.”
Cordelia stared at her for a bit, as if she were sorting through a list of things to say, unsure of what the proper protocol was. “Lela.”
“Come again?”
“That’s the other name I like to go by. Not Cordy or Lia. Lee-lah .”
Viola smiled. It suited her. “It’s pretty.”
“I know.”
A breeze drifting over the courtyard, light and full. “I didn’t know that there were other people like us in the world,” Cordelia said eventually. “Like Nico and me. I thought everyone else was the same.”
“But I’m not a—”
“But you are,” Cordelia insisted. “You aren’t scared of us. You don’t hate us. You don’t try to hurt us.”
Oh. That’s what she meant. Not a mancer, not that at all. Cordelia thought Viola was like her and Nico because she was kind. Or the sharp, impatient version of it she usually managed.
Maybe she was like them after all, a sharp stone with smooth patches, a ragged gown of silk, enough left of her to remember what she was.
“Lela, I’m not ever going to hurt you—either of you.” she promised.
Cordelia swallowed. “I really hope that’s true.”