Vadh
She found the garden.
She tells me at breakfast. She found it yesterday, after turning a corner of the temple wall and there it was. The south-facing beds, the basil gone leggy, the wild onion spreading into the border.
“You didn’t tell me you had a garden,” she says.
“You didn’t ask.”
“I’m asking now. Show me what grows there.”
After breakfast, I take her to the beds.
My mother’s beds. The stone wall holds the afternoon heat, and the soil is dark and rich.
I have been watering these beds for years.
My venom runs through the groundwater, thinned to almost nothing by the time it reaches the roots.
Diluted that far, it does not kill. The garden grows anyway.
She kneels in the dirt. She doesn’t pull anything or plant anything. She puts her hands in the soil, closes her fingers around a handful and lifts it to her face. Smells it. Dark earth and root and something green underneath.
She wipes her hands on her pants.
“What needs doing?”
“The basil has gone leggy. It needs cutting back. The onion is spreading past the border.”
She reads the beds the way she reads the channel walls. Then she reaches for the nearest basil stem and tears it at the joint.
“Higher,” I say.
“It’ll grow back.”
“Not from below the node.”
She finds the node. Tears above it.
I have been tending these beds alone for five years. My mother planted them. I have watered them and watched them spread and pulled back what grew too far. Nobody has been here to tear the basil wrong.
“Who planted these beds?” she asks, not looking up.
“My mother.”
She nods and keeps working. “She knew what she was doing. The wall holds the heat.”
I have not said the word mother aloud since she died. It does not hurt the way I expected.
She moves to the onion border and pulls the runners back, her fingers working through the soil, separating the roots from the stone wall.
Her hands are quick in the dirt. She is close enough that I can smell the mineral water in her hair from this morning’s basin wash, and below the mineral, her skin.
Her shoulder presses against my coil where I have settled beside the beds. Contact she could pull away from and doesn’t. The teal is visible at her wrists where her sleeves are pushed back. Deeper than yesterday.
We work the garden in a quiet that is different from the silence in the hall. Warmer. She is beside me in the dirt and her hip is near my coil. She does not move away.
She sits back on her heels and picks a leaf from the nearest herb. Crushes it between her fingers.
“What is this called?”
I tell her the name my mother used for it. The name belongs to no human language. The sounds are longer than human mouths are built for, the vowels shaped by a throat that is not a human throat.
“Say it again.”
I say it again. She repeats it. The first syllable is close. The second collapses. The third doesn’t arrive.
“Again,” she says.
I say it again. She tries. Closer this time. The second syllable holds its shape. The third still falls apart in her mouth. She knows it fell apart. She tries again without being told.
She grins. The first grin I have seen from her. Wide and fast and gone almost before I register it. It is directed at the herb in her hand, not at me, but I am close enough that I catch the edge of it.
I don’t know what to do with my face.
“Once more,” she says, holding up the herb.
I say the word again. She repeats it. Almost right this time. The vowels are still too short, and the ending is clipped where it should be open, but the shape of the word is there. A human mouth wrapping itself around a sound it was never designed to make but getting close.
“I’ll get it,” she says.
I believe her.
That evening, she moves her bedroll. Not to the main hall. To the corridor outside my sleeping chamber. Six feet from my door.
She doesn’t ask. She carries the bedroll from her chamber, sets it on the stone, unrolls it, arranges her pack beside it. She does this while I am in the corridor watching her. Knows I am watching, looks at me, and then gets in it.
I go to my chamber and settle on the stone. Through the doorway I can see the edge of her bedroll. The corner of the cloth, the strap of her pack.
Six feet between my door and where she chose to sleep. She did not ask. She just moved.
I wait until her breathing slows. Then I go to the corridor window. The slit is clogged with vine growth, the thick stems blocking whatever light would reach this section of the passage in the morning. I pull the vines clear. The stems come away in long strips. Behind them, the opening faces east.
She will wake to light now. I cannot stop seeing it. That grin. Wide and fast and directed at a leaf.