by Callie Bates
I start toward the dagger—my throw went wide, landing between two of the toothy stones—and feel a warm trickle between my fingers. I must have cut myself picking up the dagger that first time, because jewel-red blood shines on my finger-pads. It doesn’t hurt, but still a shiver runs through me and I look at the stones. With the light burning behind them, and their shapes throwing shadows on the ground, they seem almost as if they could shift shape—or move.
“Don’t you dare,” I say to them. I start toward the dagger but instead pause by the nearest stone. It is squat, with a small bulge on top, like a head over a square body.
I only come up here once a year, on this day. When I was twelve, Hensey caught me sneaking back in. She saw the cuts on my hands. “What have you been doing?” she demanded. I stuttered something about the Hill of the Imperishable, about what happened when my blood touched the stones—even though I knew I shouldn’t tell anyone, not even her. I knew it must be kept, a terrible secret.
“That’s witchcraft, El.” Hensey buried my face in her bosom as if she could smother the magic out of me. “Anyone sees you doing that, you know what will happen? The witch hunters will come for you. First they’ll use their witch stones to send you mad. Then they’ll strip everything you know from your mind. When they kill you after that, it’ll be a mercy.”
For months after, I had nightmares about the witch hunters coming to haul me away to a prison in Ida. Then the nightmares faded; my tutors taught me that, while magic is considered anathema, in truth it simply has no place in the rational, modern world. They said that the Paladisan emperors have made the empire and its former subject states a safer place with their inquisitions and their witch hunts, which not only cleansed our lands but purified the heart of the empire itself. For a while, even I thought we should celebrate the inquisitions that made our world a safer place.
But then the Harvest Feast came around again and I sneaked back up here. I dropped my blood on the stones. Just one morning, I promised myself, just one morning, once a year.
Hensey’s never caught me again, and I’ve grown better at sneaking out.
I stretch my hand out toward the stone, my breath stilled in my throat. No, I shouldn’t do this. The risk is too great. The taint of sorcery mustn’t touch me if I want to go to Ida.
But I want to see it happen again. Just one more time before I turn twenty and Antoine either allows me to study botany in Ida or forces me to marry some safe and dependable man. One last time, before I have to forget for the rest of my life.
I squeeze my palm.
A single drop falls, crimson, winking.
Nothing happens. I stare at the circle of my blood on the stone, willing it, daring it…
I’m about to turn away when it happens. A phosphorescent gleam out of the corner of my eye.
The stone blooms into a woman—pale as frost, more insubstantial than wind. She moves restlessly, as if she sees me and yet does not. There’s a knife in her hand, a twin to the one I just dropped. I stare at her—at the high lace collar that hugs her neck, at the folds of her clothing sweeping over and around and through the stone. Her gaze lifts above me, uneasy, intent.
“Mo cri, mo tire, mo fiel,” she says.
Her voice cuts through me. Fine as ice, softer than snow, so cold I feel myself freezing into place as I watch her. Every year, I think perhaps she will not appear. But she always does.
“Mo cri, mo tire, mo fiel.”
I grind my teeth together against the words. “I don’t know that language, you horrid thing.”
This is a lie. I do know the language.
But I don’t speak it anymore. I’ve forgotten everything I knew of it.
“Mo cri, mo tire, mo fiel!”
“Speak Ereni.” The horrible Caerisian echoes in my head. She’ll go on all day, until the blood fades or I wipe it away.
Her gaze lifts. She goes alert, tense, drawing her arm back so that the knife winks in the morning light. The muscles of her wrist tighten. The knife dips backward.
She’s going to throw it.
I duck, but she’s not looking at me. She’s looking at—
I swivel just in time to see him: a man stepping between the stones on the other side of the circle.
The dagger sails through the air. Not spectral. Real.
“Look out!” I scream.
The man starts, his gaze jerking to me. He doesn’t see the dagger until it thunks into the ground at his feet.
The man and I stare at each other.
I look back at the stone. She’s still there, a fresh dagger in her hand. She lifts her arm, poises again to throw…
I scrub the side of my hand over the stone. The blood vanishes, and so does she.
I breathe out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. I brace my palm against the stone. My thoughts scramble, frantic. Why has this man come into the circle? No one comes here. I’m supposed to be safe here, safe to taunt myself with a magic I am not supposed to possess. A magic I still don’t understand.
Did he see her? Or does he think I threw the dagger at him?
“Are you all right?”
At the sound of his voice, warm and deep and slightly accented, I remember who I am. I hitch myself upright, facing him. He’s standing on the other side of the altar stone now, the dagger held between both hands. A flush mounts in my cheeks, burning up into my ears, but there’s nothing I can do about that. Like me, he wears a bulky gray coat, with a hat pulled low over his face, so that all I see is the firm line of a jaw above a blue silk neckcloth, a mouth, and the curl of his nostrils.
The dagger gleams in his gloved hands, solid and real. Just like the one that I’ve forgotten, fallen between the stones. If he looks at it, he’ll see it’s old-fashioned, a needle-bladed rondel, its bone handle carved with running deer.
I lunge forward to snatch the dagger from his hands. He jumps back, startled, and the weapon falls onto the trampled leaves and dirt. I pick it up, stuffing it under my coat. When I get to my feet, he’s standing farther away from me, his hands shoved into his pockets.
“An unusual place for target practice,” he says.
I decide to pretend I threw the dagger. Maybe he didn’t see the specter after all.
It’s possible.
“I didn’t see you,” I say stiffly. “No one ever comes up here.”
Maybe this is a stupid thing to say. I’ve never seen this man before in my life, and now I’ve as good as told him we’re alone. Who is he? Could Princess Loyce have sent him to spy on me? It would be like her; Denis Falconier and her people are always watching me for the least sign of “Caerisian savagery”—an imperfectly spoken sentence, a poor hairstyle, a breach of etiquette. They have reported back to Loyce, and she to the king, when I’ve arranged harmless parties with friends and attended lectures at the university. Once, when I was sixteen, I tried to sneak five minutes alone in a deserted salon with a boy I liked. We had hardly even taken each other’s hands when Loyce and Denis burst in with a full retinue—no doubt hoping to find me in a compromising position. I’ve learned to be more discreet, but I don’t always hide my tracks.
And if Loyce has sent this man, it’s the end of me. She’ll finally have the leverage to ruin me, as she’s always wanted to. I have no power but the king’s mercurial affection, which would vanish as soon as anyone named me a witch.
“I don’t see why,” the man is saying. He’s young, not much older than me. The accent is strong in his voice. Idaean? Why would someone from Paladis be up on the Hill of the Imperishable? “The sunrise is beautiful.”
“Is it?” I haven’t noticed. I think of the Paladisan guards killing anyone who came up the hill and I shiver, though it was more than two hundred years ago.
We stare at each other beneath the brims of our hats. Can he see I’m a girl? Can he hear it in my voice? Does he know who I am?
“While this has been pleasant,” I begin.
At the same time, he says, “Do you know who they are
, the people in the stones?”
My voice shrinks in my throat. The man pushes back his hat. His eyes are light, uncanny against his olive skin, and his short, disheveled black hair escapes from the brim of his hat. A flush burns through me. This man, with his bright, intense gaze, makes Martin Bonnaire, whom I’ve been swanning over for months, look like a sorry sack. And he is staring right back at me, as if I’m worth looking at.
I open my mouth. My heart is leaping. But he saw me—he must have—waking the specter in the stones. Why is he here? What does he want?
No man has ever looked at me like this, his gaze skimming the length of my body and coming back to my eyes. As if he’s earned the right to look so intimately at me. As if he’s searching for something beyond the surface of my skin.
I can’t let him look at me this way.
I dart out of the circle, running the long way down the hill, back toward the palace.
It’s only when I reach the bottom of the hill that I remember I left the other dagger behind, between the stones.
—
THE LONG ROUTE takes me to the palace gardens. I hurry down the promenade, past a fountain where a statue of the sea god Ensidione wrestles with a water nymph, toward the glass walls of the greenhouse. I’m still wearing trousers, my hands scraped and dirty, but it’s not as if Guerin will care. His hands are always dirty.
I keep glancing over my shoulder, afraid the man’s followed me from the stones. He saw my magic; he could report me. The witch hunters could come for me. But of course he’s not there.
Who was he? If only I understood the magic in the stones, maybe I could have done something to make the specter vanish or obey my bidding.
Ahead, the yew trees curl against the side of the greenhouse. I need to check on the Amanita virosa—hopefully it hasn’t withered. I’ve been waiting for a couple of days, ever since I saw the mushroom growing in the duff beneath the yews. Purest white, slender and perfect, it is as deadly as it is beautiful. It will be one of the last things I study under Guerin’s tutelage, the culmination of our course on fungi. Now I’m going to cut it from the ground and make a spore sample from its fleshy cap to observe and record. When I leave Laon, I can’t take Guerin with me, or our greenhouse, but at least I’ll be able to take the memory of this final examination, as well as the drawings I’ve made in my book.
I lower myself to my knees and peer into the dark recesses behind the yew’s trunk.
The mushroom isn’t there. It’s not rotting; the damp ground is empty. It can’t have disappeared. No creature would eat the whole thing, and no human being would be stupid enough—or observant enough—to pick it.
I scrabble through the dirt. The base, the volva, should be here—somewhere. Maybe a creature, a squirrel, knocked the mushroom over. I tuck myself deeper behind the trunk, patting the soil. My fingernail catches in a fleshy, damp substance.
The mycelium—the root—is there, and the mushroom has been sliced cleanly off.
I surge to my feet and burst through the glass doors into the greenhouse. “Guerin, did you cut the amanita?”
No answer. I come to a stop. The plants sit about me in their pots, a collision of greens; if I listen hard I can hear them breathing, hear the sturdy effort of drinking sunlight. Surely Guerin does not hear this sound. Most days, when he’s here, I can ignore it, drown it out in the noise of conversation. But now that I’m alone, my treacherous ears are aware of a gritty murmur just beyond ordinary hearing. It lulls me. My breathing slows, and my hands fall loose at my sides. For a moment, I forget to be afraid. I just want to listen. I want to understand what the plants are saying.
No. I jerk myself from my reverie and march toward the worktables. This is why magic is dangerous. It lures you in. It makes you curious.
Maybe what I hear isn’t magical at all. Maybe I just have particularly keen hearing. Maybe anyone can hear plants growing, if they listen hard enough.
On Guerin’s worktable, an orchid sits with its roots exposed, stripped from the mossy log where it usually grows. A scattering of dirt lingers on the wooden surface. Someone must have called him away; he’d never abandon an orchid unless it was urgent. He loves orchids, though few grow in Eren, and it’s an expense to bring them from other countries; in order to pay for them, he grafts apple trees to produce more fruit. King Antoine likes to remind him that he only keeps a royal botanist to signify Eren’s sophistication. Antoine is keen to be seen as a sophisticate; he still grumbles about his visit to Paladis as a boy, and how the courtiers ridiculed his manners and how he made the incorrect number of bows to the then-emperor. This is, I suppose, why he longs for Paladis’s approval while at the same time trying the emperor’s patience by demanding higher tariffs on the grain, timber, and lead we export. “And for all that,” he likes to say, “we are no more than flies stinging an elephant’s back.” Perhaps this is why he takes my side when his daughter derides me as a backwoods savage. Just a few weeks ago, when Loyce mocked the indexing Guerin and I had finished of southern Ereni plants, Antoine said, “You should be wary of scorning another’s work, Loyce, when you set aside your own studies at the age of fourteen.” She stormed out. We all know she can hardly add two plus two, and her handwriting is no better than a child’s. I could read better than she could when I was nine and she fourteen.
I hesitate—where is Guerin?—but I can’t leave the orchid to wither. I lift the plant in my hands. It moves when I touch it, its petals lifting like a face toward me, the exposed roots twisting over my fingers. Their touch is gingerly and ticklish. When I was a child, this sort of thing made me giggle. Now I glance over my shoulder in case anyone has burst into the room—in case anyone sees me performing illegal magic with a plant and turns me over to the authorities for imprisonment and interrogation.
I settle the orchid on its log. It rustles and sighs, its roots twisting around the wood and moss. As soon as I set it down and step back, it stops growing and sits there like an ordinary plant.
It is an ordinary plant. All plants are ordinary, until I touch them.
All my life, I’ve had to hide what happens when I touch anything that comes from the earth—plants, stones, trees, soil, orchids. No one here, in Laon, knows. Even Guerin simply says I have a green thumb.
In Caeris, though, my parents knew what I am. I remember that much.
Surely this is what Denis Falconier meant when he mocked the Caerisians for believing the earth is alive. If he knew what I could do…
I push this thought to the back of my mind, as well as the accompanying, ever-present desire to understand my magic better. Because if my touch can make an orchid move and grow of its own accord, if my blood can wake specters in the ancient stones, what else can I do?
Nothing, I tell myself. I can do nothing. I am a botanist, not a sorcerer. Botanists have a place in this world—a respectable place. As the emperor of Paladis likes to remind us, sorcerers are worse than nothing—their impious actions are a mockery of the gods, and their historical conviction that they could rule kingdoms presented a threat to civilization itself, a danger that had to be exterminated. Too many sorcerers schemed against the empire and so, more than two hundred years ago, the empire began its hunts and inquisitions, ruthlessly exterminating magic from its territories. They claim the scourge was necessary, that the practice of sorcery leads to a delusion of godlike power. Yet a few magicians still exist, in secret, and you still hear of one or two every year brought to the prison in Ida—and never heard from again, the poor wretches. I’ve survived my father’s failed revolution to put a different king on the throne of Caeris and Eren. I don’t want to die now.
All the same, I can’t resist brushing my fingers over the orchid again. Its stalk shivers.
—
I CAN’T SEEM to focus on my work in the greenhouse, not even reading The Journal of Botanical Studies. Eventually I give up and return to my room to change for my meeting with Victoire; today is Lunedia and we have to plan the salon for tomorrow. Maybe
Victoire will know where Guerin has gone, though I don’t know why she would. Or maybe he’ll be back at the greenhouse when I’m done.
The skin between my shoulder blades twitches. The gilt-trimmed corridor is almost deserted—not an odd occurrence given the celebration last night, but still I’m not used to so much silence between these pale walls. My footsteps sound unnaturally loud on the crimson Agran carpet.
Even upstairs, where the maidservants are usually bustling about, it’s quiet. When I open the door to my rooms, Hensey launches herself at me.
“Elanna, where in all the gods’ names have you been?”
I take a step back. Even though her flounced cap is squished and her hair wisping out beneath it, her sharpness shrinks me down to the size of a five-year-old. “I went for a walk—”
“A walk?” She pronounces the word as if it’s a disgusting activity. Her nostrils flare. “You haven’t heard the news, then.”
“I—”
She plants her hands on her hips. “The king’s taken ill.”
So that’s why the corridors are so quiet. “Probably too much spiced wine. He was singing ‘Eren the Undying’ at full voice at two o’clock yesterday afternoon.”
“They’re saying it’s poison.” She stares at me, dipping her chin to emphasize her words. “They found something. Evidence.”
A rush of cold burns up my arms. The empty greenhouse, the silent corridors. Guerin missing.
The amanita, gone.
No. It can’t be anything to do with the amanita. No one else knew it was there. No one.
But Guerin was gone, the orchid dropped on the table, abandoned.
“You need to go down there right now,” Hensey is saying, somewhere beyond the rushing in my ears. “Stay in the public view.”
“Hensey—” My voice hitches upward. “You don’t think Guerin—he wasn’t in the greenhouse…”
