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“Here,” he says, handing it to Alba. “I want you to come back. Each time you do, I’ll have another one for you.”
A smile returns to her worried face, realizing that maybe for once, she has found someone who is of the right sort. His understanding response makes her not want to lose him, either.
“Then you’re going to need to put up a fence or something. If one of the few people who know and care about these flowers learns that you have them, they won’t be safe out in the open.”
“I’ll be sure to do that,” Roderick reassures her.
He then slowly reaches out for her hand, nestling his fingers between hers and leading her back around to the front of the house. Holding his hand doesn’t bring the pang back, and so Alba happily goes along with it.
“So where are you off to now?” he asks.
“West, to the coast. There’s a doctor there who asked me to bring him a peony flower if I ever came across one. He wants to study it and see if he can figure out why legends say it can heal almost anything.”
“You’ll have to let me know what he finds.”
“Of course,” Alba replies. “I’ll be back this way in a few weeks.”
“I look forward to it,” Roderick smiles.
With that, Alba leaves down the road. Roderick watches her the whole way until she disappears from view. Each step further she gets seems like a mile to him, at least to his heart. It longs for her and fears that she will never return.
The weeks pass, and Roderick can only think of when Alba said she would return. He tries to combat the anticipation and anxiety by keeping himself occupied with his work. He spends even more time in town making and executing different business plans. When he has to journey away, he leaves a note at his door for Alba and asks the townspeople to keep an eye out for her. He also d
oes as she suggested and encloses the garden, creating a large fence around it and then another enclosure around the peony.
No matter how hard he works, however, Roderick is unable to escape his fears when he lies down to rest at night. For that reason, he doesn’t sleep until he becomes exhausted, using his nights to instead complete renovations around the house.
After a long wait, Alba does return, and she is as excited to see him as he is to see her. She tells him all about her journeys and adventures hunting flowers over more tea. As he listens, Roderick is surprised to find that he doesn’t miss the life of travel, though he wishes he could be on hers simply to be with her. She, on the other hand, enjoys seeing all of his renovations and hearing about what he is doing with his company.
Months come and go, and the two of them continue to meet after this fashion. Yet despite their obvious liking for one another, they hold back from their affections, Roderick because he made a promise, and Alba because of the ghosts of her past. Roderick never asks, which she appreciates, though she hopes to someday find the courage to open up to him.
Alba’s collection of lightly-pink flowers grows and grows, but she doesn’t ever give them away, even the first, the one she was going to take to the doctor. By the time she reached the coast, she simply couldn’t bring herself to part with it.
A regularity slowly develops for the visits. The two of
them never speak of it, but Alba starts always arriving at the start of the week, never going more than three weeks without coming by. That is why Roderick begins to panic when the summer comes and over a month passes without him seeing her.
“I’ll trust whatever decisions you make,” Roderick says to his foreman as he hands him the keys to his estate. “I’m not certain how long I will be gone for, but we can meet when I get back about how things have gone in my absence.”
The two then clasp hands, and Roderick gets onto his horse and rides north. That is the direction that Alba headed in the last time they parted ways. A couple of people on the coast, alchemists he recalls, asked her to fetch certain flowers and roots that are common to the foothills near the mountains. It seemed simple enough. What could have gone wrong?
When he arrives at some villages near the foothills, Roderick starts asking around about her. After a day of searching, he finally is able to talk to someone who knows something, a cook at an inn.
“Yeah, she was here a week ago,” the cook confidently says. “She was wanting to know about the different passes that lead up to the Lower Valley. Said something about rumors of a rare flower growing in one of them. A pink one.”
“Do you remember the name of the pass?”
“Yeah, the Eagle’s Walkway. Why?”
Roderick doesn’t answer him, instead walking out of the inn disheartened as he hops back onto his horse.
‘Why couldn’t you just tell her the truth?’ he laments.
As he darts toward the pass, the many dangers that would have awaited Alba circle in his mind. Steep slopes and cliffs surround the roadway. Flooding is common, especially in the late spring and summer, and can come from nowhere. That is not to mention all of the wild beasts that could prey on her.
Roderick beckons his horse up the rocky paths, his eyes continually shifting from spot to spot looking for anything even remotely suspicious. As he gets higher, he becomes nervous about the amount of moisture in the ground, which makes it difficult for even his horse to move without slipping.
Suddenly, his heart stops, and he quickly dismounts.
