Swallowing Darkness - Laurell K. Hamilton [55]
He shook his head. “This magic is not for me. Take him, save him. I will explain where you are.”
Sholto said, “I think the garden will remain here, Henry.”
“We’ll see, won’t we?” Henry said with a smile, but there was regret in his eyes. I’d seen that look in other humans inside faerie. That look that says that no matter how long they stay, they know they can never truly be one of us. We can prolong their life, their youth, but they are still human in a land where no one else is.
I knew what it was to be mortal in a land of immortals. I knew what it was to know that I was aging and the others were not. I was part human, and it was moments like this that made me remember what that meant. Even with the most powerful magic in all of faerie coming to my hand, I still knew regret and mortality.
I went on tiptoe and laid a gentle kiss on Henry’s cheek. He looked surprised, then pleased. “Thank you, Henry.”
“It is my honor to serve the royals of this court,” he said, in a voice that almost held tears. He touched where I had kissed him as I moved away, as if he could feel it still.
I went to Sholto, who stood there holding Mistral as if he weighed nothing and he could have held him all night. I took Sholto’s arm, laid my other hand on Mistral’s bare skin, and we walked into the garden.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE STONES OF THE GARDEN PATH MOVED UNDER MY BARE feet. I was suddenly aware that I had small cuts on my feet. The stones seemed to be touching the cuts.
I clutched Sholto’s arm more tightly, and looked down at what we walked upon. The stones were shades of black, but there were images in them. It was as if pieces of the formless part of the wild hunt were inside the stones, but it wasn’t just visuals. They reached out to the surface of the stones with tentacles and too many limbs, and they could touch us. The miniature pieces of the wild magic seemed particularly interested in anywhere that I was scraped or bleeding.
I jumped, nearly pulling Sholto off the path. “What is wrong?” he asked.
“I think the stones are feeding on the cuts on my feet.”
“Then I need a place to lay the Storm Lord down, so I can carry you.” At his words, the center of the knot garden spread wide like a mouth, or a piece of cloth that you open to make room for a sleeve.
There was the sound of plants moving at speeds that no natural plant was ever meant to move, a dry, slithering rustling that made me look around. Sometimes when plants moved like that it was to simply make a new piece of faerie, but sometimes it was to attack. I’d been bled by the roses in the Unseelie antechamber. My blood had awoken them, but it had still hurt, and it had still been frightening. Plants don’t think like people, and making them able to move doesn’t change that. Plants don’t understand how animals think and feel. I suppose the same is true in reverse, but I wasn’t going to hurt the plants by accident, and I wasn’t so sure that the whispering, hurrying plants would grant me the same safety.
Normally I felt safe when the magic of the Goddess was moving this strongly, but there was just something about this garden that made me nervous. Maybe it was the feel of the stones moving under my feet, using small mouths to lick and drink from the minute cuts in my feet. Maybe it was the knotted herbs that made it almost dizzying if you looked at their patterns too long.
I looked behind us and found that the rose hedge had knitted itself completely around the garden. No, there was a gate in the hedge. It looked like a white picket fence gate with a wooden arch that curved gracefully over it. Then I realized that there were images in the pale wood. Then I knew it wasn’t wood. The gate was formed of bone.
There were four small trees in the center of the garden now, where the herbs and stones had moved aside. Vines curved up them, and the wood formed to the curving lines of the vines, the way that trees will when they’ve had the vines shaping them their entire lives.