"No," he said. "You're much more than that. You're a shaman in training. There's no rank for what you are, because since my return to Elucia over a thousand years ago, there have been no other shamans. Back in the day there were ranks, apprentice, acolyte, shaman in training, but with just the two of us, I suppose you're all of those at once."
Moki chittered, and Saphir glanced down at him as if the creature had made a point. "Yes, yes, I know."
"Does that mean Commander Ravel answers to me now?" I asked.
Saphir laughed, warm and unguarded, and Moki started at the sound and gave him a reproachful look.
"Eventually," he said, wiping his eyes. "Eventually, you'll be the spiritual leader of Elucia, and even General Lesten will answer to you. But for now, let's say you and the commander stand on equal footing, just under a different ranking system."
22
IDRILIA
"A specimen may survive transplantation but refuse to thrive. Keeping it from dying is the first step. The next step is either to replicate the conditions of its birthplace or to return it to its native soil. The rest is up to Elurion."
—Professor Ertozen Asuker, Principles of Botanical Transplantation
The Silver Princess was going to survive.
I knelt on the flagstones of my courtyard and watched the temperature gauge hold at exactly the value I'd calculated, and for the first time in two weeks, I let myself believe that she wasn't going to die. Somehow, against all odds, I'd kept her alive until the recirculating chiller the university built for me finally arrived.
It was an ugly thing, a squat box of thermoelectric plates and a coolant loop borrowed from the cryobiology bench, never intended to nurse a flower. It hummed against the enclosure I'd rebuilt around it, drawing the heat off the glass in a continuous,patient pull rather than my old method of fighting the warmth in losing increments. I'd spent three days fitting it, sealing the seams, recalibrating the gauge, sleeping in snatches on the garden bench so I could wake and check the readings.
It had worked.
Inside the glass, the Silver Princess was reviving.
When I'd found her, the petals had blazed like captured starlight, but by the time I'd unwrapped her container in the hauler, they'd faded to the gray of a deathbed, and through the worst of last week they'd stayed that way, curled and translucent, the metallic root filaments hanging slack in soil that gave them nothing. Now two of the petals had brightened toward a healthy pearl, and a single new root, thread-thin and pale, reached downward into the substrate instead of groping uselessly at the air.
She was rallying. I had pulled her back from the edge.
I wanted to feel triumph, to feel the pride of accomplishment, but I couldn't. The price had been too steep.
Two men had died for this flower. I would not insult them by pretending the loss was balanced by the gain, because it never would be. Saving the Silver Princess returned nothing to their families.
But if she lived, if I could one day coax a bloom from her and, from her roots, derive the medicine Professor Haldren believed she carried, then Moran and Voser had at least not died for a corpse rotting in a moss-lined sack. They had died for something that went on living. I needed that to be true so badly, and watching the new root reach for purchase, I could almost believe that it was.
"Come sit with me," Gavon said from his bench. "That flower is not going to do better because you are watching it nonstop. On the contrary. It might find your hovering intrusive."
Was he jealous? Resentful because all my attention was dedicated to the Princess?
I chuckled. "It's a flower, Gavon. It's not a person. It doesn't care if I look or don't look at it."
"Could have fooled me. I heard you talking to it like it was your baby."
Definitely resentful.
I didn't dignify that even though it was true. I had been talking to the Princess a lot and praying to Elurion to keep her alive.
Gavon was arranged in the morning sun with his splinted ankle propped on a cushion and a notebook he was supposed to be writing in but wasn't. He looked like an advertisement for graceful convalescence. His blond hair was freshly washed and slicked back, and his linen shirt unwrinkled. Two weeks of recovery had treated him better than two weeks of nursing a dying plant had treated me.
"She's doing better," I said. "So maybe talking to it helped, but it was probably the chiller that holds the temperature steady."
"Congratulations. Now you can stop sleeping in the garden like a hermit and come back to sleep with me in our bed."
I didn't turn to look at him, but I could imagine his pouty expression. Instead, I sat back on my heels and looked at the new root.
The chiller solved only part of the problem.
