Chapter Thirty
Willow trees, including numerous species from the genus Salix, are cultivated for their beauty as well as their medicinal use in the relief of pain. In floriography, willow usually means mourning. It can also mean freedom.
Elswyth held a box in her hands. Inside were ashes.
She’d collected them herself, from the ruins of the Royal Gardens.
She’d walked the corridors of shattered glass and through the remains of rare flowers, ascended into ash.
And she’d taken some home with her. Perhaps the ashes held some of Persephone.
Perhaps they held Silas, and Aranyani, and even Dr. Gall, although no bodies were recovered from the wreckage.
Perhaps she was laying them all to rest, the tangle of their lives.
Elswyth knelt and dug her hands into the earth. She pulled up the dirt, handful by handful, until a little grave sat before her. Then she placed the box inside and smoothed the dirt back over. When her hands came away, snowdrops sprouted there.
After she’d wept for the last time, she stood by the elderwood tree and looked out over the sea. Her grandmother sat next to her, in her chair.
“Elswyth?” she croaked.
“Yes, Grandmama?”
“Where is Persephone?”
Elswyth placed a hand on her grandmother’s. “She is home now. She is safe.”
Her grandmother smiled. “Good.”
Elswyth took the handles of her grandmother’s chair and turned her away from the sea, down the path.
Her grandmother mumbled as they walked. “Elswyth… a forest of souls… a prince of leaves…”
Elswyth patted the old woman’s shoulder. “Enough of that now, Grandmama. It’s time to go home.”
She wheeled her grandmother across the cemetery. Around Elswyth’s neck, the amberheart glinted in the sunshine. A faint whisper carried past her on the breeze. Behind her, white flowers washed over the hill in a wave, even to the distance, like she walked on a field of snow.
When Elswyth returned to Elderwood House, a footman took her grandmother’s chair and wheeled it away. Elswyth peeled off her gloves, and her lady’s maid removed her coat.
Mrs. Rose appeared in the hallway. She held a baby in her hands, a small, ruddy-faced boy with silvery-blond hair. He had the prince’s bright blue eyes, which stared at Elswyth with curious intensity.
Mrs. Rose beamed. “Percy has something to show you,” she said. She gave the boy a bounce, and he smiled, tucking his head into her hair. She kissed him on the cheek, and then set him on the ground, supporting him by his arms.
“Go on… go to Mama!” Mrs. Rose said.
To her surprise, Percy took a step, then another. He reached out to her, then collapsed and began to cry.
Mrs. Rose pursed her lips. “Well, two inches farther than yesterday. We’ll try again tomorrow!”
She bent down, scooped Percival up, and then handed him to Elswyth.
She took him awkwardly, looking into his eyes.
She hadn’t quite taken to motherhood the way she’d hoped to, but she did love the boy, in her own way.
She brought him close and kissed him on the head, savoring the pure scent of his hair, so much like Persephone’s. Then she handed him back to Mrs. Rose.
“Your father has requested you,” Mrs. Rose said. “He’s in the study.”
“Right. Have tea sent up, will you? I’m famished.”
Elswyth handed her parasol and hat to the lady’s maid. Mrs. Rose turned to the girl. “You heard her—tea, sandwiches, and cakes to the study.”
The girl curtsied. “Of course, Lady Gall,” she said nervously. Then she fled.
Elswyth bristled at the name. She’d asked the staff to call her Elswyth, but they still used her formal title.
She turned back to Mrs. Rose. “I never said anything about cakes.”
“Of course not. Those are for me.”
Elswyth smiled. Mrs. Rose had taken quickly to being her head of staff in the year since they’d left London. It helped, of course, that Elswyth was now one of the richest women in England.
“You know, you should really wait until the staff isn’t around to practice walking. He’s supposed to be three months old.”
Mrs. Rose scoffed. “He’s advanced for his age. A prodigy!” She nuzzled his head, then wrinkled her nose. “A prodigy who needs a changing.” Then she set off down the hall, calling for servants.
Elswyth put her gloves on the rack and then went up the stairs. She’d taken her rooms in the wing where her mother’s chambers used to be. Gall’s funds had financed the reconstruction of the house, even her mother’s old greenhouse, where Elswyth had established her own small laboratory.
Her father waited in his study, drinking a steaming mug of tea.
He looked more hale than he had in the previous months.
The warping on his face was gone, and she’d excised most of the growths on his body.
A tube snaked from his arm to a contraption sitting on a rack nearby.
Amber fluid flowed from the device and into his veins.
He was healthier, thanks to her treatments, but the prolonged sickness had taken its toll.
Gray consumed his thinning hair, and small red veins showed in his nose.
But in the absence of drink—and the financial stress on their house—he seemed rested somehow.
Perhaps knowing the truth about Persephone contributed to this, as well.
The curtains to the study were open, and sunlight poured through. When he turned the pages of the book in his lap, dust swam through the air.
“Are you finished?” Elswyth said, moving into the room.
She took a seat across from him in a beam of sunlight.
It filled her, restoring her spirits after the long day.
Not that she needed the vitae anymore—the amberheart provided a seemingly unlimited supply, although she knew that was not possible.
It seemed to her that the vitae within was condensed somehow, made so solid it had become stone.
She never felt tired after using floromancy now, never fainted or starved herself. Having so much power was intoxicating.
The only downside were the dreams. She couldn’t be sure that they were connected, and yet the strange dreams only occurred when she wore the stone to sleep.
Sometimes, she saw Persephone, trapped in her tree.
Sometimes, she saw a giant made from shifting dark leaves with antlers like branches casting long shadows over the earth.
But most of the time she saw Silas, trapped in amber like an insect, his eyes darting back and forth, pleading with her to let him out. Those dreams troubled her the most.
She had thought… Well, she had briefly considered the possibility that Silas might not be dead.
She did not see him die, after all, although he was surely gravely injured when the ceiling collapsed.
And his body had not been recovered in the wreckage.
It was silly, she knew. Perhaps wishful thinking, or perhaps a delusion driven by guilt.
Silas had known about Persephone. He had kept that knowledge from her, and she would never forgive him.
But as time had passed, she began to accept that Silas had just been another insect trapped in Gall’s web.
He had loved someone and had been willing to do anything to get her back.
Was that so different from what Elswyth was willing to do for Persephone?
Silas must be dead. And yet… something whispered to her that he might have somehow survived.
Gall had displayed impossible feats of floromancy, thanks to the amberheart.
And Silas had worn the amberheart often…
Was there some way he’d been able to heal himself?
Elswyth again confronted the fact that she did not understand what was possible or impossible anymore.
Floromancy had proven time and time again that it had ways of hiding its secrets.
Her father lifted the book in his hands. “I’m very nearly finished. I must admit, Elswyth, when you told me you were writing a book, I imagined something more… exciting.”
Elswyth smiled. Her lady’s maid entered, bringing her tea. She thanked her, taking her cup and picking at a plate of cucumber sandwiches. “You know I could only ever write the truth.”
Her father closed the book with a snap and then handed it over to her. She took it, admiring the cover, with its golden words embossed over a field of green leaves. Applications of Floromancy in the Age of Industry, by Lady Elswyth Gall, née Elderwood.
She’d written the book over the nine months she’d spent locked away, pretending to bear her “son.” Dr. Gall’s estates—which she’d quickly sold—contained additional laboratories and journals, full of puzzling theories.
She’d studied them extensively, adding her own research on the living engine, and that had formed the backbone for the book.
Her debut was making its rounds within academia, and preliminary reviews were reluctantly positive—she was still a woman, after all.
Now, at least, they had to accept that she was a brilliant one.
She’d already been invited to continue her research at both Cambridge and Oxford.
“Yes, but… I suppose it was not the truth I expected.”
“We’ve been over this before,” Elswyth said.
“And you know my stance,” he said.
Elswyth sighed. “I feel the same. But I will not expose Gall or the queen.”
“Though they deserve it,” her father said. He looked at a portrait of Persephone on the far wall.
“Perhaps,” Elswyth said. She thought of Dr. Gall at the end of his life—how his voice had changed, how the ivy had crawled beneath his skin, how he’d spoken about the amberheart.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that, like everyone else, Gall was influenced by forces beyond his understanding.
Still, she had no proof of this. Only a feeling.
A whisper, somewhere in the back of her mind.
“Regardless, to expose Gall would be to put myself in danger, and his alleged son. And to accuse the queen of involvement would be suicide for all of us. I will not endanger Percy.”