Among the Beasts & Briars - Ashley Poston Page 0,1
like that of the Wildwood—like a sunlit forest just after heavy rain. Orchids did not smell like that. He leveled a stern look at me. “Cerys . . .”
“I know. I doubt she’ll notice, though. Last night the flowers were fine, but this morning they were speckled with these weird black spots.”
“What kind of spots?”
“Rot, it looked like? It was strange—but I fixed them. I just used a drop. I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s just magic, like Wen and her family have.”
Papa’s lips thinned into a line, and he took my hands in his, turning them over to see the wound on my finger. “You need to be careful. Our town, our village, they love you so much. I’m not worried about how they’d react to you having magic. But there is magic . . . and then there are curses.”
“And mine’s a curse, I know.”
He squeezed my hands tightly. “The Wilds touched you, but they didn’t keep you.”
I glanced away.
Papa let go of my hand. “Maybe add a few more sprigs of baby’s breath to cover up the scent—and then close up shop at noon and bring the last half dozen rose bouquets with you to the castle when you come.”
“Don’t forget your garden keys,” I reminded him as he turned toward the front door.
He snapped his fingers and retreated back to get them from the hook in the kitchen. As he passed by the counter again, he planted a kiss on my forehead. “What would I do without you, Sprout?”
“Forget your head.”
He laughed. “I’ll see you in a bloom.”
“In a bloom,” I agreed, and watched him as he left through the front door and started out of the village on foot. He would catch a ride with one of the guards at the bottom of the Sundermount, and they would take him the rest of the way up the mountain to the castle.
The castle of Aloriya was perched at the edge of the wood, among the peaks of the Lavender Mountains. The spires stretched like shafts of broken bone toward the stars. It was much prettier at night, when all the windows were golden and warm, driving away the coldness that clung to it in the daytime, lit up like a body that had finally found its soul.
After Papa was well on his way to the castle, I slipped out of my apron, poured myself the last bit of coffee from the press, and stepped out back into the garden. It was a quarter to eight in the morning; the shop didn’t officially open until eight o’clock. My finger was still bleeding a little, so I ran it across the doorframe, and from it moss grew in a thick green patch, like a swipe of paint across the weathered wood.
I sat down on the stone bench outside the door and leaned back against the house.
The gardens were small, but what they lacked in space they made up for in colors—leaves of green and kaleidoscopes of flowers bloomed on stems and in the latticework creeping up the house, having taken decades to climb. Roses thrived in the side gardens, and strange star-shaped flowers clustered in the corners of the yard where my mother had planted some foreign Wildwood seeds. Papa and I didn’t sell those—they might have just been flowers, or they could have been cursed, and while we didn’t want to lose the memory of my mother, we also couldn’t risk any part of the Wildwood spreading.
The village knew my mother came from outside Aloriya—something that didn’t exactly help my dating prospects. There were only so many young people in the Village-in-the-Valley, and I’d gone to grade school with almost every single one of them; we all knew each other’s stories—where we came from, what we wanted to be someday, who we wanted to marry—but no one was as whispered about as I was, the girl whose mother had been an outsider. Then, later, the girl whose mother got lost in the wood. The pickings were slim to begin with, and I honestly didn’t have time for the ones who “could overlook my oddities.”
It also didn’t help that most of the village thought that my best friend was a stupid fox that wouldn’t stay away from me, no matter how many times I tried to shoo him off. I had rescued him from a hunter’s trap near the wood two years ago, and since then, he apparently thought we were inseparable.