Forty-Two
Spring sprang a bit early, and by the second week of March we were having cool mornings with warm and pleasant afternoons. The pressure I experienced from the Winter mantle had begun to wane, though it never vanished. It would get even easier after the equinox, until midsummer, and then it would begin to rise again. I’d borne it for a few cycles now. I was beginning to know what to expect.
Lara met me at the botanic gardens, at my request.
The place didn’t look like it would in April, but green had come back into the world, and the first insects, and the early flowers, and life was getting about its business again. The gardens are a big place and had been far enough from the fighting to escape any particular damage during the battle. They’d gotten their electricity back—by March, most of the city that hadn’t had to contend with collapsed buildings and toxic cleanups had been restored more or less to working order. From walking around the gardens, you wouldn’t know that civilization had more or less ground to a halt for so many people. They were pristine and growing and lovely, just the way a garden should be.
Human beings were never meant for constant concrete and steel. It’s convenient and economical and in some ways safer—but we were meant for the wilderness. For grass and trees and rocks and rivers. To be among the sights and sounds and smells of life, of things that grow. I got to the meeting an hour early, just so I could spend some time walking in that, even if it was a little curated. To watch the sunlight play withshadows, to hear the wind whispering through long grass and budding branches,grow, grow, grow.
Winter always comes to an end. Bad times always come to an end. Spring is the earth’s way of reassuring us about that. I could feel the slow stirring of power in that life, gently inexorable as the sun grew warmer, day by day—here much more clearly than I could at the castle.
There weren’t many people at the gardens this time of year. The real show wouldn’t start for another month or so. I was standing alone by a pond framed by willow trees, their long naked branches studded with leaf-green buds, when I sensed Lara’s presence. There wasn’t a sound, or a smell, and I hadn’t seen her approach. I just knew where she was.
As if she’d been carrying part of me with her and I felt it when she got close.
“It’s the smells I like best,” I said quietly. I inhaled through my nose. “Earth, and mold and mildew and new green things.”
“It’s why the White Court is behind so many environmental causes,” Lara said, from beside me.
I lifted both eyebrows. “Really?”
“We take the care of the herd as seriously as we can,” she said. “At least at the leadership levels. The younger members are too buried in sensation and lack the experience to have reasoned that far forward.”
“Sensible,” I said. “Maybe a little creepy, but sensible.”
“That’s my wheelhouse,” she said, her tone faint with humor.
I turned to her.
I was wearing jeans, a white tee, and a grey denim jacket. She had on a pale pink sundress with matching sandals and a pale yellow knitted wrap over her shoulders. The pastels shouldn’t have worked with her dark hair and pale skin, but they somehow did. They made her blue eyes look electric.
“Do you know what’s happened?” I asked her.
Her lips twisted into a small smile. Her expression was unreadable. “I worked it out,” she said calmly. “I’m on your hook now. Tables turned.”
“I didn’t know that’s what was happening,” I said. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have done it.”
Her eyes, her face, neither moved. Thomas got like that sometimes.He could be more still than anything living. “You did tell me there would be risks.”
“Yeah. I didn’t realize that was one of them.” I shook my head. “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”
She stared at me for a long time.
“Oh,” she said quietly.
“Oh?”
She tilted her head to one side. “You’re telling the truth.”
I spread open the fingers of one hand. “Yeah.”
She smiled faintly. “Oh.”
“Oh again?”
“Harry,” she said gently, “I don’t want to offend you. I honestly don’t. But you couldn’t have tricked me like that. You didn’t get the better of me.”
“Mab did,” I said.
