Mr. Grimm finally faced her. His expression was closed but . . . considering. As though he had a number of intricate calculations to run before he dared speak. Luna waited patiently, not allowing the awkwardness of silence to shift her.
“Very well, Miss Talbot,” he said at last, coming to a hard-won conclusion. Then he stepped out from behind the counter, marched across the shop, and firmly shut and locked the door, flipping the sign to CLOSED. This accomplished, he turned around, rubbed his thin hands together, and nodded. “The time has come, I believe, to introduce you to Garden.”
He kept the key inside the stacked clay pots with the polka-dot pattern. Why, he couldn’t say. Perhaps because polka-dots were so singularlyun-magical, and it struck his subconscious as the last place any green-eyed wardsman would think to look.
Polka-dots notwithstanding, Nigel felt the faint magical hum surrounding the key before his fingers closed around it, an unmistakable vibration to anyone of magical-sensitivity. His hand trembled a little, withdrawing the key and clutching it in his fist for the space of five breaths.
What he was about to do was . . . risky. He hadn’t revealed the secret of Garden’s whereabouts to anyone, not even his brother, Fabian, who attempted both bribery and blackmail to get it out of him. The Authorities of Plym resorted to even stronger measures—a dark part of his personal history, which Nigel took care not to revisit, even in memory. They had failed to produce answers from his sealed lips, however. In the end, the Authorities had decided that Garden was decimated in the Last Great Altercation with the Shadowbane Lady.
They weren’t entirely wrong. But neither were they entirely right.
Nigel released a slow breath. He’d spent the last three years carefully nurturing Garden back to health, a daunting task without Mister Grimm around to guide him. The old man was the hedge wizard, after all—the one with the gift for Green Magic. All Nigel’s expertise in sorcery had done him little good, may, in fact, have caused harm on more than one occasion. Garden did not respond well to multi-dimensional manipulation of the essential energies. Still, Nigel had done his best. And Garden was thriving now, if not quite on the same scale it boasted back when Old Mister Grimm was still alive.
Nigel turned to look at Miss Luna Talbot, who stood in the doorway of the storage room, watching him. Her large eyes strained to see in the dimness. She didn’t look dangerous. She just looked beautiful. Vulnerable. Hungry, despite her large breakfast. Deeply concerned and wildly curious. But not dangerous.
Even so, Nigel knew he should talk himself out of this course of action. Miss Talbot may not be an actual sorceress, but the heptagram marked her as part of a sorcerous family line.
And it was sorcery which nearly destroyed Garden in the first place.
Debbie’s claws dug into his shoulder, and the bird muttered low in his ear: “Never mind.”
Nigel was half-inclined to agree. Then again, he couldn’t expect Miss Talbot to go on working at The Arcane Bouquet without revealing this secret. She’d end up snooping it out for herself, most likely, and that could be far more disastrous. No, if she was going to be around, he’d best take command of the situation, introduce her to Garden properly, and set some specific ground rules.
Adjusting Debbie’s seat on his shoulder with a shrug, Nigel stepped from the storeroom, key clutched in his fist. “This way,Miss Talbot,” he said and moved past her to the door at the end of the passage.
To all other eyes, this door appeared exactly like the other three: white, slatted, with a dingy brass knob. Nothing worth noting.
To Nigel’s eyes, however, it was quite another thing. He saw old rusty hinges and flaking green paint, adorned with chipped patterns of roses and trailing vines, exactly as it had stood in the kitchen of his father’s house, back home in southern Plym. It was his mother who had painted those floral decals long ago, before Nigel was born. They were so faded and battered by years’ worth of comings and goings, but Old Mister Grimm had refused to paint over them or even to have them freshened up. This door was as familiar to Nigel as the back of his own hand, a fixture from childhood.
He slid the key into the lock. It was quite a small key, barely the length of his little finger, and the lock was but a tiny slit above the knob. But the bolt felt and sounded heavy as itchonkedunder pressure.
The door swung open, a symphony of rusty creaks and groans.
Behind him, Luna gasped: “Green Mother have mercy!”
Nigel couldn’t blame her. Even three years post-devastation, having hardly regained a third of its former glory, Garden was a spectacular sight. No king’s grounds ever compared to the glory that was Old Mister Grimm’s great work of hedge wizardry. It spread before one’s feet in gently undulating green swaths: little hills and surprising valleys, an intricate network of gravel paths leading hither and yon. Nothing pretentious or overly formal in its layout. Not a sculpted hedge as far as the eye could see. But graceful flowering trees offered shade to walkways, and mounds of blossoms abounded everywhere the eye chanced to look. Nigel, though raised with Garden out his back door, couldn’t putnames to even half the bounteous blooms on display. A brilliant blue sky hung over all, dotted with drifting white clouds stained delicately pink on their edges, as though the day hovered on the fringe of perpetual new dawn. A scent of dew filled the air, but the paths were all dry enough, one needn’t fear wetting one’s shoes. The lawns themselves varied between carefully trimmed and overgrown, but all the overgrown patches were so brimming with wildflowers, one saw in an instant that they were intended to be that way.
It would be a spectacular sight if viewed from the back windows of a grand manner house, where such a landscape made sense. Considering this door ought, by rights, to lead to a boiler room, the view beheld was made a thousand times more astonishing.
Luna stared silently over Nigel’s shoulder for such a long while, he began to fear she’d forgotten how to breathe. He turned to her and asked in a quiet voice, “Well, Miss Talbot?”
Her mouth gaped. She tried to close it, but it simply gaped again, as though the hinge of her jaw was broken. Finally, she managed to exclaim, “Green Mother!” again, while all other words simply failed her.
Nigel stepped through the portal and motioned with one hand. “Would you care to join me for a stroll?”
“Would I?” Her eyes lit up. She started to follow him out, then hesitated, one hand gripping the doorframe. “Is it . . . quite safe? Only it looks like the sort of place one might get lost in rather easily if one doesn’t know the way.”
“Oh, no, Garden would never let you get lost,” Nigel hastened to assure her. “Not unless you offended him.”
“Him?”
“Yes, well,it,I suppose. Technically.” Nigel ran a hand through his pomaded hair, causing it to stand up oddly on one side. “I tend to personify Garden in the masculine simplybecause there’s so much of my father’s essence infusing the ground and atmosphere here. It cannot help but take on some of his personality, as it were.”
“Your father?”
“Yes. Alfred P. Grimm.”
“You father . . .madethis garden?”
