Chapter 3: Venom & Vulnerability
The air in the herbology greenhouse was a physical thing, thick and warm and layered with a hundred different kinds of green. It smelled of damp soil, of chlorophyll, of peppery crushed leaves and the faint, sweet decay of blossoms surrendering to age. Sunlight, fractured by the intricate leaded glass of the dome above, dappled everything in shifting coins of gold and emerald.
Alistair Fairmont was a silhouette against a towering, thorn-riddled mass of Venomous Tentacula, his sandy hair bright in a sunbeam. He was murmuring to it, a low, steady stream of nonsense that sounded like a cross between a lullaby and a weather report. His sleeves were rolled past his elbows, revealing the map of his profession: silvery scars from errant thorns, the mottled pink of an old acid splash, a faint greenish stain that seemed to pulse beneath his skin. He held a slim glass vial in his gloved fingers, carefully positioning it beneath a throbbing, bulbous sac on the plant’s main stem.
The door sighed shut behind Rosalinda, breaking the humid quiet.
He flinched. It was a tiny, full-body jerk of surprise.The vial slipped.
It tumbled from his fingers, end over end, a sparkling cylinder headed for the flagstone floor.
Rosalinda didn’t move her feet. Her hand snapped out, a blur of motion. Her fingers closed around the cool glass an inch from impact. She straightened, examining the vial. Empty.Clean.
“Still jumpy, Fairmont,” she said, her voice cutting through the vegetative hush.
He turned, pushing his glasses up his nose with the back of a soil-dusted wrist. His eyes, that clear green, widened behind the lenses. He looked from her face to the vial in her hand, and a flush crept up his neck. “Reflexes like that should be registered as lethal weapons.”
“They are,” she said, offering the vial back.
Their fingers brushed during the transfer. A simple, unavoidable contact. His skin was warm, slightly rough from grit. The hitched breath she heard wasn’t her own. He took the vial and quickly turned back to his work, his shoulders tense.
“Student of yours came by.Thorn? Seemed earnest. Gave me your ominous coffee warning.” She leaned against a wrought-iron bench littered with potted seedlings, observing him. The tentacula shuddered, and a long, barbed vine coiled lazily toward his shoulder. He absentmindedly tapped it with a copper rod; it recoiled with a hiss.
“Elias. Good kid. And it wasn’t a warning, it was a public service announcement.” He didn’t look at her, concentrating on coaxing a single, drops of viscous, amber fluid from the sac into the vial. “The stuff in the faculty percolator is less coffee and more a punishment for existing. I brew my own. In my office.”
“A man of solutions,” she said. The words came out softer than she intended.
He finished, corked the vial, and set it carefully into a padded case. Then he finally faced her, peeling off his gloves. He looked exhausted, but in a satisfied way. “What do you need, Rosalinda? Besides, presumably, a budget twice the size of the library’s.”
She smiled, a real one. “Claus is already complaining?”
“He cornered me after lunch. Rambled about fiscal responsibility and the dangers of ‘militarizing the curriculum.’ He’s scared of you.”
“Good.” She pushed off the bench and walked slowly along a path of moist, dark earth, her eyes scanning the exotic flora. A cluster of moonbloom turned its velvety faces to follow her movement. “I need that coffee. And I wanted to see your domain. It’s… less murdery than I remember.”
He barked a laugh, short and surprised. “The basement growth chambers are where the real monsters live. Up here, it’s mostly the polite, photosynthetic kind.” He fell into step beside her, keeping a careful pace. The silence between them was fragile, filled with the drip of water, the rustle of leaves. “You really think you can fix that old platform? It’s been condemned for a decade.”
“It’s a place. Places don’t stay broken if you know how to apply the right pressure.” She stopped beside a basin where fat, white lilies floated. “You said something earlier. In the hall. About not knowing I’d taken the job.”
He stopped too, staring intently at the lilies. “Yeah.”
“Were you going to come find me? If you had known?”
The question hung in the humid air. A delicate, blue tendril from a nearby creeper reached for a loose strand of her platinum hair. Alistair gently guided it away with two fingers before it could touch her.
“I don’t know,” he said finally, honestly. “Probably not. I’d have thought about it. Planned out what to say. Then talked myself out of it.” He met her gaze. “I was never good with… unexpected things. With you.”
The admission was a tiny crack in the ground between them. She could step over it, or she could peer in.
“The graduation ball,” she said. Her heart was beating a steady, heavy rhythm against her ribs. “I wore green. You talked to Professor Linnaeus for forty-five minutes about fertilizer.”
He blinked. The memory surfaced in his eyes, clear and painful. “You saw that.”
“I was waiting for you to cross the room.”
His face fell. The realization, two decades late, was a physical blow. “Oh.”
“Yeah. ‘Oh.’”
“Rosalinda, I—” He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end. “I was trying to work up the nerve. I had a whole speech. By the time I looked up, you were gone.”
“Your speeches were always too long,” she said, but there was no bite to it.
He smiled, a weak, broken thing. “They really were.”
A spout of water misted from a copper pipe overhead, a timed irrigation burst. The fine spray caught the light, and for a second, they stood in a glittering haze. It cooled the skin on her arms.
“So,” she said, pivoting, because the past was a swamp she wasn’t ready to wade through. “Your office. That’s where the survivable coffee is.”
The relief on his face was palpable. The moment slipped, not gone, but shelved. “Yes. It’s also where I keep the good biscuits. The ones I hide from the students.”
“Lead the way, Fairmont.”
He led her out of the drowning green and into the stone corridor, the humidity lifting like a veil. As they walked, the sounds of the university returned: distant chatter, slamming doors, the scuff of boots on stone. The normal world.
Just before they reached a weathered oak door marked with his name and a painted, lopsided sage plant, he paused, his key in hand. He didn’t look at her. “For what it’s worth,” he said, his voice low. “That speech I never gave. The first line was about how your eyes looked like they’d stolen all the light from the chandeliers.”
Her breath caught. It was absurd. It was poetic. It was so him.
She said nothing. He unlocked the door, and the smell of coffee, real coffee, rich and dark, wafted out, mingling with the scents of dried lavender and old paper.
He stepped inside, holding the door open for her. She crossed the threshold.