The driver had escorted the professor to my quarters himself, which told me he'd taken a liking to Lou Haldren and figured the man would get flustered if escorted by a guard, which was protocol.
"Please show the professor in," I told Ursa.
Lou Haldren came in clutching a bundle to his chest as though he expected someone to try to take it from him.
It was larger than I'd imagined. I'd pictured one or two journals, while the bundle he was holding was an armful. There were eight or nine volumes of varying sizes, their covers worn soft and pale at the corners, each bound with a loop of leathercord gone dark with handling to prevent the pages from falling out. A lifetime of work, or the wrong end of one, given how things had deteriorated for Lou's father.
"Professor." I crossed to him and put out my hands, not to shake his but to relieve him of the load, and he flinched, clutching the bundle a fraction closer before he caught himself and let me take the top three volumes. "I didn't expect so many."
"This represents many years of work," Lou said. "After my father retired from the university, he had a lot of free time, so he wrote even more, and he added sketches to older journals. He was obsessed with the Silver Princess."
By retired, Lou had meant ousted. I hadn't known about that until I met him and he'd told me about the sorry state of his father's research in his later years. I'd done some more digging into the files and confirmed it. His father had been forced into an early retirement because his mental acuity had been questioned.
"I can understand the obsession," I said. "The Princess kind of inspires it. Would you like to meet her first, or shall we sit?"
His expression brightened. "If it's not too much trouble, I would like to see her."
I took him through to the workroom.
I had moved the Silver Princess from the garden to the cool back room where I did my work, where the light was steady and the chiller could do its work without the afternoon sun fighting it.
As we came through the door, I braced for his disappointment. At the moment, the living legend was a tired grey-hued flower, its blushing pinks and bright whites reduced to a distant memory, and it was throwing almost no light.
Lou set his half of the journals down on my bench with great care, walked to the glass, and stood looking at her with a mournful expression on his kind face.
"There you are," he said softly to the flower. "Barely, though."
"She's not at her best," I said. "She was luminous when I found her, then when I brought her here she almost gave up, but I managed to bring her back from the brink. Regrettably, it seems that this is the best condition she'll ever be in while away from her birthplace."
Lou nodded. "My father managed to keep her alive at the university for a few weeks, but flowers like her don't do well when transplanted, and he didn't have a chiller."
"I'm fortunate that the engineering department could repurpose equipment borrowed from the cryobiology bench to fit my needs."
"Indeed." He kept his eyes on the glass. "My father had more than one, you know. Over the years. He never could keep them long down here, so in the end he stopped trying to bring them home at all. He did his real work up where they grew. Hauled his instruments and his plates and half a laboratory up those slopes, season after season, and Professor Graff went with him more than once to study the roots in the living plant and extract from them right there. They got their best results in situ and nowhere else." He finally looked at me. "I joined him on one of those expeditions when I was a boy, and I saw the Princess in full bloom. She looked magical, and that's why I could never quite dismiss the rest of what he believed, the way sensible people wanted me to."
He reached into the stack, drew out one of the older volumes by feel, opened it to a page he clearly knew by heart, and turned it toward me. "My father drew this one."
The drawing was breathtaking. Literally. For a moment, I forgot to breathe.
The Silver Princess was depicted in full bloom, every petal rendered in fine colored pencils with a botanist's precision, and around her the professor had drawn light by shading the background and then carving white lines that radiated outwardand curved up, a lacework of fine bright strokes rising off the petals and gathering above the flower into an arc.
"Why did he draw it instead of snapping a photo or two or a hundred?" I asked.
"He did photograph her. Hundreds of plates. They're all in the university archive." Lou touched the edge of the page with his fingertip, careful not to touch the drawing itself. "My father used to tell me that the camera could only capture so much, and a lot of that depends on the ambient lighting and the quality of the lens and other factors that have nothing to do with the specimen being photographed. A drawing, done by someone with a good eye and a steady hand, can reveal so much more, and not just what the naked eye can see. It can communicate what the other senses pick up. It can sing praises to the mystery and wonder of it with nothing more than a set of inexpensive pencils. No fancy camera equipment needed."
I looked at the radiating lines and the arc gathering above the bloom. "He drew her a corona, crowning her with light." I pointed without touching the paper.
Lou tilted his head and smiled. "You are right. I've never thought of that. The fine, bright arc gathered over the flower looks exactly like a corona over a brow, a crown of light on a small pink-and-white princess. Now I understand why the mountain shepherds who'd never read a botany text called her the Silver Princess."
"I can see how the legend writes itself," I said.
When we returned to the receiving room, Ursa was laying out a tray with tea and honey cakes.
I hadn't asked her to do that, but I was glad she had. She always anticipated my needs, which made her the perfect maid.
"Thank you, Ursa," I said. "What a lovely idea."
"Enjoy." She gifted the professor one of her rare smiles. "Will there be anything else, Your Highness?"
