Afterward, Clover gave me the pen to keep. It’s in my pocket, and the small weight of it feels like another marker of how irrevocably everything has changed.
Rowan has stood far back in the garden, beneath an arbor of white-flowered elder trees, watching our practice without comment. Now he comes over to sit down beside me at the altar. Gently, he reaches for my arm. “Can I see?”
I nod, and push back my sleeve to show him the spell inscribed on my wrist. “What do you think? Have I done well, or will I need another writing lesson?”
He frowns at my teasing. Then he tentatively touches the mark. A few tiny sparks of magic scatter into the air between us. He watches them fade. “You’re far beyond anything I could teach you, Violeta.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. You might give me some advice on how to split kindling. You missed observance while you were cutting all that firewood.”
Scowling, he turns to the altar. He touches the earth for the barest moment before he sits back, rubbing the dirt from his hands.
I laugh. “You know, you’re supposed to chant.”
“I don’t like to sing when people can hear me.” He picks up some fallen petals from the ground and drops them beneath the icon. His eyes are distant. “Anyway, my observance is different.”
An image flashes through my mind. The altar in the parlor. Rowan kneeling with his palms to the bare floor as the dual icon looms over him. “You really worship the Lord Under?”
He arches a brow. “That icon has two figures. All the noble houses have one similar. My father, and every lord before him, they’ve all worshipped there.” He picks up another handful of flowers. “That altar, it’s a reminder for me: I’m bound to this land and all within it, their lives and their deaths. I’m still their lord, even if they all think I’m a monster.”
I have a sudden, destructive urge to tell him what the Lord Under has offered me. Because Rowan and I have looked into the same shadowed dark and made the same desperate choices. But I can’t. No matter what I did in my past, no one can know about this.
All I can say is, “I think I understand. I wish the others did, too. Everyone is so busy fearing you that they don’t see it—how much you care for them.”
Slowly, Rowan reaches toward me. His fingers are smeared with pollen from the flowers. I hold my breath as he traces the line of my throat, a dozen images flickering through my mind of what he might do next—of what I might want him to do.
But then he hooks his fingers beneath the ribbon around my neck. He draws out the key and curls his fingers over it. I try to move back, but he tightens his grip and the ribbon snags. Laughing, he gives it a little pull, tugging me forward. “I knew you’d taken this. Violeta, you’re such a thief.”
I reach to my neck, trying to unfasten the knot. “Do you want it back?”
“No.” He pulls on the ribbon again, then the key slips from his hand and thumps against my chest. The scrolled iron is warm from being against my skin. I can feel the thrum of my pulse in my throat, in the place where he touched me.
Rowan gets to his feet. He looks toward the path that curves away from the house. “Come with me. I have something to show you.”
I stand up unsteadily and take his offered hand. He leads me farther into the garden. We push through a bank of grass, the seed-filled ends almost as tall as my head. Everything is dried out by the midsummer sun and heated air. We follow the path for a long time, and then we reach the wall. The gate, covered in vines.
When I was here last, when I followed him through the dark, the garden was all silver and shadow. Now it’s lit faintly by the twilight, the air faded and otherworldly, like an illustration from the book he gave me.
“Go ahead,” Rowan says softly. “Open it.”
I carefully move the vines away from the handle and slip the key into the lock. The gate swings open without a sound. Together, we step into the garden.
The orchard trees have spread from their ordered rows, and the flower beds are only tangles of dry grass. An endless bramble winds through it all, a sharp snarl of vine and thorn, leafless and bare.
But as I look around, a warmth hums under my skin. I can see how it all must have been once. This secret, locked-up place that’s been kept asleep. Fruit and herbs and flowers. The air all sugar and pollen and the drone of bees.
It’s beautiful.
Rowan stays behind me as I walk along the path where weeds push up between the gravel stones. Quiet stretches between us. The only sound is our footsteps.