The scent of a spicy stew greeted me, and Genevieve had left a note with it in the kitchen. It smelled delicious, but I had no appetite. Instead, I turned toward the library.
When I stepped inside, Lilia’s scent reached me. It was faint but I’d recognize that earthy, floral fragrance anywhere, one that was uniquely hers. It triggered memories so vivid, I squeezed my eyes shut as they rushed through me. The quiet evenings when she read from her books, the joyful hours while we played cards or board games, and the frantic moments when we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.
I opened the cabinet and pulled out the case containing the poppy. Almost every petal had turned to stone. Only onecrimson petal remained, appearing fiercely stubborn despite its fragility.
Only one petal. My time was almost up. Strange how I no longer dreaded the end, with death so close I could practically feel it whisper.
CHAPTER 22
LILIA
Ineeded to dosomething, but what?
What could I do to help Hadrien, a gargoyle cursed by a queen who exploited dark magic, when I was simply a villager, a green witch at home in the garden? I didn’t know anything about dark magic, so how would I go about even beginning to think of some way? Hadrien said there wasn’t one, and he should know since he had shifter magic.
Still, we’d accomplished something together while working at the wards. I could feel it—it was unlike anything I’d ever accomplished before. Sure, I’d worked with plants for remedies and ailments for as long as I could remember. But to come up with a way to help protect the vast perimeter of Valgarde?
That was something I couldn’t have done myself. Whatever magic Hadrien had within him was powerful, incredibly powerful. Yet he believed the queen’s curse couldn’t be broken.
I refused to believe it. I couldn’t just give up and let him turn to stone like the rest of the gargoyles on their endless, silentwatch around Valgarde. To see him frozen like that during the day, dark lines silhouetted against the sunlight, was already horrific enough, but at least we knew that he’d break free come sundown.
No, I wouldn’t give up. I threw myself into finding a way, just as I had when I had access to Hadrien’s library at Valgarde. Back in our simple cottage, I worked in my small section with a worktable and a shelf mounted on the wall above it, stocked with dried herbs in jars, worn books, and other plants I’d grown and harvested, such as feverfew, moonwort, and stonecrop. I knew the lines of each stem and leaf the way I recognized the familiar lines in my palms. I opened the jars and sniffed their distinct scents. The green world had always steadied me, and I relied on that more than ever.
Every morning I rose before dawn and lit candles and opened books, searching through older magic manuscripts my grand-mère had left me with cramped handwriting on pages that smelled of parchment and damp earth. I was looking for clues. Any clues. Something that would give me an understanding of his curse.
After three days, I found something calledstone sicknessin one of the oldest manuscripts with pages distorted from stains and time, so that I couldn’t decipher all the words. But I got the gist. The curse was among the darkest, one of binding and encroachment, the stone claiming what was living until nothing living remained.
Like the petals of a poppy.
No known remedy.
I pushed the image away, refusing to believe it, and kept searching.
If there was a curse, there had to be a reversal. The universe consisted of opposites.
Over many more hours, I cross-referenced what I found among the spells in the ancient texts with the more modern books I’d used for healing with plants. Plants known to resist magical encroachment, such as ash bark and black hellebore root, had been used in centuries-old curse reversals. Mistletoe was harvested at solstice. I mapped connections the way roots mapped beneath soil, each one leading somewhere until it abruptly stopped.
Most paths followed the same route and led me nowhere.
But then, I came across something I wasn’t even looking for here in my family’s cottage. It was a drawing of a tree that looked familiar. The paint on the page with the silvery petals. The one in Valgarde’s courtyard.
The tree that Hadrien’s father had given to his mother on their wedding day.
Now it had a name:l’arbre miroir.
My heart quickened and I kept reading. It wasn’t an ordinary tree but one with extraordinary magic. Its leaves didn’t just absorb light but returned it, catching and redirecting whatever fell upon them. I traced my fingers over the paint strokes on the parchment. Incredible.
I only gave myself a few minutes to marvel over the magic of that tree before I resumed my search.
On the fifth day after I’d left Valgarde, I found something.
Buried in one of the oldest manuscripts, one with the most water damage, I read a passage about what the old witches had called petrification sickness. Powerful dark magic that worked like slow suffocation, turning living tissue to mineral.
I leaned back and pieced together what I was learning. It had to be another name for the stone sickness. Only this book noted a potential remedy. The counteragent wasn’t a single plant but a preparation. Three elements that individually hadmodest properties but together created what the text called a dissolution of false stone.
Moonwort for reversal. Rowan resin to break enchantments laid by dark practitioners. And the rarest—a flower called veilbloom, which grew only in the deep forest margins where magic pooled in the soil.
I sat back and stared at the page.
