Eric looked out the window she had indicated, at the neat rows of flowers before the willow grove. Everything looked normal, if a little dull since his grandmother had grown too frail to keep taking a personal hand in her seaside garden.
Then, squinting, he saw a patch that looked different from the rest. Freshly turned, and irregularly planted.
He leapt downstairs as fast as he could and ran outside.
The fact that there was an entirely new, if tiny, garden on castle grounds that Eric hadn’t heard anything about was…disheartening. It was just one more detail that cemented Eric’s flailing, ignorant, and useless place in his own castle. His grandmother would have known about it immediately. Would have been told the moment the gardeners started spending their time on anything besides her heirloom roses and exotic perennials.
The plants growing in this new patch were not roses—though they did more or less fall into the category of exotic perennial. Eric studied the leaves and little identifying tags.
Artemisia. Okay, that was like wormwood, what they made absinthe out of. His grandmother had always liked their pretty woolly silver leaves.
Belladonna. Clary sage, henbane. Old-fashioned herbs.
Mandrake.
He recognized the last because a sailor had once shown him a particularly fine specimen of the root; it looked like a little person. “There’s folks in Bretland will pay a king’s ransom for this. I just have to tell them it screamed when the farmer pulled it out of the soil.”
Eric shook his head in wonder. Even to someone more skilled in the arts of the sea and music than farming, it was obvious Vanessa was trying her hand at a witch’s garden.
Her magic didn’t work on land. So she was trying to learn new magic. Land magic.
Was that…a thing?
Was witchcraft real?
If it was, could Vanessa harness its powers? Would she be able to summon undead armies to do her bidding, call down storms and plagues on countries they were at war with?
Would she be able to cast new charms? Would Eric once again find himself foggy and forgetting, hypnotized and half-awake? Would he do everything his terrible wife said?
He swallowed, trying to control the panic that was coming on.
Boneset. Some said it was good for aches and pains. Modern doctors disagreed.
Wolfsbane.
Foxglove. A pretty flower, and dangerous to animals. It was also known as digitalis and contained a substance that destroyed the heart—literally. Eric remembered his father telling him not to let Max anywhere near it if they found some in the woods.
Whether or not witchcraft was real, poison certainly was.
No one really believed the Ibrian had died of natural causes. And here, more or less, was the proof: holes in the ground where some of the flowers had been pulled out. Used. The plant could be put into anything: tea, soup, tobacco mix for a pipe…Vanessa could make good on her threat at any time. Grimsby would keel over from a heart attack and no one would suspect anything—it would be sad, but an entirely natural, predictable death.
Nothing Eric could ever do would convince the butler to abandon his post, short of tying him up and putting him on a boat to the lands in the west against his will. Eric ran his hands through his hair, frustrated and at wit’s end.
A large bird landed on a statue behind him, casting a cold black shadow. The prince turned, fully expecting a crow or raven, as befitted the mood of the garden.
But it was a seagull. With something stringy and brown in its mouth.
“Hello,” Eric said politely. “Did Ariel send you?”
The bird answered by dropping the thing it held onto the ground. It squawked.
“Thank you…？” He picked up the leather cord; it was the one Ariel wore around her wrist. Now, letting it flow through his fingers, he realized it was the strap from the necklace that Vanessa used to wear, the one with the nautilus on it.
（Now the princess wore a gold chain that dipped down under her bodice. He had no idea what sort of pendant was on it—probably something unsettling and hideous.）
A white scroll was tied to one end of the strap; it unfurled of its own accord into his hand. On it, sketched in gold, was a carriage with a half-octopus, half-woman thing emerging through the door. There was also a drawing of a crown with what looked like a slash or a tear through it.
Eric swore when he realized what it meant. “It was a trap. The king wasn’t even there!” The little scroll faded into glitter, disappearing entirely even as he tried to grasp at the bits.
But if Ariel had cast this pretty little spell, he realized, it meant that she had to be in the water. Which meant she was safe. Just…disappointed, and probably grieving. His heart went out to the poor queen of the merfolk. They had both been so sure their respective ordeals were almost over…