"Right." He adjusted his glasses up his nose. "I hear it's going to be more spectacular than ever this year."
If even he'd heard it, the rumor must have been circulating everywhere.
He showed me more drawings as he read. The Princess in bud, in bloom, in the failing grey state I knew. The slopes where she grew, mapped and annotated. The thin places marked with a small symbol the professor had invented, a circle with a single line running through it, scattered along the frontier.
When his voice became hoarse, and he excused himself to go drink some of the tea, I followed him to the serving table. "Is there any chance you would consider leaving these journals with me for a time? I promise to treat them like the precious relics they are. I just want to study them properly, and that is not possible in a single afternoon. I give you my word that they will come back to you in exactly the state I received them."
He hesitated, but I had cornered him, and he had no polite way to refuse me. "A loan. Yes. I could do a loan. For how long?"
"As long as you care to part with them. I plan to hand-copy the texts. The drawings are a problem because I have no artistic talent, so I will probably photograph them. I'll keep the photographs and return the originals untouched, and if you want, I can make duplicates of the photos for you."
His forehead was beading with sweat again. "I don't want some clerk handling my father's journals." He sounded on the verge of tears.
I put a hand over my heart. "No one will touch these other than me. I swear."
"Really? Your Highness is going to copy the journals with your own hand?"
"Yes. There is no better way to learn than to absorb the material by writing it, and I don't think there is a way for me to merge minds with court clerks."
It took him a moment to realize that I'd been joking, and then he snorted. "I would advise against attempting such a thing. Your mind is much too bright to merge it with a dim clerk."
After we said our goodbyes, the professor regarded the journals in the way a mother leaving her babies with strangers might. "Take good care of them, Your Highness. They are dear to me despite what's associated with them."
"I know. They are safe with me." I patted his arm and called for Ursa to escort him out and find the driver to take him home.
I returned to the couch and continued turning the pages of the open journal half-idly, looking at one rendering of the bloom after another, collecting information and cataloging it almost subconsciously. When I reached the end of the journal, I went back and turned to the first full-bloom drawing, and then to the next, and then to a third. They had been drawn years apart, and the corona of light looked different in each one, which made sense. A man drawing from his imagination would draw the flower a little differently each time.
Still, at the heart of every open bloom, where the petals drew back, the professor had drawn the same structure. A ring of fine filaments rising from the flower's center, slender as hairs, each one tipped with a minute swelling, the whole ring identical in count and arrangement in every drawing across years. He hadn't dressed it up. He'd drawn it the way he drew the petals, plainly, anatomically, the hand of the rigorous botanist.
I had never seen it.
My specimen had never bloomed and never would. I had a grey survivor in a glass box that would hold at exactly this stage and no further for as long as I kept her cold.
The ring of filaments lived only in the open bloom, and the open bloom lived only in situ, high up a mineral slope across a border I had promised never to cross again.
41
ALAR
“Sometimes in the aftermath of a battle, mind and body fall out of step. The mind knows that the danger has passed, but the body refuses to listen.”
—Vedona Academy, Healer Corps
Kailin's letter had reached me that morning, and I'd read it four times before breakfast.
It was warm and full of ordinary things, which was exactly what I needed. She wrote about Saphir drilling her on her speeches until Moki stopped shaking his head at her, and about Veynathei. She'd been keeping my 'friend' company, she said, because Veynathei missed me too, and the two of them could at least be miserable about it together. She'd taken Morgateth to the flat-topped peak she said looked as though a giant had sheared its summit off with one clean stroke, and she'd invited Veynathei up to join them. They'd spent over an hour up there, bonding the way friends do over shared misery.
She'd enclosed a sketch of the peak with the two dragons crouching on its flat crown, Morgateth's dark bulk and Veynathei's iridescent one settled wing to wing, and between them, a small human girl sitting with her knees drawn up. It was funny and sweet, and totally Kailin, and I sat at my desk and grinned at it.
It had taken her letter the better part of two weeks to reach me. My letter to her would take a fraction of that now, since my mother had graciously allowed me to use her clerk network to expedite the letters, a favor I was still paying for in installments, but the cost was more than reasonable. I would gladly meet my mother for tea every morning before she started her busy days, in exchange for the privilege.
It made for a lopsided correspondence.
Now I could answer Kailin in days, while her letters crawled to me across a fortnight, so that I was always speaking to a Kailin two weeks in my past and hoping she was still okay.
I folded the letter and the sketch into my breast pocket and carried her with me down to the garden, because I was going to need her there.
Three weeks remained before Arlen had to give our father his answer. Four until the ball. The clock did not stop because the progress was going slower than I liked.
