I’m sure they will. 

He continued on for some time, and even though I tried my hardest to be an attentive listener, my mind drifted, lulled by the warmth of the rare sunshine on my shoulders.

The hymn… in the space of a late afternoon, I might be able to translate one or two of the High Tongue runes. By the Light, when I could finally present Bane with actual, verifiable translations… it would be the greatest project of my life, the unbinding of a lost language.

So that would be today’s goal, but the fact that he had risen before the sun and vanished again still had my curiosity by the throat. Could he be studying the High Tongue on his own? Or was it something to do with Wyn’s new bloodwitchery, the reason she’d filled a vessel with my blood?

I pondered whether he was holed up in the Tower of Autumn with Wyn, working on something that was possibly deadly—he hadn’t made those warnings for no reason, and I trusted him not to understate the matter—and if I should be concerned about him being involved in something of a dangerous nature.

Which made me huff aloud with laughter. Bane was a fiend. Literally, what could possibly pose a threat to him, outside an army of wargs?

“Is something funny?” Miro glanced up from the canvas, still smiling, but there was a subtle gleam of annoyance in his gaze. “I didn’t realize that I was so amusing.”

Just thinking of Bane, I wrote, and replayed Miro’s last words in my head: he’d said something about the noblemen disliking him.

Well, it clearly hadn’t been the best time to laugh, but then, I could only listen to a constant stream of self-pity and woe for so long before I began to get itchy.

“Ah.” He glanced at what I’d written. “I imagine he occupies your mind quite a bit.”

Instantly my guard went up; I examined his face for the tell-tale signs of petulance I’d come to expect from him, but he appeared almost carefully neutral, disguising his true thoughts.

That tends to happen when you’re married to someone, I wrote.

“It’s just a pity, that’s all,” he continued, brow furrowed as he dabbed more paint on the canvas. “To waste a lai, a beauty like you, on… well, you see what he is.”

And we’re done here, I wrote, holding it up for his perusal before scrawling more in sharp letters. You can keep beating the dead horse, but it’s rotting and it stinks by now. I’d wish for you to have a good day, but something tells me you’ll spend it sulking and miserable and making it worse for everyone else. You can come find me again to finish this when you’ve grown up a bit.

His eyes widened as he read my words, and when I slammed my journal shut and got to my feet, he reached out as though to grab my skirt.

My fist clenched around my pen, and I glared at him hard enough that he withdrew his hand, leaning away from me.

“Cirrien, wait. Wait.” Miro laughed disbelievingly as I walked away. “So you’re just leaving? All right, then. Good day to you too, Lady Silence.”

His mocking nickname pricked at me as I plunged deeper into the Bloodgarden, determined to walk off my irritation before going to the library. I didn’t want to be angry and uncontrolled when I handled the precious books.

Lady Silence. How clever. Really, it was amazing we didn’t fall all over ourselves to appreciate his wit.

I exhaled as I took the curling paths through the garden, until I stumbled into a shadowed corner in the back; the fountain—no, altar—where we’d made our vows was hidden in darkness, the woman’s eyes closed, her mouth no longer spilling blood. Her empty hands were dry, still stained crimson with wine and blood.

If the fountain was here… then our thorns were over there. I retraced the steps I remembered from that night, smiling as I remembered Bane signing, asking me for cats, and found the patch of earth at the base of one of the carved loggia columns where I’d knelt in my wedding dress to dig with my bare hands.

I knelt before it now, unsure whether to smile or frown: our vine was growing. Green tendrils had emerged from the soil and were beginning to creep up the column, the tiniest nubs of what would become thorns blistering their sides. There was even a bud with the faintest hint of pink to it, a bloodrose born of our conjoined hands.

But the earth here had been disturbed, and recently. I touched the freshly scattered soil, breathing in the scent of newly-turned earth.

Who had been digging in our vines?

I was happy to see it already growing, a sign, as Bane had explained to me, that their ancestors were pleased with us. But to come here and dig around in it… what purpose did that serve?

I would ask him when I saw him tonight; I made a mental note to make a written note, so I wouldn’t forget.

But forget I wouldn’t; it still nagged at me as I made my way to the library, my irritation with Miro overcome by the unsettlement I felt at the knowledge that someone had specifically found our vines and dug there.

I settled myself at my usual table in the library, wrote it down in my journal, and pulled the book with the Veladari hymn towards myself, diving headfirst into the work.

Disquiet became enthusiasm as the afternoon slipped by; it was almost impossible to keep my excitement tamped down. I identified several of the known High Tongue runes in the passage across from the hymn, cross-comparing and finding the translated words in the correct places.

So this was a parallel text, and perfectly positioned to directly translate the High Tongue verse alongside it.

I notated the new runes, checking a formal Veladari dictionary as I went. The formal version of our language hadn’t been used as common vernacular in over a millennia, but my initial suspicions seemed to be supported: the High Tongue runes seemed heavily influenced by them, or vice versa.

I’d managed to confidently add several words to the new, functional dictionary of the High Tongue that I was creating when the hair on the back of my neck rose, standing straight up. Chills followed, creeping down my spine and arms.

Something was watching me.

I looked up slowly without moving my head, taking in the library. The sky, framed in the high arched windows, was tipping towards evening in shades of rose and lavender; the shadows had grown long, and the candles had already been lit.

There was no sign of Koryek, whose silent presence I had grown used to. No sign of any servants.

I was alone, and yet I felt the slow creep and crawl of eyes on my back.

Gripping my pen as a makeshift weapon—I should keep a letter-opener here, was the sluggish thought at the back of my mind—I burst into motion, kicking my chair back and spinning around, pen held to stab.

But I froze in place at the sight of what watched me from the library doors, all thoughts of stabbing overcome by a deep, stark sense of wrongness, overlaid by a sense of awe at the sheer, strange beauty of them.

Whatever they were, they weren’t alive. Not in the sense of a living, breathing being with blood in their veins.

I wasn’t entirely sure that they had veins, in fact.

They were the shape and height of people, if people had been reduced to mere outlines: a head on a neck, joined to a torso, with limbs in the right places… even fingers and toes. Both stood several inches taller than myself.

But they had no faces. No eyes, no mouth or nose, no distinguishable features.

The one on the left was made thorny vines; black and spiny, as though the bloodroses’ brambles had grown into the shape of a vaguely masculine being, torn themselves free, and walked away.

The one on the right was softer, smoother; I decided it was a ‘she’ based on the more feminine form, and she was nothing but velvety crimson petals, molded into the shape of a woman.