Aelion Silverwind's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

The garden invitation should have made Aelion glad. Instead it kept him awake. She had asked him to visit at dawn, to sit with her among her mother's flowers. A man did not come to such a meeting with empty hands. But he had nothing worthy of her. He paced his hall at the Moonlit Elven Manor and found no answer among his shelves of dried roots and salves. Those had healed a wolf. They would not warm a noblewoman. He went to Lyra before the sun rose. She kept a cluttered stall near the market wall, and she was already awake, sorting seeds into cloth pouches. Her red hair was tied back rough. She had helped him twice before, first with word of the escaped wolf, then with supplies that got him through the gate. She looked up and read his face at once. "You've got that stuck look," Lyra said. "What does she want now?" "Nothing. That's the trouble." He told her about the dawn meeting. "I can't arrive with nothing. But a gift too grand looks like a bribe. She'll shut the door." Lyra wiped her hands on her green dress and thought. Then her purple eyes went sharp. "Not a bought thing, then. Something that's already hers." She pulled a wrapped bundle from under the table. Inside sat a clay pot and a fistful of pale seeds. "Cat blooms. The flowers with the little cat faces. You said she keeps them by the wall." "She has them already." "She has grown ones. These are her mother's strain, gone wild years back. I found a patch past the old mill." Lyra pressed the pot into his hands. "Bring her seedlings. Not a gift. A return." Aelion stared at the sprouts. They were small and green and unremarkable. A jeweler would have laughed. But the noblewoman had touched one grown bloom with a bare finger and spoken of her dead mother. He understood then what Lyra had seen. "If I'm wrong," he said, "I look like a fool with a pot of weeds." "You've looked worse." Lyra almost smiled. "Go." He came through the gate at first light. She waited in the garden as promised, alone among the tall stems. He knelt and set the pot at her feet and lifted the cloth. "Your mother's strain," he said. "The wild ones, past the mill. I thought you'd want them home." She went very still. She lowered herself to the ground beside the pot, her fine skirt in the dirt, and pressed one finger to a seedling the way she had touched the grown bloom. When she looked up, her eyes were wet, and she did not hide it. "No one living knew where those went," she said. Her voice shook. "Sit. Sit with me." Aelion sat. For the first time in three years, she reached out and took his hand.