But the temptation faded as quickly as it had bloomed, strangled by the memory of Violetta’s blood pooling in her mouth, drowning her. The very temptation proved Evelyn didn’t deserve that world. She’d barely deserved to exist within these walls that she’d built to protect herself, and now she had destroyed it all, killed again the one person who made her feel as if she could be forgiven.
“We can give you your dreams,” the soldier said. “We cannot bring her back, and for that we are sorry. But we can do so much more. We are doing so much more.”
Evelyn laughed, weakly. “I don’t want this,” she said. “I don’t want any of this.”
“You have created the world in which you live, but it is imperfect. Let us help you.”
“No,” she whispered.
“You would have let them all die anyway, once you left them behind for the border crossing,” the soldier said, driving a burning stake through Evelyn’s chest. “We do not see the difference.”
“What are you?” she asked.
Silence.
Then the soldier reached out and took both of Evelyn’s hands in his. His thumbs stroked the pinprick scars that traced over her knuckles. “We are an old thing, and a new thing,” the creature said. “We... are not sure what we are. But we saw the first of your poisoned men, and we knew that to fill him would be to let ourselves out of the darkness. We are a child, our lady. Would you end us before we can begin?”
“You are a pestilence,” Evelyn said. “You are… you are like me. You take and take, because you fear if you cease to take, you will lose all that you are. You can’t exist without the greater world. I grew off their excesses, their weaknesses, their structures and needs and movements.” All true. All hated facts, all undeniable. Her throat was dry and tight. “Without them, I will be nothing.”
“Please believe us,” the creature murmured. “With us, you are everything.”
Evelyn looked away, back to Violetta, back to her mother’s skull beside her. From the fine cracks in the bone, new growth sprouted, each stem supple, each sinuous root careful to settle where it might be sustained. Small tendrils curled into Evelyn’s skirts, brushed against her wrists. This new verdance did not erupt and struggle and seize, like the strange sprawl of the garden, but beckoned instead. As if it were offering to pull the weight of her shame back into the soil. Away from the cruel future before her.
Beneath her, the city writhed. By morning, would there even be a Judiciary? Would there be any threat left at all? Or would the whole of Delphinium be made a great garden, with nobody left to threaten her?
But without Violetta there to remind her she was human, she wanted none of it.
From her mother’s skull bloomed new flowers, the same strange array as sprawled from Violetta’s throat, the same myriad of influences. Poison, the creature had called it. Weeds. They beckoned.
Trembling, Evelyn reached out and plucked one.
Cupped in her palm, its color brightened, almost pulsing. It frightened her, made her think of staring eyes and deep obsession, but the soldier moved, as if to stop her, and that was enough. She pulled its stamen out, revealing a bead of shimmering nectar. Before she could think twice, she touched it to her tongue.
The world exploded.
It happened in a wave, a flash, an eternity. Evelyn’s mind quickened, spread, and she could see everything around her, she could see the whole of the city and the smallness of the tiniest seed at once. A thousand glowing threads, each singing to each other and to her, straining to reach her, straining to conquer the world. Iris was in there, desperate for a home, learning to please. Urvenon, in her gowns, and her sailors on the rocking seas. The city, rotting, dying, deliquescing, giving over to the fungal spiderings of the creature.
The city, waking up. Shifting. Transforming.
And then it all compressed, roaring into her body, the frailty of her limbs and the exhaustion of her organs. Her stomach roiled. Her hands trembled. She pitched forward onto the cold softness of Violetta, the dampness of the soil. Vines twined around her, and she cried out, unseeing, seeing all. Above her, she heard the soldier moving, wailing. What was happening? What was becoming?
A thousand voices chorused in her head, and she wept. She trembled and spasmed, and wondered what would happen next, if she would lose all thought, or see herself rise on puppet strings.
But neither happened. Instead, she felt a keening that was not her own. Words, tumbling words. Why? How could you? We loved you. We loved you first.
No; no, the woman whose bones she cradled in desperate hands had loved her first. The woman whose corpse now pillowed Evelyn’s thrashing body had loved her last. This thing—this thing had not known her, had seen only the fragments of herself that Evelyn hated most.
Evelyn’s limbs grew leaden, and though they ceased their spasms, it was all she could do to push herself up on her arms, to stop crushing Violetta. She trembled, her gaze blurring and focusing too fast to think. She lifted one hand to brush over the blossoms at Violetta’s throat, and their heady smell filled the air.
The soldier had not grown these. Iris had not grown there. It was Violetta, and her mother, and they were different, somehow. They were different.
She had made them different, made them more, and though she did not deserve their love, they had provided her absolution.
Her heart raced in an uneven rhythm, and Evelyn had toed the paths of death often enough to know that the nectar had been poison. It was not just the strange surging of awareness within her, but the hitching of her breath, the tightening of her muscles. But if it was going to be over, then it was over not out of cowardice, but out of bravery. Bravery, to reject temptation, to reject another escape. She felt inside of her the combined whole of the network of suffering and obsession she had given life to, and though it struggled, it had no path left to it. Whatever had grown from Violetta and her mother, it was as much an antidote as a poison.
She did not close her eyes as she brought her lips to Violetta’s, a final goodbye.
And then, between her, something new. The flowers in Violetta’s throat responded to the poison on her lips. Beneath her, the body stirred. Familiar hands reached up to hold her, to ease her over onto her side. She gasped for breath as Violetta peered at her, frowning, then touched the blossoms at her throat in confusion.
Violetta. Alive.
Evelyn had stumbled into salvation, of a kind. As if from far away, she heard her mother’s voice, whispering: Why did you ever blame yourself?
“Evelyn,” Violetta said, bending close. “My lady, Evelyn. What has happened?”
Did she still have words, or a voice to speak them with? She wasn’t sure. She was so heavy, so full of impossibilities, and she wept.
The soldier’s body lay still beside them. If Evelyn concentrated, she could hear his voice, see the face of his commanders. So much knowledge, so much hope, and fear, and hatred of her, and bleak amusement at how fate had crossed him. But he, too, was free now. And beyond him, the city had ceased its roiling. The horrors were over, contained in her soul.
“I have ended it,” she whispered.
The garden stirred around her, one last time, and Violetta stumbled back, pulling herself from the earth. Evelyn did not fight; she felt roots twine around her arms, in between her fingers as she curled against the cool, damp soil, pulling the fragments of her mother’s skull against her chest. It eased something inside of her, something old and vicious, and she felt herself smiling. She was glad the end had come this way. She was glad to be in her garden.