“Say that again.”
“I said, he told me that he was your father.”
Kirchel was staring at Erin with a completely blank expression, as though her feelings about what Erin had just said had gotten stuck somewhere on the way to her face. “Erin, my father is dead. I was at the funeral. I saw his body.”
“I know! But he looked so much like the pictures you had of your father at your house. So I asked him, and he said he really was.”
Kirchel’s expression was still unreadable. “Did he happen to tell you what he was doing in the Zeiryn Eyathar when he’s been dead for forty years?”
Erin shook her head. “He said it was a really long story, and he didn’t have time to tell me then. He said he had to leave before someone named Nievar found out he was gone. But he promised he’d explain it to me later, and he asked me to tell you to meet him at the Nirá Garden tomorrow at sunset.”
Kirchel turned to Arturyn, who was sitting on the couch next to Erin, listening quietly to their conversation. “Did she already tell you about all this?”
“Yes. She was worried that it might not be genuine. I mean, with all the strange things that have been happening to the poor girl lately, you can imagine why she might question it. But I think that she really did meet a man down in the eyathar storage rooms and that he did say he was your father, whether or not he was telling her the truth.”
All three of them were silent for several minutes. Kirchel was staring down at her lap. Arturyn was regarding the bouquet of pink roses that stood in a vase on the table next to Kirchel’s chair with a sad look in his eyes. Erin kept looking back and forth between the two of them, waiting for one or the other to say something.
“The Nirá Garden?” Kirchel said finally. “Is that where you said?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Erin said. “At sunset tomorrow.”
Kirchel nodded and stood up, moving over in front of the fire. She stood there, watching the dancing flames, her back to Erin and Arturyn.
“Are you going to go?” Arturyn asked her.
“Of course,” Kirchel said without turning around. “If my father’s alive, I certainly won’t miss a chance to see him. And if he’s not, I want to know why this man is pretending to be him.”
“Well, I don’t think you should go alone,” Arturyn said, looking concerned. “We have no way of knowing before you go who this man really is or what he wants with you. And even if he really is your father, there’s still the question of where he’s been for the last forty years and who this Nievar is and why he cares where your father goes. It could be dangerous for you.”
Kirchel turned around and looked at him, her eyes narrowed. “So you’re saying you think you ought to come along and protect me?” she asked coldly.
“I didn’t mean that I had to be the one—” Arturyn began, but Kirchel cut him off.
“For your information, Arturyn, I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself,” she snapped. “I’m an adult and a trained mage, and I don’t need you to look after me.”
“I never said you couldn’t take care of yourself. I just thought—”
“I know what you thought.” There was a snarl in Kirchel’s voice, and she took a few steps closer to Arturyn, like an advancing tiger. “It’s driving you crazy, isn’t it? The idea that I might not need you. That I might be happy with someone else.”
Arturyn looked as though she’d hit him across the face. “Kirchel...I….”
“You wanted me to spend the rest of my life being miserable because I couldn’t have you—is that it? You wanted my heart and my devotion, even though you’ve known all along you could never return them. Well, I’ve given them to you for the last seven years. And I’ve been alone and miserable, just like you wanted.” Kirchel was breathing hard, and her eyes were flashing fire. “And now that I’ve finally started to get over you and be interested in someone else, you have to think up reasons why I should still spend time with you—why I should still depend on you. Well, forget it! I’ve gotten tired of being your hopeless beloved, all right? I don’t need you anymore!”
Erin stared from Kirchel to Arturyn and back again with her mouth slightly open, feeling stunned. Was this outburst really coming from Kirchel, her sedate and sensible cousin? It seemed almost as hard to believe as Kirchel’s father coming back from the dead.
Arturyn’s face had gone very white. For a moment he just stared at Kirchel in silence. Then, slowly, he stood up. “Whatever makes you happy, Kirchel,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
He moved past Erin and walked quickly out of the room.
As the door shut behind him, Kirchel whipped around and faced the fire again. She was still breathing heavily and had her arms folded tightly over her chest.
There was a very long silence.
Erin sat on the couch, looking down at her hands and wondering what she ought to say. Her first impulse was to try to defend Arturyn. She didn’t think Kirchel had any right to lash out at him like that when he’d only been trying to help her.
But somehow she felt that arguing with Kirchel wasn’t the thing to do right now. There was something not right about how Kirchel had been acting the last few days, and Erin thought she’d have a better chance of finding out exactly what was going on if she kept on Kirchel’s good side.
“Kirchel?” she said tentatively after a few minutes had passed.
Kirchel turned to look at her. She seemed calmer now, but her face was still tense.
“Would you mind if I went with you tomorrow night? I’d like to see your father again, since he's a family member and all. And he hasn’t seen you since you were a little girl, so it might be easier for him to know it’s you if I’m there, too. And...well….” Erin hesitated. “I was wondering if you might like a little bit of…you know…moral support?”
She watched Kirchel nervously, half expecting her to explode again.
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Kirchel was silent for a moment, not looking at Erin. Then she nodded slowly. “Yes, you can come if you want to,” she said quietly. She glanced at the clock over the mantle. “But now it’s getting late, and you’ve had a tiring day. You should get some rest.”
From the look on her face, Erin could tell that she wanted to be left alone for a while.
After she had said goodnight to Kirchel, Erin went back into her bedroom and closed the door slowly behind her, thinking about everything that had happened that day.
“You know, maybe I’m not the one going crazy,” she told her pillows as she flopped down onto the bed. “I think it’s the whole rest of the world that’s going crazy around me….”
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The next evening, Erin and Kirchel left the palace on a borrowed paskjy about an hour before sunset. Kirchel said it wouldn’t take that long to reach the garden, but she wanted to make sure they got there in plenty of time.
“What is this garden place, exactly?” Erin asked as they went over the bridge. “Is it like a park or something?”
“Yes, kind of like that,” Kirchel said. She seemed to be in a much better mood than she had been the previous evening. “It’s sort of like a cross between a park and a museum, in a way. It’s a garden of exotic plants. Plants from all over Isil-Gal. And some from the human world, too. Things like tulips or poinsettias don’t seem very exotic to us, but most people here have never seen them before. I used to love going to the Nirá Garden with my father when I was a little girl. We had to go at least once every time we came to the capital. That’s what makes me think it might actually be him, impossible as it seems. He would know how much the garden meant to me.”
Kirchel’s voice trembled slightly as she finished speaking, and neither of them spoke again for a while.
When they left the bridge, Kirchel turned the paskjy west, and they started around toward the other side of the lake. There wasn’t as much traffic this time of day—most people were probably home having dinner.
It was a beautiful summer’s evening, and Erin enjoyed riding along and watching the people they went past. She saw a pair of twin girls about her age shopping with their mother at one of the outdoor market stalls. The threesome reminded Erin of something she had been wanting to ask Kirchel. She hadn’t had much chance before because Kirchel had been spending so much time with Teral the past few days.
“Kirchel, aren’t people going to be worried about us being gone for so long? It’s been more than a week since I last talked to my parents. They’ve probably been trying to call me. And what about your shop?”
“Don’t worry about that,” Kirchel said. “I told your parents before you came that I might take you to visit some friends of mine for a week or two sometime during the summer. That’s what I told your mother we were doing after it turned out we were going to be staying here for a few days. It is the truth, although I obviously left out a few details.... And I told Sarah we would be gone for a while, so she’s taking care of the shop for me.”
“You mean you called my parents before you left?”
Kirchel shook her head. “No, of course not. I came after you as soon as I knew you were gone, and it was late at night then. I talked to them the day we got here.”
“You called them from here? How? They don’t have telephones here, do they?”
“No, not exactly. They have a different kind of communication system. But it’s possible to connect it to the human telephone network if you need to. And vice versa. I gave your mother a number to call if they need to get in touch with us. And if you’d like to talk to them, we could arrange that, too.”
“That might be a good idea,” Erin said. “Though I’m really not sure what I’ll tell them when they ask what we’ve been doing this week.”
Kirchel smiled. “Yes, that might be a problem.... You’ll have to tell them the truth eventually, though. Otherwise, how are you going to explain it when you show up at home with your leg back to normal? Or if you decide in a few years that you want to come back to study magic at Zeiryn?”
“You think they’ll believe me?”
“Well, you’re their daughter. They ought to believe what you tell them. And it’s not as though you can’t offer them any proof.”
Erin considered that, wondering exactly what she would tell her parents when she talked to them next and how they might react. She also thought about what Kirchel had said about her studying magic. For years the only career she’d really considered was dancing. Now that was an option again, but the months she’d spent believing that she would never be able to dance again, as well as her experience here in Silmar, made her wonder if that was what she really wanted after all.
“There’s the garden,” Kirchel said, pointing to the end of the street, where there was an arched entrance set into a long stone wall.
They rode up to the entrance, and Kirchel pulled the paskjy to a stop. She slid off its back and helped Erin do the same.
“Animals aren’t allowed inside,” Kirchel explained as she took hold of the paskjy’s reins and started leading it toward a small paddock to the left of the garden entrance, which already contained several other paskjys. “They might hurt the plants.”
When their paskjy had been shut in the paddock, Kirchel and Erin walked through the entrance into the garden. It reminded Erin a lot of the floral shop. Kirchel had probably gotten some of her inspiration here. There were plants and flowers of all shapes, sizes, and colors, artistically arranged into groups and beds. There was also a stream running through the garden, forming small pools and waterfalls here and there.
Since there was still some time left before sunset, and since Edward hadn’t specified where in the garden he wanted to meet Kirchel anyway, they walked along the small stone paths that ran between the flower beds. The entire garden was about the size of an average city park.
Kirchel seemed to be familiar with most of the plants, and she gave Erin the names of some of the more interesting ones they passed, telling her where they came from and describing some of their magical properties. They met a few other people who were also touring the garden, and Kirchel exchanged greetings with them in Silmarith. She seemed to be back to her friendly self again, and Erin was very grateful.
“Why don’t we find a place to sit down?” Kirchel suggested when the sun was just starting to brush the tops of the mountains to the west.
There were stone benches scattered throughout the garden, and they chose one close to the garden wall, not far from the entrance. It was next to one of the little pools, and Erin, looking into the water, could see several brightly colored fish swimming around. She watched them for a few minutes and then looked back at Kirchel, who was sitting silently next to her, staring off into the trees. Her face looked tense and rather pale.
“Are you nervous?” Erin asked quietly.
Kirchel looked at her and smiled faintly. “Wouldn’t you be?”
“I think I’d be terrified.”
Kirchel reached over and gave Erin’s hand a light squeeze. “I’m glad you came with me, Erin.”
They sat and watched the pink and gold light spread slowly across the sky, touching the clouds and setting them aglow with color. As the sun sank out of sight, the sky changed to a fiery red and then began to gradually fade into a dull, rusty orange. Small lamps flickered into life around the edges of the flowerbeds, shining palely in the approaching darkness.
Most of the other people seemed to have left the garden, and it was quiet except for the muffled noises coming from the rest of the city. Erin glanced over at Kirchel. She was looking around them, obviously watching for an approaching figure. But for the moment, there was still no one in sight.
“You do think he’ll come, don’t you?” Erin asked. She was starting to feel rather nervous herself now.
“I don’t know.”
Erin looked down at the pool again, trying to focus her attention on something other than Edward not being there yet. It was too dark to see the fish now, so she watched the reflections from the surrounding lamps dancing on the moving surface of the water.
A few more minutes passed. Most of the light had faded from the sky now, making the lamplight seem brighter and the shadows darker.
Kirchel suddenly reached out and gripped Erin’s arm.
“What?” Erin asked, turning her head quickly.
Kirchel didn’t answer, but following her gaze, Erin could see 'what.' There was movement on the other side of a nearby group of trees. It looked like someone was walking along behind them.