A Red-Rose Chain

“Good; you made it.” Ceres appeared from behind a trellis as casually as if we were at her cottage, and not at some secret rose garden at the end of a long tunnel. She was carrying a red rose in each hand. Both had the wide, loose-looking petals that I associated with wild roses, rather than the tight swirl of cultivated blossoms. “Marlis had no trouble finding you, I trust?”


“Marlis nearly got herself gutted by my fiancé when she surprised us, but apart from that, it went just fine,” I said mildly.

Ceres raised an eyebrow. “I would have expected you to be the sort of woman who did her own gutting, after the things Walther has told me about you.”

“I normally would be, but she grabbed me first, so I had time to get over my surprise.” I rubbed my hands against my dress again, trying to get rid of the tacky feeling of blood drying on my skin. “Where are we?”

“My own test garden. I cultivate my roses here, in privacy, and plant what grows well around my cottage for others to enjoy.” Ceres stepped closer, holding her two roses out toward me. “Smell these.”

I raised an eyebrow. “That’s why we’re here? So I can smell a couple of roses? No offense, but I could have done that in my room, without bleeding all over everything in sight.”

“Aunt Ceres, I told you: you can’t be mysterious with Toby, all it does is piss her off.” Walther emerged from a cluster of rosebushes. He looked tired, but there was a light in his eyes that I recognized from my visits to his office. He was an alchemist before he was anything else, and alchemists thrive in the presence of puzzles. “Hi, Toby. Can you please smell those not at all mysterious roses for me, and tell me which one smells more like the rose we’re looking for?”

“For you, yes,” I said. I stepped forward to where Ceres waited, and sniffed the roses in her hands, first the right, and then the left. Then I frowned. “Neither one of these is right. They smell great, but they don’t smell like her.”

“I told you,” said Walther. He sounded oddly triumphant for someone who had just had both his roses rejected. “You can’t trick Toby’s nose. It’s weird, but it works.” He opened the pouch attached to his belt and withdrew a third rose. It was smaller than the others, only half-open, and while the petals were red, they were patchy and bruised-looking, like it hadn’t been grown to be picked and hadn’t been prepared to be separated from its bush. He held it out toward me, almost reverently. “Smell this.”

“Right,” I said, and leaned forward, sniffing the rose. Then I recoiled, atavistic revulsion rising in my throat, so strong and fierce that I almost slapped the flower out of his hand. It might have seemed like a melodramatic reaction to something so small, but the rose’s smell was so close to the scent of Evening’s magic that I couldn’t help myself. It lacked the depth and power of her signature. It was just a rose, with no undertones of ice or snow. But I had never smelled a rose like that one, old and deep and somehow primal, the sort of flower that would have grown on a grave in a folksong, or provided the perfume to a figure from a fairy tale.

Walther watched me, assessing my reaction with a faint gleam of satisfaction in his eyes. “Well?” he asked, needlessly.

“That’s the one.” I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, leaving flecks of dried blood on my lips. That helped a little. “It smells so close to her magic it makes me want to throw up. Where did you find it?”

“In the oldest of my rose gardens, in a corner, where the sun only shines fully for a few months out of the year,” said Ceres. “I’ve thought it dead several times, but always it returns.”

“Yeah, well, it and the woman whose magic smells like it have that in common,” I said, resisting the urge to wipe my mouth again. “That’s the one. That’s the rose that smells like her magic.”