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“Good. I’ll make arrangements for you to have a room in the east wing on the second floor with the rest of the staff,” she informed me, moving toward the door. A thought occurred to me as she wandered away.
“What was I wearing?” I asked, nodding toward the heap on the floor before she could leave me alone again in the sterile, high-windowed room.
There was no view of the outside from here, not without standing on one of the beds and straining beyond to see.
Endora paused and glanced back at me. “It’s hard to say for sure,” she admitted. “Pants of some kind and a shirt? Really, you were worse for wear when you came in. There wasn’t much to see that wasn’t damaged by the water.”
I looked at my arms again, the bruises I’d seen earlier already fading away to reveal the smooth cream of my flesh. Jorga had done a good job.
“Will you…” I hesitated, unsure of how to say it. “Can you thank the king for me?”
Endora cocked her head. “For what, exactly?”
I swallowed.
For making sure I wasn’t hurt badly? For bringing me here? For not killing me when he found me on his property?
I said none of those things. “For everything.”
A small smirk formed on the enchantress’ lips. “I suspect you’ll have a chance to thank him yourself.”
With that, she vanished before my eyes, leaving me to ponder my next steps and how I might navigate a life without any past.
* * *
Endora hadn’t been lyingabout Lacroix. The old fae was brusque and cranky, the idea of having an apprentice clearly offensive to him. Although I was sure someone had alerted him to my arrival, he acted as if I had blindsided him by showing up for my first shift at the interior gardens.
“They’re trying to replace me, huh?” he muttered, stomping through the carefully cultivated rows of hemlock and wolfsbane. “They think I’m dead already!”
“I don’t think—” I tried to tell him, following behind at a safe distance, but he continued to storm through, watering his plants with surprising agility for a being of his advanced age.
I had no illusions about what I was doing there. I really didn’t believe that they had brought me on to replace Lacroix, but trying to explain this to the aging botanist was proving futile.
“I’ll show them. I’ll show you, too, fairy-face. I’ll outlive them all!” He snorted and cackled until he coughed, the over-exertion driving him to a fit of hacking.
“I’m not here to replace you, Lacroix,” I promised earnestly. “I just want to learn.”
“You’re damn right you’re not replacing me,” the old timer grouched, his hearing more selective than failing, I quickly realized.
I also learned to keep my mouth shut and simply watch the very skilled botanist work rather than engage in his endless barrage of griping, and within two days, he begrudgingly accepted my moderately silent presence.
The hours were long—seven in the morning until seven at night, but the shifts flew by when I was among the plants I understood on a primal level. It was true that I had a natural knack for working with them, but they didn’t trigger anything beyond my knowledge for them. Being near them grounded me and inspired a feeling of home—despite the fact that I still had no idea what that meant.
Lacroix explained them to me, but I had already known most of their names and classifications, although some were new to me. I absorbed all his lessons without writing anything down, a fact that Lacroix involuntarily grew to admire.
“You’ve got yourself a quick mind, huh?” he told me begrudgingly after that second day.
“Thank you.”
“If you keep your head down, maybe I’ll teach you a spell or two,” Lacroix promised every day, but when I retired to my bedroom on the second floor of the castle every night after the first week, I was no closer to opening his thick volumes of spell books, which he kept locked in his glass office inside the greenhouse.
On my seventh day in the castle, I returned to my room, tired but contented, the scent of lavender and sage clinging to my simple work uniform. It was a standard issue, one provided for most of the staff in varying styles, depending on their profession, to easily identify which section of the castle one belonged to.
My white shirt was streaked in soil, the Silverhold wolf crest half-concealed beneath the dirt, blue pants damp from the excess watering. Legs aching, I looked forward to a hot shower and a quick bite in the kitchen before tomorrow’s shift.
I pretended not to notice the guard lingering halfway down the servant’s hallway, his eyes steadfastly watching my every move. After a week, I thought I would have been used to him by now. Jaylen was this one—the night guard. There was a day guard, too, and they both made me uncomfortable, mostly because they never said a word to me, like I was some kind of criminal to be examined, not interacted with, even when I tried to be friendly. They didn’t want my companionship. They had a job to do, and it involved scrutinizing me like a bug under a microscope.
What is he expecting me to do?
