The Thornbound Crown: The Garden Below

The tapestry sagged on its rod, moth-eaten at the edges where silver thread had once traced the Ashworth stag. Elara Veyne ran her fingers along the worn fabric and felt something behind it that did not belong. A draft, thin and cold, breathing through a seam in the stone. She pressed her palm flat against the wall. The rock gave way beneath pressure that should not have moved stone at all, and a panel of masonry swung inward on hidden hinges, releasing the scent of loam and something sweeter, something green that had no business thriving this far beneath a dying castle.

She hesitated only long enough to glance over her shoulder. The corridor behind her lay empty, lit by guttering sconces that had not been tended in days. Whatever servants Thornhold still possessed had abandoned the upper towers to the coughing fits and the rumors. She stepped through.

The passage descended in a tight spiral, carved directly into the bedrock, its walls sweating moisture that caught the light of her stolen taper. Water dripped somewhere far below, a steady percussion that measured the seconds she spent descending. Forty-seven steps. Forty-eight. She lost count somewhere around the third switchback, when the stair opened without warning into a chamber that stole the breath from her lungs.

The cavern stretched the length of a cathedral nave, its ceiling lost in shadow, its floor carpeted in cultivated beds of black soil. Above her, a lattice of crystal hung like frozen rain, each facet catching the meager light from her taper and multiplying it into something approaching daylight. The air was warm. Humid. Alive in a way that Thornhold had not been for months. And rising from the beds in ordered rows, tended with an architect's precision, stood the source of every horror she had fled in the spring.

Flowers. Plague-bloomers in every stage of growth, from tight fist-sized buds the color of bruised plums to mature blossoms the span of her open palms, their petals the deep, unsettling crimson of arterial blood. Each blossom exhaled a faint vapor, visible only when she moved the taper, curling upward in lazy spirals toward the crystal canopy. The Whispering Plague, cultivated in rows, labeled with small brass markers driven into the soil. She crouched and read the nearest one. Cultivar III. Optimized strain. Harvest window: fourteen days.

A tremor ran through her, not of fear but of a colder recognition. Someone had been breeding this sickness. Someone had been improving it.

She moved deeper into the garden, trailing her free hand along the tops of the nearest plants, careful not to let her skin brush the petals. The leaves were slick with condensation, cool and thick as frog's skin. Beneath the cloying sweetness of the blooms she caught another scent, sharper, almost metallic, and her stomach turned at what it suggested. Fertilizer. The wrong kind.

The first body lay between the second and third row, half-consumed by the root systems of a particularly aggressive cluster of mature blooms. A man, judging by the remnants of his clothing. A Thornhold servant, by the cut of the grey wool. His face had gone waxy and slack, his mouth open, his eyes filmed over with the same grey-white that she had seen on the dead in Ashford Village. The flowers had threaded themselves through the empty sockets, pale roots drinking what remained.

Elara swallowed hard and forced herself to look away. She had known what the plague did. She had buried neighbors. She had watched her uncle waste to a husk over three weeks of coughing, and she had learned to keep her face flat through the worst of it. But standing among the cultivated source, seeing the body used as compost, she understood for the first time the scope of what she faced. This was not a sickness that had happened to the realm. It was a sickness that had been made.

A sound behind her, soft as a footfall on wet moss. She spun, taper extended, heart hammering against the cage of her ribs. The shadows between the rows shifted and resettled. She counted her own breaths, in and out, until her pulse slowed enough for thought. When she stepped forward to investigate, she found a second body slumped against the stone lip of an irrigation channel, this one further along in the process, the blooms around it already producing mature seedpods. A woman, older, her grey hair still pinned beneath a stained coif. The brass marker beside her read simply: Sacrifice. Donor.

She was not alone down here. The garden had a keeper.

Elara moved more carefully after that, hugging the shadows at the perimeter, keeping her taper low. The crystal lattice overhead hummed faintly, a resonance she could feel in her teeth, and she understood after a few moments that it was not decorative. It was amplifying something. The soft exhalations of the blooms, gathered, magnified, conducted through the stone of the tower above and out into the corridors of Thornhold, where the coughing servants and the bored guards breathed it in without ever knowing. The plague was not spreading through the realm by accident. It was being pumped through Thornhold's walls like water through an aqueduct, and she was standing at the heart of the system.

She reached the far end of the cavern and found a workbench cluttered with tools that did not belong in any gardener's she'd. Glass vials in wooden racks. Mortars stained with pigments. A leather-bound journal splayed open, its pages covered in a cramped hand she did not recognize. She lifted the taper and read.

Day 412. Strain VII shows improved aerosolization. Subjects in the east wing developed symptoms within nine days, as projected. The Duchess has requested a slower progression for the Thornwood buffer zone. Adjusting aerosol density by three percent.

The Duchess.

Elara's hands had gone cold, though the cavern air was warm. She turned the page. More entries. Cultivation notes. Yield projections. A list of names and locations that made her throat close, Ashford among them, with a date beside it that fell two days before the first household in the village had fallen ill. Someone had known. Someone had scheduled it.

A floorboard creaked at the entrance to the cavern. She was not alone, and whoever else was down here had heard her moving among the rows.

She doused the taper against the leg of her trousers and pressed herself behind the workbench, into a wedge of shadow where the crystal light could not reach. Her eyes adjusted slowly. The footsteps descended the spiral stair with the careful, measured cadence of someone who knew every loose stone, every uneven tread. Whoever it was had made this journey many times before. The rhythm suggested no fear, no hesitation, only the boredom of routine.

A voice drifted down from the stair, half-whispered, conversational, as though speaking to an old companion.

You have grown beautifully this season. I have brought you something.

Elara risked a glance around the edge of the bench. A figure moved into the cavern, her silhouette backlit by the sconce-light from the passage above. Tall, slender, moving with a courtly grace that Elara recognized from the rare occasions her uncle had brought her to gatherings in Marantine. She wore no mask, but the shadows were kind, and at first Elara could not be certain. Then the woman stopped before the largest cluster of mature blooms and lifted the veil from a wicker basket, and Elara saw what lay inside, and her stomach rebelled.

A child. Young, no more than six, drugged into stillness, breathing in shallow sips through pale lips.

The woman set the basket at the base of the cluster and drew back, satisfied, and the roots of the nearest blooms had already begun to unfurl toward the small unconscious form, questing, hungry.

Elara did not remember deciding to move. She came up from behind the bench with the heavy pestle she had palmed from the workbench, swung with the muscle memory of a woodcutter's apprentice, and caught the woman across the back of the skull before the basket-keeper could turn. The crack of impact echoed through the cavern. The woman crumpled without a sound, folding like a folded cloth, and lay still among the roots that were reaching for the child.

Elara dropped the pestle, her hands shaking. She seized the basket and stumbled back, nearly falling over the unconscious woman, and set the child down at a safer distance, checking for breath. Still shallow. Still alive. She ripped a strip from her own sleeve and pressed it over the small mouth and nose, a crude filter against the vapor already curling from the disturbed blooms.

Her hands would not stop trembling. She forced them flat against her thighs and looked down at the woman she had struck.

In the faint light from the crystal canopy, the face of Duchess Lyra Marantine looked up at her from the soil, slack and unguarded, stripped of the courtly smile she had worn at every state function Elara had ever witnessed. The woman who had hosted the harvest banquets. The woman who had mourned the fallen prince in public and demanded justice against the Thornwood borderlands in the same breath. The woman whose signature had authorized the quarantine that had killed her uncle.

Elara knelt there in the warm dark, the child breathing faintly beside her, the flowers swaying in a breeze she could not feel, and tried to summon the cold clarity that the moment required. The journal lay on the bench above her. The bodies lay in the rows. The crystals hummed overhead, pumping their slow poison through the walls of Thornhold and out across the realm. She had found the source. She had found the architect. And now she had to decide what to do with both before someone came looking for the Duchess, before the roots found the child, before the crystal lattice exhaled another breath into the corridors above.

Somewhere far above her, a bell tolled the small hours. She had perhaps until dawn.

The footsteps came without warning.

Elara's head snapped up from the crumpled figure of Duchess Lyra Marantine, her pulse spiking so hard she felt it behind her eyes. She pressed herself flat against the bench, one hand still covering the child's mouth, the other reaching for the weighted iron bar she had left leaning against the lattice support. The garden's false breeze tugged at her hair. The crystals overhead pulsed their slow, sick rhythm.

A shape detached from the stairwell arch.

He moved like smoke given weight, all controlled economy, the sword at his hip dark with old blood that even the lamplight could not quite hide. Captain Sevryn Dace stopped three paces from the last step and surveyed the scene in a single sweep: the bodies, the crystals, the bench, and her.

"You should not be here," he said. His voice was gravel and old iron. Not loud. Not soft. The kind of voice that expected to be obeyed.

Elara did not move from the child. The little girl had gone rigid beneath her hand, eyes wide and wet in the gloom. The makeshift cloth had slipped an inch down the small nose. Elara eased it back with fingers she willed to be steady.

"Neither should you," she said.

Sevryn's gaze dropped to the body of the Duchess. Something passed across his face, too quick to name. He stepped closer, his boot brushing a fallen bloom that crumbled to ash at the contact.

"Stand up slowly," he said. "Hands where I can see them."

"She's dead," Elara said. "I put the bar through her skull. There were children in the vats. Two of them. I got one out."

"I can see what you did." His hand did not leave his sword hilt. "I need you to stand up."

She rose, keeping her body between the child and him, one palm out. The iron bar lay where she had left it. She did not reach for it. Not yet. Not until she understood what kind of man this was.

"You are Elara Veyne," he said. Not a question.

"And you are the captain who let Crown Prince Alaric die on the Thornwood border."

The words came out harder than she had meant them. She watched them land. They did not flinch him. He absorbed them the way old walls absorb weather, with the patience of something that had stopped expecting kindness.

"They discharged me after," he said. "Stripped my commission. Gave me back my sword and told me to go."

"And yet here you are."

"Here I am."

Above them, the crystal lattice exhaled. The mist thickened along the rows, curling around the sleeping figures in the vats like a slow, affectionate tide. Somewhere deeper in the garden, a child coughed in her sleep. Elara heard it and felt the sound go through her like a blade.

Sevryn heard it too. His eyes closed for half a breath. When they opened, something had shifted behind them.

"You said there were two in the vats," he said. "Where is the other."

"Still in there. I couldn't carry both. I thought if I got her out and found the journal, I could come back."

"You would have come back."

"Yes."

"Liar," he said, almost gently. "You would have run. With the one you saved. And told yourself you would return, and never done it."

She wanted to deny it. The denial sat in her throat, ready and sharp. But she looked down at the child curled against the bench leg, and she remembered the precise moment her feet had chosen the stair instead of the vat, and she knew he was right.

"Yes," she said. "I would have run."

Sevryn nodded once, as though she had passed a test he had not told her she was taking. He crossed to the nearest vat and looked down into it. The mist parted around his jaw. The child inside slept on, cheeks blotched, lips faintly blue. He did not touch her.

"They are not asleep," he said.

"I know."

"No." He turned back to her, and in the green half-light his face was older than she had expected, the lines cut deep around his mouth and brow. "You do not. You think they are drugged. You think they will wake. You are wrong."

Elara's mouth went dry. The child against her leg stirred, and the cloth slipped again, and she pushed it back with the heel of her hand, automatic, the way her aunt had once taught her to bind a cut on a working animal.

"What do you mean?"

Sevryn moved away from the vat. He paced the center row with his hands clasped behind his back, and for a moment he looked less like a mercenary and more like a man reviewing a battlefield he had been ordered to lose.

"Twelve years ago," he said, "I stood at the eastern gate of the capital and watched a column of refugees come down out of the Thornwood. Whole families. They had been walking for days. Some of them were bleeding from the mouth. Some were already gone in the head. We thought it was a sickness of the blood. The court physicians thought so too. They isolated the refugees in the lower wards. They burned their clothes. They said prayers over them. They did everything the rituals required."

He stopped in front of the Duchess's body and looked down at her face.

"I was the one who carried Prince Alaric out of the lower ward on the third night," he said. "He had gone in to give comfort to the dying. He had been there for hours. I found him kneeling beside a woman who was already past saving, with his gauntlets off, and his bare hands on her forehead."

Elara did not speak.

"He came out breathing wrong," Sevryn said. "I could hear it from across the courtyard. A sound like a man trying to swallow glass. By morning the court physicians had him in a sealed room. By the next day, the King had ordered the ward burned to the foundation. They told the public it was a precaution. They told me it was mercy."

He turned to face her fully.

"He lived," Sevryn said. "Against every expectation. Against every physician's oath. The corruption entered him and stopped. He carried it after that, the way a man carries a scar. But it changed him. It gave him something."

Elara felt the floor of the garden tilt under her, though she knew the stone was level.

"You are saying," she said slowly, "that Prince Alaric was one of them. A Plague-Bearer."

"I am saying that what the court calls a Plague-Bearer is a person whose body learned to live with the corruption instead of dying from it. I am saying there are perhaps a dozen in the realm. I am saying they can feel the sickness in the blood of others from across a city. I am saying that the Prince was one, and that his younger brother has been one since the day his elder brother died."

Elara's thoughts rearranged themselves with a violence that almost made her stagger.

"Kaelan," she said.

"Kaelan," Sevryn agreed. "He took the corruption from his brother's hand on the night of the pyre. Alaric told him to. He told him it was the only way to keep the sickness from spreading through the royal line. The boy did it. He was sixteen."

The child at Elara's leg whimpered. Elara knelt and gathered her up, settling the small weight against her hip. The girl's skin was clammy and too warm. Elara could feel the faint wrongness in the rhythm of her heartbeat, a stutter that did not belong in a body so young.

"And you," Elara said, looking up at him. "You know this because you can feel it too."

Sevryn said nothing for a long moment. His eyes moved from her face to the child she held, and something in them tightened.

"There was a reason," he said at last, "that the King kept me close to the Prince after Alaric's death. Not as captain of the guard. Not as a man-at-arms. As a hound. The Plague-Bearers can sense corruption in others, but they cannot always tell where it is. They need someone who has been exposed, someone the sickness has touched and left behind, to find the source. I was that hound. I was what they used to hunt."

"And now you hunt for Kaelan."

"Now I hunt for whoever will pay me," he said. "But the boy keeps me close. He thinks I do not notice. He does not understand that I can feel the corruption moving under his skin the way you can feel rain coming in the air."

Elara stared at him. The garden hummed around them, the crystals pulsing their slow green, the mist breathing between the rows. The Duchess lay at their feet like a discarded glove.

"If you can feel the sickness," Elara said, "then you know what is happening to the children in these vats."

"Yes."

"Tell me."

Sevryn's jaw tightened. He looked at the vat nearest him, at the child sleeping inside it, at the roots threading slow and deliberate into the soft skin of her temples.

"They are being hollowed," he said. "The corruption does not kill the body. It takes the body over. It eats the self out of the flesh the way a beetle eats the heart out of a green branch, and what is left behind is something that looks like the child and walks like the child and will, in time, speak with the child's voice. But the child is gone. There is nothing inside to come back to."

The girl in Elara's arms made a small sound, half cough, half sigh. Elara pressed her closer, as though pressure alone could keep the sickness out.

"The one I pulled out," Elara said. "Is she already too far gone."

Sevryn crossed to her in two strides. He did not touch the child. He held his hand an inch above her crown, palm down, fingers spread, the way a man holds his hand above a stove to test the heat. His eyes half-closed. The tendons stood out along his forearm.

"She is early," he said. "Hours, not days. You got her out in time."

Something in Elara's chest loosened enough to let her breathe.

"The other one," he said. He moved to the second vat and held his hand above the sleeping girl. He stood there longer this time. When he drew back, his face had gone the color of old ash.

"She is further along," he said. "But not gone. Not yet. If we take her now, there is a chance."

"A chance of what."

"Of waking up a person who remembers her own name." He paused. "Or of waking up something that wears her face."

Elara looked from the vat to the body of the Duchess to the bench where the journal still lay in its leather binding. The weight of the choice pressed against the inside of her ribs like a hand.

"If we leave her," Elara said, "the Duchess's people will come. They will put her deeper in. They will finish what was started."

"Yes."

"And if we take her, and she turns."

"Then I will put her down," Sevryn said. "Quickly. Before she knows it has happened."

Elara searched his face for any sign that he was performing mercy, or pretending to. She found neither. She found a man who had made this promise before, perhaps many times, and intended to keep it.

"Why should I trust you," she said.

"You should not," he said. "You should take the child you have and walk up those stairs and out the postern gate and into the Thornwood before dawn. You should forget this garden and the children in it and the Duchess who lies at your feet. You should trust no one, least of all a man whose king once paid him to hunt his own citizens."

He turned to face her fully.

"And yet," he said, "here I am. Asking you to help me carry one more child out of this place."

Elara looked at the girl in her arms. She looked at the vat where the second girl slept. She looked at the journal, and the Duchess, and the crystals overhead, and the mist curling between the rows.

She thought of her uncle, who had died behind a quarantine line because a woman who lay dead in a garden had signed a piece of paper.

She thought of the children in the vats above her, who would breathe this same poison tomorrow night, and the night after, and the night after that.

She thought of Kaelan Ashworth, somewhere above her in the palace, wearing his polished smile over a corruption he had inherited from a brother who had loved him enough to give it to him on purpose.

"We take her," Elara said. "Both of them. And then we go back for the others."

Sevryn's mouth twitched. Not a smile. The shadow of one, long buried.

"There are a hundred and seven," he said. "I counted on the way down."

"Then we start with two," Elara said, "and we do not stop."

The girl in Elara's arms stirred against the cold, her breath catching in the mist. Sevryn moved toward the second vat with the careful steps of a man who had carried too many bodies to set one down carelessly. He lifted the sleeping child into the crook of his arm and turned to face Elara across the rows of glass and the long grave of his old captain.

"Elara," he said. Not a question. A naming.

"Yes."

"Hold her close. The stairs are narrow."

They began the climb. The Duchess watched them from the floor with eyes that had forgotten how to close, and somewhere above them the castle groaned as if the bones of it were shifting in their sleep. The mist curled after them up the stair, and the crystals at their belts hummed a low and silver note that Elara felt more than she heard, a vibration in the teeth and the soft cartilage of her inner ear.

Sevryn took the steps slowly. His free hand rested on the wall, and she could see the cost of each one in the set of his jaw and the careful way he set his weight. He had carried children before, she thought. He had carried them out of places like this, and some of them had lived, and some of them had not, and he had kept the count of both in a ledger somewhere behind his eyes.

They came up through the trapdoor into the greenhouse proper. The night had deepened while they were below. The glass walls threw back the blue-white of the moons, and the shadows between the planting beds lay like spilled ink. Elara blinked against the change in light, and for a moment she could not see Sevryn at all, only the dark shape of him and the smaller dark shape in his arms.

Then a lamp kindled at the far end of the greenhouse, and she saw Prince Kaelan Ashworth standing between the camellias with his back to her and his head slightly tilted, as if he had been listening for a long time and had only now decided to let them know.

"I had hoped," he said, without turning, "that the trapdoor was a legend."

He turned. The lamp was a small one, set on a wrought iron stand, and it threw his face into sharp relief against the dark of the leaves. He looked younger than he had in the council chamber. He looked tired in a way that practice had not yet taught him to hide.

"Captain Dace," he said, and his voice carried that crisp Ashworth politeness, that careful music. "I had heard you were dead. Several times, in fact. It is a relief to discover the reports were exaggerated."

"Your Highness," Sevryn said. He did not bow. He adjusted the child in his arm.

Kaelan's gaze moved to Elara. To the girl in her arms. To the journal that was still clutched against her side. His expression did not change, but something behind it did, a subtle rearrangement, as if a room had been re-furnished while the door was closed.

"You found the garden," he said.

"I found it," Elara said.

"And the Duchess."

"I found her too."

He was silent for a moment. The lamp flame shivered in some breath of air that did not reach Elara where she stood, and the camellias at his back nodded once, as if in agreement to a thing that had not yet been said.

"My brother," he said at last, "believed that the lower kingdoms were a problem to be solved. He was fond of solutions that did not require the consent of the solved. He kept his notes in a study in the west tower. They are still there. They are very thorough."

Elara felt the girl in her arms shift, a small dream-murmur against her collarbone. She did not step back. She did not soften.

"And you?" she said. "What did you believe?"

Kaelan's mouth did something complicated. It wanted to smile, perhaps. It decided against it.

"I believed," he said, "that I would be king someday, and that when I was, I would be a kind one. I believed this because my tutors told me it was so, and because my brother's example made kindness look like the easiest possible rebellion against him."

He looked at the children. Both of them. As if he were counting.

"You are not going to be kind," Elara said.

"No," he said. "I am not. I am going to be expedient, and then I am going to be afraid, and then I am going to be cruel in the particular way that frightened men are cruel, unless someone breaks the pattern before it sets."

He set the lamp down on the stand. He stepped forward, between the camellias, into the space between Elara and Sevryn. He was unarmed. His hands were empty and open at his sides.

"You have two children," he said. "There are a hundred and seven in the vats. The crystals in the ceiling are not decorative. They are tuned. When the moons align, as they will in approximately nine days, the resonance will carry through the palace foundations, through the aqueducts, through every well and cistern in the lower city. The plague you have seen in Verenmere is not plague. It is a test. The Duchess has been refining it for six years. My brother funded her. I inherited the project when I inherited the crown."

He paused. He let the words sit.

"I could have stopped it," he said. "I have had three years. I did not stop it. I told myself that the children in the vats were necessary, because the alternative was a war I did not know how to win. I told myself that the lower kingdoms would die of something else if not this, and that a clean weapon was a mercy compared to a slow one."

He looked at Elara, and for the first time she saw him without the polish. He looked like a boy who had been given a crown that did not fit and had been told to wear it anyway.

"I am telling you this," he said, "because Captain Dace is going to try to kill me in approximately four seconds, and I would like you to understand why he is right to try."

Sevryn had not moved. His free hand had drifted toward his belt, but it had not completed the motion. He stood with the sleeping child against his chest and the war behind his eyes, and he was listening with the patience of a man who had learned to wait for the lie in a confession.

"The lower kingdoms," Elara said. Her own voice sounded strange to her, as if it belonged to someone standing a step behind her. "How many?"

"How many kingdoms," Kaelan said, "or how many people?"

"Yes."

"All of them," he said. "The project was never about winning the war. The war was the cover. My father wanted a tool that could empty a province of its people and leave the soil intact for resettlement. The Duchess promised him that the plague could be tuned to any population the user had access to. She promised him it would not touch the wells of the upper city. She promised him it would not touch the wells of the palace."

He looked up at the crystals in the ceiling. They were dim now, but she could feel them listening, a faint pressure at the back of her skull.

"She lied," Kaelan said. "Or she did not lie, and my father did not ask the right questions. The resonance does not care about wells. It cares about water. The aqueducts run both directions. When the moons align, the resonance will run up as well as down. The upper city will be the first to fall."

He said it the way a man says a thing he has said to himself a thousand times in the dark and has only now said aloud.

"I have been trying to decide," he said, "whether to tell anyone before the alignment. I have been trying to decide for nine days. I had not decided when you opened the trapdoor."

Sevryn's hand was on his belt. His thumb rested on the pommel of the knife.

"Your Highness," he said, and his voice was the roughest thing in the room, "I am going to ask you a question, and I would like you to answer it as if the children could hear you."

"Ask," Kaelan said.

"The crystals in the ceiling. Can they be stopped?"

"Yes," Kaelan said. "There is a sequence in the study in the west tower. A counter-resonance. It will shatter the crystals and break the tuning. It cannot be done by me. It can only be done by someone whose blood the Duchess keyed the system to, which is to say, by my brother's line, which is to say, by me."

He paused.

"Or," he said, "by the only living heir of the Thornwood line, which the Duchess also keyed, because my brother was nothing if not thorough."

He looked at Elara. He looked at the journal under her arm. He looked at the girl in her arms, who was beginning to stir against the cold.

"Miss Veyne," he said, "I believe you have just inherited a very large problem. I am going to help you solve it. I am going to do this not because I am kind, but because the alternative is that my father's project kills the people it was meant to spare, and I find that I cannot live in a kingdom built on the bones of my own court."

Sevryn's hand came off the knife. He did not sheath it. He held it at his side, the blade loose in his grip.

"Your Highness," he said, "if you are lying to us, I will kill you before the moons align."

"I know," Kaelan said. "It is one of the things I am counting on."

Elara looked down at the girl in her arms. The girl had opened her eyes. They were the color of the mist, and they were looking up at her with the particular clarity of a child who has been asleep a long time and has woken into a world she does not recognize.

"Who are you?" the girl said.

Elara thought of her uncle. She thought of the quarantine line. She thought of the journal under her arm and the vats below and the resonance humming in the bones of the palace.

"I am Elara," she said. "I am going to take you somewhere safe."

She looked at Kaelan. She looked at Sevryn.

"Both of you," she said, "pick up a child. We are going to the west tower, and we are going to do this now."

Kaelan bent and lifted the lamp from its stand. Sevryn shifted the girl in his arms and moved to Elara's side. The three of them stood for a moment in the greenhouse, in the blue-white light of the moons, with the camellias nodding at their backs and the trapdoor open at their feet and the long dark of the garden visible through the mist.

Then Elara turned toward the door that led to the courtyard, and the others followed, and the crystals overhead hummed a note that was almost, but not quite, the note of a bell.