But what?
“Oh,look,” said Anaïs. She had discovered a world atlas and had it open to a double-page spread detailing some of the most populouscities in Stivale. Anaïs traced her finger along a hand-painted scene of Caprietti, a city of floating buildings, green canals, small boats, and arched stone bridges. One drawing showed half a dozen partygoers dressed in flamboyant gowns and bejeweled masks, prepared for one of Stivale’s famed masquerades. Anaïs sighed longingly.
With renewed determination, Mallory refocused on the bookshelves. She reminded herself that she didn’t actually have to rid the house of the ghost—she only had to play to Armand’s sense of goodwill. He was a count. He had money to spare. As long as he believed that she and her sister had done all they possibly could, she would doubtless be able to talk him into rewarding them for their efforts.
Once that money was in her pocket, she would take Anaïs anywhere in the world she wished to go. Mallory would give her sister elaborate gowns and take her to sparkling festivals and watch her dance with masked men beneath star-studded skies. The entire world would be theirs, along with a freedom they’d hardly dared to dream about.
Mallory’s fingers paused on the spine ofHerbal Remedies for Common and Not-So-Common Household Ailments.She pulled the book out and flipped to the table of contents. She scanned the page, stopping at chapter nine: “Aromatics for the Cleansing of Bad Fortune and Unclean Energy.”
“Close enough,” she said, slamming the book shut.
When Mallory asked Yvette where she might be able to find pennyroyal, viper’s bugloss, and madderwort, she wasgiven a suspicious scowl before being directed to check the kitchen gardens. Failing that, she might try the conservatory, where there was a fine collection of herbs and plants, and—if that should still not yield anything—there was an apothecary in the town of Comorre, six miles to the south.
“The conservatory?” Mallory had asked, unable to keep the intrigue from her voice. “The same one where Béatrice was murdered?”
Yvette had let out a scandalized groan and stomped away.
Hoping she would not have to go into town, Mallory hitched her drawing satchel onto her shoulder and set off for the potager. When she arrived, she quickly discovered that she preferred it to the formal gardens off the terraces. There might be fewer flowers, but the plants here were abundant with late-season produce—turnips and onions, squashes and beets, cabbages and lettuces of every variety.
Thankfully the plants were labeled with slate plaques, otherwise she wouldn’t have known what many of them were. She paced along the path, reading the unfamiliar names aloud.Gooseneck squash. Snake gourd. Saltbush. Skirret.
She walked around the garden three times before she was certain that what she needed was not there.
She headed for the conservatory next—a palatial structure of glass walls and decorative iron. As she opened the doors, she was greeted by a wall of warm, humid air, at striking contrast to the autumn chill outside. Knowing that one of the wives had been killed here, Mallory had expected the greenhouse to be dismal and unkempt, as neglected as the rest of the gardens. Instead,she found it flourishing with plant life in every corner. Wooden tables and benches overflowed with countless flowers and exotic greenery tucked into an assortment of clay pots. Fuzzy stems, prickly leaves, flowers with voluptuous petals, and others that had strange needlelike teeth, plants with purple berries and vines with jagged thorns, shrubs with bulbous black-tinted fruit and blooms redolent with the scents of licorice or vanilla or pepper or pine. The aromas clogged her lungs as she wound through the jungle of growth, searching for the neatly written labels like those in the potager, but here there was nothing. Every pot, every plant, was a mystery.
An even bigger mystery was the boy spritzing a feathery vine in a suspended planter with water from a small glass perfume bottle.
“Armand?”
Startled, he shoved back a lock of hair from his face, leaving a smudge of dirt high on his cheek. It was not possible that he was more surprised than she was, because he was dressed like one of the vineyard farmhands in simple trousers and a loose linen shirt that gaped indecently at the throat. A belt at his waist held his ring of iron keys.
“Mallory,” he said, setting down the perfume bottle. “Hello.”
“What are you doing?”
He glanced around, almost guiltily, but also apparently confused as to what he ought to be guilty about. “Tending to the plants. Were you looking for me?”
“No. I was…” But she couldn’t remember what she’d come for. Her brain was too wrapped up in seeing the heir to the Saphirestate wearing the clothes of a common peasant. Clothes that revealed the hollow between his clavicle bones. The golden skin at the top of his chest. “What do you mean you’re tending to the plants? Don’t you have servants for that?”
“We used to,” he said, wiping his hands on his pants, leaving filthy smears behind. The table in front of him was littered with dark soil and an assortment of clay pots—some sporting baby plants, others empty and waiting. A tray of seedlings rested beside it, along with a collection of knives and scissors and small shovels. “But I prefer to do it myself.”
She gaped at him. “You’re agardener.”
He chuckled awkwardly. “Hardly. I assist in the formal gardens from time to time—we have only two gardeners, who come but once a week. It’s far too much for them to handle alone. But these are mostly medicinal plants, some from Lysraux, but many more from around the world. It’s… fascinating. To learn what parts of a plant can do to help us, or heal us.”
“Or hurt us,” she added.
He smirked. “Ever the contrarian. But yes, a fair number of poisons could be made from these plants, too.” He shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder if I might have trained as an apothecary, if I didn’t have to run a wine empire.” He picked up a watering can and gave a drink to the newly filled pots.
Mallory found herself inspecting the lush landscape of foliage with new appreciation. She could not name any of these plants, and doubted she had seen half of them before in her life. One vine in particular caught her attention, for along its length blossomed a series of unusual flowers. Long, amethyst-colored petalscurved like a pinwheel in one direction, while at their center, a second layer of speckled blue-and-white petals twisted the opposite way. It was beautiful, but almost made her dizzy to look at.
“Do you know what all of these are?” she asked.
“I do,” he said, without pride. “That is a pinwheel crown. Most of the plants in here I keep for practical uses—medicines, tinctures, and so on. But that one…” He smiled a bit whimsically. “I just always thought it was pretty.”
He quickly looked away.
“Perhaps you can help me.” Mallory walked to the opposite side of the long table, tenderly brushing her finger along a wide leaf that appeared to be as soft as peach fuzz—and was. Her hand strayed curiously to its neighbor.
