Chapter 2 The Wardens Garden
The Warden's Garden
Sera did not sleep. She lay on the bed that had been grown for her from the wall of her assigned quarters, a shallow depression in a surface that was softer than any fabric she had ever touched and faintly warm, as though it had been incubated at the temperature of a living body.
The walls of the room were translucent, veined with that same silver luminescence that permeated the Silver Glade, and through them she could see the shadowed outlines of the gardens beyond, the slow pulse of light moving through the vegetation like circulation through the body of something vast and patient.
The wolf, whose name she had learned was Kaelen, had settled outside her door in a curl of living shadow, its amber eyes glowing softly in the dark like a pair of night-lights left burning by a thoughtful parent.
Her satchel sat on a shelf that had grown from the wall at the precise height of her hip, and the nightbloom rested in a glass vial she had filled with water from a basin that had produced its own water when she touched its rim, warm and faintly mineral-tasting and unlike any water she had ever drunk.
The flower's silver veins still pulsed, though more slowly now, and when she closed her eyes, she could see the light through her eyelids, a faint silver glow that matched the rhythm of her heartbeat with an accuracy that should have been disturbing but was instead strangely comforting, as though the flower were keeping time with her, reassuring her that she was still alive, still real, still anchored to something.
She stared at the translucent ceiling and tried not to think about Aldric.
She tried not to think about the specimen log due in three days, or the lichen she had been chasing when the world opened beneath her feet, or the morning lesson she would miss tomorrow, and the one after that, and the one after that.
She tried not to think about the apothecary shop with its shelves of dried herbs and its perpetually fogged windows and the smell of tincture and beeswax that had been the olfactory backdrop of her entire adult life.
She tried not to think about her mother's grave on the hill above the town, the one she visited every Sunday with a small bunch of wildflowers that she picked from the meadow below the eastern wall.
She failed at all of it. The tears came without warning, hot and sharp, and she pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and breathed through them the way she had taught herself to breathe through every wave of grief that had crashed over her in the eleven years since her mother's death.
In through the nose, slow and measured. Out through the mouth, even slower.
She counted her breaths. She counted the pulses of the nightbloom's silver light.
She counted the faint chime of the bell-flowers that grew somewhere in the gardens beyond her walls, their notes so soft and so far away that they might have been imagined.
By the time the tears stopped, Kaelen had pressed his massive head against the door, and she could feel the warmth of him through the translucent wall, a steady, animal presence that asked nothing of her and offered only the simple comfort of proximity.
She reached out and pressed her palm flat against the wall, and something in her chest unclenched, just slightly, just enough.
She slept. *** She woke to the sound of footsteps and the smell of something she did not expect: bread.
Not the dense, dark bread of Ashenmere, which was baked in the communal oven on market days and tasted primarily of determination and rye, but something lighter, sweeter, with a faintly floral aroma that she could not identify and that made her stomach clench with a hunger she had not noticed until this moment.
Sera sat up. The light in her quarters had shifted, the silver luminescence now carrying a warmer tone, like the difference between moonlight and the first pale rays of dawn.
She had no idea how long she had slept. Time, in this place, seemed to move according to principles she did not understand, and the absence of a sun to mark the hours left her adrift in a way that was more disorienting than the crossing itself.
The door, which was not a door but a section of the living wall that had retracted silently at some point during the night, stood open.
Beyond it, a short corridor of the same translucent, veined material led to a larger space, and in that space, Malakor Thorne stood with his back to her, his hands clasped behind him, looking out through an opening in the wall that gave onto a view of the Silver Glade.
In the warm-toned light, his silhouette was striking: the breadth of his shoulders beneath layers of shadow-silk that shifted between deep purple and absolute black, the clean line of his jaw, the way his black hair fell loose around his face instead of being pulled back as it had been the night before.
He looked less like a Warden and more like a man who had not slept, and the observation surprised her, because she had not expected to notice such things about him, and she certainly had not expected the small, unwelcome flutter beneath her sternum that accompanied the noticing.
He turned before she could look away. His amber eyes found hers, and for a moment, neither of them spoke.
The air between them felt different than it had the night before, thinner somehow, as though the distance that his authority and her fear had maintained had eroded slightly in the hours she had spent sleeping in his territory.
He was carrying a tray, she realized. A tray made of something that looked like dark, polished wood but that caught the light in a way that wood never could, and on the tray were bread, a pale, steaming liquid in a cup that looked like blown glass, and a small arrangement of flowers she did not recognize, their petals a deep violet edged with silver.
"You need to eat," he said. He set the tray on a shelf that grew from the wall at the height of a table, his movements economical and precise, and gestured toward it with a tilt of his chin.
"The realm's food is not what you are used to, but it is safe.
I have had it prepared in a form your body will recognize.
" Sera looked at the tray, then back at him.
She was still wearing her coat, which was stiff with dried earth and stained with the dark sap of the nightbloom.
Her hair had come loose from its knot during the crossing and hung in tangled strands around her face.
She was acutely aware that she looked like exactly what she was: a woman who had been dragged through a hole in the world and deposited in an alien garden with nothing but a satchel full of specimen vials and a flower that should not exist. "Thank you," she said, because it was the only socially acceptable response to being fed by one's captor, even if the word tasted strange in her mouth.
She crossed the room and picked up the bread.
It was warm, and when she tore it, the interior was soft and faintly iridescent, like the inside of a pearl.
She took a bite, and the flavor was extraordinary: floral and slightly sweet, with an undertone of something earthy and rich that reminded her of the soil in Aldric's greenhouse after a watering.
She ate half the loaf before she realized how hungry she was, and then she ate the other half, and then she drank the liquid in the glass, which turned out to be something like tea, amber and warm and delicately spiced with notes of vanilla and something she could not name, something that lingered on her tongue and in the back of her throat like the memory of a feeling.
Malakor had not moved from his position near the window.
He watched her eat with an expression that was difficult to read, not because it was blank but because it contained too many things at once, layers of attention and assessment and something else, something warmer and less defined that surfaced briefly and then submerged again beneath the controlled surface.
When she set down the empty cup, he spoke.
"You said you were from Ashenmere. It is a border town, on the edge of the region where the Veil thins.
" "I know what Ashenmere is," Sera said, and a flash of irritation sharpened her voice more than she intended.
"I have lived there my entire life. What I do not know is how I got here, why that flower brought me here, or what you intend to do with me now that I am here.
I would very much like answers to those questions.
" The irritation faded from her voice as she spoke, replaced by something steadier and more deliberate, because she had spent her entire adult life dealing with Aldric, who was a man who answered questions in his own time and in his own way, and she had learned that demanding answers loudly was less effective than asking them clearly.
She met Malakor's amber gaze and held it, and she felt that strange perception again, that brush against an emotional current that she had no business being able to sense, and this time the current carried something that surprised her: not irritation at her tone, but a flicker of respect, quick and bright, like a fish surfacing in dark water.
"You crossed the Veil," Malakor said. His voice was calm, measured, the voice of a man who had explained impossible things before and would explain them again.