Chapter 10 The Nightblooms Secret
The Nightbloom's Secret
Sera could not sleep. The nightbloom on her windowsill pulsed with its slow, silver heartbeat, casting shifting patterns across the ceiling of her chamber that looked, in the half-dark, like script in a language she could almost read.
She had been staring at those patterns for the better part of two cycles, watching them form and dissolve, form and dissolve, and the longer she stared, the more certain she became that the patterns were not random.
They repeated. Not exactly, not in the way a mechanical process repeats, but in the way a living thing repeats, the same themes and variations circling back on themselves with the deliberateness of meaning rather than the chaos of coincidence.
She sat up in bed and pressed her palms against her eyes until she saw sparks, and the sparks were silver, and everything in this realm was silver and shadow and she was so tired of not understanding what any of it meant.
The political storm that had engulfed the Court since the Descent breach had not yet subsided.
Darius's accusations still echoed through the corridors of the Court of Thorns, repeated and amplified by the shadow-beings who staffed the Outer Ring, each retelling adding a new layer of invective, a fresh detail that made Sera sound less like a confused botanist who had stumbled across the Veil and more like a calculated weapon aimed at the Garden's heart.
Nysara's manipulation was subtler but no less corrosive, a steady drip of innuendo and concerned observation that never quite accused Sera of anything specific but created, in the minds of those who heard it, a portrait of danger and instability that required containment.
Sera could feel the Court's mood shifting around her like a tide, and she could do nothing to stop it.
But that was not what kept her awake. What kept her awake was the nightbloom's patterns, and the memory of Seraphine the Elder's face in the memory-crystal, and a question that had been gnawing at her with increasing ferocity since the moment she had first touched the black flower in the dark woods above Ashenmere.
If someone had planted the nightbloom, as the crystal had revealed, then the soil in which it had been planted was not ordinary soil.
Nightblooms were Umbral flora. They did not grow in Sunlit earth.
They required shadow substance, emotional residue, the specific alchemical conditions that existed only in the Umbral Realm or at its thinnest boundaries.
And if the soil at the Thinning Point had been prepared to sustain a nightbloom, then there would be evidence of that preparation, residue that her botanist's training and her shadow-touched sensitivity might be able to detect.
She needed to go back. *** The Thinning Point where she had crossed was located in a remote section of the Garden's outer reaches, beyond the cultivated zones of the Silver Glade and past the wilder territories where the Violet Reach began its transition into untamed shadow.
Sera had not been there since her first disorienting arrival, and the memory of that arrival, the terror and confusion of falling through warm darkness into an alien world, had been buried beneath layers of subsequent experience so thoroughly that she was surprised, as she made her way through the Garden's winding paths in the pale light of the realm's deepest cycle, by how vividly it returned.
The smell of the Veil, that electric, ozone-sharp scent of compressed emotional energy, rose in her memory with such intensity that she could taste it on the back of her tongue, metallic and bright and utterly foreign to the sweeter scents of the Garden's cultivated flora.
She should not be out here alone. The Court had assigned her an escort, a quiet, competent shadow-being from House Draven named Veth, and Veth was technically waiting outside her quarters for her to emerge for the morning meal.
But Sera had slipped past her window, dropping from the sill into the Garden's shadows with a clumsiness that would have earned a raised eyebrow from