“Wow,” she said as she ran her fingers over the thick petals. Not even her dad’s roses had smelled this sweet. She had the sudden urge to bury herself in the plants, to let them cover her up and fade away. So she did. She watched the clouds pass and relished the kiss of rain on her brow. Eventually she managed to stop missing Uncle Henry and looked down at her damp dress. Her hair would frizz into a wild mess soon if she didn’t dry it, yet she was less inclined to care.
“Not like they don’t have plenty of these costumes anyway.” Shoving the irritating sleeves back to her elbows, she turned her head and watched a vaguely familiar blue cap dart through the hedge and skip over the babbling brook.
“What the heck?” Amie whispered and sat slowly upright. The cap turned again, retreating at the other end of the circle garden. She listened to the fine clipping of shears and moved to follow it. When the blue-capped figure did not return, Amie stood up from her plot and tried to find a path not littered by flowers. What she discovered was a trail darker and wilder than any of the others, where the roses grew thicker and less controlled with larger, sharper thorns.
As the sun fell, light within the shade was less clear. But after a week of being mainly cooped up inside the great house she was used to seeing through shadows.
What she found made no logical sense at all, and all her hopes for sanity flew out the window. A squat little man worked about this wild garden, a faded blue cap over his white head and beard. He was shorter than a dwarf or any small person she had ever heard of, three feet tall at the most from where she was standing. When he turned she grabbed her chest and thought she might literally faint. “The statue was real?” Hearing her words, the gruff little man met her eye and tilted his head slightly to the right before spreading his opposing hand, in a proper gnome greeting. Amie’s eyes widened and he turned to continue his work, yet she stared dumbly after.
Suddenly she remembered Henry’s formal greeting to the statue and found herself repeating it. Inclining her head to the left and sweeping her right palm to the side, she said, “Pleasure and a pinch of nutmeg, ye kin.” The little man looked at her again, only his deep-set eyes and pointed nose visible amid his wispy white beard.
There’s no such things as gnomes, Amie repeated to herself. Still she refrained from speaking aloud in case the guy suddenly fell down dead. She was surprised when his name came to mind as well. “Periwinkle,” she whispered. When he shoved his clippers into his pocket and dug a large satchel from the bushes, he moved beside a wall of tall yellow blossoms and inclined his head for her to follow.
Pushing her way after him through a forest of overhanging vines and flowers above, she saw rows of silvery-barked trees had been planted in thick clumps and their roots rose and twisted deeply. Amie was careful not to trip or fall into a patch of thorns barring the path ahead. Yet she somehow found this untamed beauty more appealing than the cultured greenery she and Henry tended. It felt less than safe, something she had grown used to every day in a creepy old mansion-castle-thing.
Periwinkle’s garden was older, its flowers sturdier and different from anything else she had seen. Petals hung thicker and glowed with richly violet, indigo, gold, deep red and dusky pink tones. The leaves curled and turned sharper on their stems and everywhere she stepped on a thick carpet of clovers.
Beneath the branches of the trees sat something very like elaborate bird houses. Indeed there were tiny platforms and holes fixed in the gray trunks with thin bridges between them.
Amie’s eyes widened. “Okay, this is a whole different kind of hobby.”
Periwinkle appeared inches from her waist when she stepped forward, with a hand raised towards her, and so Amie froze, waiting. Slowly, his eyes never leaving hers, the grizzled old gardener moved his palm to cover his own mouth and turned his head aside.
Amie was still reeling from the fact the tips in Henry’s strange old book, What Not to Say to a Gnome, were actually coming in handy now. Never mind the fact they had referred to the customs of gnomes. Amie knew they didn’t exist. Yet as she followed Periwinkle’s gaze she couldn’t help but wonder.
The garden bordered another wall of natural rock with a tiny waterfall spilling from its edges into a steady stream, source of the mysterious brook marking their path. Set into and among the rocks was the most elaborate dollhouse she had ever seen. Amie watched, transfixed, as Periwinkle stepped up a small stool to meet its many rooms and pulled out berries and tiny steaming tea pots from his sack. Carefully the old man set them onto each little table and repeated the process for the next dollhouse.
She had to admit it was an interesting hobby, far less harmful than Underhill’s thing with experimental medicines or Cook’s exploding gooseberry porridge, yet no less eccentric. Every part of the elaborate village was crafted with painstaking detail. Everything was made with pieces of nature, most likely from the little hedged wood around them. It was the sort of thing she would have loved to make when she was a little girl. And it looked very much like something from her father’s stories about Wenderdowne.
Tired of standing so rigidly for so long, Amie sat in the center of the garden and leaned against the silvery trunk of a nearby tree. She watched Periwinkle carry his stool from house to house and wondered how the little sack managed to hold so many miniature teapots. She wondered if Uncle Henry knew about his gardener’s strange hobbies and if it was why he kept him on staff, out of pity. Surely no other land owners would tolerate their gardeners being more concerned with faery villages than plants? The more she thought about it, the more she thought it ridiculous her family could be in the horticultural industry. The gardens were too chaotic and strange to cater to a larger market. She wondered most how the poor old man wound up with a name like Periwinkle and sincerely hoped for his sake it was a nickname.
It was during that time, with her mind distracted by such mundane musings, the most amazing thing happened. Periwinkle turned back to her with one last curious twist of his wide mouth before unexpectedly disappearing into the brushwood. And not simply moving from one part of the garden to another. He melded into the earth and plants he so fastidiously tended.
The moon had replaced the sun by now and the stars glowed wherever the quilt of clouds did not cover them. Brushing Periwinkle’s odd departure aside, she noticed he had left his sack of goods behind and stood to fetch them. Her fingers trembled from a day bursting with too many surprises, yet she found there was more waiting inside the sack. And it was then she spotted a vacant burrow at last. In the hollow of the shortest tree what was once a grand staircase climbing against the inner wall of the small hollow had fallen in. Altogether it looked abandoned. Amie wondered why Periwinkle had not dressed it like the others.
So she borrowed a nearby lantern from its coop, set it inside, then laid out the freshly made square bed, dress and clothes fashioned from petals, leaves and gossamer thread thin as spiders’ silk. On the table she placed a silken hankie and used another to hang from naturally jutting hooks framing the hole.
Drawing her cloak tightly over her shivering form, Amie settled down on the carpet of cloves in the abandoned corner of the wild faery garden, leaned against the moss-covered rock and waited.
She pulled her father’s ring out from beneath her dress and turned it over in her hands. Silver inlaid with a green stone she did not recognize, the letter W carved with tangled vines and forming the odd spiraling symbol which haunted her dreams and steps. The metal was cool to the touch, unlike the burning in her chest or the damp cold air making her shiver. Slowly she slid the hollowed metal onto her right ring finger, watched it dwarf her knuckle and smiled as she felt the better for it. It reminded her she had been Amie Wentworth once, willing to tackle the world long as she had her parents behind her. Her eyes misted over in their new annoying habit.
Turning her attention to the gathering clouds above, Amie tried to find the Evening Star. It was something she and her father had often done when she was still young. Some people might call twenty-se
ven still very young and she supposed it was all relative. But ever since her parents’ car wreck she’d felt ages old, clinging to vestiges of her childhood to keep up the illusion of normality.
When the clouds began to break and the stars began to fall from the sky and hover closer, she frowned. Rubbing her eyes furiously, Amie sat up and realized the strange pale lights weren’t stars at all. Her mind grasped at a stray memory from her long journey to her new home, of the strange-looking fireflies she had watched in the forest. Yet Amie had grown up catching fireflies with the twins in their back field in Kansas and none of them were bigger than the size of her pinky nail.
Feeling trapped in the headlights, all Amie knew to do was to wait and watch the lights cluster and slowly descend into Periwinkle’s garden. The closer they hovered, the greater variation of colors she saw shifting around their solid iridescent core. With the north wind sang the echo of a song, a whisper of voices and lutes that could have easily been her imagination, like straining to hear voices in the dark. There was no finding logic in this, Amie reasoned. Something akin to faith and forgotten dreams made her want to believe this wasn’t her imagination. Perhaps because she had not felt this free since her father stopped telling her stories of Silver Hollow.
Once her vision cleared Amie saw a single golden light limp on air closest to her. Alone, it flickered unsteady as if in danger of snuffing out completely. Amie didn’t want it to die. It looked warm and she wanted it to keep coming closer. The nearer it drew, the more Amie realized it was indeed dimmer than the others she had seen. Hesitantly the luminous wings struck up and the tiny person attached to them stumbled to its knees before staring amazedly at its new home. Slowly it dragged itself inside the hollow, ran its hands over everything, leaving a trail of golden dust in its wake.
Her heart raced, mind disbelieving what was in front of her eyes. She froze the moment the tiny creature turned and its beady eyes found hers. It jumped off the edge of the hollow, wings pulling it from a deathly plunge. Amie drew her knees closer to her chest the closer it hovered.
When its wings lifted and it tumbled onto her knee, scrambled to its feet to inspect her closer, Amie gasped to find a strikingly almost-human face greeting her. Its tiny body burned hot as a candle flame, yet never seared through the fabric of her dress. Instead the warmth spread through her legs all through to her fingertips and somewhere deep in her soul. Once it recognized the emerald eyes staring back at it, a wide smile split its tiny face nearly in two, revealing its sharp row of teeth.
She reached out to touch it, felt the chain round her neck tug as the ring still bound to both metal and finger refused to give. So the creature reached with its own hand to hers. A light grew between them, encompassing their corner of the garden and growing still until Amie could see the hundreds of other lights and hear their songs, like the rush of waterfalls and clash of bluebells.
Her vision went black and she did not awaken till much later to the sound of grumbling and the sight of familiar dark eyes boring down into hers. He picked her up with too much ease, clutched her to his chest while the midnight mist showered over them. “…meddlesome faeries…should never have left you into the garden alone, senile old gnome.”
She thought to ask his name, but couldn’t keep her thoughts straight. She only knew they weren’t coated with rain anymore and candlesticks flashed by them in blurry rapid succession. All the while his eyes bore into hers. Had she been more aware she might have wondered how he knew where to step as his gaze never wavered. Or how he knew what room she slept, how he was able to pass into it without propping the door and set her onto the nearby chair.
He was speaking harshly over her. “...had enough sense not to play with things you don’t understand, Jessamiene, you wouldn’t be half dead now. Curse those fools and their muddled methods. Iudicael should have known better than leave you in their charge…” His fingers fumbled as he untied her cloak and threw it beside the hearth, then continued to strip her of her soaked outer layers.
She might have missed the soft expression on his face were she not on the cusp of a bad case of hypothermia, as he lifted her again, closer now and tucked her beneath a mountain of covers. . For now she was too grateful to the stranger to argue with him and her lazy smile took him off guard.
His hands swept back the hair from her brow and Amie, feeling the many strange calluses and grooved scars, absently wondered aloud, “How did you get so many scars?”
Rather than laugh as she expected, he froze as she reached out feebly for him. Taking his hand in hers, she turned his fingers over with her own and traced each painful mark. For a long moment where he could not speak, Amie felt a thrilling surge of feeling pulse from her skin to his and back again, the sensation stronger than any other she had felt before. Within seconds she gasped for air and he too dragged in a haggard breath before flinching away from her touch. Link broken, Amie’s inner fire cooled.
He leaned in closer, lips slightly apart and eyes bleeding with something she did not understand, but took her by surprise when he pulled her hand from the edge of the covers. The ring on her right ring finger burned brightly against the firelight. “Where did you get this?” His words were a harsh whisper. His grip tightened. “Where did you get this, Jessamiene?”
His features blurred as warmth returned to her body and his voice turned to something sweet as musical strings and harsh as rock. She thought for a second a shadow grew like a trembling halo around him and his eyes changed colors too rapidly to catch. Again he pressed, leaned in closer and his skin turned dark as the earth and faded to cool gray. “Jessamiene? Who nixed the ring to fit? Do you know what this means?”
She knew by now, of course, this was the ghost from this morning. Vaguely her mind sought to connect the missing puzzle pieces, but she felt so warm now she wanted him to stop talking and to stop thinking. His words were too roughly sweet to listen to now, not when she wanted to sleep. “Father’s ring…put it on tonight and then couldn’t touch the faerie so it touched me…”
“They did not know you had it. Only explanation.”
“Why are you here? Thought you only haunted the hall?” Her eyelids drooped shut.
His silence was soon replaced with rich laughter. “So much you do not understand, little girl. But now you wear this you have no choice.” He traced her brow and lingered over the high cheekbones, square angle of her jaw and hesitated just below her lips.
Chapter 19
Effectively Nixed
Her lids parted the following morning to the reflection of the sun shining through the glass vials on her bedside table. Everything ached like she had just come out of a hundred-year sleep, not unlike the morning she had woken from this bed the first time. Stiff-necked, she pushed aside the covers and slid into her slippers while trying to make sense of everything that had happened the night before.
One thing Amie was certain of, her dreams last night were relatively normal. She had gone to the garden because she missed Uncle Henry and things got really weird afterward. The gnome statue wasn’t a statue at all and had led her into a secret faery garden. Of course, he disappeared and she met one of the little winged beasts. After passing out she was being brought to bed by the castle ghost and he kept rambling on about her father’s ring.
“What a nightmare,” she mumbled in a hoarse voice.
Amie frowned, twisting the cool metal resting against her pointer finger with her thumb, and suddenly froze. Jerking her hand from beneath the covers with a gasp, Amie stared at the Wenderdowne crest on the ring encircling her finger. Grasping for her chain, she discovered her neck was bare and the ring missing from its chain.
Not gone…nixed.
Gripping the metal, she tried tugging it off, but quickly realized she’d have to lose a finger before that happened. Her eyes widened as she touched the ring and images from the night before flashed back into her mind.
It wasn’t a dream!
…
As she lay in a bubble-soaked tub
soon after, she recalled her ghost’s scarred hands and maelstrom eyes.
Definitely too solid for a ghost.
Her eyes darted to the ring snugly fit round her right-hand finger and she wondered at the strange things the ghost had said of it. The bubbles faded quickly after.
In a daze she slipped into the clothes Underhill laid out for her, thankful not to be dressed like a doll for once. Rummaging through her wardrobe, she found a sturdier pair of heeled boots and began the tedious task of looping them. Tying her hair back with a green ribbon Amie stared back at her reflection and tried to smile.
She had never been one for keeping up appearances, but she hardly recognized the woman staring back at her this morning. The emerald eyes framed with their curling black lashes were the same, her full expressive eyebrows still quirked in relation to her curiosity. Her dark curls still refused to be tamed, but now gleamed silvery blue in certain slants of light. The most startling of all revelations was how the top of her head met the high end of her mirror. With the heels on, she had to duck to find her eyes again and while her form was equal in proportion her limbs moved more gracefully.
“What the heck? No one grows five inches overnight!” On closer inspection she noticed her cheekbones seemed sharper and when she lifted her hands to inspect them, she saw the veins in her hands pulse faster with a silvery rather than violet sheen beneath the thin skin.
“Holy cow.” She exhaled and pulled out her longest layer of curls to find it trailing past her breast. “I got my hair cut the week before I came.” Leslie, her stylist, was able to work wonders with her thick mane but she had never given Amie a magical hair-growing conditioner.
Her smile grew and showed fewer lines than she remembered being present. Days ago she would have found this beyond strange. But that was before she leapt blindly on the back of a running horse, met a garden gnome and touched a faery. Instead of royally freaking out like she was inclined to do, a growing excitement filled her instead.
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