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“I don’t understand,” Eadwulf says.
Astrid doesn’t look up from where she’s wrist-deep in the soil, working free a piece of burned wood lodged next to a gravestone. Sweat runs down her back, prickly and uncomfortable. “Don’t understand what?”
“There’s no sun in Xhorhas,” he replies, sounding almost petulant. “So where did he learn to garden?”
She follows his gaze to the part of the garden she’s designated in her mind as Thelyss territory. She and Eadwulf — mostly Wulf — have already laid down a stepping-stone path with ruthless precision between the two patches, delineating the border. (If they’d crushed some of Thelyss’s plants in the process, well, death is a part of growth, isn’t it?)
It is, to her chagrin, a remarkably thriving and well-tilled plot.
“Do you think he’s cheating?” Eadwulf mutters darkly. He means using magic, which they’re both aware has been explicitly and expressly forbidden to the two of them.
“No.” Her estimation of Essek Thelyss says that (barring a bit of high treason, if she’s correct about who he is) the man is quite earnest about respecting the wishes of his — friends. “We just need to step up our game, Wulf. That’s all that means.”
He grumbles, shoving the end of his hoe into the ground. “Well, he got a five day head start, anyways.”
Astrid refrains from pointing out that with two of them versus one of him, they should be well on their way to matching his efforts with the past day and a half of work. Instead, she wrenches the burned wood free and throws it aside, narrowly missing another grave. From the porch, the older Clay sister — the angrier one — glares in her direction. Astrid pointedly ignores her, bending down to continue clearing debris.
***
Under the stars, Essek kneels in the cool, dark soil and buries flower seeds. His movements are unhurried and careful, though every now and then he glances up to see if his companion is still staring down at him in unsettlingly curious silence from her seat on a nearby gravestone.
“You’re planting them too deep,” she says just as Essek has started to forget she is there.
Essek blinks. “Excuse me?”
The youngest Clay sits perched on the ancient grave marker, her feet occasionally kicking out into the long grass. Her eyes sparkle with a faint pink glow — a darkvision spell, he assumes — and she’s wearing a massive straw sunhat despite the lack of anything but moonlight at this time of night. She’s been wordlessly watching him for the past hour. He’s not sure why she’s chosen now to criticize his gardening techniques, which he is very much aware are sorely lacking.
“You’re planting them too deep,” she repeats mildly, pointing to the seeds he’s pressing into the soil. “They can’t reach the light when they try to grow if you bury them so far down.”
Tired, sore, and more than a little frustrated, Essek sits back on his heels. (Caduceus never said no magic meant no hovering, but Essek is abiding to the generally stated terms of penance-gardening with precision.) “What, then, do you suggest?”
Clarabelle Clay grins at him and hops down from the stone. “I’m gonna help you, dummy. You don’t know anything about gardening, that’s obvious.” (“There’s no sun in Xhorhas,” Essek protests faintly.) “There’s two of the angry wizards and one of you, so I’m just making it fair. Deal?” She thrusts her hand out at him. Her sun hat flops over her eyes.
Essek stares at the proffered hand, not quite sure what he’s agreeing to. “I, ah—”
She takes his hand and shakes it, the movement surprisingly delicate. “Deal.”
***
They take shifts — Astrid and Eadwulf in the garden when the sun is out and they have a reprieve from questioning, Essek in the garden once night has fallen. (The drow’s early experiences with sunburns seem to have prompted him to retreat to the darker hours.) Once or twice at dusk, they spend a tense hour working on opposite sides of the garden, as far apart as they can physically manage. They don’t speak. They barely make eye contact.
Through unspoken agreement, and perhaps a respectful fear of Caduceus, who is never far away, they never destroy anything that’s rightfully full-grown. Still, that leaves the margins of sabotage wide open to interpretation.
Perhaps it was inevitable that another war would begin — one that mostly involves dirt and floral gardening gloves once Astrid and Eadwulf are forced to admit that black leather (attractive as it may be) isn’t the most practical for digging. Thelyss gives as good as he gets, once the opening salvo has been made, and Astrid finds the silent competition a welcome relief from all the rest of their unspoken turmoil.
Eadwulf is the first to admit that despite growing up in Blumenthal, their connection to the land may have atrophied somewhat in the past twenty years.
“Aren’t carrots supposed to be planted farther apart?” Astrid asks him at one point, frowning at the crooked row of leafy green tops he’s spent the last hour and a half transplanting from a burned section of the garden.
His brow furrows. He scratches his cheek, leaving a smear of dirt on his sun-reddened skin. “How should I know, Astrid?”
She makes a frustrated gesture. “We grew up with this kind of thing.”
“And when was the last time you farmed? Because unless you’ve got hobbies I don’t know about, it was the last time I farmed, which was when we were twelve—”
“Don’t get angry about it,” she snaps. Heat flares in her cheeks, up the back of her neck.
“I’m not,” he says, then switches to flat, frustrated Zemnian to add, “I just don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing here. None of this fixes anything.”
He doesn’t mean the garden. Astrid knows, because she’d said as much to Beauregard during their first interview — no amount of confession will change the past — and so she also knows the Expositor’s response by heart already.
No one can undo what you went through, but you can make sure no one else has to suffer the same way.
Astrid knows she is a terrible, selfish person because sometimes (often) she still wants to drive her blade into Trent’s chest and watch him bleed out, exposing corruption be damned.
In lieu of her preferred target, she stabs her trowel into the soil. “Would you rather leave this home ruined as well?” she asks Eadwulf in the same language. “It’s penance, isn’t that what Caduceus said? You seem to hold his opinion in some esteem.”
She expects him to say something about his Matron and holy places. After so many years under Trent’s thumb, they know each other’s scars well enough to press to the edge of pain, then decide if they want to stop at the precipice or plunge into freefall.
Instead, he looks down at the dark soil and starts pushing up another mound. “It doesn’t matter.”
It does, Astrid wants to say, it does, and I understand, because I feel the same way. She wants to take him by the hand and confess that she doesn’t know who they’re supposed to be in the absence of the person who caused that pain or what to do with the freedom she’s dreamt of for so long. (A freedom she was supposed to buy with their teacher’s blood on her hands, not gardening gloves and bitter testimony.)
She shouldn’t miss the fear, but she does miss how certain it all felt.
“Just plant the fucking carrots,” she says.
***
“Did you and Astrid have a fight?” Beauregard asks Eadwulf the next morning. Her notebook is open, her pencil set beside it in anticipation of another grueling few hours of interviews, and though her arms are still crossed, there’s a keen focus to her gaze that Eadwulf has become familiar with.
Eadwulf shrugs. “Doesn’t matter.” He seems to be saying that often lately. It shouldn’t surprise him that the Expositor has picked up on the strained silence between the two of them today — she is alarmingly insightful — but somehow it still does.
“Okay,” she says, though she doesn’t pick up her pencil yet. They’re off the record, for now. “Is it something you want to tell me about?”
“Just a minor disagreement,” he says, and then — maybe because he’s gotten into the habit of baring his soul in these interviews — “I think that while our teacher was still an immediate threat, we had to work together. I don’t know what roles we’re supposed to play now.”
Beauregard gives him a thoughtful, searching look. “Maybe you don’t have to play any roles anymore. You’re allowed to want new things, you know. Maybe that’s part of growing.”
Eadwulf shrugs. “Her desires haven’t changed.”
“But yours have?”
Every morning seems to add to a new, strange feeling layering in him like sediment — he hesitates to call it peace, but the pain of it all doesn’t seem to matter as much anymore. Not the power plays, nor the bizarre garden competition that Astrid is taking more and more seriously.
Maybe Caduceus (enigmatic, powerful Caduceus) was right about gardening being good for him.
At the same time, even as Eadwulf’s own fury has dulled and solidified to sink away like a stone through water, Astrid’s has fragmented like a blade shattered then whetted into a thousand painful shards.
“I never matched her ambitions,” he admits. “Not the way Bren did. I think she always missed having that rivalry to sharpen her ambition on.” He sighs. “But no, you’re right. She does have different goals than me. Different ideas of what our next steps should be after we survive this shitstorm.” There he goes again, still saying we, as if half of him doesn’t want to cut and run the moment this is done.
He gives Beauregard a tight smile. “Speaking of, we should get started. I can’t imagine it’s enjoyable, listening to us bare our souls.”
“Well… yeah.” She shrugs, the movement a bit too tight to come off as careless. “It’s fucking terrible, hearing what’s been going on without anyone trying to stop it for so long. It makes me absolutely furious. But if I don’t listen to you, I don’t know who else will. And you do deserve to be listened to.” She still doesn’t pick up her pencil. “What do you want to do after this?”
After is such a foreign concept. Still, he considers it for a moment. “I don’t know. Go traveling, maybe. Get the hell out of the Empire for a few months.”
Beauregard nods. “You know, we’ve got an island you might like. Actually, we’ve got a whole ship, if you can talk Fjord into letting you on board. We were sort of pirates for a bit, and then we rescued an island from a volcano god — a fake volcano god. It’s a long story.”
Eadwulf has long since given up on understanding exactly what the hell the Mighty Nein do besides beat up archmages and adopt war criminals. He shrugs. “I’ll think about it.”
***
He and Astrid hadn’t gone back to Rexxentrum during those five days between Trent’s downfall and their return. Not to Zadash, either. They’d spent one night in Shadycreek Run in the shittiest, dirtiest inn Eadwulf has ever seen — not strictly necessary, not when both of them still had enough magical reserves to teleport, but neither of them had known where to go until dawn broke sleepless over them.
Then they’d both known, almost without speaking. Eadwulf had insisted on casting the spell to bring them both there, convinced Astrid would teleport directly into the dining room of an empty house, dishes cracked and stained with long-mouldered food. (He never actually inquired into what they did with the once-homes, or the bodies, but in his mind they all stand in ruin — decades-old bloodstains on warped wooden floors, the dessicated remnants of poison at the bottom of a wine glass, a foundation filled with ash and charred wood. Monuments frozen in space but still subject to the terrible progression of time.)
He brought them to the forest at the edge of town.
They looked out across Blumenthal.
They didn’t enter the town, or go find their childhood homes, or seek out the cemetery. He knows he’d never returned after that long-ago night; if Astrid had, she gave no indication of it.
They camped in the forest, taking turns casting a protective dome to shelter in, hidden. Astrid had left a few times, saying she wanted to set a few affairs in order — in Rexxentrum, at Vergesson, he hadn’t asked. For his part, Eadwulf had sat in the shadows of tall, solemn evergreens and thought. Prayed to the Matron, even though he had little hope of her answering him favorably after he’d nearly burned down a temple.
He knew Astrid would decide to go back to the Blooming Grove. He knew he’d go with her. (He was faithful enough to still believe in fate, after all.)
Before they did, she informed him that they couldn’t implicate anyone else, not even Ludinus. There had to still be a Cerberus Assembly after all of this was over. He knew she was still playing their games, angling for power, an Assembly seat.
He wished he could care more.
I’m not getting involved, he’d told her, point-blank. They stood at the edge of the forest near town, dark cedars looming overhead, a light rain dripping gray from the needles. I’ll wish you luck, but I’m not stepping into the politics of it all ever again.
She’d looked at him with eyes like flint. I don’t need luck. I just need you near me at the beginning.
Only then?
However long you’re willing to stay. She didn’t ask him to stay, or admit to wanting it, but he heard it anyway. (Neither of them ever knew how to wear their hearts on their sleeves, but they’ve had years to figure out something survivable and a perpetual, aching absence between them to fill. They understand each other better than themselves, sometimes.)
I’m making no promises, he’d said. Remember that — I haven’t made any promises to you yet.
She’d smiled an empty smile, putting her hands in his. Her teleportation spell had flared to life around them as she said, No. You’re smarter than that.
***
Essek sits on the porch with Caduceus as the sun sets over the forest, each of them cupping hands around a still-warm teacup. Though the trees beyond are as strange and twisted as ever, within the boundaries of the Blooming Grove, everything the dusk light falls across is vibrant and alive. His area of the garden, bordered by the stepping stones on one side and a line of ancient graves on the other, is flourishing beyond what he would’ve ever thought possible.
Admittedly, he isn’t sure how much credit he can take for that. Clarabelle’s guidance has been invaluable, even if her haphazard and chaotic techniques make him nervous sometimes.
As though tracing the outline of his thoughts, Caduceus says, “Clarabelle told me she’s been helping you in the garden.”
“Ah, yes.” Essek clears his throat. “I hope that’s not an issue…?”
Caduceus chuckles. “She’s not the sort to let problems happen without her encouragement.”
“She has been very patient with me,” Essek offers. “I had to dig up all of the sage because she told me it wouldn’t grow well next to the—” He searches for the word in Common. “The long green ones.”
“Sometimes plants don’t get along,” Caduceus agrees steadily. “You just have to be mindful of who you’re putting next to each other.”
The corner of Essek’s mouth twitches upwards. “In that regard, it reminds me of certain political gatherings in Rosohna. Which senior den members should never be put at the table beside one another, that sort of thing. Though — at least in a garden there is the compost pile for failed combinations.”
“What is a city but a very noisy compost pile?” Caduceus muses.
Unsure what sort of response to make to that, Essek takes a sip of his tea. “And a much more barren one,” he says eventually. “Even the weeds here are beautiful. I sometimes feel bad about tearing them up.”
“I firmly believe that you can’t be a good gardener without having a little mercy and a little ruthlessness in you.”
The corner of Essek’s mouth twitches. “From what I have seen of you, you must be an extremely good gardener, then.”
Caduceus laughs, a low and pleasant rumble. “One of the best. There’s something I’ve been meaning to mention, by the way.”
“Oh?”
“When you leave this place, you can rest assured knowing that there’s a plot waiting for you here when you die.”
Essek blinks. “Ah — thank you?”
“Of course. And if you live as long as your body lets you — and I hope you do — you could even spend many beautiful years here, helping tend the graves. Our graves, someday.” He drinks his tea. “I understand safe havens may be in short supply for you.”
Essek exhales, staring down into his cup. “That is true,” he admits.
“You are always welcome in the Blooming Grove.” Caduceus gives him a slow, warm smile.
“Thank you,” Essek says, more certain this time.
For the first time in many months, he finds himself staring down a future that is less like a blade at his throat and more like a road that winds to a gentle sunset. Possibilities spin out before him like paths through a garden — flowers, ocean breeze, butterflies alighting on a gravestone.
A hearth fire. A coat hung on a hook. Spellbooks and ink.
In his mind’s eye, he sets the rest of his life (years into decades into centuries, wavelets of time lapping at his feet) on a set of silver scales and to his quiet surprise, comes up with more hope than terror.
***
On the evening of their second day in the Clay family house, Eadwulf returns to his room after a long several hours of interrogation (interviews, whatever) to find Astrid sitting in his chair, her feet propped up on the edge of the bed.
“I went and got some books,” she proclaims, gesturing to a heavy satchel she’s dumped on Eadwulf’s bed. He immediately perks up at the prospect of reading material, crossing the room and sitting down on the bed. It creaks under him.
“Where? Not Shadycreek, there’s not a single library in that shithole.”
“Made a stop somewhere else,” she says vaguely. He narrows his eyes, immediately suspicious.
“I thought we agreed not to go back to Rexxentrum once we came back here.”
“Not Rexxentrum,” she says hastily. “Nowhere in the Empire.”
“Where, then?” He reaches into the satchel and pulls out the first book. The title reads Treatise on Northern Tuber Cultivars, with a finely detailed copperplate engraving on the inside front cover depicting the life cycle of a potato.
She stands, starting to pace. “The Cobalt archive in Port Damali, if you must know. Don’t tell Beauregard, she’ll be far too self-satisfied about that, and also angry that I stole these.” (“Astrid, we’ll need to give them back,” Eadwulf sighs.) “I was disguised, of course. The pickings were sparse, but they do get a lot of commerce from many places, so I made do with what I could find.”
“What’s the plan with these, then?” He pages through the book of tubers, which is far more detailed than it has any right to be. “Optimize the potato crop for the next decade?”
“No,” Astrid says, firm. “We’re going to reverse engineer the least optimal combinations of plants and use that against Thelyss.”
After a brief pause, Eadwulf says carefully, “Astrid, do you think you’re perhaps taking this gardening rivalry a little too seriously?”
She stops pacing and stares at him.
He exhales. “No, you’re right. Of course.” He supposes he should be glad Astrid is talking to him again.
“It’s an intellectual exercise, if nothing else,” she says, voice clipped. “I don’t know how much more of this peaceful gardening I can take.”
He’d been finding it rather enjoyable, given the alternatives. Maybe some of these vegetables could be grown in Ambition’s Call, beneath the oak trees. There’s something very satisfying about the thought of planting potatoes in the shadow of Ikithon’s tower.
“I don’t know if this is supposed to be intellectual,” he offers. “What if doing this the right way means working together?”
Astrid’s eyes cut away, hard with something he can’t — doesn’t want to — untangle. “What is any of this,” she says with sharp resignation, “if not an extended attempt at working together?”
Eadwulf watches her, waiting for whatever aching, upset thing lurks in her silence to fight free — or not. He doesn’t think he’s the right person to help her, nor she him, but they’re all the other has at the moment.
“It was supposed to be me,” she says at last. Her voice is quiet, breakable. “And he was supposed to die.”
He refrains from pointing out that they can, in theory, still kill their former master. It would be as simple as burning down the garden shed Bren’s insane friends are keeping him in. “You’re still getting what you want.”
She whirls towards him, jaw clenched. “Am I?” she grits out. “They’ll offer Bren the archmage’s seat. As a bribe, as a method of control. Da’leth will want him under close watch after all of — this.”
Eadwulf shakes his head. “He won’t accept.”
“How can you be sure, Wulf?”
How can you not be? “He won’t accept,” Eadwulf repeats. “And it will be yours.”
“But they’ll offer it to him first.” She isn’t furious — that would be easier to face. For once, her ambition and the path laid before her are aligned perfectly: their teacher removed from the picture, an archmage’s seat left open for her. Now the only bitterness lies in how, after so long running the race, she still thinks of herself as only second best. Still picking up the pieces left discarded by someone who burns brighter.
There’s nothing Eadwulf can say to ease that sting or convince her that it shouldn’t matter at all. Instead, swallowing back any hint of reluctance: “I’ll make you a promise if you’ll make me one.”
Her eyes narrow.
***
Clarabelle seems to have decided that mushrooms will prove easier for Essek to cultivate. She shows up around midnight with the usual massive sunhat — not on her head, but carried upside-down in her hands, the center of it full of a variety of faintly phosphorescent mushrooms and lichen and moss.
“You don’t need sun for these,” she explains.
“Indeed,” Essek agrees. “What do they… ah, do?”
“Glow.” She squishes one of the mushrooms between her index finger and thumb, leaving a bright stain of green shining on her skin. “And don’t eat them unless you want to have a really interesting couple hours.”
“So they do not have healing properties, or other things of that nature?”
She shrugs, almost carelessly. “Maybe they do.”
It’s such a contrast to her brother that it gives Essek pause. “You are… you are not a cleric of the Wildmother, are you?” he asks delicately.
Clarabelle shakes her head. “Being a cleric’s not the only way to be a follower of the Mother. What, just ‘cause Caduceus is one, you think we’re all like that?”
He’s not sure what he thought. It’s clear enough that the Grove is something entirely different from the bright and perfect and cold veneration of the Luxon that has been a veil around the Dynasty for as long as the Bright Queen has ruled. After every miracle he’s seen Caduceus work, Melora’s power has been made more than evident, but worship is something separate from belief. “I have no preconceived notions, only curiosity.”
“Curiosity’s good,” she muses. She picks up a strip of lichen that glows the same pink as her eyes and holds it up. “Here. Take this one.”
Essek takes it. “Is this one of the ones with interesting effects when eaten?”
Clarabelle considers this. “I guess having the spins is interesting, yeah.”
“Ah.” He holds the lichen at arms length and eyes it warily.
At that, she giggles. “Only if you eat it. But—“ She leans forward, conspiratorial. “Crumble it into the dirt so it turns the tomatoes weird colors, okay?”
She has not yet steered him wrong, but he still has to ask, for his own peace of mind: “And that will not have… adverse effects?”
“Nah, just makes them purple.” She carefully plucks an iridescent beetle from her hair and sets it down on a leaf. It skitters away. “And the bugs like ‘em more.”
“Are the beetles followers of the Wildmother as well?” Essek asks, surprising himself with his own levity.
With complete sincerity, Clarabelle says, “Of course.”
“Well, then who am I to deny them their favored color of tomatoes?” Gingerly, he begins to break off pieces of the lichen. Scraps and sparkles of pink scatter across the dark soil like a dusting of stars, or the lights of a city spread under a blanket of night, seen from above.
Clarabelle gives him a satisfied look.
***
Dinner in the Clay family home is a communal affair: bright and loud and warm. Astrid has already run through all the thin excuses she might use to avoid it; now she simply sits and eats in stoic silence, speaking only when spoken to.
She retreats to the kitchen as soon as seems reasonable, ostensibly to wash her dishes. The relative quiet is a relief, though she still catches bits of rowdy conversation filtering through the doorway — and even that fades when she quietly pushes open the back door and steps into the cool blue of evening.
Fireflies pulse in the long grass, tiny flickers of candle-warmth. Somewhere in the direction of the spring, a frog croaks twice, then goes quiet. Astrid leans against the back of the house, arms folded, and tilts her head back to stare up past the edge of the roof to where the stars are beginning to burn through the revealed dark.
The door opens. Footsteps approach, then pause.
“Are you okay?” Constance Clay asks.
Astrid glances at her. Constance carries a small tray of bread and water — feeding time for their prisoner in the shed, Astrid assumes, and has to push down a now-familiar stab of anger-regret-pain at the reminder.
“I’m fine,” she says.
Whatever emotion those two words betray seems to give Constance pause. She hesitates, then steps back inside and returns with her hands empty, having presumably set the tray down inside.
“It’s really quite understandable if you aren’t,” she offers. “I know that you’ve been spending a lot of time talking to Caduceus’s friends about it all, so you don’t need to talk to me unless you want to, but you also don’t need to tell me that you’re fine if you aren’t.”
Despite the fact that she’s spent dozens of hours weeding gravestones over the past three or four days, it’s only now that Astrid recalls and fully processes that the Clays are undertakers. “I suppose you’ve had a lot of practice saying that sort of thing to mourners.”
Constance nods, stepping down from the stone steps to join Astrid. Her eyes are kind; Astrid looks down to avoid meeting them, staring instead at the black lines of ink traced along her forearms. Mazes of magic. She could wake it now, feel blue fire lick through her veins.
“I appreciate the hospitality, but I’m not mourning anything,” she says, not looking at Constance.
“Aren’t you?” There’s nothing but mild curiosity in Constance’s voice, even when Astrid’s shoulders stiffen. “Any big life change comes with possible regrets, and I — well, I understand that these past few days have brought a lot of changes for everyone here.”
“All changes for the better, no?” She can’t help the slight twist of scorn that slips into the words.
“I think that depends on what you do with them.”
“I intend to shape history for the better. As I’ve been taught to.” Astrid tastes the sharpness of the words as they emerge. She doesn’t miss the irony that the man who taught her that lesson best sits shackled and silent in a shed a few yards away.
She can’t imagine a life where she isn’t followed by constant reminders of the past, on her arms or around every street corner of Rexxentrum — in the mirror, or in Eadwulf’s eyes. His promise to stay as long as she needs him to sits uneasily under her skin, like an itch she can’t scratch. It isn’t something she should need as a reassurance.
Constance nods thoughtfully. “Well. Maybe it would comfort you to know that whatever history you carry forward, the Blooming Grove is a far deeper well into the past.”
She knows Constance is trying to be kind and hates herself for the jaded twist of her own mouth. “Why would that be a comfort?”
“Things grow here, year after year. They always will. There are small cycles, and there are big cycles, and bigger cycles still, and maybe we can only see the smallest ones, but...” She shrugs. “Death and renewal and death returning, that’s what this place is about. People are born and people die. We plant flowers on their graves. The flowers grow and die and grow again.”
“It sounds so gentle when you say it like that.” She doesn’t mean it as a compliment. Constance laughs, not unkindly.
“Oh, the cycle of death and life isn’t gentle. It’s hungry — the natural kind of hunger, the kind that sustains, but not gentle.” Her voice softens. “You seem like the kind of person who understands hunger.”
Not that sort of hunger. Astrid shrugs. She isn’t a fool; she knows when someone’s trying to offer her perspective. “I might.”
“I’m not going to pretend to understand the kinds of politics and magic that you’re an expert in.” Constance chuckles ruefully. “So I can’t help much with that. All I can do is talk about the things familiar to me. And this place is very familiar to me, in every aspect it has, even when it’s a little wrecked.”
“I’m sorry,” Astrid says, automatic before realizing she means it.
“For?”
Constance knows what she means. “For bringing pain to such a beautiful home.”
After a pause, Constance nods. “Well. You’re helping repair it, so that’s a start.”
Astrid looks out across the garden. Lightning-blackened swathes of grass seared into the garden point to the spot where Trent and his pride had come crashing down with Astrid’s hands closing a collar around his throat. Beyond that, near the edge of the forest — the place where Bren, clothes smoke-stained and grief written clearly on his face, had knelt beside her and asked her to set aside the one solace she’d clung to all these years: that Trent would die by her hand.
I am sorry. I loved you both.
Now we must be strong.
You weren’t there, she would’ve told him then if her throat hadn’t been choked with fury and anguish. Do you think your absence meant the pain stopped? I spent so long telling myself escape was impossible, that the only way out was reaching the top, and you escaped—
There are flowers growing over the singed grass already, tangles of thin green stems and blossoms like tiny blue stars glowing in the dusk.
“See,” Constance says, following her gaze. “It’s all blooming again.”
***
The night before the Mighty Nein part — everyone but Caduceus to Nicodranas, then Beauregard, Yasha, and Caleb to the Empire to clear their collective names — Essek finds himself cornered by the larger of the two Scourgers.
“Thelyss. Can I have a word?”
Through the doorway to the living room, Essek sees Caleb glance up and make eye contact with him, expression just barely on the near side of concern. Essek weighs the situation and decides that if Eadwulf wanted to murder him, he wouldn’t be making an invitation of it.
“Of course,” Essek tells him, all cool, pleasant diplomacy. He sees Caleb relax just a fraction, though he doesn’t go back to reading his book as Essek glides out of view, following Eadwulf outside into the cool night air.
Eadwulf stops on the front steps and turns to Essek. The lamplight from within casts warm shadows across his furrowed brow. “Look,” he says, with the air of someone making a gravely important pronouncement. “If Bren — Caleb, sorry — wants to fraternize with a Kryn renegade, that’s his business.”
“Excuse me?” Of all the things Essek had expected him to say, that had been nowhere on the list.
Eadwulf raises a single eyebrow. “Am I misunderstanding?”
“Very much so,” he says firmly. It’s not even a lie — no matter what unfamiliar desires have been stirred in Essek by Caleb, no matter the trembling, terrible hope that that desire could be reciprocated, they have not fraternized with one another.
“Okay.” Eadwulf looks less convinced than Essek would like. “That wasn’t really the point of this, though. I just wanted to say…” He eyes Essek, then the gardening implements hanging from a nearby rack, then says with an air of great reluctance, “Do you want help tonight? In the garden? We’ll come help you. No foul play or anything.”
Several responses vie for Essek’s tongue, including you just accused me of indiscretions with your former friend and I know you purposefully put those stepping stones down on top of the mint I planted.
What emerges, improbably, is: “Very well.”
***
To Essek’s continued surprise, Astrid is waiting for them in the garden, arms folded.
“This is an unexpected peace offering,” Essek notes. She lifts an eyebrow at him, an uncanny mirror of the look Eadwulf had given him moments before.
“One night of doing things the right way,” she says, sounding almost wry. After a pause, she adds, “There’s no need to ever speak of this again, though.”
Essek nods. “I understand.” It’s a blatant lie. He isn’t sure he understands anything about these two, let alone why he’s been invited to garden with them.
Eadwulf tosses Astrid a handheld spade, which she catches in midair with ease before giving it a critical look. She doesn’t say anything, though — just surveys the moonlit garden and says, “Well? where should we start?”
“Perhaps… closer to the spring,” Essek offers. “Since none of us have been working on that plot.”
“Neutral territory,” Eadwulf says, sounding satisfied.
The plot in question is overgrown, though mostly spared from the ravages of the battle the week before. Beetles scuttle between the tangled vines, taking flight between leaves limned silver by Catha’s light, disturbed by their approaching steps.
“What’s this one supposed to be?” Astrid asks, crouching down to consider a plant.
Eadwulf joins her, plucking a leaf from it and popping it into his mouth before Essek can pass on any of the warnings Clarabelle has given him about hallucinogens and toxins. He chews it meditatively for a second before nodding. “Lemon balm.”
“Wulf.” Astrid slaps his shoulder, irritated. “Don’t just eat them.”
“I have received… cautionary notes about some of the things growing here,” Essek adds after a brief struggle to reconcile his image of the two battle-hardened Scourgers and this strange glimpse into the familiar, fond way they seem to interact with each other in private.
“Haven’t died yet,” Eadwulf says, unruffled. “I could tell from the smell of the leaves, anyway.”
Astrid mutters something under her breath in Zemnian. Eadwulf raises an eyebrow, then gives the sky a long-suffering look.
“D’you think that no magic means no light, either?” he asks, and Essek remembers abruptly that the two humans must be having a difficult time in the scant moonlight.
“Here,” he offers, and makes his way over to his own plot to retrieve a few faintly glowing strips of lichen. He crushes them, and they flare brighter — a yellow-tinted green that, after a moment of hesitation, he rubs across the tops of the nearest gravestones, casting a dim glow over the area.
“Neat trick,” Eadwulf says.
“I fear I cannot take full credit for it,” Essek admits. “Hopefully that will help, though?”
“It does, but none of these plants make sense.” Astrid glares at a particularly flamboyant magenta-stemmed vine as though wondering if she can convince it to unlock its secrets for her with the weight of her judgement alone. “What’s this one, some sort of flower? I don’t think it’s supposed to be able to grow here. I don’t know where it is supposed to grow.”
This is quite possibly more words together than she has spoken in Essek’s hearing in the entire time since the two Scourgers returned to the Blooming Grove. Hesitantly, he says, “I am no botanist, nor am I familiar with the plants of this region, but my understanding is that there are many things that grow here through the grace of the Wildmother more so than… the usual strictures.”
“Maybe if you just steal the right book, you’ll find a diagram to help,” Eadwulf tells Astrid, obscurely amused.
She rolls her eyes. Sounding faintly aggrieved, she adds, “We’re also the greatest minds of our generation. Shouldn’t we be able to figure it out?”
Essek refrains from pointing out that he is almost a century older than them, which strains the definition of generation. “I’m sure that there’s a lesson in there somewhere about the mysteries of nature, though I couldn’t tell you what it is,” he says instead, and is strangely gratified when Eadwulf lets out a snort of laughter.
“Stop thinking, Astrid,” Eadwulf says, hefting his shovel. “Just garden.”
***
Afterwards, they survey their work, dirt-stained and sweating as the forest makes its night-sounds around them.
The two Scourgers flank Essek, which in any other context would make him anxious, but here and now there’s only an unfamiliar sort of contentment. A quietness like a sheathed blade, so different from the warmth and comfort he feels with the Mighty Nein. Still, some reckless part of him wonders (despite Astrid saying no need to ever speak of this again, despite the thorny politics waiting for them beyond the boundaries of the Blooming Grove) if this, too, is a contentment he could be allowed to savor.
He wonders if Astrid and Eadwulf feel it, too.
Eadwulf is the first to break the silence. “We should go back inside, or they’ll start coming out here to make sure we haven’t murdered each other.”
“I’m sure some of them have already taken bets on that.” It’s hard to tell from Astrid’s tone whether she’s irritated or entertained by the idea.
“There are worse bets they could be taking,” Essek says without thinking, then immediately regrets it. “Ah — that is, Veth and Jester have a certain sense of humor. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
Oh, Light, he’s making it worse. But Eadwulf just laughs, and even Astrid’s lips quirk in something like amusement, and the fragile peace between them remains unbroken.
They linger a moment longer beneath the trees, in the dark garden and the pale lichen-glow, the scent of crushed leaves and damp earth like a cradle around them.