Mirella Blackthorn stood at the top of the sunken steps and made her hand open. The mirror slid free of her sleeve into her palm, cold as pond water. She turned it, glanced once, and saw the thing living under her skin: a churn of black behind her own face. That was the deal she had made with herself. One look, every hour, to remember what she would become if she did not cut the dark magic out of her. Below her, the garden wept. Blue tears bled from cracked grey stones set along the low wall, marking the edge she would not cross. She had crossed it twice in her mind and turned back twice with her feet. Past those stones, down among the willows, stood Laurel Greymourner, hands locked to her face, mouth open in a scream that had lasted years. Mirella had put her there. She had watched from these same stairs and let a jealous thought slip its leash, and the stone had climbed Laurel from the soles up. She came down three steps. The magic in her chest jerked awake. It reached through her left hand before she could close it, and the flagstone under her boot split. Black vines shoved up through the crack, thick as her wrist, curling around the stone in a knot of thorns. She stumbled back. The vines kept growing where she had stood, feeding on the print of her. Mirella raised the mirror again. The dark inside it pressed forward like breath on cold glass. Her own eyes were almost gone in it now. She understood, plainly, that the magic was not waiting for her permission anymore. It would take the next person who passed. A gardener. A child on the path. It would not care. She stepped down to the weeping stones and knelt. She set the mirror face-up on the wet grass so the darkness in it looked at the sky instead of her. Then she pressed both palms flat to the cold boundary stones. The magic surged into her arms, hunting an exit, and she did not close her hand this time. She let it go into the stones. They drank. Blue tears ran faster down their sides. The vines behind her shivered, blackened further, and locked hard around the flagstone, no longer growing. The pressure in her chest dropped to something she could carry. Not gone. Held. Mirella looked up. Through the willows, Laurel still stood, screaming without sound, blue roots threaded through the cracks in her body. The dark magic was quiet now, but only because Mirella had fed it into the ground. The stones would not hold it forever. She picked up the mirror, wiped the grass from its back, and stepped past the boundary for the first time. The garden did not stop her. Laurel did not turn. Mirella began to walk down.

Mirella took three steps past the weeping stones before the garden noticed her. The air tightened. The willows above her stopped drifting and hung still. She felt the ground read her boots and know whose weight it carried. She did not stop. She had left the mirror behind and the black knot in her chest was quiet for once, held under the boundary stones like a held breath. Laurel stood ahead through the trees, hands clamped over her stone face. Mirella walked toward her. The first vine came out of the grass and touched her ankle. Deep blue, wet-looking, thin as a finger. Another followed, then a dozen. They wove up out of the dark grass in a knot that spread as fast as spilled water. She looked past the tangle and saw where it fed from: a dark hall of grey figures set with glowing cracks, its walls sleeved in the same blue vine. The garden was pulling its defense from that building. She raised her hands, palms open, and kept walking. She would not burn it. She had done enough burning. "I'm not here to hurt her," Mirella said. The vines heard her and did not care. One looped her boot and pulled. She stumbled, caught herself, tore her foot free. Cracked stones near the path bled brighter indigo down their sides, feeding the growth at her feet. She stepped over the wet knot and pressed on. She kept her hands loose. Every time the dark magic stirred behind her ribs she pushed it back down toward the boundary stones behind her. Work with it, she told herself. Do not fight it. She was ten paces from Laurel when the ground broke open. A mass of gnarled roots and blue vine shot up in front of her, thick as a tree trunk, folded on itself like a fist. It slammed into her chest before she could turn. She went down hard on her back. The wind left her. The tangled growth bent over her and lowered, ropes of vine spreading across her arms, her legs, her throat. She could not lift her head. She could see Laurel through a gap in the vines, stone hands still locked over stone eyes. Mirella stopped fighting. She let her arms go slack under the vines. She spoke up into the leaves, quiet, so only the garden would hear. "I put her there. I came to take it back." The vine at her throat paused. It did not loosen, but it did not tighten either. Somewhere above, a willow shifted its branches. The garden was listening now. It had her pinned, and it had heard her, and those were two different things. She lay still under its weight and waited for it to decide.