Chapter 8: The Garden's First Seed
The garden was a graveyard of someone else’s happiness. Elena stood at its edge, the damp morning air seeping through the thin fabric of her dress. Before her, a chaos of thorn and vine strangled the geometry of raised beds. A stone bench lay on its side, half-swallowed by nettles. The fountain was a skeleton of chipped marble, its bowl filled with murky rainwater and dead leaves.
But the light. It fell through the tangle in slanted, dusty shafts, gilding the edges of the wreckage. It found the pale, determined faces of late snowdrops pushing through the mat of old growth. It was not dead. It was sleeping. Uneasily.
She took a step, then another, her bare feet cold on the overgrown gravel path. The bandage on her thigh pulled, a dull, persistent ache. She ignored it. Here, the silence was different. It wasn’t the suffocating quiet of the attic or the tense hush of the kitchen. It was a living silence, broken by the scratch of a sparrow, the drone of a bee, the endless, patient industry of growth and decay.
Her hands, pale and slender against the dark green, reached out almost of their own accord. She brushed her fingertips along the velvety underside of a lamb’s ear leaf, thick with dust. She traced the vicious curl of a blackberry cane. This was a language she understood. One that didn’t hurt.
From the shadow of the kitchen doorway, Jovi watched.
He’d followed her out, a silent shadow. He told himself it was to ensure she didn’t overexert herself, that the wound didn’t open. A practical concern. But as he watched her move into the wilderness, her silver hair catching the same light that pierced the canopy, the panther within him settled. The restlessness that had plagued him since their arrival—since long before—eased into a watchful calm. This was a perimeter he could guard.
She knelt, a slow, careful folding of her body, beside a mound of what looked like brown sticks. She winced as her leg bent. Jovi’s muscles coiled, ready to spring forward. He forced himself still. His help, so far, had been a chair pulled out, a draught offered. Intruding now felt like a violation of a different kind.
With her bare hands, she began to dig. Not frantic, but methodical. She pushed aside the crunchy layer of last autumn’s leaves, the fibrous net of old roots. The soil beneath was dark and rich. She scooped handfuls away, her breathing becoming the only sound he could hear from this distance.
Then she stopped. Her back straightened. She leaned closer.
Jovi took a step forward without deciding to. The gravel crunched under his boot.
She didn’t jump. She’d known he was there. She slowly sat back on her heels and looked over her shoulder at him. Her eyes were clear, the storm in them quieted to a soft, morning grey. In her cupped hands, cradled in black earth, was a clutch of tiny, bright green shoots. Unfurling ferns, maybe. Something tender and fiercely alive.
“They survived,” she whispered. The words were for the plants, but they hung in the air between them.
Jovi looked from her face to the shoots, then back. He gave a single, slow nod. He turned and walked back into the kitchen’s gloom.
Elena watched him go, a familiar cold knot forming in her stomach. Of course. She looked down at the green in her hands. It was enough. This was enough.
The back door swung open again. He emerged carrying a wooden bucket, a rusted but serviceable trowel stuck in its side, and a chipped watering can. He didn’t walk directly to her. He set the tools down on the cleared edge of the path, a few feet from where she knelt. An offering, not an imposition.
“The pump water is cold,” he said, his voice that low rumble that seemed to come from the earth itself. “Sun-warmed rain would be better. But this will do.”
He stood there, waiting. Not for thanks. For something else.
Elena looked at the trowel. Its handle was smooth from another woman’s grip, a lifetime ago. She looked at Jovi’s hands, hanging loosely at his sides. Strong. Capable of violence. They had never touched her except to haul her upright when she stumbled on the journey here, his grip impersonal and hard.
“Thank you,” she said. The whisper was barely louder than the rustling leaves. But she lifted her gaze and met his amber eyes as she said it.
He held her look for three full heartbeats. The cold, disdainful wall that had always been in his eyes was gone. In its place was something complex, unreadable. Assessment. Acknowledgment. A hint of a shadow that might have been shame.
“We need this garden,” he said, the statement practical, grounding them. “Cai’s accounts. The stipend is late. If it doesn’t come…” He left the sentence hanging, a stark possibility in the fragrant air.
Elena understood. Food. Medicine. Security. It wasn’t just solace. It was survival. The reality of their situation, of his world, crashed into her quiet moment. But instead of panicking, she felt a strange calm. This was a problem she could touch. She could fight weeds. She couldn’t fight an emperor.
She nodded, looking back at the soil. “The soil is good,” she whispered. “Deep. It remembers.”
“What does it need?”
The question surprised her. It wasn’t a demand. It was a request for intelligence. She scanned the thicket, her herbalist’s mind waking from its long, fearful sleep. “Sunlight. Most of it. The roses have taken over. They need to be cut back. The herbs… there may be seeds still in the soil. Sage. Thyme. They’re stubborn.”
“We can cut,” Jovi said.
“No.” The word came out firmer than she intended. She saw his eyebrow twitch, a flash of the old impatience. She softened her tone. “Not yet. They’re blooming. The bees… they need them. We can clear around them. Save some.”
He considered this, then nodded again. A commander accepting a field report. “I’ll get the others.”
He left her then. Elena let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. She picked up the trowel. The metal bit into the earth with a satisfying shunk. It was a good sound. A real sound.
The garden, over the next hour, ceased to be a single place. It became a series of small, concurrent dramas.
Kael arrived first, a scythe in his hands that looked like a toy. He took one look at the wall of brambles at the far end and grunted. Without a word, he began to swing. The sound was brutal, efficient. Swish-thud. Swish-thud. Canes fell like slain soldiers. He worked with a furious, focused energy, as if each vine had personally offended him.
Marcus and Oscar appeared next, carrying baskets for the debris. They stopped at the edge of the carnage Kael was creating.
“Try not to render it into pulp, brother,” Oscar called, his voice dry. “We’re gardening, not making jam.”
Kael just growled and hacked at a particularly thick trunk.
Marcus, meanwhile, had discovered the compost heap—a festering, magical mound at the garden’s rear. “Oh, this is magnificent,” he declared, poking it with a stick. “The layers! The decomposition! It’s a symphony of rot!” He immediately began forking the black, crumbly bottom layer into a basket, seemingly in his element.
Oscar rolled his eyes and started gathering Kael’s leavings, his movements economical and neat. He glanced at Elena often, a clinical curiosity in his gaze, as if observing a rare plant’s response to sunlight.
Cai was the last to join. He didn’t bring tools. He brought a ledger and a piece of charcoal. He sat on the overturned stone bench, somehow avoiding the moss, and began making notes and sketches, mapping the garden’s potential yield against their dwindling stores. His presence was a quiet anchor of impending scarcity.
And Jovi. Jovi worked. He found an axe and began tackling the small, dead trees that crowded the light. Each thwack of the blade was sharp, final. Between swings, his eyes were never still. They scanned the tree line beyond the garden wall, the lane, the windows of the house. His work was physical, but his mind was on patrol.
Elena moved through it all like a ghost. She directed with whispers and pointing fingers.
“That one stays,” she said to Oscar, pointing to a spire of purple foxglove.
“The nettles by the wall,” she murmured to Marcus as he passed with his glorious compost. “They’re good for the soil. And for tea.”
He blinked. “You can drink that?”
A tiny, almost imperceptible shrug. “If you need to.”
She was sweating, a thin sheen on her forehead, and the ache in her leg was a bright, hot coal. But she kept working, clearing a small, square bed near the fountain. Her hands were black with soil, nails packed with it.
Jovi dropped a load of split wood by the kitchen door and strode over to her. He stood over her, blocking the sun. She flinched, her body reacting before her mind could catch up, curling in on itself.
He stopped immediately. He didn’t move closer. “You’re pale,” he stated.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not.” He knelt, still keeping a careful distance. He nodded at her leg. “The bandage is showing red.”
She looked down. A small, blooming rose of blood had seeped through the grey fabric of her dress. She hadn’t noticed. The sight of it, the faint metallic smell, sent a jolt of pure, old terror through her. Not from the pain. From the expectation of punishment for the mess, for the weakness.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered automatically, her eyes squeezing shut.
The silence that followed was thick. When she opened them, Jovi’s face was hard, but not with anger. It was with a kind of grim understanding.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said, each word deliberate. “The wound opened. It’s a fact. Cai needs to see it.”
He rose and offered his hand. Not to pull her, just to be there. A bridge.
Elena stared at it. The lines on his palm, the scars across the knuckles. She remembered the nightmare, his voice in the dark turning the song down. She remembered the quiet, ‘You are my wife.’
She placed her filthy, trembling hand in his.
His grip was firm, warm, and carefully neutral. He took her weight as she stood, his other hand hovering near her elbow, not touching. He led her, not back to the dark attic, but to the sun-drenched stone of the fountain’s edge.
“Cai!” he called, his voice cutting through the sounds of work.
Cai looked up from his ledger, his gaze sharpening behind his spectacles as he took in the scene. He set his things aside and came over, his movements brisk and professional.
“Let’s have a look,” he said, his tone devoid of any sentiment. It was easier that way.
As Cai bent to examine the wound, Elena kept her eyes on the patch of earth she’d just cleared. The dark soil was now exposed to the sun. In its center, the cluster of green shoots she’d rescued looked impossibly bright, impossibly vulnerable.
Jovi hadn’t moved. He stood a few feet away, his back to them, watching the woods. On guard. But his presence was no longer just that of a sentinel. It was a shelter. A silent, stubborn fact in the wreckage of the day.
In the soil, her future was a tiny, defiant green. And for the first time, she wasn’t tending it alone.
Cai determined it was fine just reopened and cleaned her up, wrapping a fresh bandage around it. “Rest now. The garden will still be here later.”
Elena nodded a little but looked back at the plants with a weird expression. “Alright… let me just find something and then I’ll go rest.” She moved slowly, limping from her wound and started searching through the overgrowth for something. When she spotted it, there was a visible relief in her posture. She took a couple handfuls of the herb and shoved them in her pocket. It was pennyroyal, a poisonous herb that was used as an abortion tool. She had been pregnant by her father just before they were banished, and she knew after that kick to her ribs there was no way the fetus survived. She didn’t want it even if it had. So she silently shoved the herbs in her pocket and started making her way back inside slowly, the limp making it a little harder to move after straining so hard.
The back door was a mile away. Each step sent a sharp complaint from her thigh straight to her teeth. She focused on the worn stone of the step, the grain of the warped doorframe, the cool darkness of the kitchen within.
Behind her, the rhythmic destruction of the garden continued. Kael’s scything. The solid thunk of Jovi’s axe. They were sounds of reclamation, but to her they felt like accusations. She was leaving the work. She was failing.
A shadow fell across the doorway before she reached it.
Jovi stood there, a sheen of sweat on his forearms, a single dead branch in his hand. He’d moved without a sound. His amber eyes tracked from her face, pale and set, down to the deliberate way she cradled her side, to the bulky shape of the herbs in her pocket.
“Cai said rest,” he stated, his voice low.
“I am,” she whispered, not meeting his gaze. She tried to sidestep him, a flutter of a movement.
He didn’t move. He was a wall of heat and spent energy. “What did you take?”
The air left her lungs. Her fingers twitched toward her pocket, a guilty reflex she stifled immediately. “Nothing. Weeds. For the compost.”
It was a terrible lie. They both knew Marcus was the compost zealot.
Jovi’s stare was a physical weight. He said nothing. The silence stretched, filled with the distant sound of Oscar directing Kael to spare a hydrangea. Finally, he stepped aside. Just enough.
She slipped past him, the scent of crushed mint and earth rising from her clothes. And something else, sharper, beneath it. The pennyroyal.
The kitchen was dim and quiet after the bright chaos outside. The stew pot sat cold on the hearth. The ledger was gone from the table. She went straight to the dry sink, her back to the room, and pulled a small mortar and pestle from the cupboard. Her hands were shaking.
The herbs came out of her pocket, a bruised, fragrant handful. She didn’t look at them. She began to grind, the ceramic scraping rhythmic and hollow. Crush. Grind. Crush. The pungent, almost metallic smell filled the still air.
Jovi had not followed her in. She could see him through the open door, a dark silhouette against the green, perfectly still. Watching the woods. Or watching the house. She couldn’t tell.
She poured hot water from the kettle into a chipped cup. The steaming liquid turned a murky, ominous green. She stared into it, seeing not tea, but a different kind of ending. A necessary one. The bruises on her ribs, a constellation of yellow and purple beneath her dress, throbbed in time with her leg.
A floorboard creaked behind her.
She stiffened, her hands closing around the cup’s warmth.
“That smells… interesting.” It was Oscar. He leaned against the doorway to the hall, polishing a lens of his spectacles on his shirt. His copper hair was tied back, a few strands escaping. His intelligent, snake-like eyes missed nothing. “Pennyroyal, yes? Powerful stuff. Not typically for compost.”
Elena’s throat closed. She gave the barest nod, a tremor she couldn’t control.
“It has uses,” Oscar continued, his tone conversational, clinical. “For pests. For certain… female complaints.” He slid his spectacles back on. The glass made his yellow eyes seem larger, sharper. “It’s also quite toxic. The dosage is very precise.”
He wasn’t asking. He was informing. And waiting.
Tears burned behind her eyes, hot and shameful. She couldn’t speak. She just held the cup, the heat searing her palms.
“You were gone for weeks before the banishment,” Oscar said softly. “In the Emperor’s private quarters. Everyone noted it. The rumors were… colorful.”
A sob escaped her, harsh and ugly. She hunched over the cup.
Oscar pushed off the doorframe. He didn’t come closer. “Cai is a competent physician. For physical wounds. Some things require a different kind of medicine.” He paused. “Or just confirmation.”
He turned and left the room as quietly as he’d entered.
She was alone again with the steam and the bitter smell. The weight in her belly, a cold, sick dread she’d carried for weeks, felt heavier than stone. She lifted the cup. Her hand shook so violently the tea sloshed over the rim, scalding her finger.
The shadow in the doorway shifted. Jovi now stood inside the kitchen, his broad shoulders blocking the light. He’d heard every word. His expression was carved from granite.
“Put it down.” The command was quiet, absolute.
She flinched, but her fingers tightened. It was her choice. Her body. Her final, filthy secret.
In two strides he was before her. He didn’t grab the cup. He covered her hands with his own, completely engulfing them. His skin was calloused and warm. He didn’t try to pry her fingers loose. He just held them, steadying the terrible tremor.
“Look at me,” he said.
She couldn’t.
“Elena.” Her name in his mouth was a new sound, rough and urgent. “Look at me.”
She dragged her eyes up. The storm in them had broken, leaving raw, bewildered pain. He saw the child’s fear, the woman’s defiance, the bottomless grief.
“We will have Cai confirm it,” Jovi said, each word measured, forcing calm into the space between them. “Then we will decide. We. All of us. You do not drink a poison in the dark because you are afraid of us.”
A tear tracked through the garden dirt on her cheek. “It’s not fear of you.”
“I know.” And he did. The understanding in his eyes was a horrorshow. He gently pried the cup from her frozen grip. He turned and poured the contents into the dry sink, the green liquid swirling down the drain. The scent faded, replaced by damp stone and old wood.
He placed the empty cup on the table with a soft click. “Sit.”
She sank onto the bench, her legs giving out. He knelt before her, not touching her, his eyes level with hers. The panther was close to the surface, a protective rage simmering in his gaze, but it was not for her.
“Nothing that happened there,” he said, his voice a low, furious vow, “follows you here. That world is dead. We kill it every day we stay alive.”
From the garden, Marcus’s laugh suddenly rang out, clear and surprised. “Oi! Oscar, come look! Is this a carrot or some kind of optimistic orange worm?”
The ordinary, absurd question sliced through the thick tension in the kitchen. It was a thread of normalcy, ridiculous and vital.
Jovi’s jaw clenched. He stood, offering his hand once more. “Come on.”
“Where?” Her voice was a shredded remnant.
“Outside. You’ll sit on the bench. In the sun. You’ll tell Marcus about his orange worm.” He said it like a military order. A mission. “You will not sit in this dark kitchen and listen to ghosts.”
She looked at his hand, then at the empty cup. The choice was different now. Not between secrets and poison, but between hiding and stepping back into the fractured, rebuilding world.
She placed her hand in his. He pulled her up, his grip unwavering.
He led her, limping, back to the doorway. The sunlight was a physical shock, warm and blinding. Kael had cleared a breathtaking swath of ground, revealing the bones of old brick paths. Oscar was now peering at Marcus’s discovery, a faint smile on his lips. Cai was back on his bench, scratching numbers, but he glanced up, his gaze lingering on her face for a sober moment before returning to his work.
Jovi guided her to the stone bench by the fountain, now righted and cleared of moss. “Sit. Direct.”
He returned to his woodpile, picking up his axe. He didn’t look at her again. But his presence was a fixed point, a warning to the past, a shield against the green.
Marcus bounded over, his hands filthy, holding a twisted, pale root. “Well? Carrot or tragic worm? Your expert opinion, my lady.”
Elena looked at the root, then at Marcus’s eager, dirty face. She looked past him to where Jovi brought the axe down, splitting a log clean in two with a crack that echoed off the house.
She took a breath that didn’t quite hitch.
“A carrot,” she whispered. “A survivor.”
Despite the effort to make her feel included, and their words that they would handle it together. Something in Elena broke down slowly as she sat there. The anxiety bubbled up in her chest, and silent tears started to track down her cheeks. She was trying very hard not to have a panic attack, but her breathing was already starting to hitch and her knuckles were white from gripping her skirt.