Chapter 22
LILIA
Ineeded to do something, but what?
What could I do to help Hadrien, a gargoyle cursed by a queen who exploited dark magic, when I was simply a villager, a green witch at home in the garden?
I didn’t know anything about dark magic, so how would I go about even beginning to think of some way?
Hadrien said there wasn’t one, and he should know since he had shifter magic.
Still, we’d accomplished something together while working at the wards.
I could feel it—it was unlike anything I’d ever accomplished before.
Sure, I’d worked with plants for remedies and ailments for as long as I could remember.
But to come up with a way to help protect the vast perimeter of Valgarde?
That was something I couldn’t have done myself. Whatever magic Hadrien had within him was powerful, incredibly powerful. Yet he believed the queen’s curse couldn’t be broken.
I refused to believe it. I couldn’t just give up and let him turn to stone like the rest of the gargoyles on their endless, silent watch around Valgarde.
To see him frozen like that during the day, dark lines silhouetted against the sunlight, was already horrific enough, but at least we knew that he’d break free come sundown.
No, I wouldn’t give up. I threw myself into finding a way, just as I had when I had access to Hadrien’s library at Valgarde.
Back in our simple cottage, I worked in my small section with a worktable and a shelf mounted on the wall above it, stocked with dried herbs in jars, worn books, and other plants I’d grown and harvested, such as feverfew, moonwort, and stonecrop.
I knew the lines of each stem and leaf the way I recognized the familiar lines in my palms. I opened the jars and sniffed their distinct scents.
The green world had always steadied me, and I relied on that more than ever.
Every morning I rose before dawn and lit candles and opened books, searching through older magic manuscripts my grand-mère had left me with cramped handwriting on pages that smelled of parchment and damp earth.
I was looking for clues. Any clues. Something that would give me an understanding of his curse.
After three days, I found something called stone sickness in one of the oldest manuscripts with pages distorted from stains and time, so that I couldn’t decipher all the words.
But I got the gist. The curse was among the darkest, one of binding and encroachment, the stone claiming what was living until nothing living remained.
Like the petals of a poppy.
No known remedy.
I pushed the image away, refusing to believe it, and kept searching.
If there was a curse, there had to be a reversal. The universe consisted of opposites.
Over many more hours, I cross-referenced what I found among the spells in the ancient texts with the more modern books I’d used for healing with plants.
Plants known to resist magical encroachment, such as ash bark and black hellebore root, had been used in centuries-old curse reversals.
Mistletoe was harvested at solstice. I mapped connections the way roots mapped beneath soil, each one leading somewhere until it abruptly stopped.
Most paths followed the same route and led me nowhere.
But then, I came across something I wasn’t even looking for here in my family’s cottage. It was a drawing of a tree that looked familiar. The paint on the page with the silvery petals. The one in Valgarde’s courtyard.
The tree that Hadrien’s father had given to his mother on their wedding day.
Now it had a name: l’arbre miroir.
My heart quickened and I kept reading. It wasn’t an ordinary tree but one with extraordinary magic. Its leaves didn’t just absorb light but returned it, catching and redirecting whatever fell upon them. I traced my fingers over the paint strokes on the parchment. Incredible.
I only gave myself a few minutes to marvel over the magic of that tree before I resumed my search.
On the fifth day after I’d left Valgarde, I found something.
Buried in one of the oldest manuscripts, one with the most water damage, I read a passage about what the old witches had called petrification sickness. Powerful dark magic that worked like slow suffocation, turning living tissue to mineral.
I leaned back and pieced together what I was learning.
It had to be another name for the stone sickness.
Only this book noted a potential remedy.
The counteragent wasn’t a single plant but a preparation.
Three elements that individually had modest properties but together created what the text called a dissolution of false stone.
Moonwort for reversal. Rowan resin to break enchantments laid by dark practitioners. And the rarest—a flower called veilbloom, which grew only in the deep forest margins where magic pooled in the soil.
I sat back and stared at the page.
I had moonwort. Rowan resin I could collect in the forest. But veilbloom. Where could I find it?
I studied the page, rummaging through memory. I’d seen it before, but where?
I tapped my chin as I searched my mental catalog of plants.
Yes! I remembered where. It was off a path leading to Valgarde, one of the routes Hadrien and I had taken on our evening treks to repair the wards. The veilbloom was small and pale pink, and it grew in clusters along the mossy roots of the oldest trees. My pulse quickened.
It wasn’t a guaranteed cure. The text warned caution about all the ways that the counterspell could go wrong. I had to be careful and I would. If I could harvest fresh veilbloom on the walk back to Valgarde and prepare the compound correctly…
I pressed my hand flat over the page and then pressed it to my racing heart.
Hadrien, hold on…
My mother was in the kitchen when I came out of my room with my satchel packed with the manuscript and the moonwort.
She stood at the hearth in her dressing robe, stirring something that smelled of chamomile and honey.
She looked at my packed bag and my traveling cloak but said nothing.
The fire popped softly. Outside, the sky was lightening at the edges, a blue-gray bridging the nighttime shadows to the color of day.
She inhaled deeply and let it out. “You’re going back.”
“I have to,” I said. “He’s cursed, Mom. By the queen.” I’d given her a quick overview of the curse of his men, the poppy… “And I found something in Grand-mère’s book that I have to try.”
She tipped her head. “What did you find?”
I pulled out the manuscript and laid it on the table.
“A counter-preparation—plant-based, rooted in old magic. Hadrien and I, we did something before, something incredible, when we were repairing the wards. And I think if we entwine our magic again…” My voice trailed off.
What I was proposing was so far beyond magic I’d ever thought possible, but I had to believe.
The alternative with what would happen to Hadrien was too unbearable to conceive. “I have to see if it would help him.”
She brought two cups of fragrant tea to the table and sat across from me, wrapping both hands around hers the way she did for deeper conversations.
“Is that the only thing pulling you back?” she asked quietly.
I opened my mouth to answer quickly. Closed it again.
The fire crackled. A bird sang outside and went quiet. My mother watched me with patient understanding.
“No,” I admitted.
She waited.
I turned my cup slowly in my hands. “He let me go, Mom. Told me to come home even though I could see what it cost him. We developed a”—I pursed my lips as I searched for the word—“connection.”
She reached across the table and covered my hand; hers was warm from her tea.
“Then go,” she said simply.
I nodded, swallowing a lump wedged in my throat. My family had gone through so much and a part of me weighed heavy with guilt for deciding to leave them. But someone else needed me more.
“Be careful,” she murmured.
“I promise.”
The forest path was familiar now. That should have been comforting.
I gathered the resin first.
I harvested carefully, the way my grand-mère had instructed. Take what you need. Do no harm. Give thanks.
I did so, tucked the vials into my satchel, and kept moving.
That was when I heard it.
A soft crack behind me of a branch underfoot. I stopped and turned.
Nothing. Just trees and pale morning light filtering through in long, thin shafts, and the ordinary sounds of a forest waking up. Wind in the upper branches. A bird somewhere high above.
I had to be imagining things. Turning back, I continued on the path.
The second sound came several minutes later. Not a branch this time, but a rustling, low and deliberate, somewhere in the thicker undergrowth to my left where the light didn’t reach. I slowed without stopping, straining to hear over my own footsteps.
Silence.
I knew the sounds of the wilderness. I’d grown up studying them—the particular rustle of a startled deer, the skittering retreat of something small, the creak of old wood settling. This wasn’t any of those.
I kept my pace even, trying to keep my footsteps as silent as possible. My hand moved protectively over the strap of my satchel. Don’t react.
I passed the wards, closing my eyes as if to embrace their protection. But Hadrien had warned me it would take weeks to seal, so whatever I felt would be a placebo.
The break in the woods finally appeared ahead, the bright light a beacon in a tunnel that drew me to it.
Although my feet itched to sprint toward it, I needed the veilbloom.
After two deep, calming breaths, I moved with light steps over to the old wood where I’d seen it.
There, mingled with the moss on old roots, the tiny, pale pink petals bloomed.
I pulled clippers out of my satchel and harvested some, carefully stowing it in a smaller bag.
Then I thanked the forest for its gifts and resumed the trek toward Valgarde.
More sounds behind me, further back. The movement low and rhythmic, like something trying to be silent, just as I had been.
My heart knocked against my ribs. Slowly, I turned.
At the far edge of the path, where the trees grew densest and the shadows pooled deepest, something shifted. Too tall for an animal. Too still. A dark figure, or the suggestion of one, standing in the distance, there and gone as the shadows folded and rearranged themselves.
It’s nothing, I consoled myself. A trick of the light. The trees playing games with the morning shadows. Nobody’s there watching you.
I turned back to the path and told myself to believe it.
With the way my heart pounded, I didn’t believe it. So I rushed down the familiar path.
The stone walls of Valgarde appeared through the tree line ahead, and something in me broke loose. I stopped walking and ran, my boots pounding the packed earth, and clutched the satchel to my side, protecting its contents as if they were both precious and terrifyingly fragile.
I broke out of the forest and fell forward, breathing hard, and gazed up at the rising sun. Hadrien loomed overhead, his gray stone magnificent against the light of day.
Raising my hand, I gave him a small wave and then pressed my eyes shut. Please don’t let me be too late.