She opened the box. Inside lay strips of white silk, each tied with a sprig of dried rosemary.
“These mark you as trial participants. You will wear them until the crossing is complete.”
She tied one around each bride’s wrist, the herb releasing faint bitter scent with every movement.
A temple official stepped forward from the shadows near the door, older than the woman who had delivered the summons, robed in ceremonial black edged with gold, carrying a staff carved with intricate knotwork.
“The garden is sacred space,” he said. “It has been consecrated through generations of trial and witness. What it shows you is not random. What it demands is not arbitrary. Breath is the body’s surrender to time. Control your breath, and you control your place within the rite’s judgment. Lose it, and the path closes.”
His gaze swept them once. “The garden does not lie. It reflects. What you see inside is what you carry. If you cannot bear witness to yourself, you are not fit to bear witness to the realm.”
Sabine’s chest tightened.
Not fear. Recognition.
The trial was not asking for serenity. It was designed to convert private dread into public failure.
Halvine gestured toward the garden entrance. “Lady Brinna will proceed first.”
Brinna rose on unsteady legs. An attendant opened the heavy wooden door. Beyond it, Sabine caught a glimpse of formal hedge geometry, gravel paths, and morning mist hanging low between the shaped yews.
Brinna stepped through.
The door closed behind her.
For a moment the antechamber held only waiting and the faint sound of gravel crunching under uncertain footsteps. Then the hedges shifted, not wind, something deeper, a rustling that seemed to movetowardrather than past.
Brinna’s breathing became audible through the door. Quick. Shallow. The beginning of panic.
Then silence.
Tavi muttered something low and profane.
Yselle did not move.
The wait stretched. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Finally the inner bell rang, signaling passage, and Brinna emerged through a different door on the chamber’s far side. She looked worse than when she had entered, face streaked with tears she had tried to wipe away, hands shaking, the white silk at her wrist torn where she had clawed at it.
An attendant guided her to a bench and offered water. Brinna drank without looking at anyone.
“Lady Tavi,” Halvine said.
Tavi crossed to the entrance without hesitation and disappeared into the garden.
Her passage was faster. Angrier. Sabine heard boots striking gravel too hard, heard breath controlled by force rather than ease. When the bell rang and Tavi emerged, she looked furious but intact.
Yselle went next.
She walked into the garden as if entering a formal salon and emerged twenty minutes later with her composure so flawless it felt eerie. Not a hair displaced. Not a tremor visible. Only the faintest tightness at the corners of her mouth suggested the trial had touched her at all.
Then Halvine called Sabine’s name.
The garden entrance opened onto a gravel path lined with shaped hedges taller than a man. Morning light filtered weakly through the branches. Mist clung to the ground in patches, and the air smelled of damp earth, yew, rosemary, and something sweeter underneath, incense or root-rot, Sabine could not tell which.
The door closed behind her with soft finality.
She was alone.
The path stretched ahead in formal geometry, turning left at precise intervals. No visible center. No obvious exit. Just hedge walls and gravel and the faint sound of her own breathing magnified by enclosure.
