PROLOGUE
London, 1888, and a girl is about to die.
See London: See the labyrinth of her spires and domes, of her smokestacks and steeples. Heart of her own gray empire, iron tendrils reaching every corner of the map. A city racing toward a new century, teetering on the tracks, unable to bear its own weight. Monster of metal. Mecca of smoke and flame.
See the girl: nineteen, silver-haired, her skin like milk, her eyes like shadowed violets. Hidden in her carriage, as a sapling in a seed, protected—for now—from the waiting world. Her eye lingers on the streets around her, on the workmen and the whores who call after them, on the little ’prentice boy with fingers shaking from the cold, on the old woman coughing blood into her hand. She is so very far from home, from the palaces and the ballrooms, from the lords and ladies with flowers in their hair.
See her death: lurking behind her, watching as she descends into the city, down into the roots of the world, where darkness waits.
Persephone Elderwood watched the alleys close around her: Brick buildings rose to gabled roofs, their piped chimneys spewing smoke toward permanent clouds. She kept herself well within the carriage, behind the curtained window, where none could see her. She was no fool: She knew this was a very different place fromwhere she lived with her uncle in the West End. Her neighborhood was all flower gardens and sprawling palaces; here, in the Rows, the streets were cramped with factories and opium dens, with fallen women and leering men. Mud stuck to everything: the cobbled streets and twisting alleys, the time-worn carriages, the people who trudged through the narrow pathways, jostling past one another, cursing, slipping on soaked cobblestones. Tattered umbrellas paused the constant rain of November, but there was nothing to be done about the fog: It drifted from the nearby river, carrying the scent of filth. Little tendrils of it searched through the gaps in the coach’s walls, chilling her tender skin.
She watched the last bit of daylight—if it was truly daylight and not some gray trick of the clouds—fade on the distant masts of ships. Her carriage turned down an alleyway, leaving the cobblestones in favor of mud-filled ruts, and then turned sharply again. The brick walls of the alley closed around her like a throat. The people were closer, too: she could see the coal-covered faces of laborers, the toothless smiles of drunks, the knowing frowns of the women on the corner, smoking their cigarettes.
The carriage jerked. Persephone dropped the curtain, steadying herself with one hand and moving the other to protect her stomach. She frowned, taking her hand away, then looked at the little bulge beneath her gown. Her corset concealed most of it, but not all. If she waited any longer, people would begin to notice.
She closed her eyes; she mustn’t think of such things. Persephone had ignored her growing belly for weeks, hoping that she was mistaken. The baby was a seed that might not sprout, and yet she’d felt it, waiting, about to start its inexorable march toward life. She needn’t try to protect the unborn from the rocking carriage. That was her body betraying her mind, trying to shield theparasite growing inside her. Trying to cling to the fantasy that she might, perhaps, bear the child.
Of course, the baby’s father could come back to her—he could show up at her door and make everything right—but that was only hope, and she was through with hope. Hope was for foolish girls who went and got pregnant, who threw away their future for fantasies. Theirs was not a love story like she’d thought—there would be no happy ending. She wondered, for the first time in her life, if there ever truly was.
If shedidkeep the baby—as if that were an option—she would have to leave the city. Spend a year locked away on her father’s estate, bear the child in secret, send the thing to an orphanage. But then her father would know, and she would never be allowed to return to London. He’d send her to a convent, where she could never embarrass the family again—or worse, she’d be forced to wed her vile old cousin. All the better to keep her shameful bastard in the family, and Cousin Ficus wouldn’t turn his nose up at cuckoldry, if it meant securing his claim to the Elderwood lordship. Persephone shuddered at the thought of their wedding night.
So,no, she would not bear the child. With the help of the hedge witch, she would stop her tragic tale before it ever started. She would return to society in the spring, find a proper husband, and go on to live the life she deserved.
The coachman called back and said that they were nearing the address. Persephone thanked him and removed the hood of her cloak, taking a compact from her reticule. She clicked it open and assessed herself in the mirror. She was still lovely, not far past nineteen, every inch the young lady. Nothing would take that from her. Nothing at all.
Persephone raised a delicate finger to her temple and thought offlowers. The softness of their leaves, the white flesh of their petals, their golden dust of pollen. The veins of her temple swelled with green, bulging from beneath her pale skin like rootlets. They were the green of spring, of fresh flowers and growing things. Of life itself.
And then, as though curling up from soil, small sprouts broke the surface of her skin. They swelled into buds, carried forward by stalks that grew from the green veins. And then they bloomed. A patch of small lilies unfolded from her skin, with their ivory petals and emerald leaves. She took a deep breath, focused, and then summoned a few more flowers: a bloom of violets, a smattering of snowdrops. In floriography—the language of flowers—the corsage indicated youthful innocence: violets for faithfulness, white lilies for virginity. All the things a young lady should be.
She removed her white gloves and rubbed her forefinger and thumb together. From them, through her skin, she excreted the oil of lavender. The perfume glistened on her fingers, which she dabbed on her wrists and beneath her jaw. She examined herself in the compact once more, angling her face to catch the light coming through the window, and frowned.
She didn’tneedto spruce herself for a visit to the hedge witch. In fact, it might work to her detriment, if she didn’t want to be recognized. But beauty was what Persephone had—what she’d always had, like her sister had books. And Persephone wore her beauty like armor.
After the dreadful business with the witch was over, she was expected at Lady Forscythe’s estate, for a ball at Syon House. She’d told her bumbling uncle that she needed to shop before the dance—for unmentionables, so that he would not send his steward along—and so she’d bought herself a few precious hoursunsupervised. Afterward she would attend the ball, free of her burden, and none would be the wiser.
“Right here, miss,” said the coachman. The horse whinnied, and the carriage slid to a stop. Persephone clicked her compact shut and looked out the window. To her left, in the shadows of larger buildings on either side, was a narrow alleyway. At the end of it stood a small house, wedged between the other buildings. It seemed from another time, as though the rest of the city had grown over it: thatched roof, half-timbered frame, wattle-and-daub walls. Ivy crawled over the stained-glass windows like something from a fairy tale.
The coachman came around and opened the door, extending his hand. She took it, stepping over the puddle of mud beneath her. The alleyway was dark, but a lamplighter stalked up the hill, lighting the gas lamps that stood like iron candles in the street. Up the alley, barely visible in the fog, a group of men bellowed at a prostitute. The woman teased them from a balcony above, lifting her skirts to reveal a patch of poppy petals between her legs. She laughed at the men, telling them to come and have a taste of Eden.
Persephone quickly looked away and then back to the dark alley ahead. A hand-carved sign swung above the gap in the wall.APOTHECARY. Persephone turned back to the coachman, keeping her head down, her face concealed by the hood of her cloak. She handed him a stack of coins from her reticule and instructed him to wait until she returned. The man pocketed the coins, nodded, and then vanished back into the coach.
Persephone turned to face the alley, lifting the hem of her cloak to avoid the mud. She stepped between the ivy-covered walls toward the lone door and the house that seemed so out of place. The door had no handle, only a mascaron of an eldren, his woodeneyes watching her from a mask of leaves. She rapped the knocker against the door three times. A scraping sound followed, and a small hole appeared in the door. A yellow eye stared back at her. Persephone flinched, stepping back.
“What do ye want?” a haggard voice asked.
“I’m—my name is Miss Prince,” Persephone said, “I was told to seek your services. Concerning a… trouble of mine.”
The peephole slammed shut, and Persephone was alone once more. Then the sound of locks clicking echoed through the alley, and the door opened, groaning on ancient hinges. A shadowy stairwell waited beyond the door frame, with no sign of her host. She looked over her shoulder and then back through the door. She didn’t want to go inside. She wanted to return to the coach, to go home, to never come to such a terrible place again. But it was cold, and she was alone, and there was nothing else to be done.
Light shone inside the witch’s house; a few spare candles burned in the darkness of the stairwell. Wooden walls followed the stairs downward before giving way to dirt, and roots grew through cracks in the walls, weaving in and out of the crumbling house. At the bottom of the stairs, a shape waited, cloaked in a robe of ragged green.
The hedge witch was so warped that she seemed more tree than human. Bark covered one side of her face, and where her left eye should have been, there was only a knot of wood, like the false eyes of elderwood trees. Stringy hair fell nearly to the floor, and pine needles grew along her braids in sheaths. Shelflike mushrooms climbed the bark of her neck, and moss speckled the rest of her, tinging her skin green. Even her robes seemed rotten: crisscrossed with patches, crusted with lichen, and held together by rootlets and tendrils. A burl of wood the size of a pumpkin grew from ahole in the shoulder of her cloak, and she bent beneath the weight of it like a hunchback.
The hedge witch reached her knobby hand to the wall, grasping a root that wove between the boards of the house. Behind Persephone, the door groaned and then crept closed. The locks clicked into place.
“Come,” the hedge witch said. She turned slowly, half-wooden limbs clicking as she hobbled into the next room. Persephone lifted the hem of her cloak and followed. She turned at the bottom of the stairs and came to a dark, low-ceilinged room. Roots rose from the dirt floor and wove between the stone walls like mortar. On the far wall sat a hearth with a low fire crackling beneath an iron kettle. It cast flickering light over the room, with a single altar-like table at its center. Herbs hung in bunches from the ceiling’s timber beams. Even with the fire, Persephone shivered.
The hedge witch stood before her, at least a head shorter than she. “Remove your cloak,” the woman said. Persephone obliged, trying to stop her hands from shaking. The hedge witch was even more monstrous up close. Her one eye glowed in the firelight like an amber set in withered skin. Persephone folded the velvet cloak and placed it on a nearby chair. Beneath it, she wore her most modest gown, the ivory muslin, three seasons out of style.
