22. Idrilia
IDRILIA
"A specimen may survive transplantation but refuse to thrive. Keeping it from dying is the first step. The next step is either to replicate the conditions of its birthplace or to return it to its native soil. The rest is up to Elurion."
—Professor Ertozen Asuker, Principles of Botanical Transplantation
The Silver Princess was going to survive.
I knelt on the flagstones of my courtyard and watched the temperature gauge hold at exactly the value I'd calculated, and for the first time in two weeks, I let myself believe that she wasn't going to die.
Somehow, against all odds, I'd kept her alive until the recirculating chiller the university built for me finally arrived.
It was an ugly thing, a squat box of thermoelectric plates and a coolant loop borrowed from the cryobiology bench, never intended to nurse a flower.
It hummed against the enclosure I'd rebuilt around it, drawing the heat off the glass in a continuous, patient pull rather than my old method of fighting the warmth in losing increments.
I'd spent three days fitting it, sealing the seams, recalibrating the gauge, sleeping in snatches on the garden bench so I could wake and check the readings.
It had worked.
Inside the glass, the Silver Princess was reviving.
When I'd found her, the petals had blazed like captured starlight, but by the time I'd unwrapped her container in the hauler, they'd faded to the gray of a deathbed, and through the worst of last week they'd stayed that way, curled and translucent, the metallic root filaments hanging slack in soil that gave them nothing.
Now two of the petals had brightened toward a healthy pearl, and a single new root, thread-thin and pale, reached downward into the substrate instead of groping uselessly at the air.
She was rallying. I had pulled her back from the edge.
I wanted to feel triumph, to feel the pride of accomplishment, but I couldn't. The price had been too steep.
Two men had died for this flower. I would not insult them by pretending the loss was balanced by the gain, because it never would be. Saving the Silver Princess returned nothing to their families.
But if she lived, if I could one day coax a bloom from her and, from her roots, derive the medicine Professor Haldren believed she carried, then Moran and Voser had at least not died for a corpse rotting in a moss-lined sack.
They had died for something that went on living.
I needed that to be true so badly, and watching the new root reach for purchase, I could almost believe that it was.
"Come sit with me," Gavon said from his bench. "That flower is not going to do better because you are watching it nonstop. On the contrary. It might find your hovering intrusive."
Was he jealous? Resentful because all my attention was dedicated to the Princess?
I chuckled. "It's a flower, Gavon. It's not a person. It doesn't care if I look or don't look at it."
"Could have fooled me. I heard you talking to it like it was your baby."
Definitely resentful.
I didn't dignify that even though it was true. I had been talking to the Princess a lot and praying to Elurion to keep her alive.
Gavon was arranged in the morning sun with his splinted ankle propped on a cushion and a notebook he was supposed to be writing in but wasn't. He looked like an advertisement for graceful convalescence.
His blond hair was freshly washed and slicked back, and his linen shirt unwrinkled.
Two weeks of recovery had treated him better than two weeks of nursing a dying plant had treated me.
"She's doing better," I said. "So maybe talking to it helped, but it was probably the chiller that holds the temperature steady."
"Congratulations. Now you can stop sleeping in the garden like a hermit and come back to sleep with me in our bed."
I didn't turn to look at him, but I could imagine his pouty expression. Instead, I sat back on my heels and looked at the new root.
The chiller solved only part of the problem.
The Silver Princess needed more than the freezing temperatures of her native heights. She needed the magnetic fields that ran through the Elucian rock to feed on.
Professor Haldren's monograph had been right about everything.
Up on the ledge, I'd watched her copper-bright filaments weave through the stone along the magnetic lines, using them the way a vine used a trellis.
I'd measured the field strength up there with my instruments and felt the readings climb the higher we'd gone.
I thought I could compensate with artificial magnetism, but I wasn't fooling the Princess. It wasn't the same.
I could chill her. I couldn't magnetize her, not with a field strong enough to feed a plant that had evolved at thirteen hundred meters on a mineral-veined slope.
"What's the matter?" Gavon asked. "Why are you frowning again?"
I sighed and turned to him. "Survival isn't the same as health.
She needs the magnetism, and I can't give it to her.
She may never bloom again, and she certainly won't set seed.
I can't propagate her. One specimen teaches me almost nothing.
To study her properly, to breed a hardier strain, to actually derive anything from her, I'd need her in situ.
On the slopes where she grows. Across the border. "
The words sat in the cold morning air between us.
Across the border meant Elucia. It meant another expedition into the range that had already swallowed Moran and Voser and very nearly Gavon, and I had sworn that I would never again make a decision that put other people's lives in my hands on that mountain.
I'd meant it.
I shelved the thought, but it refused to cool all the way. Some ember of it kept its heat at the back of my mind, a pull I couldn't reason away toward a place that had cost me far too much but held the only thing that could complete my work.
"You know that you can't go back there. Just keep her for decoration, living in that box and glowing faintly, like a very expensive nightlight."
"Your Highness." Ursa walked outside, curtsied to me, and cast a haughty look down her nose at Gavon. "You asked me to remind you about the fitting."
"Oh, yes. The fitting." I rose to my feet. "I wish I could forget."
It was the third one this week.
"You need to wash up beforehand, Your Highness."
"Yes." I turned to Gavon. "Do you want to go inside or are you going to stay out here?"
"I'll stay." He sighed dramatically and pulled the pen from where he'd tucked it behind his ear. "I'll stay out here and continue working on my script."
"Good luck," I said as I followed Ursa inside.
She closed the glass doors behind us and snorted. "He doesn't need luck. It is I who needs it to fix those deformed feet of yours, Your Highness."
"My feet are not deformed."
"Whatever you say, Your Highness."
In the bathroom, Ursa had prepared a soaking station, with one bowl on the floor next to a chair and another one on a side table next to it.
Both contained warm water and an assortment of oils intended to soften my calluses.
She wedged my feet in the basin while I dipped my hands in the bowl on the table.
After some vigorous scrubbing, starting with my hands and moving to my feet, she uttered another long-suffering sigh.
"It's as good as it's going to get for today, but I'm not giving up.
" She pulled my feet out of the basin and patted them dry.
"By the time I dress you for the ball, your hands and feet will be callus-free. "
All washed up and wearing a dress for a change, I arrived at the fitting room, which occupied a long gallery lined with mirrors. Bolts of fabric stood propped along one wall, an assortment of sky blues and silvers, the colors of the royal court of Tarina.
We would all wear variations of them to the Catonian ball. My mother in deep slate-blue and old silver, Cardilia in something paler and more luminous as befits the heir, Lotian in a coat the color of a winter sky, and me in whatever my mother and sister decided would look good on me.
I didn't care.
I stood on the dais while the seamstress circled me with a mouth full of pins, and I tried to hold still.
"If you shift your weight one more time," the woman said around the pins, "I will draw blood, Your Highness, and it will be your own fault."
"Then we'll match the silver with red," I said. "Very striking."
"Idrilia." My mother's voice came from the chaise where she presided over the fitting. "Please act as the adult you are. You endured the mountains of Elucia, you can endure a fitting for a gown."
"I'd rather be on those frozen slopes, facing an avalanche, than here."
I wanted to take those words right back because they were disrespectful to the memory of the men who had died in that avalanche.
"You don't mean it," my mother said.
"No, I don't."
Through the mirror, I saw Lotian walk into the room, his mouth curled in an amused smile. "I'd also take an avalanche over Madame Verrin's pins."
"You are both being silly." Cardilia crossed the gallery and stopped in front of me, her gaze sweeping over me, cataloging everything about me that a princess shouldn't be.
The tan I'd brought back from the mountain, the calluses on my palms from garden work, the hooked nose I'd inherited and she'd somehow escaped.
"Your hands," she said, taking one of them in both of hers. "Idrilia, you can't go to the Catonian ball with hands like a stonemason's."
"Ursa is working on them. She says everything will be perfect by the time she dresses me for the ball."
Thankfully, Cardilia couldn't see my feet under the dress.
She turned my palm over, frowning at the rope burn that hadn't quite healed. "I just don't want them whispering about you. You give them so much to whisper about already."