Chapter One #2
The carriage stopped. A small stone chapel stood on the hillside nearby. Townsfolk trickled through the doors, coming to pay their respects. Up above, the church bells tolled, signaling the start of the proceedings.
The door of the carriage opened. Her father exited, helping her grandmother down, and then Elswyth was alone.
After the vicar said his piece and the mourners had cleared into the church courtyard, Elswyth stood atop the hill with her father, watching as the empty coffin was lowered into the ground.
She’d pushed her grandmother’s wheelchair to the cemetery, where the grave sat beneath an ancient elderwood tree.
Elderwood trees were often planted in cemeteries.
Or rather, cemeteries often sprung up around elderwood trees.
The leaves of the elderwood made a distinct whispering sound when moved by the wind, which the ancients had believed were the voices of the dead.
The trees themselves were completely without color, bone-white from the deepest root to the tip of the highest leaf, and at night they glowed faintly, casting eerie white light over their graveyards.
She supposed it had never been an auspicious namesake for their house.
And now the last remaining members of the House Elderwood stood before an empty coffin and an empty grave and prepared to pay respects to a person who was not there. Who might not—Elswyth dared to think—even be dead.
Her mother’s grave sat next to Persephone’s, its headstone already beginning to fade. The wind from the sea bore down relentlessly upon the stones. Her ancestors’ graves were little more than nubs, their headstones worn down by the centuries, their names lost to time.
They stood in a circle of black-clad mourners.
There stood the vicar, saying his final verse: The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Gates of Eden stand forever.
A few lords had come to pay their respects, but not many; the House of Elderwood—once kings in their own right—had long since faded into obscurity.
A crowd of townsfolk waited behind the nobility.
They wore their best clothes, little more than cotton tunics and breeches or a sheath of dyed wool for a gown.
Fungus had blighted last year’s crop, and the common folk had suffered for it; Elswyth could see the bones in a small boy’s wrists, jutting out beneath his finest cotton shirt.
The wind stung the skin of her cheeks and tore at her veil, but she bore it, persisting even through the cold and the endless dirge of the bagpipes.
Persephone would have hated it—there were not enough flowers, nor any eligible bachelors.
If Persephone could have planned her own funeral, Elswyth thought, it might have actually been enjoyable.
But Persephone was not there. She would never plan another party.
She would never don another gaudy dress, or steal another bottle of wine, or tease Elswyth for being boring and bookish.
She would never love, or cry, or dance, or gossip.
Would never wed some silly man and bear spoiled children as she always meant to.
No, Elswyth thought, setting her jaw. There was no body.
The police might have stopped looking, but that did not mean Persephone was dead.
London was a city of millions, endless miles of twisting streets and darkened alleys.
Somewhere in that faraway city, Persephone might still be alive.
Her father and the police might be willing to give up on her sister, but Elswyth would not—she could not.
A line formed to pay respects. Elswyth was second.
She watched her father kneel in the snow, whispering.
He summoned a clutch of funeral lilies to his hand and dropped them onto the casket.
When he stood, he kept his head low, so that the others did not see his tears.
Elswyth bristled at this, that he would weep for Persephone even as he turned his back on her.
Elswyth stepped toward the grave, staring at the casket of polished oak. She closed her eyes, summoning a bouquet of asphodel from the veins at her wrist. Then she dropped it onto the coffin. My regrets follow you to the grave, dear sister.
When Elswyth had finished she walked away quickly.
She did not want to see the pitying looks of the other mourners.
Did not want them to wonder why she shed no tears, why her face was a mask of rage rather than grief.
But when she returned to her grandmother’s chair, she found it empty.
Elswyth spotted the old woman across the graveyard, standing beneath the elderwood tree.
She hurried to her. It was considered bad luck to touch an elderwood, but her grandmother seemed not to mind. She rested her old hands on the wide trunk and mumbled to herself.
“Grandmama?” Elswyth said. She put a hand on her grandmother’s back and tried to lead her away, but it seemed as though the old woman was fixed there, rooted to the ground.
“Persephone?” her grandmother whispered.
“No, Grandmama. It’s me. It’s Elswyth.”
“Where is Persephone?” Her grandmother turned to face Elswyth, her ancient face shifting beneath the veil.
The question broke Elswyth’s heart. What was she to say? Would her grandmother understand if she told her the truth? And what was the truth?
“I don’t know, Grandmama.”
Her grandmother turned back to the tree. Her fingers caressed it, moving over the eyelike knots on the trunk. “With the bones now,” she said, “under the earth.”
Elswyth shook her head. Now, of all times, tears came.
They pricked her eyes, making her voice waver.
“No. No, I don’t believe that. Persephone is gone, that much is true.
I don’t know where, and I don’t know why.
” Elswyth took her grandmother’s hands from the tree, placing them in her own.
Her voice shook with anger. “But I’m going to find her.
I’m going to find whoever did this to her. ”
A sudden wind tore across the cliffs. It lifted her grandmother’s veil, revealing the horror beneath: a face half-warped and knotted with wood, lichen crusting her jaw, twigs sprouting from beneath folds of skin, and galls dotting her flesh like pustules.
The warping—that curse of all floromancers—had taken most of her body now, as it had her mind.
Her grandmother stared into the distance, clouded pupils set amid green veins.
But in that moment, under the tree, she seemed almost lucid.
She looked at Elswyth as though she recognized her.
“As you should, my dear. And Elswyth?” Her old hand gripped Elswyth’s wrist with shocking strength. “When you find him: Kill the bastard.”
Elswyth shivered at the venom in the old woman’s voice. Then, as suddenly as her grandmother’s lucidity came, it vanished. The grip on her wrists slackened, and recognition left the old woman’s eyes. They began to drift, focused on nothing.
“Persephone?” she asked, her voice a whisper once more.
Elswyth frowned, leading her grandmother toward her chair and lowering her in.
Elswyth took the handles of the wheelchair and they left the cemetery, her grandmother mumbling about grapes. Behind her, the leaves of the elderwood whispered.