She sighed and Jacob slipped his hand into hers. She looked down at him and gave a little smile, squeezing his hand and glad that he had taken hers, because it gave her the reassurance that she herself needed. “Alright then…come along,” she said and started down the hall. Unlike their rooms where the heavy drapes had been replaced with sheer ones to let in the light, the heavy drapes remained in every other part of the manor. Small slivers of pale light from the cracks of the drapes were all that lit the halls, and Keturah walked slowly, uncertain at all of where she was going.
There was no sound to be heard in the manor. No shuffling of servants, no flutter of curtains. Even their feet, despite the heavy boots, landed without so much as a shuffle on the plush carpet that padded the halls. Keturah longed for something—anything, even rats in the walls. This place was so terribly quiet and so dark. She was sure that her eyes were going to begin failing her if she stayed like a bat in this dismal place. She decided that magic or not, she was going to find something to do about those heavy curtains. It wasn’t good for a person to be in the dark so long.
With a sigh, Keturah realized that they had come to the end of a long hall. They could either go around the great, gaping hole in the room and into, what she assumed, was the main part of the house, or they could go down. “Which way?” she muttered, considering the place.
Jacob bit his lip. “Down,” he said resolutely, although really only because he was half hoping that Keturah would let him slide down the banister of the spiral staircase. She didn’t.
Sure enough, although Keturah could not remember the room, she realized at last where they were. To the right of her was another long hallway with majestic doors and to the left, from what she could see of the great, arched entry, was the top of the grand staircase. She let out a breath and, with Jacob still holding her hand, walked out to the top of the staircase. She paused at the top, Jacob continuing and nearly pulling her down. But he realized that she had stopped and looked back at her. Keturah’s eyes were fixed on the opposite side of the house, although it faded into darkness, completely unseen. The front entry of the house, thankfully, was at least navigable from the small windows at the top of the door that were not covered, although the whole room was still cast into a pale gray tone.
“What is it, mother?” Jacob asked, following her eyes to the darkness that led to the right wing, and then back to her face.
Keturah closed her lips and did not answer him, instead turning and heading down the stairs. “I told you not to call me that,” she complained.
Jacob huffed, thoroughly forgetting his mother’s earlier distraction and hurrying down the stairs with her. “No one can hear me,” he argued back, insistent.
“Obstinate urchin,” Keturah grumbled and stopped at the foot of the stairs.
Jacob stopped too and looked up at her. “Mother, what is…ob-cinn-ate mean?”
She glanced down at him. “Obstinate. It means that you don’t do as you’re told.”
Jacob considered this and then grinned. “Good,” he declared. Keturah raised a questioning brow, and his grin widened. “You don’t do what you’re told either. I guess that means I really am your son.”
Her eyes widened a bit and she smiled, shaking her head. He had such a funny way of acting like a toddler one moment and then saying such grown-up things the next. “Of course you’re my son. Now be silent. You’re giving me a headache.”
Chapter Eight
Beautifully carved staircases led down to a valley cut into the mountain the house was built against. There were beautifully paved paths, elegant, mighty statues at the center of bubbling fountains, benches artfully carved to rest the weary feet. But everything else was death personified. The bushes were shriveled and dark green with holes where leaves had fallen out like the hair of an old man and left a great spot. Anything that might have flowered along the walkways was clinging to its last limbs if it was even alive at all. The trees were surrounded in the decay of their leaves and seemed to mourn them, their frames twisted and dark and naked.
A chill came through the valley, and Keturah shivered. “If you get too cold, Jacob, go inside,” she told him and descended the stairs to the walkways, beginning to inspect her work. “Alright…” she said more to herself than anyone else. “I’m going to need sheers and a spade and… gloves… heavy gloves.”
They did not magically appear, but Jacob cried out, “Mother! Look at this!” She turned her head and went towards the sound of his voice, wishing that she had brought a scarf out with her. Around one of the decrepit hedges and a guardian statue, Jacob was staring at the side of the manor.
There, in front of him were great bushes which were, amazingly enough, not charred and black. They were still nothing to look at, though. The bushes and the vines behind them were dark and shriveled but clinging to whatever life was left in the soil. But more than that, they were covered in some of the sharpest thorns that Keturah had ever seen. Their barbs were curved and wickedly pointed, hundreds of them coating the shrubs and vines behind them. “What are they…?”
Keturah shook her head. “I don’t know, love…I’ve never seen these.” She sighed and looked down the path and watched as a door seemed to open from around the corner. Keturah left Jacob there to wonder at the monstrosity before him in order to investigate the opened door. There, tucked into a little nook of the garden where a visitor would not notice it, was a shed. Inside was an arrangement of tools which, despite the shape of the garden, seemed well-oiled, sharpened, and cared for. She hadn’t a clue what some of them even were, but she recognized a few that she would need and took them out, putting them into the pockets of her apron. Her hands brushed a rough material, and she gasped, withdrawing at once. But closer inspection revealed a pair of gloves, and she reached out, picking them up. They were not the large, bulky things she was expecting, but instead wrist-length gloves with leather on the insides of the fingers and palms, small and dainty for her hands.
She pulled them on after checking the insides for spiders, calling to Jacob, “I’m going to walk the length of the garden. Don’t run off.” Although she didn’t know where he could go. The garden was completely walled in either by the manor or the side of the mountain or by a towering wall at least ten feet tall constructed of large, gray stones. She sighed and started walking down the paths, taking notice of everything that was there.
“We really do have our work cut out for us…” Keturah muttered. It was going to take her the hours she had left just to clear the bed with those razor-thorn bushes by the back of the manor. She sighed and turned, but something caught her eye. She had walked the whole of the length of the paths, but behind one of the beds there was a white wooden lattice which probably would have been covered with climbing vines and hidden from view if everything was not dead.
But beyond that, she could see more. She could see color. Carefully stepping over the ruined bed, she shifted the little lattice door to the side and saw a little alcove cut out of the stone wall, and she slipped through it. On the other side was a smaller garden. There were only a few walkways and a single statue in the center, a great bear standing majestically with two little cubs at her side. Surrounding her and her babies was a little pond of water where fat fish swam around eagerly. There had been no fish in the other fountains, and Keturah went over to the water to watch them for a moment before looking around. Here, everything was still green. The colors were bright and brilliant (at least what was still blooming this time of year) and the hedges were full and thick, showing no signs of winter. There was a tree to the left of her, a great towering thing, with little rosy pink buds which had since fallen, shedding for the winter, and they covered the ground.
She turned around and around, wondering at why this small section would bloom when the great valley beyond would not. She frowned and put her hands on her hips with a heavy sigh. She looked back to the manor, but this garden was accessible only through a single, wooden door cut into the stone. Keturah went to it, her
curiosity overtaking her, but no matter how she turned and pulled at the knob, she could not pull the door free. With defeat, she glared at the thing and stepped back, looking at it.
The other doors and windows had reason for being large—they were decorative and lovely and would often boast more traffic than a single person. But this door could only be meant for one person…although no one seemed to have told the architect who designed it, for the door was at least ten feet high and five feet wide. Keturah stepped back, looking up at the door with darkening curiosity before she heard Jacob calling her name.
“Coming!” she called and took a step back from the door, then another, before leaving what she could only assume was the Lord of the Manor’s garden. She walked around the large bench nestled into one of the beds to the degraded piece of wall that was hidden with lattice. She replaced the lattice and then returned to the walkway just as Jacob came into view. Before he could speak, she said, “Okay, let’s get started. Grab that wheelbarrow there. We’re going to need it.” She returned to the front of the gardens, inspecting the great thorny thing in front of her.
Keturah considered how to tackle the thing, but there really was no good way, so she just dove on in. She clipped and pruned, cutting more and more until she found green at the center of all of the black, shriveled parts. She tossed the dead things away and, with gloves on his hands, Jacob picked them up and put them into the wheelbarrow. Keturah worked and worked, hacking and stabbing and pulling at the sharp bushes and vines until the sun had faded to the point that she could no longer tell fingers from branches, and at that point, she decided to stop.
◆◆◆
Alvaro spent hours watching her with the mirror. There were many things magic could do, and many more still it could not. Gardening was a task learned from human effort, and not from any other source. And so he studied her, trying to see what she did, how he could do the same thing. The sorry state of his gardens was not due to lack of concern or lack of effort. Alvaro deeply enjoyed his gardens when they were blooming and full. Not only that, but many of the plants were good for use in various forms of magic. He simply could not make them grow. He could not give life. He could make magic to prune and water the plants regularly, but if he did not know when or how much, then neither did his magic. The plants would either be over-pruned and cut down to little stubs or left completely wild. And some plants would drown while others would die of thirst. A gardener would know which plants needed what, but he simply had no clue.
And so, Alvaro had watched from his mirror while slender, calloused hands pulled expertly at the plants. She would pause and study a twig just so, and some she would cut while some she would spare. Surely, she saw something there to tell her which ones to prune and where, but whatever it was, he could not tell. She would get the most peculiar look on her face too, her brows knitting together and her lips in a slight frown. Alvaro found himself smiling, just a bit, every time the young lady made such a face, and for a moment, everything would seem to go still. He would forget about gardens and sheers, about the winter coming. But then she would decide on a stem’s fate and he would set himself back to the task of searching for the method to her madness yet again.
But still, although much of it was difficult to understand without someone explaining what they were doing, he did pick up a few things. He watched how she trimmed away at a twig until finding the green in plants he was certain were dead. He noticed how she tested the roots to see if the plant would move easily, and if it did, she would pull it up. For plants that were almost completely dead, she would trim all the way down to the base but would not pull it up. All the while, she turned the soil, testing it and aerating it. He took note of those things and determined himself to mimic them as well.
After a few hours, he left her to her work and rejoined his own tasks. When he watched her for long enough, everything she did just looked the same, and he had stopped learning anything. So instead, he resumed his task with the butterflies and peered over at the whole of them, fluttering about his room with little wisps of sound. He seemed to have reached a conundrum with the little butterflies, in that they were something of a test.
Like with all things, he seemed to have no problem with too much. It was the small things that bothered him. Alvaro had no doubt that he could use enough magic to alter the form of the mountain in order to cut a sculpture of a bird with precise detail. But doing the same thing with a small stone was considerably more difficult. He had placed varying numbers on all of the butterflies and infused them with varying levels of magic to see how much magic was needed to keep one in flight at a steady pace per hour. So far, it had been several days and none of them had ceased their flapping yet.
Some of the butterflies buzzed around the room at an alarming pace, while others flapped casually by. Still, none of them had ceased, and Alvaro sighed as he watched them, shaking his head before sitting himself down at his desk. He had a pile of butterflies to enchant, and so he began weaving webs of a programmed loop of motion magic to fuse with each butterfly. This time he decided to start with five horizontal threads and three vertical, and he began to rub his fingers together, the way a spider does her thread, until tiny collective strings of magic became visible to his sight. They were not things that any human would be able to see, but all magicians could see these threads. He wove the strands carefully into nets, five to three as he had decided, working carefully to keep the threads neat and untangled.
He worked while she worked, and when he let his mind wander, he found some small delight in that fact, as if they were working side by side. His little musings made him smile just a bit, and he turned his attention back to the paper butterflies who would never flinch at his smile. As much as he wished to see his new guest, to greet her with his own words and his own voice…she was not like these butterflies. She was living, human. She would flinch at his smile. And then she would run. Alvaro sighed and turned his thoughts away from her two-toned eyes and focused upon the butterflies.
◆◆◆
In the garden, the woman sat back with a sigh and for the first time since starting was aware of her state. She looked like she had spent the afternoon fighting with a pack of rabid cats. Her face and neck and arms were all cut up with little, red lines, the worst of which had forced a bead of red from between the cracks in her skin, rolling down the side of her face or down to her wrists. “You look awful…” Jacob said softly, clearly concerned.
Keturah was breathing hard, and she gave a tired smile. “I’m fine…just some scratches…” She pushed herself up and sighed, taking all of her tools and cleaning them with her apron before putting them away, along with her gloves. The wind was sharp and biting, and her cuts burned into her flesh. She winced but gave no other sign of discomfort, at least until her stomach growled angrily in the garden. She laughed and turned back towards the manor, the wheelbarrow waiting patiently beside the thorny bushes, half full and needing to be dumped out with the other dead things to be burned. “Come on. Let’s wash up and find some food,” she told Jacob and nudged him along. She could deal with the burn pile tomorrow.
Chapter Nine
It was much easier finding their way this time, although the sun had sunk below the horizon and the castle was once again dark and foreboding. Keturah’s heart didn’t stop racing until they reached their room. That door in the magician’s garden was surely made for some monster of a creature, and when she could barely even see her own feet in front of her in the darkness, Keturah had no notion of what waited in the shadows to devour her. She had said nothing of the lord’s garden or door to Jacob, and when they reached their room, he scurried off to his own bedroom while she went to hers. The room was perfectly in order, and the bath by the fire was steaming hot and waiting.
Keturah sighed with relief and stripped out of her clothes, her hair all a mess, having been pulled out of the leather thong by the thorns and dotted with blood near the front. Keturah sank into the hot water without hesitation, but she nearly scre
amed when the water came over her arms. She held them out of the water and clenched her teeth, leaning her head back and just breathing. After a long moment, she finally forced her arms under the water. She held her breath, tears rolling down her face and burning the cuts on her cheeks. She clenched her eyes, and slowly, the pain subsided, and Keturah washed her arms very carefully before going under the water. Her neck and face weren’t as badly cut up, but they hurt worse. She came up out of the water gasping and trying not to cry, carefully washing her face and neck before scrubbing the rest of her body and getting out.
She rubbed herself dry, dabbing gently at her offended flesh, and then wrapping up in her towel. She went to her vanity and sat down, a hair brush waiting for her to attack the tangled, black mess. She pulled and pulled at her hair until it was free of mats and tangles, and with a heavy, exhausted sigh, Keturah set her brush down, right beside a curious glass-cut jar. She considered it, the jar filled with some sort of white cream. She opened it and sniffed. It didn’t smell horrible, but it didn’t smell like anything she was used to. She wrinkled her nose but dipped two fingers into it curiously, then looked down at her arms.
Carefully, she dabbed the stuff onto her cuts. They burned at first, and she squeaked, but then a wonderful cooling and numbing sensation filled her, and she sighed. With great relief, Keturah smeared more of the stuff on her arms, then her neck and face. It sank into her skin and calmed the burning scratches, and Keturah closed her eyes for a moment, savoring the relief.
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