Theodor nodded with a grudging laugh, and we walked out into a bright winter afternoon. It was perhaps curiosity and perhaps nostalgia and perhaps a bad idea that drove us along the road toward the public gardens. Tents and brush shelters skirted rosebushes and fountains, temporary shelter for an overwintering army. The only space where the rows of wedge tents were absent was the labyrinth of boxwood, and I wondered if its paths and dead ends would soon hold canopies of pine branches for those still lacking shelter.
“The last time we were here,” Theodor said slowly, “was Viola’s party for the passage of the Reform Bill.”
“We thought it was over then.” I sighed.
“We were inimitably stupid.” Theodor stopped and watched several men coax a thin blaze out of the coals of their campfire. “Perhaps we still are, if we think it’s over now.”
We rounded a bend in the path, and I saw it—the greenhouse. “I wondered if it would still be here,” I confessed. “I didn’t want to say anything, didn’t even really want to hope that it survived.” Tentatively, I pushed on the door, partially blocked by a shattered flowerpot, and stepped inside.
Sunset etched bright hues into the glass walls and ceiling, bringing color into the garden plots inside, though most of the plants had withered without watering. I gently touched one exception, an East Serafan cactus blooming with tiny yellow flowers.
“I don’t imagine I’ll have much time to bring it back to its former glory.” Theodor pulled his penknife from his pocket and sliced the stem of a dwarf rosebush. “No sap at all, she’s dry as kindling.”
“It’s all right to be disappointed,” I finally said, his search for live plant stock yielding little more than cacti and sickly olive trees. “The losses of this war—they’re not just on the field. Kristos says that the archive had books stolen—rare ones, valuable ones. We won’t get those back. The scholars at the university have certainly stagnated of late. We won’t export much grain this year, I’ll wager, and our wine and cider exports will be hurting even longer.”
“Our new government is a tower of matchsticks ready to collapse, people lost their livelihoods and, worse, their families, and our economy won’t recover for years. And my houseplants died,” Theodor snapped. “That’s hardly worth the notice.”
“But you care,” I said quietly.
“I oughtn’t to care! How many thousands killed, wounded, lost limbs? How many will struggle for years to come, widows and orphans? How many businesses destroyed? And my hothouse flowers died, well. Let’s erect a monument to my prize dwarf crystal hydrangea, shall we? I am a governor of Galitha and I have deeper hurts to consider on behalf of my country.”
I struggled to find the right words, to acknowledge that even in the face of death and destruction, loss could also be measured in hundreds of minute ways. In families split and friends no longer speaking, in books stolen and in ciders unpressed, in children’s birthdays missed, in a rare cultivar dead from neglect. “It will take a long time to recover what this war took from many people. It took the gift you worked so hard to give Galitha.”
Theodor sank onto a bench, a rusty trowel clattering to the floor beside him. He kicked it away. “There are better gifts I ought to have given her.”
“And you yet will. But first you gave this one.” I sighed. The building was still sound, and the tools at the ready to rebuild what he had created, once, in a simpler time. No, not simpler, I acknowledged. The simplicity that allowed for his study and development of his art was a false peace, made by ignoring the deep fault lines cracking the country’s very foundations. Not simpler, not really, nor better, but I held to the hope, fervently, that we could return to peace. “We’ll need places like this again, someday.”
“We never did need them.” Theodor turned an empty ceramic flowerpot over in his hands.
“Of course we need archives and gardens and universities—what in the world is the point of a free country governed by its people if its people can’t invest in beauty and knowledge and art?” I snatched the flowerpot away from him, turning it over and brushing dirt away from the drainage hole at the bottom. “This? This flowerpot without a plant is about as satisfying as having nothing beyond bread and barley to think of. It’s…” Laughter bubbled in my voice without my permission, but I recalled Sianh’s phrase in Serafan for a useless thing, a hopeless case. “It’s a cup with a hole in it, Theodor.”
He looked up, confused, and then broke into a rueful smile, remembering. “It is a cup with a hole in it.”
“Galitha won’t always be at war or setting up a new government or struggling to rectify the mistakes of its very recent past. It’s going to need places like this again.”
“I suppose I know that, if I make myself think about it. But after this is over…” He took the flowerpot back and set it carefully on a saucer. “I can’t really believe that I’m going to be filling my days with gardening again. I don’t know what my place will be.”
“I don’t, either,” I said quietly. I sat next to him. “We’re going to have to figure that out together.”
63
WINTER BEGAN TO SOFTEN AROUND THE EDGES, THE SNOWS receding from the lawns and the icicles melting from the eaves, and the frozen stalemate between Niko’s contingent and the rest of the council began to abate, as well. Niko still made his vehement distrust of Theodor clear at every turn, and I noticed more than one unflattering broadside tacked up around the city. Even so, Niko’s barbed insults didn’t seem to snag on Theodor any longer, and Theodor seemed almost content with his work. I fell into a comfortable routine of assisting Hamish at the hospital, meeting with my Pellian friends and with Alice, and playing occasional hostess to the new political elite of Galitha. We had even begun to talk, in vague notions not yet fully coalesced, of a wedding.
I was readying for tea with Maurice Forrest and his family when I was interrupted by a brisk rap on the door. Annette stood on the wide portico, framed by a contingent of Kvys nuns. Not just Kvys nuns, I saw as I scanned their faces, but members of Alba’s order—the ones who could cast. Tantia shyly raised her hand in greeting. I raised an eyebrow in return, but before I could ask, Annette stepped in front of Tantia. “I found these ladies looking for you,” she said. “They were held up by the officials at the port.”
“Looking for me?” I asked. “Didn’t the letter reach them about Alba?”
“They’re aware of what happened to Sastra-set Alba, but their main aim was to find you.” Annette ushered the sisters inside.
I offered a half smile to the silent huddle of nuns, and gestured toward the parlor. They moved in a single unit away from the door. “Thank you for bringing them—do I need to sign for them or some such?”
“As though they’re import goods? No, I don’t think so. The officials took the good word of the Lady Admiral that they were on the up-and-up.”
“Are they?” I whispered.
“Too late to worry about that now,” Annette said. “But I’ll stick around. Not that I’m much good in a fight, but then again…” She craned her neck to see the front parlor, where the sisters waited patiently. “I don’t suppose they are, either.”