“What all did you hear?”
The question came from nowhere, startling Mara so badly she dropped the sheers. She’d just bent to trim a couple stalks of Hogstail from the plant beneath her window, Nick having scampered off to investigate the manmade creek that cut diagonally through the garden.
“What do you mean?” she asked, picking up the shears and standing up straight.
Eli stood a few strides away, thumb hooked through his belt, posture relaxed, face impassive. “Last night. You were listening to Quint and I talk, but I didn’t notice until the end. What all did you hear?”
Mara didn’t bother to deny it. She’d been wondering how to bring up what she’d heard without stepping all over her own feet. Trust Eli to do the hard part for her.
“You didn’t notice until the end because I wasn’t listening until the end.”
His lips twitched. “No apology for eavesdropping?”
She tossed the shears in the basket hooked over her arm and braced her hand on her hip. “No apology for waking me up with your chatter?”
When he only raised his eyebrows at her, she turned her back and crouched, trimming three Hogstail stalks and setting them in her basket. When she was done, she glanced at Nick to make sure he was keeping out of trouble, and then headed toward a row of Hillibrand bushes, their berries a toxic, warning shade of green.
“You planning to poison me again?” Eli asked from behind her as she twisted a few berry clusters from a branch and dropped them into her basket.
“I’ve never poisoned you,” she huffed, leaving him behind again to pick her way through a tidy square of tall, dry grasses the color of obsidian. The grass grew in tufts, and one of the tufts, near the center of the square, had sprouted a stalk topped with silver fuzz. “Unless you’re referring to the truth elixir.”
“Suppose I am referring to the truth elixir?”
“That wasn’t poison.”
“Hm. Guess I’ve been using the word wrong. What are you meant to call it when you consume something that causes you to vomit yourself inside out?”
Standing straight, Mara turned and crossed her arms over her chest, basket thumping against her hip. “You promised me it didn’t make you sick.”
He shrugged one shoulder. “It had worn off by the time you asked.”
Mara leveled her best aggravated glare at him. Eli stared steadily back, eyes dancing.
“So,” he asked, after a few seconds passed. “What all did you overhear last night?”
“This morning,” Mara snapped. “It was past two.”
He rolled his eyes. “What all did you hear this morning?”
She turned back to the grass and crouched down, tapping one of the silver fuzzballs atop the stalk with the tip of her little finger. A zing of static engulfed her entire hand and she pulled it back, shaking it until the buzzing sensation faded.
“Boltshrub,” she said, standing once more and moving on. “Interesting plant, but no real application.” Some people used a tincture made from boltshrub seeds to enhance sensation during sexual intercourse, but that information didn’t feel appropriate to share at this moment to this man in this place.
“Mara, please talk to me.”
Huffing out a sigh, she sat on a small, crudely constructed wooden bench. It wobbled a bit, one leg too short for the uneven ground, but it was sturdy enough. She patted the open space beside her and the bench rocked forward as Eli sat.
For a moment they simply sat in silence and watched Nick play, piling rocks and sticks up in the stream to form a dam.
“I’m trying to decide what to say,” Mara finally admitted. “It made me nervous.”
Eli didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. He had a way of holding silence open between them that all but grasped for words to fill it.
“It sounded like Quint wants you to lead some sort of rebellion within the rebellion. Against Elise and Rorick. That concerns me. Selfishly, which is the only way I seem to be able to think these days. Me and Nick are tied to the Linharts. We are Linhearts. If there’s going to be some kind of coup, with them on one side and you, of all people, on the other…”
“There’s not going to be a coup.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because it’s not as dire as it may have sounded. Yes, some people are unhappy. But Elise and Rorick have been running the rebellion for decades. It would be impossible for their every decision to please every person. There were bound to be a few dissenters.”
“But… it sounds like Quint views you as chief among them. Like you’re the one the dissenters are looking to for a solution. I feel as if I’m caught in the middle of something huge and I can’t begin to protect myself from it because I don’t even know what’s happening. All of this is so new to me, and I’m so reliant on you to look after me, and now I’m walking into this unknown situation where you have your own priorities and loyalties that don’t concern Nick and I at all. And that’s fine, I don’t begrudge you that, but I just…I want to know what I’m walking into. I hate being so ignorant.”
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He didn’t answer right away, and they were sitting too close for her to observe his face without being obvious about it. Instead, she watched his hand, clasped around the edge of the bench beside his leg. The knuckles were white.
“Eli?”
“People have concerns,” he said, tone drawn tight across the clipped sentences. “It’s only natural. I can explain some of the specifics, if you like. It would help to have a map at hand. But in brief, the Linharts’ strategy in this fight has some weaknesses, as any strategy is bound to have. Many people look to me to help them shore up those weaknesses, and I intend to do so. But I do not intend to betray Elise and Rorick.”
“Why are people looking to you, though? I thought… I thought you worked for Davy. You let me believe you just worked for Davy.”
He didn’t answer, but his grip tightened on the edge of the bench, the blanched white spots around his knuckles spreading up the back of his hand, veins popping up on his forearms.
“You and your Depthsbound blood oaths,” she sighed.
His hand relaxed, blood returning his skin to a healthy color as he let out a huff of humorless laughter. “They’re inconvenient when one is trying to establish trust, yes.”
Mara groaned with mock annoyance. “We already established that trust is established, remember?” She knocked her shoulder into his, a small smile tugging at her lips when he swayed as if the blow had actually knocked him off balance. “I trust you. What I’m asking is to know you. So what can you tell me, without accidentally killing yourself?”
He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his thighs, and spoke to the garden. “I can tell you that I will never betray Elise and Rorick. And that I am devoted, heart and health, to the success of the rebellion. And that as long as I’m alive, I will do everything in my power to keep you and Nick safe.”
Mara moved her basket from her lap to the ground and leaned forward, mirroring his posture.
“You have to help me understand that last one,” she said softly. “I appreciate the sentiment, but let’s be realistic. Once we reach the Enclave, Nick and I aren’t your responsibility anymore. This is a temporary arrangement.”
He turned his head to fix her gaze, brow furrowed. “Is it?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged, trying to look nonchalant. “Isn’t it? You promised Davy to see us to safety, not to babysit us for the rest of our lives. Once you deliver us to the Linharts, you’ve seen to your obligation.”
“My obligation.” Not a question but a statement of inquiry.
“To Davy. Your promise to him. That’s why we’re here.”
He dropped his gaze back to the ground, idly twisting the heel of his boot in the soft earth. “You married Davy for the sake of the rebellion, right?”
“Right.”
“Is that all your marriage was? A promise to the rebellion? An obligation?”
He stood without waiting for an answer and Mara grabbed her basket and followed as he trailed after Nick. Her son had grown bored of the little creek and was hustling off in search of fresh stimulation. As they strolled along in his wake, she processed Eli’s challenge and the implication behind it–the declaration and the promise.
She slowed to a stop by a bed of dewdancers. They’d always reminded her of a child’s approximation of a flower. Spindly stems, each supporting a single tiny but ostentatious flowerhead. They came in a rainbow of colors, but these were blue, green, and white, countless miniscule, multicolored petals spiraling outward from the thin white stamen. Mara crouched, using the shears to snip the hard stem of the nearest flower.
“You know this one?” she asked as she rose to her feet, studying the elaborate, spiraling pattern of the petals. She’d never seen dewdancer outside of a specialized hothouse. Like rubifel, it was persnickety about its growing conditions.
“Can’t say I do.”
She turned toward Eli, face burning, unable to lift her gaze beyond the hollow of his throat. She split her gaze between the flower in her hand and his left shoulder. His jacket had a worn look about the shoulders, a product of the constant friction of his pack straps, the rain, the sun. It bleached the leather, turned it shiny.
Fixing her gaze on the flower alone, she reached deep within herself and pulled out what she felt she owed him–a tiny sliver of the raw, red truth. An answer to his declaration.
“Dewdancer is a perennial,” she said. “If you can get it to grow in the first place. I never could. Never bothered, honestly. On its own, it’s just decorative, and though it comes back every year, you have to pollinate by hand. It needs a particular bee that we don’t have this side of the Stormway. But if you did somehow get access to a hive of these bees and managed to restrict its pollination to the dewdancer… the honey from that hive would fetch you five hundred gold for a liquid ounce. Even if you didn’t restrict pollination, if you could guarantee that a mere one percent of the source flowers for a hive were dewdancer, a liquid ounce of honey would still earn you upward of fifty gold, depending on the market.”
She raised her eyes to his, expecting confusion, annoyance, exasperation with the diversion. Instead, of course, she found patience. Peace. Warmth like sunshine beating down on the crown of her head. “There’s no category for it,” she went on. “Nobody has been able to classify its magical properties. In a rejuvenative, it eliminates the need for compensatory rest and fuel. In an analgesic, it negates the brain fog. It decreases the effective dose of mood stabilizers, increases the effective duration of contraceptives, doubles the potency of every known antidote, and wards against both hangover and addiction associated with recreational intoxicants.”
Eli’s eyes dropped from hers to the flower, then lifted back to hers. “What does it do by itself?”
She lifted a shoulder, let it drop. “By itself, it tastes good.”
“That’s it?”
“It tastes really really good. It’s killed people. Stops their hearts.”
“Hm,” he grunted, brows pulling inward with concern. “That does sound like something that would interest you.”
“Stop,” she laughed. “I’m being serious. Trying to be serious.” The eye contact would kill her just as surely as a drop of dewdancer honey if she let it go on, so she looked down at the flower and drew forth the last of the difficult words. They came out wooden, like she was reciting from a textbook. “As a symbol, most traditional herbalists associate dewdancer with motherhood. It’s the dichotomies, I think. Heartbreak and joy, strength and tenderness, depending on the context. I’ve always associated it more broadly with hope. It just…makes everything better.”
“So long as you don’t eat it raw.” There was a smile in his voice, his tone the kind he used to tease her out of hiding when she went too far within herself.
“So long as you give it somewhere to go. Something to do. A focus,” she corrected, and before she could stop herself with reason or doubt, she reached out with shaking fingers and tucked the flower’s stem into the top empty buttonhole of his jacket. The act depleted her remaining courage, and she turned away to follow after Nick. After a few seconds she heard Eli’s footsteps behind her.
“When we go inside, let’s find a map,” she said, dropping the shears into her basket as she walked. “I want you to tell me everything you possibly can about the Linharts’ plans.”
