Delia Prance's Arc

Chapter 31 of 59

The locked office was ready, but Delia still needed her old cottage. She had left a box of her grandmother's things there, and she wanted the ledger of remedies inside it. So she and Nick rode back to the riverside. The stone cottage stood where the path met the water, its windows framed by vines, flowers crowding the door. Delia had not slept there in weeks. It smelled of dried herbs and dust. She knelt at the old cedar chest by the hearth. Nick crouched beside her. They lifted out folded aprons and a cracked mortar. Under a wool blanket lay a book she did not know. Its cover was worn soft at the corners. She pulled it into the light. "Not the remedy ledger," she said. "Something older." She opened it on her knees. Names filled the pages, drawn in careful ink, joined by thin lines. A family tree. She found her own name at the top branch. She traced the lines back, generation by generation, past her grandmother, past names she had never heard. The line ended at a woman near the root of the page. Beside the name someone had painted a small face. Pointed ears. Pale hair. A note ran beneath in her grandmother's hand. Nick read it over her shoulder. "'Elira. Elf. The gift runs from her blood.'" He went still. "Elves. They died out. Everyone says so." "Not everyone," Delia said. Her hands were shaking. "Not all the way." She understood now what the willow fruit had woken. The magic had not come from nothing. It had come down through this line, sleeping, waiting. The fruit only opened a door her blood already held. She pressed her palm flat to the cottage floor. A green stem climbed between the boards, quick and sure, the way it always did now. She looked at the painted face, then at her own hand. "This is why it comes so easy for me," she said. "I'm part of them." Nick took the book from her and turned the pages slow. His jaw was tight. "This can't leave your hands," he said. "If a noble sees this, they won't call it a gift. They'll call you a thing to own. A living elf, hidden in the king's own lands." He met her eyes. "They'd never let you go." Delia closed the book. Her secret had grown heavier. Before, she hid a power. Now she hid what she was. But she also felt something settle in her chest. The garden she wanted to build, free healing for every wounded soul who came, it was not a stranger's dream. It was the work her blood was made for. She wrapped the book in the wool blanket and held it against her. "We take it to the locked room," she said. "No shelf. No worker. Only us." Nick nodded. They rode back with the truth of her line hidden under her arm, and a new danger riding with them.