Chapter 18
LILIA
Imissed my family.
It had only been days since I’d last seen them, but it seemed like months. Concern for Henri’s health was always in the back of my mind, although I found ways to distract myself here at Valgarde—with the plants and books on botany and magic…and Hadrien.
Perhaps I’d write them a letter. Whether I’d have any way of getting it to them, I didn’t know. But at least if I got my feelings out on paper, it might not keep me awake at night.
Once I returned inside and cleaned up, I headed into the library in search of some decent parchment and ink. I searched the desk and found parchment, but the inkwell was dry. There must be more inside one of the cabinets.
I worked my way through the lower cabinets first, finding the items that had accumulated over decades, including old maps, stacks of correspondence from names I didn’t recognize, dried flowers pressed between the pages of an old book.
The library had a way of pulling my interest from my task, as each new discovery captured my attention, leading to more questions.
Focus.
I continued down the lower cabinets, bringing a candle to help me see inside their depths. Nothing useful. Old ledgers. A rolled piece of vellum that crumbled at the edges when I touched it. When I shifted to the right, I saw it.
A display case tucked deep within a cabinet. It sat on the lowest shelf, half-hidden in the shadows. Something was inside it, but I couldn’t make it out in the dim light.
I crouched lower and brought the candle closer.
Through the glass, I discerned the shape of a flower. A poppy, perhaps, but something about it looked wrong. Some of the petals were a deep garnet, but others—gray. Stone gray.
I gasped. What in the…
How could a flower exist here in the darkness, hidden on the lower shelves far from any sunlight? It couldn’t be real. And why was it so peculiar?
Half soft petal, half hard stone. Bizarrely frozen mid-bloom.
The candlelight caught it at an angle, the way it caught frost on a windowpane, and for a moment the stone petals seemed to shimmer, almost alive.
I stared at it for a long time, and the silence in the library felt more pronounced, as if holding its breath, waiting.
I froze, the rising sense of cold dread rushing through me.
My fingers reached out, fumbling for the cabinet latch, before I realized I was opening it.
“Don’t—”
The word came out strangled, pained. I jerked upright and spun around. Hadrien stood at the entrance of the library. His arm was half-extended, as if reaching for me or the cabinet. He lowered his arm to the side and didn’t move. Didn’t even seem to breathe.
We stared at each other, and heat rushed to my cheeks, as if I was caught doing something wrong.
The fire crackled somewhere behind him, casting his face half in gold and half in shadow. His gray eyes were fixed on the open cabinet with an expression I couldn’t decipher. It wasn’t fury, no, it appeared closer to anguish.
What tormented him so? The poppy?
His gaze shifted to the cabinet, and mine followed.
With the glass open, I could see more details.
The gray crept inward from the outer edges, advancing on the crimson like rot.
Most of the petals on the outer ring were completely stone.
The ones inside them were mid-transition, red at the center darkening to gray at the tips.
The gray didn’t bleed inward cleanly, but feathered, the way ink spreads through wet paper, reaching into the last red petals.
The way the darker gray threaded like marble in Hadrien’s skin.
The only sound was the fire and the soft tick of the cooling stone walls and my pulse, which had grown deafening in my ears. I straightened slowly and turned to face Hadrien.
He hadn’t moved. He was still watching me, and his gray eyes appeared resigned, haunted.
I suspected he’d waited for this moment for a long time and had hoped it would never come.
“Hadrien,” I asked, just louder than a whisper. “What is this?”