Chapter 18 #2
"You knew I was there." She was laughing before he had even finished the performance. "You knew the whole time."
"I had no idea whatsoever."
"You knew," she said, "but I appreciate the effort all the same."
"I confess I have never been a very good actor."
She crossed to him and kissed him, brief and warm. "There is entirely too much honesty in you."
"For a man who spent years lying about his own name," he said, "I consider myself remarkably honest, all things considered."
She laughed properly at that. "How did you know?"
"First, fresh footprints on the path — someone had come this way not long before me.
Then a shadow, behind and to my left, though I could not have told you who it belonged to at first. Only that it was a woman, by the way the shadow's hair moved with the wind.
" He tilted his head slightly. "And then you came close enough that I caught the lavender in your hair. "
"Now I understand why you meditate." She shook her head slowly. "I could never sit so still. It makes me feel entirely too vulnerable. But your mind is always searching for danger, is it not?"
"Always. Whether I wish it to or not."
His eyes caught on something then — a book, set carefully on a flat rock a little further on.
"I take it that is yours. Unless there is a third person sharing this forest with us today."
"Come." She took his hand, drawing him toward it. "I want to show you my anthology. I have been building it since I was seven years old. Frederick gave me the first pages of it as a birthday gift, and I have never stopped adding to it since."
They sat together on the moss, and she opened the book across both their laps — page after page of pressed leaves and careful ink drawings, each one annotated in a hand that had clearly grown steadier and surer over the years: how a plant liked to be grown, what it needed from the soil, what it could heal and what it could harm if handled carelessly.
She led him deeper into the trees after that, showing him the living versions of what the pages only described — comfrey growing wild along a stream bank, feverfew in a clearing where the light broke through just right.
At last she turned to the final pages of the book. These held no pressed samples at all — only careful drawings, copied from other books she had read, and long, hopeful descriptions beneath them.
"These are the rarest of them," she said. "I will likely never see a single one in my lifetime. But I wanted them recorded all the same, even if only on paper."
"Which one has the greatest healing power, of all of these?"
"This one." She touched a small, careful illustration of a pale, star-shaped bloom. "The Aegis Bloom. People speak of it as though it holds something otherworldly. Magical, even."
"Then it must be remarkable indeed."
"I do not believe in fairy stories." A faint smile touched her mouth.
"But if it possesses even half of what the old accounts claim for it, it would be a marvel regardless of what anyone chooses to call it.
So few people have ever seen one — or claim to have — and it is said to grow only at the very top of the highest mountains, on cliffs no sensible person could ever reach. "
Benjamin considered that for a long moment.
"Then some man must have put it there on purpose," he said slowly. "The most valuable things in this world are rarely left where they are easy to take. They are hidden. Guarded. Worth the risk of a life to reach."
"You had best not let anyone from the church hear you say such a thing."
"Fortunately," he said, glancing round the empty clearing, "I have already checked. It is only the two of us here."
She laughed, and he kissed her, and this time neither of them drew back.
He kissed her again, slower this time, and felt her hand come up to rest against his jaw, holding him there.
"We are entirely alone," she said, when they finally broke apart, her voice gone low. "You checked."
"I checked twice."
She laughed against his mouth, and then the laughter faded into something else as he drew her closer, one hand sliding into her hair, careless now of the pins that had held it so carefully that morning.
They sank down together onto the soft moss and the folded weight of his coat, and for a while there was no more talking at all — only the slow, deliberate undoing of buttons, the catch of breath when skin finally met skin, the dappled afternoon light moving over them both through the canopy above.
Amelia's fingers found the old, faint scar along his ribs and traced it without asking what it was, and he let her, watching her face rather than her hand, the particular focus in her eyes as though she were learning the whole of him by memory.
When his own hands found her in turn, unhurried despite everything in him that wanted to hurry, she made a small sound against his throat that undid something in his chest more thoroughly than any battle ever had.
"Benjamin." His name, said like that, low and half-breathless, was its own kind of undoing.
He answered without words — a slow drag of his mouth along her collarbone, the weight of him settling over her with a care that made her arch up to meet him, impatient now where he had been patient a moment before.
The forest went on around them, indifferent and beautiful, sunlight breaking gold and green through the leaves, and for a long while neither of them thought of fences, or fathers, or names at all — only of each other, moving together with a tenderness that had been three months in the earning.
Her fingers dug into his shoulders when he finally, finally gave her what they had both been circling since the garden that first night.
She said his name again, differently this time, and he held her through it, forehead pressed to hers, breath ragged and mingled with her own, until the whole world had narrowed down to the two of them and nothing else existed at all.
Afterward they lay tangled together in the settling quiet, her head against his chest, his fingers moving idly through her loosened hair, both of them slow to want to move again, as though moving might break whatever spell the forest had cast over that particular hour.
"You know," Benjamin said, "I believe I may have seen your Aegis Bloom once. Not the flower itself — but something very close to it."
Amelia lifted her head, brow raised. "Did you enjoy that so much you have already begun inventing things to impress me?"
He laughed, low and warm. "I enjoyed it a great deal. But no — there was a mission, once. In the Alps, where a prisoner saved on of my men when the doctor there had already given up on him."
"You have mentioned that mission before.
You never finished telling me the whole of it.
Tell me the whole of it," Amelia said, her head still resting against his chest, her fingers tracing idle patterns along his forearm.
"Properly this time. Not the version you give when you want to change the subject. "
Benjamin was quiet a moment, looking up at the canopy above them, before he began.
"It was in the Alps. A campaign I have never particularly wanted to revisit, if I am honest — but I will give you the whole of it, since you have asked twice now.
" He drew a slow breath. "We had just finished the final charge against an enemy position, and I was walking the ground afterward, the way an officer does, checking for wounded, for survivors, for anything worth noting before the reports were written.
And I found two men huddled beneath a white flag. Unarmed."
"Soldiers?"
"That was my first thought. I drew my blade on them before either had said a word.
" He felt her go still against him at that, and continued regardless.
"One of them cried out that they were not soldiers at all — that they were healers from a village up in the mountain, and they had no part in our war whatsoever.
I did not believe him. I told him plainly that he looked a good deal more like a warrior to me than a healer, broad through the shoulder as he was, with an old scar down one side of his jaw that had not come from mixing salves. "
"What did he say to that?"