Chapter 423

Not a large amount. Just the surface disturbance of someone moving their hand through the edge of the pond with the specific economy of motion of someone who’d made a decision quickly and was acting on it before it could be reconsidered. It caught me across the side of my face.

I looked at him.

He was looking at the far end of the pond with the expression of someone who had not done anything and was deeply interested in the nightbloom at that end.

I reached into the pond and sent a proper splash at him.

It hit him in the chest. A real splash- the kind with volume, the kind that soaked through fabric.

He looked down at himself. Then at me. The expression he’d had when Jordan had said *five times* at the corridor door, the look of someone deciding how much to engage with a thing.

Then he reached into the pond.

The resulting exchange was not dignified. It covered approximately three minutes and involved the complete abandonment of anything approaching the appropriate behavior for an Alpha and a Luna in the botanical garden during a herb-collection errand, and produced an amount of noise that was going to be in a guard report somewhere.

At some point we both ran out of ability to splash effectively and I was sitting on the non-mossy part of the stone edge entirely wet from the shoulders down and Kael was on the ground on the other side of the pond in a similar condition, and the botanical guide was being held above my head to keep it dry which was the one piece of responsibility I’d maintained throughout.

The guide was dry.

Everything else was not.

Kael was laughing.

The real version – the one that came from the actual place rather than the almost-version I’d seen occasionally. The one that changed his whole face. He was sitting on the wet ground next to Ivory’s secondary garden pond at dusk, completely soaked, laughing in a way that I’d spent months not seeing from him and was seeing now.

I started laughing too, which was not a decision but a response to the specific contagious quality of someone laughing genuinely in your proximity.

We sat on either side of the pond in the fading gold light, wet, making noise that was going to be in a guard report, the botanical guide held above my head like a trophy.

“The guide is dry,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Ivory would never forgive us.”

“She annotated a plant to specifically predict you touching the wrong one,” I said. “She would have annotated a whole chapter

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Chapter 423

about what would happen to someone who damaged the guide.”

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“She has a section about care for the guide,” he said. “I read it when I was pretending to look for the nightbloom. Page one.”

“What does it say,” I said.

“This book is a professional document. Treat it accordingly. If you find it in poor condition I will assume the worst and treat you accordingly.”

I looked at the dry guide in my raised hand. “She’s very consistent,” I said.

“She’s never been inconsistent about anything in her life,” he said. “It’s both admirable and deeply inconvenient.”

We sat for a moment longer. The laughing had settled into something quieter – the aftermath of it, the specific quality of a space that had contained something like that and was still warm from it.

The evening was properly arriving now. The gold was going blue at the edges, the temperature dropping the few degrees that came with dusk, the garden’s sounds shifting into the evening register.

“She listed you,” he said. “In the voice resonance margin. Your name.”

“Three weeks ago,” I said.

“From the beginning of the training sessions,” he said. “She was paying attention from the beginning and she decided three weeks in that you were one of the people who could do it effectively.”

‘I talked to a plant,” I said.

‘You talked to a plant like you meant the question,” he said. “Which is what she said mattered.”

looked at the nightbloom at the edge of the pond, its silver undersides catching the last of the evening light.

“I did mean the question,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

We started collecting the remaining items from the list. Kael’s plant identification improved significantly once he’d property found the third section of the guide and accepted that the organizational system was what it was. He got three in a row correctly, and 1 marked them against the list, and the basket filled with the evening smell of what Ivory had sent us for.

“The red tabs,” I said, because it had been sitting since he’d mentioned them and not asking was becoming harder than asking “in the folder.”

He looked at the nightbloom he was wrapping.

“Eleven of them,” I said.

“Eleven,” he said.

“You read them,” I said.

“This morning,” he said. “In the documentation session.”

I waited.

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Chapter 423

04 [

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“There are people,” he said, “who were involved in the search not because they were protecting information. Who became involved afterward. Who decided that someone pursuing the curse’s origin was a threat to something they were protecting.” He wrapped the plant with the careful motions of someone doing something physical while thinking about something else. “The eleven red tabs are those people. Not opportunists, not collectors with bruised egos. People with deliberate intent and significant resources.”

“The ones connected to the caster,” I said.