“If you are my revenge, Your Majesty, then it is the sweetest I’ll ever taste.” He stalked away toward his plant shelf, leaving her aching for more. “Your hand,” he said gruffly, without glancing back.
“My—oh.” There was still a smear of red along her finger. The scrape had been deeper than she’d thought. She reddened further and wiped it on her dress, uselessly hiding it behind her back.
He returned with a white cloth in one hand and something long and green in the other. He looked more amused than hungry, but with him it was difficult to tell. He cocked his chin to the end of the bed. “Sit. Let me help you.”
She slid off her cloak and settled onto the edge of his bed, again surprised that a vampire would keep his chamber so warm and cozy—though she supposed it was for the sake of his shelves of strange plants.
Garin reached down to peel her injured hand from her side, laughing when he met some resistance. “You think you could ever hide the scent of your blood from me? That, among the numerous summer aromas of Brocéliande, yours isn’t the temptress that calls me forth?”
“This is what Lorietta gets for making me chop potatoes.” She couldn’t help but smile. “I honestly forgot it happened. I also wasn’t sure how you would fare, after everything.”
“Nothing about my desire for you has changed. If anything, it has been amplified.” He lifted her palm to his nose and sniffed delicately at the gash on her finger. “Just as my ability to achieve that desire has been restored.”
“Doesn’t that make this worse for you?”
In answer, he squatted before her and drew out the green stem—it looked more like a long thorn than a stem—before readjusting his grip on her hand. It was a tapered stalk of some kind, covered on each side in a row of hair-like bristles. “What do you take me for? An amateur?”
She squirmed as he rubbed the slimy edge of it against her wound without warning.
His hand clamped around hers, stilling her. “Are you not used to an ounce of discomfort?”
She answered his inquiry with one of his own. “Did you get this from Adelaide?”
“No. She kills every plant in her care. Why do you ask?”
She didn’t take the witch as someone bad at caring for plants, not withall the flora surrounding her cottage; the information threw her. “It looks like something out of the Low Forest.”
“Oh. No, not this. Although it looks like one, it’s not considered a fae-rooted plant at all.” He cocked his head at the plant shelf. “Those blue ones are the only Low Forest species I own. My father would forage illegally in the outcropping of trees near Adelaide’s cottage, and there were several patches of outliers that would grow there. He’d bring home seeds and plants but could never keep them alive, and the ones he did manage to maintain for a short while, my mother got rid of.” He cleared his throat. “After I’d entranced Jeanare in the west wing, I’d poked around and found an unmarked bag of seeds in a box of belongings my father kept under one of his floorboards. It was still there. So, I took a sachet and planted the seeds that were inside.”
Lilac stared disbelievingly at the plants. As if they’d heard him, the nearest one slowly swiveled its head in their direction. After all these years, it still took mere weeks for them to grow. She shuddered. “They seem so… so?—”
“Not of this world?”
“Yes.”
“I suspect that was at least part of what my father was trying to study without getting too close. Why the flora of the Low Forest only grew there, why the plant species had not naturally dispersed over time as other plants tend to do.” He glanced back at his shelf. “I believe he overlooked one simple solution: the soil. I thought of how nothing had happened when my father tried to plant them in his best garden soils, so I went and scooped some from the edge of the Low Forest.”
Lilac found this rather peculiar. “Why would the soil there be different?”
Garin only shrugged. “You ask me questions I ponder myself. Besides their odd coloring, they’re almost identical to a mysterious plant I find fascinating from the New World, theDionea muscipula.” He withheld an impressed smile. “That’s what the three pots below them should grow into in a few months, the mortal variety. They both survive on sunlight, water, and insects, though I have a suspicion the fae-rootedDioneamay have other appetites. I have plenty to learn of them.”
She stared, fascinated by both the mystical plant species—and Garin.She felt he could go on forever about his studies in botany, and she would gladly listen to them if it meant hearing him speak about what he enjoyed learning.
“And this plant, then?” She looked down to the thorn.
“This,” he said, sealing her wound with a last pass of its warm, clear sap, “isAloe vera, found in warmer regions, used for healing and medicine throughout the world. This one’s from Spain, a recent gift from one of Lorietta’s trades with her passing travelers. As were the seeds from the New World”
“A human trader?” she guessed, and her eyes widened when he nodded.
“There are much older, greater empires in other corners of the world who don’t run screaming from the likes of us, believe it or not.”
He unwrapped a corner of the cloth from the knuckles on his opposite hand and brought it to his mouth, tearing a long strip of it effortlessly with his teeth. She found herself rocking forward, unable to keep from staring at his full bottom lip.
He seemed not to notice, or at least pretended as much, but he cleared his throat as he wrapped the base of her finger thrice, loosely, and expertly tied it so there was enough room for her to flex her hand. “There,” he said, looking pleased with himself. “The salve will allow you to heal normally.”
“There will be a scar.” She wasn’t concerned with the scar at all, wanting instead to feel his mouth on her.
“My saliva only heals vampire-made wounds,” he reminded her. “The scars we choose to wear are the ones that make us human.”
