Roswell Petalion's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Roswell Petalion had been locked out of his wife's grove for six days, and he still had nothing in his hands worth bringing back. He stood at the edge of the royal rose garden with the gates of her sanctuary shut against him, a thin frost of her anger crusting the hinges. He was Prince of the roses and guardian of the flower fairies. None of that had spared him. His wings were folded tight against his back so the roots would not spread and shame him further by pushing under her wall uninvited. The quarrel had been small until it wasn't. He had spoken over her at council. She had told him to leave the grove until he came back with proof he understood what she tended. Six days of picked blooms, braided vines, and honeycomb had earned him only silence at the gate. She was a goddess. She did not want prettier versions of what she already grew. He walked the garden path and tried to think of something she did not already have. Every bed answered him with her own work: her fountain running clean water over carved petals, her empty throne under the arbor, the potted trees she had shaped into the faces of her sisters. He had built none of it. He had only flown above it and let his roots stitch the edges. At the far wall he stopped. A single sunflower stood there that had not been there yesterday. Behind it, a woman in a white dress was crouched with her fingers in his soil. Her sunflower crown had one brown petal curling at the tip. "Your ground is clean," Antheia Botanis said without looking up. "Mine isn't. I came to ask for cuttings." Roswell knelt beside her. He had heard of her. A plant goddess walking north because sacred groves were turning black. Her crown told her where the sickness was, and it was telling her now that his garden was one of the last places still whole. She needed him. That was the thing he had been missing. His wife did not want a gift. She wanted him useful to something larger than the wall between them. He looked at the browning petal on Antheia's crown, then at the shut gates behind him, and understood he had been shopping in the wrong market. "Take the cuttings," he said. "And take me. My roots go through stone and frost and cursed ground. If your black groves need something opened, I can open them." Antheia stood. She studied him for a long moment, then pulled three seedlings from a fold in her dress and pressed them into his palm. "Plant these at her gate before we go," she said. "Tell her where you went. Don't ask her to wait." Roswell closed his hand around the seedlings. The gate stayed shut. For the first time in six days, he was glad of it.