Chapter 2 The Wardens Garden #3
"The science of this realm is different from the science of yours," Malakor said.
"In your world, plants respond to light, water, soil chemistry, and temperature.
In this world, they respond to all of those things and to emotion.
The connection is not metaphorical. It is physiological.
Shadow-plant roots absorb emotional energy from the soil in the same way that your plants absorb nitrogen and phosphorus.
It is a fundamental nutrient, as essential to their survival as water.
" Sera looked at the wine-colored shrub, at its humming leaves and its warm, responsive surface, and she thought about the way the plants along the path had brightened when Malakor walked past them, and the way the bell-flowers in the wild garden had chimed in a breeze she could not feel, and the way the nightbloom's silver veins had pulsed in rhythm with her heartbeat.
A hypothesis was forming in her mind, not yet fully articulated, a connection between her own strange sensitivity and the properties of the realm she had stumbled into, and the shape of that hypothesis both frightened and exhilarated her.
They descended to the second terrace, which was given over to medicinal plants, species that Malakor explained were used by the realm's healers to repair emotional damage, restore resonance balance, and prevent the early stages of a condition he called the Hollowing.
Sera listened and catalogued and asked questions, and Malakor answered them with a patience that surprised her, because his bearing suggested a man who was accustomed to giving orders rather than explanations, and she could feel the effort that patience cost him in the slight tension that never quite left his shoulders, the faintest tightening around his eyes when she asked a question he had already answered in a different form.
She noticed, too, that her own emotional state was affecting the gardens as they walked.
When she felt a spike of wonder at a particularly beautiful specimen, the nearby plants brightened, their bioluminescence intensifying in response.
When a thought of Aldric brought a pang of guilt and longing, the light dimmed and the air cooled, and the plants nearest to her drooped almost imperceptibly, as though sharing in her momentary sadness.
She did not mention this to Malakor. She was not ready to discuss it.
But she filed it away alongside the other impossible facts, adding it to the growing weight of evidence that she was not who she had always believed herself to be.
*** They returned to her quarters as the light in the Silver Glade shifted to a cooler, more silver tone that Sera was beginning to associate with the realm's equivalent of evening.
Malakor stopped at the threshold of her door, and Kaelen, who had followed them through the gardens at a distance, settling into his usual position outside.
The Warden turned to face her, and in the silvered light, his amber eyes were steady and unreadable, and Sera felt the familiar pull of that gaze, the way it seemed to reach past her defenses and touch something she kept locked away.
"There are things I have not told you," he said.
"Things I cannot tell you until I have spoken with the Council of Shadows.
" "The Council of Shadows," Sera repeated.
The words carried a weight she did not fully understand, a sense of scale and authority that made the small, practical part of her mind want to retreat to the safety of specimen logs and taxonomy.
"The governing body of this realm. Twelve beings who, along with the Warden, determine the laws and policies that govern the Shadow Garden and its inhabitants.
" He paused, and she saw that same flicker of something she could not name pass through his eyes, something that felt like the shadow of a feeling too large and too complicated to be contained in a single expression.
"Your arrival here is not a small matter, Seraphine.
It has implications that extend far beyond the personal.
The Council must be informed, and they will have questions that I cannot answer on their behalf.
" Sera absorbed this. She stood in the doorway of her borrowed quarters in a realm she had not known existed twelve hours ago, wearing a coat stained with impossible earth, with a flower that should not exist pulsing on a shelf behind her, and she understood, with a clarity that was both painful and necessary, that she had no leverage here.
She could not negotiate. She could not threaten.
She could not leverage her knowledge or her skills or her professional reputation, because none of those things had any currency in a world where plants responded to emotion and the sky was made of glowing fronds.
She was alone, and she was dependent on the goodwill of a being she did not understand, and the only thing she had to offer in exchange for that goodwill was information she did not yet possess and cooperation she was not yet certain she wanted to give.
"And until this Council meets?" she asked. "What am I supposed to do?"
"You rest. You eat. You allow yourself to begin adjusting to this realm.
" Malakor's voice was steady, but something beneath it, that current she could sense but not name, carried a texture she was beginning to recognize as restrained intensity, as though he were holding back words or actions that wanted, urgently, to be released.
"You are a guest here, Seraphine, not a prisoner.
But you are also a being who crossed the Veil in a way that has not happened in living memory, and there are those who will want to understand how and why before they decide what it means.
I would suggest you cooperate with that process.
It will go better for you if you do." It was not a threat.
Sera knew what threats sounded like. Aldric's supplier in the southern towns had been a man who made threats the way other men made small talk, casual and constant and with a smile that never reached his eyes.
Malakor's words were not that. They were something more nuanced and, in their way, more unsettling: a clear-eyed assessment of her situation delivered without malice but also without illusion, a mirror held up to her vulnerability by someone who had the power to exploit it and was choosing, for reasons she did not yet understand, not to.
"The Council of Shadows," she said again, more quietly this time, tasting the words.
"And you are their Warden." "I am." "Then you will speak for me.
" It was not a question. It was not a request. It was a statement of fact delivered with the same stubborn, reckless courage that had made her walk into the Twilight Woods after dark and pick a flower that glowed in absolute blackness.
Malakor looked at her, and for the first time since she had met him, the controlled stillness of his expression cracked, just slightly, just enough to reveal something beneath it that made her breath catch: not approval, not amusement, not the cautious respect she had seen before, but something fiercer and more complicated, something that looked almost like recognition and almost like fear and almost, impossibly, like the first faint stirring of something that she had no name for and was not ready to examine.
"I will speak for you," he said. "Until you are ready to speak for yourself.
" He turned and walked away into the silvered dark, Kaelen rising to follow him, and Sera stood in the doorway and watched him go and felt, with a certainty that she could not explain and did not try to, that her life had just become infinitely more complicated and infinitely more dangerous, and that she was not ready for any of it but was going to face it anyway, because that was who she was, and because the alternative was to sit in this beautiful, impossible room and wait for beings she did not understand to decide her fate without her input.
She was not good at waiting. She had never been good at waiting.
She closed the door, which sealed itself behind her with a soft, organic sound like a leaf folding, and she sat on the edge of the warm, living bed, and she pressed her hands to her face, and she felt, beneath the fear and the grief and the disorientation, the first small, bright spark of something that might, in time, if she let it, become determination.
The nightbloom pulsed on its shelf, silver and steady, keeping time with her heart, and outside the translucent walls, the Silver Glade breathed its slow, deep breath, and the shadow-gardens glowed in their patient, eternal light, and somewhere in the darkness beyond the Glade, the Council of Shadows was about to learn that a woman from a border town had done the impossible, and nothing in either realm would ever be quite the same.