by Naomi Hughes
Theon edged closer, craning his neck, breathing shallow breaths as he searched for any sign of the witch in this eerily domestic scene. As he neared the window, he spotted another girl crouched on the floor nearby. She was a mirror image to the first, with a pile of wavy, tangled hair as wild as the gardens, but her expression was much sterner and her eyes were gray rather than green. She seemed to be carving a design of some sort into the wooden floor with a butter knife as one of the hauler dogs at her side looked benevolently on. The man at the table glanced up at her and said something, and the fond exasperation in his voice meant she was his daughter, too. The girl waved him off impatiently and continued in her carving.
Nowhere was there any sign of the witch.
A cautious hope welled up in Theon. Maybe he had gotten lucky. Maybe the witch was out. He had heard rumors that her husband could be dangerous in his own right, though—the man was a metal-worker now, spending his days restoring old temples, but according to the rumors he was still a formidable bodyguard employed by the Council of Delegates when they traveled beyond the borders of the empire for their democracy-building work. Theon searched for the man’s weapons, a pair of twin short swords. They were leaned up against the wall next to a stack of firewood and a woodsman’s axe, as if they had been dropped there weeks ago and then forgotten.
Theon took another step closer, and his shoe scuffed against a paving stone with a sound softer than a whisper—and when Theon froze and looked up, the man’s head was lifted and his bright green eyes were locked on him.
Theon quivered, right down to his bones. His heart tried again to leap out of his chest. His knees went shaky, and he could already picture his mad dash back to the village—but he needed a flower. He would not leave without a flower.
His gaze dropped to the window box to judge the distance between him and it again. It would take him perhaps three seconds to reach it, snatch a flower, and run, but he had lost any hope now of escaping undetected. The best he could wish for was to go unrecognized, and to get away without being caught. He looked back up to see if the man was going to the swords or straight to the door, but to his surprise saw instead that the man’s head was once again bowed, and he was now tickling the girl in his lap as he tried to retrieve the quill, as if he had never even seen Theon at all.
Was it a reprieve, or a trick? It didn’t matter. Theon’s already-small reserves of courage were nearly drained in either case. He took two long strides to the window box and reached for a dainty blue flower, intending to run the second he laid hands on it.
Something sharp poked him in the chest. “If you’ve come to throw rocks at our window, you had better think again,” said a young but very imperious voice.
The boy froze. The tip of a sword—one of the short swords that had a moment ago been leaning against the wall inside—rested now against his breastbone. On its other end was the girl with the wild hair and the gray eyes who’d been carving into the floor. She glared at him as if she were deciding whether or not to run him through here and now.
She was the witch’s daughter. Perhaps she was a witch herself. Perhaps Theon would never emerge from this garden, and no one but his sister would ever guess his fate.
Theon tried to say something. His mouth wouldn’t work. His legs wouldn’t, either. His knees had already been weak and at this new threat, they seemed to liquefy entirely, and made him stumble forward into the sword’s point. Its razor-sharp edge bit a stinging line across his chest.
All thoughts of flowers vanished. He threw himself backwards and fled.
At his back, a door slammed. “Mama!” called the imperious girl. “There’s an intruder in the garden!”
“It was just a boy. I saw him a moment ago,” said the man’s voice mildly. Then, a second later: “Why do you have my sword?”
As Theon dove into the rosebushes, he heard sharp footsteps and then a woman’s voice. “Nettle Sarai Melaine-Ironheart,” said the witch in a foreboding tone, “have you stabbed another boy with that?”
“He fell into it,” said the girl, unrepentant.
A door slammed again. The witch was coming after him.
Heedless of the path, Theon threw himself straight through the rosebushes in the direction that he hoped led homeward. He barely felt the sharp thorns scrape over his skin, barely noticed the beads of blood that welled up in their wake. He was foolish. He was weak. He was terrified.
And, he realized a minute or two later, he was lost, as well. He stumbled through a hedge and onto a path and spun around there, searching for signs of anything that looked familiar, but all he could see was the night sky with its dazzling stars and the smoke from the cottage winding through them. There were wandering paths all around but he could see from here that many of them led to dead ends, to carved-out clearings with ponds and benches and wrought-iron arches draped in wisteria.
Impatient footsteps snapped against the paving stones not far away. He turned himself in a direction that was opposite from the smoke and the footsteps both and plunged through another rosebush. This one, though, was not as permissive as the bushes he’d shoved through earlier. It was full of heavy yellow-orange blooms like flames, and like flames, they seemed to want to consume him. The thorns were nearly as long as his fingers. The branches were thin and creeping and hungry; they embraced him, and he could not escape. He tried to back out of the bush in the way he’d come but every movement sent thorns burrowing deeper into his skin. He was caught, a fox in a snare. Drops of his blood spattered against the roses. Dizzy with fear, he cried out.
A shadow fell over the brambles. Something bladed and metallic glinted in the moonlight. The hunter had come to retrieve her prey. Another cry caught in his throat, but with all his might, he held it down. A small bit of courage had found him at last.
The bladed thing slashed downward, and then slashed again, and again after that. None of the swipes touched him. Instead, the thorned branches began falling away until he stood in the midst of a felled rosebush, blooms and chopped-off twigs scattered across the ground all around.
The witch stood before him.
Her dark hair was as wild as her daughters’. Her eyes were brown and carried an expression that looked both annoyed and faintly curious. A carnage of petals clung to her curls and her shoulders, falling like sparks when she took a step toward him. The bladed thing caught the moonlight again: a pair of long, sharp gardening shears.
She extended her free hand toward him. “Come out, little rabbit.”
“Are you going to eat my liver on toast?” he demanded, unwilling to move until he had at least some assurance that it was safer out there than in here amidst the demolished roses.
Her brow arched gracefully. Her eyes flickered with some emotion that was no longer annoyance or curiosity, but instead something like sadness, or perhaps regret. She shuttered it away quickly. “The night is yet young,” she mused, as if she were indeed considering eating his liver on toast, but perhaps only when it was closer to midnight.
Her answer made him feel oddly comforted. If she were planning to do awful things to him, she seemed like the sort of person who would simply do them, not make threats that sounded like jokes in that cool, amused voice of hers. He stepped out of the rosebush.
Several branches were still stuck to him, their thorns buried too deep in his clothing or skin to fall away when they’d been cut. She saw them and frowned. She reached out and, heedless of the thorns as they dug into her own skin, pulled the branches away. Her hands were strangely gentle. “Why are you in my garden, rabbit?”
“My name is not rabbit,” he dared.
“A brave rabbit you are,” she remarked. “What’s your name, then?”
“Theon.”
She waited, pulling another branch away from him. A drop of her blood smeared on his sleeve.
“I was here to take a flower,” he admitted at last. “For my sister. To prove I am not a coward.” He braced for punishment.
She only responded mildly,
“You don’t seem at all cowardly to me.”
“You called me a rabbit,” he pointed out reasonably.
She pulled another branch full of thorns away from his leg. He winced in pain. She answered him, “Rabbits are not cowards. They are simply very frequently afraid. There is a difference.”
He could not believe he was having a conversation with the witch. The whole scene had taken on a sort of sideways, otherworldly quality, and it made him less cautious than he would normally be. “What’s the difference?” he asked.
She pulled the last branch off him, dusted an errant petal from his shoulder, and stood back. “How one chooses to respond to the fear,” she said, and then glanced over to where the cottage’s smoke trailed into the sky. “You had best go in and be seen to. No sense sending you home like this.” She turned and pointed at a path that looked, to Theon, exactly like all the other paths. “Follow that one until you reach the cottage. Tal will take care of you. Tell him I’ll be in in a moment.”
Theon hesitated but finally followed her orders, creeping down the path she’d motioned at. He was still lost, after all, and at least this way he would gain some distance from her.
The girl who’d stabbed him—Nettle, the witch had called her, which seemed a very fitting name—was waiting at the door. She had her arms crossed and her legs braced wide and her chin defiantly lifted, clearly barring the entrance. “Go,” she told him coldly, “away.”
Theon lingered at the end of the path, examining her carefully for any signs of weaponry. When he found none, he dared to edge a little closer. The witch had ordered him here and Nettle was ordering him away, and he found himself less willing to disobey the mother than the daughter. “I did not come to throw rocks.” He hesitated. “Do…people throw rocks at you often?”
“They do, because Mama used to be the Destroyer and she burned up an awful lot of people. Now that she doesn’t have fire and she hasn’t murdered anyone in a long time, some folks think that makes her an easy target. It doesn’t. Because she’s got us to look after her.” Nettle continued barring the doorway, staring at Theon through narrowed eyes as she waited for him to digest this undigestible statement.
The Destroyer. Theon’s world at once inverted and imploded, shrinking to something so small that this moment of time touched another from his past, and then another, and another: when the bullies at his old village had taunted that the Destroyer would burn him up, when his father told him that the Destroyer came for bad little boys who wouldn’t go to bed on time, when his teacher made him read a history of the old empire. A mercury Smith with a long record of war crimes, the Destroyer was crowned Empress for a single day, and in that day, she felled the empire. She was the villain of every scary story he’d ever been told.
And she had just freed him from a rosebush.
He tested the thought. It held his weight. Slowly, slowly, his world began to stretch out again. Tentatively, he prodded at its borders. She had freed him from a rosebush. She had felled the old empire and helped replace it with the new democracy. He recalled his mother’s words: she gave up her magic, and now she gardens.
Theon attempted to wrap his mind around this. Nettle watched him do it. There was a challenge in her gray eyes, but also something a sliver of something murkier and sadder and wanting. Theon wasn’t sure what it was she wanted, though. With the warm light of the cottage behind her and the silvery moonlight gilding her features, she looked at once terrible and unknowable, a creature of impossible duality, a twin to her mother. And then she turned her face slightly to listen to something someone behind her was saying, and her actual twin took the opportunity to slither through the doorway between Nettle’s legs.
Nettle stumbled, thrown off balance, and grasped for her sister’s arm. “Alaya!” she said, alarmed and suddenly much more normal-seeming, her earlier coldness shucked off like an old snakeskin.
Alaya squirmed neatly away and flounced forward, seizing Theon’s arm before he could move. “Hi!” she chirped, smiling brilliantly. “Don’t mind my sister, she is ‘incorrigible’ and ‘overly protective,’ Mama and Da say it all the time.”
“Also ‘excellent at biting people,’ don’t forget that bit,” Nettle called threateningly from the doorway, baring her teeth to demonstrate.
Alaya leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, “They don’t actually say that.”
“Girls,” came the man’s voice, disorienting because it emanated from the shadows at the outside corner of the house rather than inside the cottage where Theon had assumed the man would still be, “perhaps we should stop frightening our visitor, and tend to his injuries instead.”
The girls’ father—Tal, the Destroyer had called him—stepped out of the pooled darkness as if he’d been a part of it just a moment before. He wasn’t wearing any weapons as far as Theon could tell, but something about the set of his shoulders said he didn’t need one. Still, his face was kind.
Tal stopped a few feet before Theon and crouched down, running his gaze quickly and expertly over Theon as if he were tallying up all the parts of him and seeing what they added up to. “Where is Elodie?” he asked when he was done, and Theon suddenly realized that this must be the Destroyer’s name, and he had a moment of dizzying uncertainty at the sudden knowledge that the witch, who was also the Destroyer, was also an actual person.
Tal was waiting for an answer. Theon thought it was probably a bad idea to keep him waiting. “She chopped up a rosebush to get me out of it and then said that I should go to your cottage and have my wounds tended and that she would be along in a moment,” Theon said quickly.
“Ah,” said Tal, and his expression eased, a small smile wrinkling the corners of his green eyes. “I suspect she is doing something sentimental, then.”
This statement struck Theon as bizarre since Elodie seemed like the type of person who would strangle sentimentality with its own necktie, but it would be impolite to naysay a man when you were an uninvited guest in his garden, so he didn’t say so.
Alaya moved her grip from his arm to his hand, ignoring the smears of blood on it. His fingers twitched in hers like a trapped spider but she paid no mind. She dragged him merrily toward the door, where her twin was still trying to skewer him with the force of her glare.
“Scoot, my thorny girl,” said Tal with that note of fondness from earlier, and Nettle unwillingly moved away into the house to let the three of them enter. Tal dropped a hand on her head and smoothed down her wild hair as he passed, and a bit more of her coldness thawed. Her quicksilver eyes flashed to adoration as she gazed up at him, and then she saw Theon looking and pulled her features back into a stony glare.
“You better not have hurt Mama,” she hissed in a low tone as Theon moved past her, “because if you have, I know where Da hid his swords just now.”
Theon stared back at Nettle, utterly bewildered at the implication that he was capable of hurting the Destroyer, but made no answer because he had just spotted the three hauler dogs who were still lying across the floor in various poses of laziness. They did not seem aggressive, but they were enormous and looked a bit like wolves. One of them flicked an eye open, assessed Theon, and then went back to sleep. Theon took that as a relatively positive sign and moved cautiously forward, doing his best to avoid stepping on tails or toes.
As Tal moved into the kitchen and opened a cupboard, Alaya, who still had ahold of Theon’s hand, used it now to tow him toward the table. A full bowl of stew sat at its end, steaming. “I dreamt about you last night,” she confided to him, “so I made sure Mama made enough stew for a visitor. She’s a terrible cook but I snuck in some carrots and extra bone broth when she wasn’t looking so it should taste okay.”
Theon gave up entirely on trying to process or respond to anything the twins said, and sat down as he was directed.
Tal had found whatever he was searching for in the cupboard and moved toward the table, carrying a vial of pearlescent liquid that gleamed with coppery flecks. Theon recognized it
as a copper-Smithed healing potion. His parents kept some in their own cupboard, but it was only for emergencies—it wasn’t as rare and expensive as it once had been, they’d told him, but it still cost enough to merit use only when absolutely necessary.
Tal poured half the bottle into the bowl of stew, then dropped a spoon in it and pushed it toward Theon. “Eat up,” he said. When he saw Theon staring at him, he explained, “You have too many small injuries to try to treat them all topically. This way, it’ll treat the pain of all of them right away, and help them heal more quickly than they would naturally—overnight, probably. In the morning you should be good as new. Eat up,” he repeated.
Theon mechanically lifted the spoon to his mouth as ordered. The stew was, as Alaya had predicted, okay. He ate it all. When he was scraping up the last spoonful, Elodie returned.
The woman who had formerly been the Destroyer strode through the door with no particular sense of ceremony and dropped what she was carrying onto the table before Theon: a beautiful bouquet of the yellow-orange roses from the bush she’d shredded to free him, tied together neatly with a white silk ribbon. The bouquet caught the corner of his stew bowl, which skidded across the table and sent the spoon flying.
“For your sister,” said Elodie, and somehow the words sounded like a dare.
No one moved to pick up the spoon. Everyone stood, silent, and watched Theon—except Elodie. She had already turned and was striding towards the door to the next room, shoulders thrown back carelessly, every movement elegant and commanding.
Theon was reminded, suddenly, of Nettle; of the way she’d stood in the door and braced herself and glared at him, trying to hide that sad wanting in her eyes. He thought he knew now what it was she wanted, even though it wasn’t anything he could put into words yet. And in the same way, he thought he understood why everyone was watching him so carefully, and why Elodie had dropped the bouquet as if it didn’t matter at all to her, even though he could tell from the blood on her hands and the way she must’ve had to take great care not to get any of that blood on the white silk wrappings that it did, indeed, matter. It was an offering. She was offering something to Theon. Not just the bouquet, but the knowledge that she was the type of person who would give a bouquet of prized roses to a boy so he could prove to his sister that he was not a coward. It was a glimpse of some small, secret part of herself, he thought—and she would be hurt if he did not accept it, so she was trying to pretend she didn’t care whether he did or not. Her family knew this, and that was why they watched him so carefully, as if he was holding something precious.