BLYTHE’S MEALS BEGAN TO SHOW UP ON A BURNISHED TRAY OUTSIDE her door
the following day. For three days she consumed porridge for breakfast, cold meat and plain bread for lunch, and shepherd’s pie for dinner. Nothing extravagant. Nothing varied. And none of it with any of the flourish she’d grown to expect from Aris.
She hadn’t seen him since he’d found the mirror, though this wasn’t like the last time he’d disappeared, when she’d had no clue where he’d run off to. All the lights in Wisteria slanted up toward his study. She’d not seen a single sign of his existence, or heard so much as a shuffle of footsteps to prove that he was alive. There was no opening of doors or clattering of a teacup on a saucer. No clinking of a fork against a plate.
And there was certainly no discussion of anything that had happened that night in the glade. Blythe, for her part, had not been able to get their kiss and all they’d nearly done from her mind. She cringed every time she thought of how she’d run her foot up his chest and how she’d urged him on, wanting so much more.
It was probably good that Aris had disappeared. How was she ever meant to face him again?
At least, that’s what she’d thought the first day into his hiding. By the second, Blythe found herself wandering the halls just so she could listen for him to open his door. And by the third, she felt like she was losing her mind when he still hadn’t. It didn’t help that the weather had fouled into a flurry of a snowstorm that kept her trapped indoors with only a pesky fox that could do without her existence. There were a few times a day where the
beast might deem her worthy enough for a visit, but it would scurry off into the shadows as soon as she made any effort to befriend it. Perhaps if she knew its name it might be more decent, but for that she’d have to ask Aris.
She’d tried, once. She’d stood outside his study calling for him and demanding he tell her the name of the beast, but he’d never answered. Not even to yell at her to go away or to force her back into her room with magic.
Whatever they’d built between them during their days in Verena was gone. One more day of solitude and Blythe feared that she might lose her mind.
Her discontent was bolstered by the fact that, despite Christmas being mere days away and the storm that was raging outside their door, Wisteria was no longer cold. It instead simmered with a heat so oppressive that Blythe took her fan with her as she paced the halls, opening the windows to cool herself only to have to shut them moments later when snow flurried inside.
She needed to get out of Wisteria. Needed to leave before she shriveled into a husk and fell dead, only to probably end up as a spirit forced to wander the halls of this place and torment Aris for all eternity. But this time there was no sending a letter to Signa to come rescue her. And it wasn’t as though there were any horses for her to take to Thorn Grove even if the weather had been cooperative.
She pounded her way down the stairs, catching sight of the small fox curled up on an armchair, looking perfectly at ease in the warmth.
“Enjoying this, are you?” she asked, only for the fox to slit one eye to inspect her before returning to its slumber. Blythe sighed as she passed it, doing her routine check of the windows to see whether the storm had let up. It hadn’t, of course, and she threw the curtains over the panes with a stream of choice words to detail precisely how she felt about that. It wasn’t until she stomped past the front door that she froze in place, a glimmer of a
gilded knob catching her eye. She turned toward it, her throat thickening.
It wasn’t possible. A thousand golden threads wound protectively around the door, and even Aris himself had told her that she’d never be able to use it when Wisteria was a very part of his soul. Still, desperation drove her toward it. She cast one look behind her, half expecting Aris to storm down the steps and laugh at her for even considering such an idea. But the halls
remained silent.
Blythe turned back to the door, leaning into its frame as she whispered, “I need you to get me out of here.” She dropped her head against the wood, gritting her teeth at the jolt that struck through her ring finger as she skimmed her fingers over the handle.
“Take me to Foxglove.” She whispered the words like a spell, filling them with all her hope. But when she opened the door there was only an icy blast of snow to greet her. She shut it again and clenched the handle tighter. “Take me to Thorn Grove.”
Again, another blast of snow smacked her face when she threw the door open. She slammed it back shut, fuming.
“To Brude!” This time she couldn’t even twist the handle, for her ring burned with such ferocity that she clenched it into her skirts.
“Fine!” Blythe smacked her hand against the frame, then bit back her wince from the pain. “Fine, then, you wretched thing. Take me to wherever it is that you want me to go, so long as it’s away from here!” All at once, her ring fell cold. Blythe stilled, not daring to breathe as the golden threads surrounding the door snapped in half. They did not fall but vanished before her eyes in a glimmer of light, leaving the handle bare. This time when Blythe curled her fingers around the knob and eased the door open, it was not a snowstorm that greeted her. This time, Wisteria opened into the last place she ever expected.
 |
Her mother’s garden was unrecognizable from what it had been a month prior.
One side of the gate hung open and was swaying in the wind, its tinny creaking the only sound aside from Blythe’s own footsteps crunching against the snow as she stepped outside.
Grey’s, it seemed, had not been the only place to be vandalized.
The fire’s destruction was now but one small fragment of the garden’s disarray. Parts of the ground had been completely uprooted, piles of dirt tossed haphazardly as though someone had been digging.
The snow cut into Blythe’s bare soles, but she couldn’t feel the sting of it. She couldn’t feel anything but the rage that burned in her belly as she glanced past the empty pond to her mother’s headstone, now decimated. Step-by-step, Blythe made her way toward it, falling to her knees beside the place where the grave had once lain. With trembling, frostbitten hands, she dug up broken pieces of the stone that lay half-buried beneath the snow.
She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t believe that anyone could find it in themselves to ruin such a sacred place. Once upon a time, Blythe had hoped the garden would overcome its past year of suffering and would one day flourish. She’d hoped that flora would overtake her mother’s grave, and that this place would forever thrive in secret deep in the woods behind Thorn Grove.
Blythe stared around the garden, at the dried twigs and scorched ground where she used to spend days smelling rows of hyacinth. She waited each spring for the wolfsbane to bloom and for the frogs to come out of their hiding and perch themselves atop the lily pads.
Now it was quiet. There were no frogs. No wolfsbane or hyacinth. There was only a broken gate, a shattered headstone, and a memory of a place Blythe would never be able to return to. The longer she stared, the more the loss festered within her, hastening her breaths.
She wanted it back. Wanted the overgrown flowers and the hum of insects buzzing in her ear. Wanted the croaking frogs she’d spent too many hours of her life trying to capture as they leaped from bank to bank. Blythe shut her teary eyes, ridding her mind of what this garden looked like now and instead satiating herself with memories of how it had looked in full spring bloom. She thought of the lavender that had grown taller than she was and the jasmine bushes that had never failed to make her sneeze. She filled her mind with the garden’s image until it felt real enough to touch.
And when she opened her eyes, it was.
Ivy crawled across the ground, covering her heels and any signs of snow and ash. Wolfsbane ensnared her ankle, clawing up her thigh with such vigor that Blythe had to throw herself back lest she become part of the garden herself. She had to be dreaming, or perhaps she was still in Wisteria, overheated and passed out in a puddle of her own sweat.
No sooner had she let herself believe this than she gasped, having backed straight into a growing bush of plump white roses full of thorns that
scraped her skin. One drew a bead of blood, which Blythe watched trickle down her elbow and fall onto the soil. Hellebore in the most peculiar shade of silver blossomed in the exact spot where it landed, and when Blythe inspected the injury, she found nothing. No trace of blood. No open wound. Just a tiny crescent scar that was nearly the same shade as her skin. Beneath it, she could still feel the ghost of the thorn’s sting.
It was like what had happened during the picnic with Aris. Only this time, she was certain she’d seen the blood. This time, she was certain it was real.
Blythe stumbled backward, trembling as she fought to keep on her feet. The ivy at her heels kept growing, stretching toward her. It reminded her of the incident back in her father’s study, where flora had blossomed out of nowhere and taken over everything in its path.
The snow that had blanketed the ground only moments prior had been absorbed into the earth, and in its place flowers blossomed. Clover spread beneath her bare feet while moss tore its way up what remained of her mother’s grave and toward Blythe’s hand. All the flora was reaching toward her, crooked stems bent as if craning their necks in search of her.
As if… as if they were a part of her.
Blythe’s eyes fell to the hellebore, born of her blood, and the garden swayed. Her skin was clammy as her mind worked to process what she was witnessing. No trick of her imagination. Not a dream, but a flourishing spring garden in the midst of winter. Wounds that healed as fast as they were made.
Sickness churned her stomach, threatening its way out, but Blythe wound an arm around herself and held tight. She had to know the truth of it. Had to confirm. And so she bent to press a palm atop a bare bit of soil beside the growing clover and pictured a flower she had never before seen in her mother’s garden. The first one that came to her mind—wisteria. She pictured a tree as strong and sturdy as the one at the palace, blooming over her mother’s grave. And as she pictured it, she could feel the tree’s roots spread through the earth. The base of a trunk grew, stretching into branches that filled with petals as white as snow.
Blythe lost her footing and slid down to sit on the soil just as a frog leaped beside her, croaking as it dove into the melted pond. Was it her imagination, or was there blood slicking its back?
She turned to find herself staring at a tree with its bark stained crimson and at the bones of several frogs scattered at its base. One by one, she watched as their bones reassembled, followed by their flesh. Soon, plump frogs hit the ground with a croak, blinking in confusion before jumping toward the pond as well.
This time, Blythe couldn’t contain her nausea. She barely managed to make it five feet before losing her stomach in the lilies.
For months, she had believed these strange occurrences were Signa’s doing. In her father’s study, she had been devastated by the thought of losing Percy and had desperately hoped she was merely imagining things. Then with the horse, and with Eliza and the child… Signa had acted as though she was the one helping them, but hadn’t Blythe wanted them healed just as much as her cousin? Was it not Blythe who had demanded that the horse be revived and that Eliza be healed at any cost? Hadn’t her hands been laid upon them, too?
She had seen Elaine sick in the mirror only for the woman to be healed after Blythe touched her.
She had made the door of Wisteria—a part of Aris’s very soul—obey her command.
For months she had been plagued by visions that felt more like memories than dreams.
And now, as Blythe stared up at the wisteria tree, she understood why. It was not her cousin who Aris had been searching for all this time.…
It was Blythe.
The realization was a weight that threatened to bury her. It was a tightness in her lungs that had her gripping her throat, fingers digging into her flesh, for she could not breathe.
She was the one who Aris was searching for, not Signa. She was Life.
