Chapter 3 — The Prisoner and the Gardener (2)

"Gardener." She corrected him. "You're the gardener, I'm the flower. And heads up, flowers have thorns. Roses hurt."

"The flower I keep is a rose."

"…Where did you learn to say that?"

"My subordinate." He said. "He said humans like hearing it."

Lila leaned against the takeout mountain and laughed until she couldn't breathe.

The next three days, the castle staged an absurd show of taming.

Kael Ravencroft was like a new machine with no instruction manual, trying to imitate how humans behave — and crashing constantly.

When she painted, he sat three meters away, unmoving, watching her. She protested. He said, "I'm watching the flower bloom." She threw a paintbrush at him. He caught it, handed it back, and said, "The way you throw brushes is also like a flower." She threw the other brush. He caught that one too. She was starting to suspect he could catch anything, and also that he enjoyed it, which was somehow the most annoying part.

The south-facing window she'd demanded turned out to be a whole sunroom the size of a studio apartment. He'd had it cleaned, furnished, and stocked with canvases, oils, pastels, and one enormous easel that looked like it had been carved from a single oak. She asked where it came from. "I had it made," he said. "Yesterday." She asked how much it cost. He said, "Irrelevant." She said, "That's not a number." He said, "Correct."

When she got hungry, he sent his people into the city overnight to buy the candied apple she'd mentioned once in passing — his people searched half of New York until they found a cart that still sold them. At three in the morning, Lila was woken by a knock. She opened the door and found him standing there, holding a single sugar-glazed candied apple, expressionless:

"You wanted this."

"…I said I wanted something sweet."

"My subordinate said this is sweet."

"You crossed half the city at three in the morning to buy me one candied apple?"

"Not half the city." He said. "The whole city."

It should have been terrifying, this level of attention. Instead it was just… sad. Lila looked at the ancient king of the dark world standing in her doorway holding a candy like a peace offering, and she understood, with a sudden ache, that he had no idea how to do any of this. He was running on instinct and old rumors, assembling the concept of "caring for someone" from fragments.

When her soup burned, he drank it without changing expression, then said: "Terrible. Still better than the sandwich."

"I thought the sandwich was the worst thing you'd eaten in 2700 years?"

"The ranking has changed." He said. "The soup is second. The sandwich is third."

"What's first?"

"Two hundred years ago, I had a cup of tea in London." He paused. "Someone made it for me. She's gone now. So that cup of tea is first, forever."

Lila held the burned soup bowl and felt her throat tighten. She set it down, and asked softly: "Kael. In all these 2700 years — have you ever wanted to die?"

The hall went quiet.

Kael Ravencroft set down his spoon. He looked at the soup for a long time — so long Lila thought he was angry.

"Every day," he said. "Every single day."

"…Then why don't you?"

"Because I can't." He said. "Immortals can't kill themselves. Blades, fire, sunlight — they can wound us, but they can't end us. I'm trapped in this shell. Eternity is not a blessing. It is a sentence."

Lila understood those English words. She translated the shape of them quietly for herself: no blessing, no mercy — a life sentence, with no parole date and no death penalty attached.

"Yes." He said. "No parole. No time off for good behavior. No death penalty. Just me, and forever."

"Then what if—" Lila looked at him seriously, "—there was someone who made the sentence a little less unbearable?"

He looked at her. For a long time.

"I don't know." He said. "In 2700 years, I've never encountered that."

"Then now you have." Lila said. "And if you ever lock my door again while I'm sleeping, I'll stick that candied apple stick right through your heart."

"You can't pierce my heart with a stick." He said. "But I'll remember."

"Remember what?"

"You said 'what if'." He looked at her, and spoke each word slowly. "I'll remember that."

Lila's face went hot. She grabbed a cushion and threw it at him. He caught it, set it on his lap, like a child with a new toy. She threw another one, then a third, and he caught each one and stacked them neatly, and when she ran out of ammunition he looked at the small tower of cushions and then at her, and she could have sworn there was something almost like amusement in the dead gold of his eyes.

"You're impossible," she said.

"I'm old," he corrected her. "There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"I don't know. I've been both."