Chapter 7
Chapter
Seven
The hallway on the fourth floor of Greymarket Towers was dim and golden, lit by sconces that always flickered like they couldn’t decide whether to commit to gaslight or give up entirely.
Goldie had just paused to unlock her apartment door, keys jingling softly, when the hairs on the back of her neck prickled.
She turned. A figure stood several feet away, coat impeccable, posture straight as ever.
His face was sharply symmetrical, almost too much so. His skin carried the smooth, silvery texture of birch bark, underlaid by a faint shimmer of green. His hair was a dark, vine-like mop that seemed to drink in the light instead of reflecting it.
The Thornfather’s Assistant.
The Thornfather had woken unexpectedly last fall, sending a ripple through the building like a root wrenching under the foundation.
The Assistant arrived three days later. No one remembered him moving in, but by the end of the week he was a fixture, unsettling as a draft you could never find the source of.
No one quite knew what or who he was, only that he served the Thornfather with ritual precision.
Though he kept mostly to himself and the atrium, he was occasionally seen slipping through Greymarket’s halls at strange hours, or striding out of a bookstore downtown with a scroll tucked under one arm.
The first time Goldie had met him, she’d tried her usual charm, cooing a brilliant (in her opinion) line about how he looked like he’d just stepped out of a gothic botanical catalog.
He hadn’t so much as blinked. Just stared at her with leaf-shadow-green eyes in a way that made her feel like he’d seen through her glitter and down to bone… and found her lacking.
For someone who’d built a life dazzling brightly enough to keep the dark at bay, that had shaken her. More than she liked to admit.
“Looking for someone?” she asked, forcing lightness into her voice, a polite sparkle to hide the tightening in her chest.
The Assistant tilted his head slightly. “Merely passing through,” he said, his voice low and smooth, but the words seemed to rustle, as though a whole forest had whispered them in unison.
Goldie gave a brittle laugh and waved a hand with more flourish than necessary. “Well, don’t let me stop you.”
He didn’t smile, but something in the set of his shoulders shifted, like a plant orienting toward unseen light. The sconces down the hallway dimmed in unison, as if leaning in to listen.
“You smell of sun and change,” the Assistant murmured.
The words crawled down her spine, snagging in the spaces between her ribs. Somewhere behind the plaster of the walls, a pipe let out a single hollow knock, like Greymarket had seconded the thought. Her heart kicked into a faster rhythm, but she only arched a brow.
“Keeping tabs on me?” she asked, voice sweet and edged. “How flattering. I didn’t know you cared.”
His gaze didn’t soften. If anything, it sharpened, pupils gone deep green-black, their edges bleeding outward into his irises like ink in water. “I see what must be seen.”
The lightbulb above her door buzzed and steadied as he spoke, haloing him in faint gold.
Goldie’s lips curved upward, the reflex automatic even as her brain spun like a hamster on a wheel. Sparkle, Goldie. Charm it, disarm it, dazzle it until it forgets what it came for. Make it go away.
She winked and let out a bright, tinkling laugh. “Well. I’m pleased to be seen.”
She reached out, almost a reflex, and brushed her fingers against his chest where a human heart might beat.
The Assistant looked down at her hand like it was a curious growth that had sprouted overnight in a tended garden bed. Before she could snatch her hand back, his own shot up and clasped her fingers.
Heat crawled up Goldie’s neck at the sudden grip. He studied her hand intently, tilting it as though there might be runes he had yet to decode etched into her skin. His thumb brushed across her palm like a botanist testing the grain of a leaf.
She swallowed hard, her heart thudding against her ribs like it wanted out. Then she let out a laugh, bright and a little too loud, and eased her hand from his grasp as gently as she could.
“So, uh, loving what you and the Thornfather have been doing to the atrium,” she blurted, words tumbling out like marbles across a polished floor. “It’s very… leafy.”
She flapped a hand in what might have been a gesture of appreciation.
“I’m not great with plants,” she added quickly, already regretting this conversational detour.
“Sig—you know, Sig Samora? Used to be a Harbinger? All wingy and Doom-y and stuff? Anyway, he’s started sighing every time I bring home a potted anything.
Real mournful sighs. Like he’s already writing a eulogy for it. ”
Did I just admit to murdering his kindred? Oh gods and goddesses, please. Let the ground open up. Let the Greymarket implode. Let the wallpaper catch fire. Anything.
The Assistant’s brow furrowed slightly, lips pulling down. “Perhaps it is not that you are poor with plants,” he said at last. “Perhaps you burn so brightly, they cannot compete. They give themselves over to you, starved of air and light, until they wither in awe.”
The words landed in her chest like a stone dropped into deep water, rippling through places she usually kept still. Heat rose, unbidden—not just at the praise, but at the way he said it, as though it were an observation rather than a kindness.
She opened her mouth to laugh it off, to drag her sparkle back into place, to make it a joke before it became something else, but he was nodding, as if some verdict had been reached.
“Be steady, Marigold Flynn,” he said.
The sconce above her door flickered, buzzed, and went dark. When her eyes adjusted, he was already walking away, the outline of his coat sharp against the dimming hall.
Goldie stood frozen, cheeks flushed, heart hammering, with the unmistakable sense that something very strange and very important had just occurred.