Story Magic Page 10

  He groaned as the carriage slowed and came to a stop. Rennear pulled his mouth away from hers. His lips spread into a wide smile as he sighed, running his fingers through her hair. “I should have picked a park that was farther away.” He cleared his throat and sat up straight before sweeping into a mock-formal bow. “Fair mistress Persephonie, if you would do me the honor.”

  She giggled and accepted his proffered hand. “Yes, I will.”

  Rennear led her out of the carriage and onto the cobblestone street. He reached back inside behind her and withdrew a black silk shawl embroidered with tiny flowers and leaves. “Just in case.” He unfolded the shimmering fabric with a flourish, refolded it in a triangle, and draped it around her shoulders. Braided fringe hung from the edges and tickled her arms.

  “Do you keep this in your carriage for evenings at the park?” The edges of the embroidered flowers caught on her fingertips as she ran her hands over the silk.

  “Not usually, no.” Rennear tucked his arm around her shoulder and led her toward the archway that marked the park’s entrance. “But I saw it at the market earlier today, and it made me think of you.”

  She leaned her head against him, angling her face up toward his as they walked. “It’s lovely. Thank you.”

  The cut-stone wall gave way to an intricate metal archway whose pattern resembled the braided fringe of her new shawl. Two guards stepped out of the shadows, hands upheld to tell them to halt, but they lowered their arms when they recognized Rennear. “Patron Ignatius.” They each clamped a fist to their chest and bowed.

  “Apologies, sir,” the one on the left said.

  Rennear nodded to both of them. “Thank you. I know it is after hours, but might my companion and I take a turn about the Empress’s Gardens?”

  “Of course, sir.” They bowed again and stepped back. The second guard set about opening the gate. The hinges whispered, and the bottom of the gate scraped over the pebbled pathway. “Will you be requiring a lantern, Patron Ignatius?”

  Persephonie shook her head against his shoulder. Rennear glanced down, the side of his mouth twisted in a small smile. “I believe the moons and stars grant us enough light this evening.”

  “Very well, sir.”

  She and Rennear slipped beneath the sweeping boughs of the trees that lined the garden path. As they walked, the tiny pebbles crunched against one another beneath her slippers. “Why did you call this the Empress’s Garden?” She knew that the council reserved the elegant parks for the city’s nobility and political servants, but she’d never heard it attributed to the exiled empress before.

  “Ah, that is one of many interesting quirks of Andel-ce Hevran history.” Rennear turned her from the path lined with flowering trees to one lined with tulips. Beyond the carefully planted rows of flowers was a sweeping meadow that held three sprawling elms. The tulip buds were closed tight, lips concealing a secret they desperately wished to reveal.

  Rennear adopted their conspiratorial air, his voice dipping and diving over the winding edges of the story. “According to the legend, after the priests, generals, and senators who would later form the Council of Andel-ce Hevra drove the evil druidic empress and her monsters from the city, they set about torching each of the empress’s beloved gardens, razing them to the ground.” His eyes flashed with the drama of his story, but he paused to ensure she had caught the overexaggeration of both the honor he placed upon the Council and the sneering condemnation he affected when referring to the empress.

  “And then what?” Persephonie whispered, eager for him to continue. Before they’d met, a city servant speaking of evil druidic magic would have made her feel hurt as well as frightened, but now, after Rennear had shared his secret with her, and after their evening together, the accusation didn’t hold the power over her that it would have. She knew its false nature with every spark of her being, and she knew that Rennear did too. Perhaps this garden held a secret for understanding the empress and why the city continued to hate her—as if the empress still frightened them.

  “We shall reclaim these spaces for the people of our great city.” Rennear thrust his fist into the air, pretending to be one of the famous Andel-ce Hevran generals from the years following the great flood. “Trees were burned, shrubs fashioned to resemble animals of all shapes and sorts were maimed, flowers were uprooted and tossed onto garbage heaps.” Rennear sighed and glanced over his shoulder. He took both of her hands and guided her over the row of tulips and toward the third elm tree. Rennear covered her eyes for the last several steps, holding her against his chest as he led her to the tree’s trunk. He turned her around, leaning her back against the rough bark. The stubble of his beard scratched the side of her ear. “We should wait for the clouds to pass.”

  His lips met hers in the darkness. She kept her eyes closed, pinned between him and the sacred tree. Countless stories wound around the roots of the elm, weaving about her and Rennear now and holding them tight in their embrace. To the saudad, it was a guardian tree, symbolic of the wide wings of Apollo. Rennear’s heart pounded against her hand. She ground the other into the gray-green bark of the tree. His breath hitched as her palm drifted lower down his chest. He pulled her hips closer to his.

  The druids held that the elm was powerful enough to maintain a lover’s bond, even after the beloved had journeyed on to Astralei. “There’s a reason the elm graces both the card for The Lovers and for Death, Persephonie,” Mama had said.

  Rennear pulled away suddenly. He caught her hands and held them close against his chest. They both breathed quickly. Rennear didn’t take his eyes from her. Behind him, a silver glow bathed the branches of the elm. It reflected against his skin. “And then they came to this garden,” he whispered. “Here, for just a moment, everything changed.”

  The silver gleam grew brighter as they rounded the wide trunk of the tree, shining through the sweeping branches of the elm. Persephonie gasped. Behind the gateway tree was a hillside covered in argent maples. They shone pure silver, basking in the light of the moons. She stopped, staring. Never before had she seen so many of the trees blessed by the lunar goddess Selene all in one place. Their collective radiance was as bright as a third moon, hung low in the gardens, coating her and Rennear in their light. “I can hardly believe it.”

  His eyes shone in the treelight, sweeping from her to their glowing leaves and back. “Will you walk beneath their branches with me?”

  Wordlessly, Persephonie nodded.

  Beneath the boughs, the ivory light took on a liquid weight, painting their skin as though they’d stood still in a silver rain. She ran her finger over the ridges of a leaf, the blood in her veins arcing toward the tree’s lunar energy. “After seeing this, they still wanted to destroy the gardens?”

  Rennear’s brow creased. “The way my mother told it, this was the last garden left. Many of the priests fell to their knees along the hillside, weeping at what they had done. The generals bowed. They saw the argents’ proximity to the elms as a symbol of their fallen soldiers, the ones who had passed through the portal of death into the wide waters of the astral seas.” His shoulders lowered, and he stared at the earth beneath their feet, thick blades of grass, white in the light of the trees. “But the senators, they knew what to do.” He ran his hand back through his hair. His jaw clenched. Finally, he took her hand again. “‘We’ll make it a private garden,’ they said. ‘For the elite and their families, so we always remember the cost of the empress’s rule, what she took from the city, and the mercy, the restraint we showed in that which we spared.’”

  He had spoken of his mother a little before. Persephonie knew she had died when he was young. In those early years of her son’s life, from what she could tell, his mother had planted the seeds that would blossom into questions against his father’s strict tenets, the limiting beliefs through which Senator Ignatius and those like him framed their world.

  “We have a story about the argent trees, Rennear.” Legends served as water over scattered seeds, bring
ing to the surface the truths that lay buried beneath.

  He kissed the flat planes of her knuckles. “Tell it to me.”

  She smiled and pulled him deeper into the argent forest. “Like all the best stories, this legend, taught to us by Cassandra, is a story of love.” He raised his eyebrows, waiting for her to continue. “It can be easy to forget, in the darknesses that cover the world, but this plane, and all of the others, they came to be out of the forces of love.”

  Persephonie took a deep breath, sinking into the lulling rhythm of her people’s stories. “It is love that binds, just as love divides.” His hand traced the line of her waist, sparking butterflies in her stomach, but she pulled away out of reach, not allowing him to distract her from her tale, not yet. “Many have forgotten, and many more know not how to see. My datha says it is up to us, the saudad, to remind and teach them, those who are ready to remember. And for the rest, we hold this knowledge dear until they too yearn to no longer forget.”

  She spun, walking backward until she reached the trunk of one of the silver trees. Rennear’s arms and the tree’s branches pinned her in on either side.

  “And which legend is this, story mistress of the saudad?” Rennear tucked a curled strand of hair behind her ear.

  “We call this one ‘The Legend of Enidia.’ It recounts the great, long-lasting love of two ancient trees in the worlds’ first forests. An argent maple, lunar bearer of the skies above, and her lover, the elm, guardian of the worlds of death below.” She held a finger to his lips as he leaned closer.

  Chapter 20

  “THE LEGEND OF ENIDIA”

  As Cassandra taught us, love and its stories exist in many forms. Countless peoples have forgotten this truth in a tradition that dates back even to the earliest days of the world. Pursuing their own ends, these civilizations separated those who should not have been, those who loved one another, who held deep lore and love all their own.

  One such story comes to us on the whispers borne between the boughs. It tells of a love from those earliest years, where deep in the forest, spirit intertwined between argent maple and her lover elm.

  “Jasper.” Enidia exhaled the name in the early morning air.

  He awoke beside her.

  “By the light,” he said with a warm wave of pollen.

  “By the light,” she answered with a flurry of her own.

  They shared breakfast together, a flirtatious exchange between intertwined roots.

  It had been she who initiated their friendship. One morning, in early spring. She stopped growing toward him, granting him full access to the light.

  He answered with generosity in turn and fed her a share of the nutrients gifted him by the sun.

  Out of these simple gestures, trees’ great loves are born.

  One day, a young woman walked by. She spoke to the two trees and smiled at their response. They told stories together. She fell asleep atop their roots, and they sheltered her from the midnight rain as best they could.

  The next morning, the young woman awoke. “Would you like to come with me?”

  “This is our home,” Jasper answered.

  “But I’m scared to continue through the forest alone.”

  “There is nothing here to be frightened of,” Enidia assured her.

  “I have always loved argent maples,” the girl said. She murmured something under her breath.

  Enidia’s body tingled. Pain shot up and down her trunk, across branches and leaves, down through her roots, as though she’d caught fire. Though they shared much, she tried to shield Jasper from whatever curse the girl had uttered, to protect him from the bolts of pain.

  His panic drifted toward her—dry, bitter, urgent. “Enidia!” he called. The scents of desperation.

  The cry originated from her heart core, and Enidia fell. She tumbled, trunk split asunder from the roots, branches quaking in her and Jasper’s shared sunlight before they crashed to the ground.

  Her screams echoed across the forest, ricocheting back to her.

  The earth caught her as she fell.

  But the sky did not fall sideways as it should have.

  Jasper’s branches held her up. The warm scent of wonder fell in soft drips on her face. “Enidia?”

  The space near a small branch, one she had grown only recently, parted. The girl stood beside her, smiling. Jasper held her in a circle of branches. He was so . . . tall.

  “My darling,” Jasper whispered. Too many smells lingered on the breeze. What did he mean? She reached out for him with her roots as she had so often done. But there was nothing but the soft press of earth beneath.

  Her towering love beside her . . . there was suddenly so much of him she could not perceive. Only the lowest branches and a solid stretch of trunk.

  Enidia’s own trunk and branches had been . . . softened by the fall. She gasped at the sudden press of the air all around her—and she echoed the wisping sound of the wind, not the distinguished groan of a tree.

  Beside Jasper, the trunk and limbs where she had been leaned, a hole gouged in her side as if by lightning’s strike.

  His rain of pollen continued. She felt and understood so little. Her body she perceived of its own accord and not in relation to those nearby, her friends, Jasper . . . Only four of her branches remained. A short, spindly one on either side, and two where her trunk should have been.

  Jasper’s branches helped her to balance as she swayed side to side.

  “What have you done?” Enidia demanded.

  “I’ve rescued you,” the girl said. “You’re free now.”

  Jasper stood. Frozen. Silent.

  “Come on.” The girl reached out her hand for Enidia’s branches. “You’re the prettiest one I’ve made yet.”

  “There are more?” Though she couldn’t feel it, Enidia knew her heart matched Jasper’s, petrified as stone.

  The girl tugged at her branches, and Enidia stumbled forward. Her limbs slipped free of Jasper’s, his bark somehow rough.

  She did not turn away from him as the girl pulled her through the forest. Her love’s branches stretched wide and tall, reaching out for her, calling her back. Half of him was missing, hidden by the earth. Still, she knew he called for her. His pollen clung to her softened bark, though for the first time, she could not hear his voice.

  Enidia called back to him, a bird’s cry lost on the breeze. The girl continued to yank at her branches. They entered a part of the forest Enidia didn’t know.

  “There is much that I can teach you,” the girl told her on that sunlit afternoon. She told Enidia how to identify the parts of herself that had separated from her body. A different body. Head. Arms. Legs. The girl called her form “dryad.”

  Seasons passed.

  Many of the others were as heartbroken as she. Some had forgotten themselves entirely.

  No matter how often the girl said it, Enidia knew they were not free.

  The girl gathered more dryads around her. She made her own grove of severed trees.

  Even the dryads who had forgotten themselves, who had forgotten the forests from which they came, grew concerned. “Why do you gather so many of us?” they asked the girl.

  “Because one day they will come for me,” the girl said with a shake of her head. “And I don’t intend to be taken again.”

  The dryads did not know of whom she spoke.

  Enidia watched and waited. The girl’s magic grew in might. She returned with more severed sister trees.

  And one day, the promised danger arrived.

  To Enidia, the newcomers didn’t look very different from the girl. They strode confidently on branch-legs. But instead of the glisten of magic at their fingertips, they carried shiny weapons instead.

  “What have we here?” one with a deep voice said to the girl.

  “Witch!” “Enchantress!” the others sneered.

  Enidia didn’t know what they meant by the words that they used, but the girl snarled back at them. “You’ve no idea whom you’ve stumbl
ed upon.” She called white fire from her fingertips, and lightning flashed overhead. “By the light!” the girl screamed.

  In an instant, the dryads nearest her fell dead. Their spirits swirled forth from their trunks, transformed from verdant life to the brilliant fire the girl wielded. She swept her arm from hip to shoulder, and the white flame burned across the strangers’ chests. The first line of strangers and their silver weapons toppled over onto the earth. Those who had come behind cried out and ran toward the girl.

  “By the light,” she yelled again.

  Above, the sky darkened. Only the two moons remained in the sudden dusk. Their light shone on Enidia.

  A second circle of dryads fell. Their spirits, too, flew forward at the girl’s whim.

  But around Enidia, misty shadows clung. They carried with them a protective pollen, and a whisper—Jasper’s—that years had passed since she had heard.

  With the girl’s third casting of the spell, the remaining dryads fell.

  Their spirits drifted up toward the moons. The girl slashed forward with her hands.

  Shadows clung to the dryads’ spirits. They trickled back as rain onto the ground.

  The girl gasped and spun toward Enidia. She cast her spell once more.

  Roots groaned deep beneath the earth, and a wall of shadow rose. Wide-reaching branches encircled Enidia. They absorbed the girl’s spell.

  “Impossible,” she whispered.

  Like the first lashing of a thunderstorm, the remaining strangers surged forth. Their silver weapons thunked into the girl.

  By nightfall, Enidia stood alone inside the clearing. Beads of white dribbled from the bodies of her sister-dryads. Their spirits swirled, guided by root and shadow back into the earth.

  “Wait below until one who is worthy calls you,” Enidia whispered as they returned to the world beneath. The earth would hold their souls, their stories, and remember. And for this memory, this story is told.

  With her sisters laid to rest, Enidia returned home, walking back the way she had come.