Her eyes were empty, inanimate, untouched by the perversion of the creature.
But where a gaping wound should have stood brilliant against her throat, flowering vines had knit the flesh together.
The vines bloomed in a riot of colors, small-petaled blossoms with long stamens, casting a fine dusting of pollen across the bed. Evelyn approached, heart in her throat. She knelt beside the bed and reached out with her practiced fingers, stroking the petals, inspecting the leaves. The features belonged to no plant she knew, and they seemed to possess a hundred conflicting traits. Some stems were knobbed, some smooth, some dense like fungus. The flowers, too, differed in tiny ways, and she saw in each echoes of plants she had fed Violetta, had fed herself, had fed Delphinium.
A hundred thousand traces of her, fingerprinted on Violetta’s flesh.
She tried to disentangle the stems and roots from Violetta, but they refused to give. The plants shivered at her touch and released a heady, melancholy perfume. Unnatural; this was unnatural, too. But it had to mean something, something about the garden, the start of ruin.
This wasn’t just violence. It was something else. Something new. Something she couldn’t understand.
“I am sorry,” Evelyn said, lifting her hand to cup Violetta’s face. “I am so sorry.”
Violetta did not respond.
She waited for a flare of gold to steal over her eyes, or even that familiar emptiness, but there was only the blankness of death.
Biting down a sob, Evelyn lifted Violetta into her arms. Violetta was a small woman, but Evelyn was exhausted, and she struggled to bear Violetta’s weight out into the hall. Her every step was an insult, unsteady and unworthy. But she made it back down to the garden despite the weakness of her muscles. She reached where she had placed her mother’s skull, and where the soldier still stood, and she laid Violetta down between them.
The moon broke from behind the clouds. Silver light slid into the dark places of the greenhouse. And where there should have been gaps, she saw leaves, stems, blossoms. Beneath her feet, all around her, the soil in the beds shifted. In the gaps left bare by her destruction, new growth shot up. It came from shreds of root left behind, fragments of leaf she had not yet turned into the soil. Her hellebore strained up from the ground, pointed leaves growing lush and sheltering over fresh blossoms. Foxglove spiraled upwards, sprouting a hundred new screaming flowers, and behind them spread gelsemium vines, spidering out across the greenhouse to throw out saplings, climb walls, scale doorways.
The plants were so close to the ones she had known, that had comforted her all her life, but she knew them too well to think them strong and healthy. Some were sickly pale; others sparsely grown, erupting too fast to remain alive for long. Sap oozed from stems that splintered under their own weight. Roots pushed up from the soil like bulbous maggots, the ground unable to contain them. The gelsemium multiplied past all reason, siphoning vitality from everything it touched, its myriad hosts becoming drawn and limp before her eyes.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
The soldier smiled. “Spreading. Spreading, in a new way.”
She looked down at Violetta, then, crouching beside her, touched the blossoms. Each flower differed, but the petals were evenly formed, the stems strong, the leaves gleaming in the low light. “Are these yours, too?”
The soldier’s smile twisted into something else, something wrong. “Only weeds,” the soldier said. “Give her to the garden.” Something in its tone had shifted.
“Will it bring her back?”
The soldier did not speak.
“These flowers,” she said. “These flowers, what are they?”
“Poison,” the soldier said, and there was no delight in the word. No wonder. No hunger. “She is gone. She is gone, our lady.”
“No,” she said, scowling. “No, that was not the bargain. I have brought her to you. I have never offered you anybody with full knowledge until her, and you say she is gone? No. Take her. Now. Bring her back to me.”
“We cannot feel her,” the creature said. The soldier bared his teeth, for only a moment, as if angry.
She had never seen it angry before. And her anger matched the creature’s, swirling inside her heart, hot and inflamed. But she would not beg, and she could see no other way to force the thing.
And what did it mean, that Violetta had sprouted after death, while the soldier stood before her now?
It meant that there was no way to make amends. There was no way to playact, to pretend Violetta was back and that Evelyn had not betrayed her. It meant that there was nothing left for her here except the gallows.
The fight inside of her died back. Her heart broke. Relief crept forward, too; could she have truly born seeing that golden light in Violetta’s gaze once more?
“Take me out of the city,” she whispered, subsiding.
“Our lady?”
She looked at the soldier’s body, at his tattoos. “You say you can play a role? If you cannot play Violetta’s, then play this man’s. Take me away, somewhere safe.” Because the only alternative was death, and she knew she was too cowardly to take that option. She always had been. But she could not remain here, her handiwork arrayed around her, her night’s labors undone in an instant.
“We could do this for you,” the soldier said, and she could have screamed from the surge of guilt and relief that flooded her, working into the tiniest crevices of her skull. She did not want to leave this house, but her safety was gone. Gone, forever. This house was no longer the fortress she had built.
“But there is no need, our lady.”
Evelyn stilled. “There is every need.”
“We feel your hand on this city, on the wind, in the soil. You have touched so many; we have found them. But there are others, too. Others, poisoned by your influence. We feel it, the spread of rot. We can use it. We will change them, as we are changing this garden now.”
She could see behind the soldier the lights of the city below, and they looked like eyes, winking, watching, golden and staring.
A hundred eyes, a thousand. All of Delphinium, bewitched.
Blood drained from her face. “No. No, that is—no, the Empress is foolish, and this city is dying, but I—I—”
I am responsible.
“Your rescuers would have caged you, made you reliant on them for every scrap,” the soldier continued, and he went down onto his knees before her, the supplicant. “You have killed for less. You grow your freedom. You do not need to rely on us; we will rely on you.”
Outside, the ground appeared to tremble. She could have sworn she heard the sound of green things growing, of soil shifting, of the swell of ripe fruit.
“We will make for you a home. A home which loves you, accepts you, sees all of you and will never seek to punish you for it. It is the least we can do for you, our lady. We have lived so long adrift, without a medium in which to take root and spread, but you have provided it for us. A whole city, a whole, closed world, that will serve you. A better world.”
A whole world that will love you. It was tempting, just as Violetta resurrected to a half life had been tempting. A world where she no longer had to guard herself, a world where she could unspool the tangled knot that was her beating heart. A whole world like that night when Violetta had found her, addled and mad, and had stayed by her side. A world where she could act not out of fear, but out of want. Desire.