Page 35 of The Ruin of Eros

I grit my teeth.Of coursethis would be the one door I can find. Again I find myself wondering if these corridors have a will of their own.

Well, I suppose it won’t hurt to have another look at the garden, since I’m here.

As I push open the doors into the golden light, I have to stop to catch my breath. If anything, it’s more beautiful now than it was at twilight. Despite everything, the sight of it sends a ripple of peace through me. I step out into the light, so bright I almost have to shield my eyes.

The land I grew up in is beautiful, to be sure: I love its black soil and sun-bleached skies, its hillsides of white chalk, where donkeys pull their loads up steep paths. But this? This is beauty of a kind I’d never dreamt of. The grass is long and wet, with winding pathways between flower-beds that stretch in every direction, and fruit-trees that overhang the meandering paths, all of it seeming to go on forever. The pond in the middle is a glassy mirror of the sky. And all around it, herbs and flowering plants in row after row, leaves and petals of all colors and shapes, glowing faintly as though underwater.

I have the sense of being watched, and look up in time to see a flicker of movement in the pond, and a splash.

Nymphs,he said. Did I imagine the faint, silvery sound, like a distant laugh? I start to move toward it, where telltale ripples are spreading. But then a sound from right behind me stops me in my tracks.

“Where are you going?” a voice rasps, and I spin around.

Chapter Fourteen

Aletheia. And she’s speaking to me.

I’m not sure it’s much of an improvement though. I’m certain she made me jump on purpose.

“I—I didn’t know you were there.”

Her eyes travel over me, sharp and quick, and I wonder what information she’s taking in.

“There is much you don’t know,” she says.

I don’t argue. She’s right.

I clear my throat. “Aletheia, I want to apologize. The way I behaved yesterday, it was very wrong. I should never have spoken to you like that.”

She says nothing, just continues looking me over with those birdlike eyes.

“I’ve known worse,” she says finally, and turns from me. “Come this way.”

She has no interest in my apologies, I suppose, no interest in my words at all, and why should she? Disoriented, I follow her—she steps nimbly for an old woman, over tree roots and fallen fruit as if they’re nothing, and she moves fast. After a while, she comes to an abrupt stop, and turns to point out a plant with bright yellow buds. “We harvest this today.”

She’s holding two baskets, and hands me one.

“Flower is delicate,” she says. “If we don’t harvest right, pods will break. If you cut stem too low, plant will die.”

She’s speaking an older Greek than I am used to. The words are the same, more or less, and yet it’s different. But it’s no wonder, if she was born more than three generations ago, thatour dialect is no longer quite the same.

She demonstrates to me how the harvesting should be done: where to cut, and how to hold the plant as she makes the incision. Then she drops it gently in her cupped palm and holds it in front of me.

“Later, dry the pod and harvest seeds. I show you.”

There’s nothing friendly in her tone, and yet when she saysI show youit occurs to me she does not hate me, perhaps, so much as I had thought.

She hands me a small knife then, to see if I can harvest as she showed me. I take it with some trepidation. I hadn’t planned to be out here at all today, being Aletheia’s garden assistant. I’d planned to be devising some kind of way out of this place. But then it occurs to me that this garden might help me with that, too. It is a garden full of witching-herbs, after all. Surely some of them can be useful to me. So for now I take Aletheia’s hand-knife and try to repeat what she showed me, but she interrupts, shaking her head.

“Stem is too young. Needs more growing. You try this one.”

We continue like this for a while, me attempting and her correcting me. Finally, I seem to be doing a passable enough job and she moves off to another corner and busies herself with the plants there—when I look up I see she’s moving through them at least five times faster than me, wielding her small knife with quiet efficiency, almost like a dance. Her basket fills quickly, though mine only has a thin covering of herbs across the bottom. I take advantage of her intent focus to scan the plants for ones I recognize.

The sun beats down on me but with none of the harshness of Sikyonian sun. I move through rows of strange and beautiful plants—I think I remember some of the names he told me: bettany, herb of Lethe—but not their functions. It’s with surprise then that I stumble on a bed of garden peas beside them. But thedemon did say that not everything growing here is magical. The garden supplies the palace and its dining table; demons must eat, too, it appears.

I stare at the rows of pea-pods, inhaling the green scent of them in the sun. They look so delicious. When I run a finger over the pods I can feel the plump peas inside, ready to burst out. The hunger is tormenting me. They are only garden peas, I tell myself: what harm could they do?

I pop a few pods and tip them into my mouth. The taste courses through me like emotion. This is not the way taste used to feel. I move the peas around my mouth, tasting the seasons, tasting spring; honey-water, crisp as dew. I open my eyes, breathing fast. I throw the empty pods on the ground. Taste is not just a sense anymore, it’s something more than that.

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