“And it is all yours.” His hands smoothed over the silk covering her shoulders.
Vhalla felt like a princess. It hit her all at once. Like a fairytale come true. She was garbed in foreign finery, revered as nobility, preparing to marry the Emperor. It was more than she could’ve ever dreamed—and it had come at a cost that was far greater than she could’ve ever imagined.
“Mine,” she repeated softly.
“Every book in our Empire will belong to you. It will be your choice if you share them or keep them.” He intertwined his fingers with hers, beginning to lead her up a side stair.
“Knowledge should always be shared,” Vhalla decreed thoughtfully.
“I don’t know if I agree.” He surprised her as they rounded the second stair. Aldrik continued, “If we could have kept the knowledge of the caverns from Egmun, Victor would have never known to pursue them.”
“But,” Vhalla followed his logic, “if I had known the full truth about the caverns from the start, I may have done some things differently.”
“A fair point,” he conceded.
All talk on the failures of the past and what knowledge—or the lack of—had wrought ceased as Aldrik led her through a small door wedged between bookcases. Vhalla blinked against the bright unfiltered sunlight in contrast to the dim light of the library. A wave of heat hit her cheeks, followed by the quiet whispers of wind through leaves. A familiar scent greeted her nose.
Her senses adjusted, and Vhalla took in the garden before her. It was familiar, yet different, from the smaller glass greenhouse in the Southern palace where she had read with Aldrik. This was its own room, tucked into the walls of the castle tower. Glass replaced stone on two of the walls and above. Roses, giant and beautiful, wound up trellises that arched over the pathway cutting through the modestly sized space.
“This way.” Aldrik hooked her arm, offering no further explanation.
Vhalla was well aware of where they were. It was as though the wind itself here had been trapped by time, weighted in the scent of roses. There was the hum of magic around them, different and yet so very similar to the man who was leading her toward a marble obelisk. The figure of a woman sat atop it, a ruby sun at her back. She recognized it from a dream of Aldrik’s she’d viewed so long ago.
“This was her garden,” Vhalla stated.
“It was.” Aldrik looked only momentarily surprised at Vhalla’s ability to piece together where he had taken her. “My father proposed to her here, asking the youngest of three princesses to take a throne that she was never meant to have.”
Vhalla attempted to push her resentment for the former Emperor aside. In some ways, he was like her original perceptions of the North. Vhalla had a very limited scope as to who the late Emperor Solaris really was. She’d known him during the final years of his life, the point in time where all he’d seemed to covet was his Empire and his legacy.
But perhaps—behind the weathered, bearded, and scarred face of the Emperor she knew—there had been a young man. A man who had been as attractive as Aldrik. Vhalla saw a woman who was tall, given Aldrik’s family’s propensity to height, looming over a kneeling Emperor. She would make him wait, in Vhalla’s vision. The late Princess Fiera would be one to smile coyly and keep her true wants hidden just long enough to make the man tremble, to remind him that she was in control.
“They must have loved each other very much.”
“So my family tells me.” Aldrik didn’t look anywhere but his mother’s face. “My father took rose clippings and had them transported South for her so that she would feel at home.”
“A garden she never saw,” Vhalla thought sadly.
“My father told me once that he was still glad for building it. That it helped my mother live on. Though, eventually, I think it caused him more hurt than anything.”
“So you took up the mantle of tending to it.” Vhalla reflected on Aldrik’s story, on the history that she had, for so long, barely understood surrounding his family. His mother had given up ever seeing that garden, ever spending time in it, for the sake of saving her son from madmen.
Vhalla’s eyes met the statue’s once more, and she wished she could speak with the woman whose visage she now looked upon. Vhalla understood what had compelled Aldrik’s mother to run to the caverns that night, and it was something they now shared across time and life and death. She had known a truth about the world. Be it of her own insight or of some unknown guidance—like a Firebearer named Vi—Aldrik’s mother had known what the caverns could reap.
It would stop with her, Vhalla vowed. She would end the cycle that they were trapped within, enslaved to the Caverns across time and generations. It would all end with her.