Hux wasn’t much help with the celestial mathematics—the cipher made his head ache, and the orbital calculations were beyond his expertise—but he could cross-reference, could organize, could bring his mayoral attention to detail to bear on the chaos of Deia’s research.
She’d been brilliant, the witch who came before. Her journals were dense with observations, theories, half-finished equations. She’d understood the Hollow King better than anyone—had mapped its feeding patterns, its vulnerabilities, the specific frequencies of starlight that caused it pain.
“She was so close,” Lunaria murmured at one point, running her finger along a passage. “Look at this. She’d figured out that the orrery could be used to amplify celestial energy—could turn the entire garden into a weapon. She just needed more time to calibrate the focal point.”
“And Cornelius killed her before she could finish.”
“He must have known exactly how close she was. Must have been terrified that she’d succeed.” Her voice was bitter.
They kept working. Comparing notes, building on Deia’s foundation, slowly assembling the puzzle she’d left behind.
When the clock in the cottage struck midnight, Lunaria finally set down the journal and stretched. Her spine cracked audibly, her shoulders rolling to release the tension of hours spent hunched over ancient texts.
“Enough,” she said. “We can pick this up tomorrow. You need to rest, and I need to...” She trailed off, rubbing her eyes. “I don’t know what I need. Sleep, probably. Food. A week without existential dread.”
“I can’t help with the last one.” He caught her hand, tugging her toward the bench near the pavilion’s edge. “But come sit with me. Just for a minute.”
She let him pull her down onto the stone seat. The bench was positioned perfectly—facing the orrery but also open to the sky through the dome’s largest crack. Stars spilled across the darkness above them, brilliant and countless, their light enhanced by the gardens’ magic.
Lunaria curled into his side without hesitation, her legs draped over his thigh, her body fitting against him like they’d been doing this for years instead of days. His arm wrapped around her automatically, his hand settling on the curve of her hip.
They sat like that for a long time without speaking. The orrery hummed around them, flower-planets continuing their slow traverse. Stars wheeled through the crack in the dome above. It was the first quiet they’d had in days that didn’t feel like waiting.
They walked backto the cottage, hand in hand.
The gardens seemed to watch them pass—flowers turning to track their movement, leaves rustling without wind, the wholecomplex humming with awareness. The path was different, Hux realized. Narrower. More overgrown. As if the plants were deliberately drawing them closer, forcing them to walk shoulder to shoulder instead of side by side.
At the Fate Lily Pond, they paused without planning to. The water was perfectly still, reflecting stars and moon and the silhouettes of two people standing at its edge.
“The lilies show destiny-lines,” Lunaria said, almost absently. “Touch the water, and they glow to show glimpses of your fate.”
“Have you looked?”
“No.” She glanced at him sideways. “You want to?”
He thought about it. About dipping his fingers into the still water, about watching the lilies react, about seeing whatever future the gardens thought he had.
“Not tonight,” he said. “Tonight, I don’t want to know.”
She smiled—soft, understanding—and they kept walking.
Behind them, unnoticed, the Fate Lilies stirred.
One by one, they began to glow. Not with the usual pale luminescence that marked a normal reading, but with something richer, warmer—the gold of sunrise breaking over the horizon, of firelight in winter, of a treasure finally being found.
The lilies bloomed bright gold in their wake, marking their passage like a trail of gilded breadcrumbs, a blessing neither of them had asked for, and neither of them saw.
The gardens noticed.
The gardens always noticed.
TWENTY-SEVEN
LUNARIA
Leaving him was harder than it should have been.
Lunaria stood in the cottage doorway, bag slung over her shoulder, watching Hux sleep.
