Page 62 of The Verdant Cage
“What?” Gryphon asks, suddenly too close behind me.
I turn to face him, my voice low and steady despite the fury building inside me. “The Vex is no virus, Gryphon. It’s a poison. My mother knew. She prepared these packets in case of another ‘outbreak.’” I take a deep breath. “That’swhy she was killed.”
His face pales. “Rose, you can’t just accuse—”
“The Record Keeper knows it, too, I suspect. I saw his footprints around the well.” I put my hands on my hips, eyes narrowing. “What is your father up to?”
Gryphon grips my shoulders, and I’m acutely aware of the size of his hands. “Lower your voice,” he hisses. “This isn’t safe to discuss.”
“So youdoknow something!” I challenge, searching his gaze.
For a moment, I see conflict in his eyes. Then he releases me, and I feel too light where his hands used to be. “We need to go to the training grounds,” he says, voice carefully neutral. “My mother is waiting.”
He’s not going to answer me. I know without asking that he won’t accept any further detours, either, not until we’ve done our Guardian duty. Fine. Tonight, I’ll try again to crack my mother’s code. Whatever the truth is about the Vex, about her death, about this village with its stone Wall and ancient secrets, I’m going to find it. Even if it kills me.
Which—given what I’ve learned today—seems increasingly likely.
.
True to his word, Gryphon has us stop by the Bakers’ after I drop off the day’s completed census materials at the Record Keeper cottage. He charms yesterday’s rolls off the Bakers’ youngest daughter. I’m surprised to see how friendly he can be with others. We’re eating and walking, the warm sun shining down on us, when a question surprises my lips. “Do you think your parents care for each other?”
His brow creases. “Why do you ask?”
Because I suspect Jarek was responsible for my mother’s murder, and his loving her would complicate that.
“Something your father said this morning.” I wonder if I should even repeat it, but I’ve gone too far to back out. “That he was in love with my mom when they were teenagers.”
Gryphon’s expression is pained but not surprised. “Through here,” he says, directing me down an alley I’ve somehow never walked before. The Guardian training ground is out of the way, and few of us ever have reason to visit. I’m excited to see somewhere new in the Valley.
I think Gryphon’s ignoring my question and decide I won’t press the issue, but then, “My mother loved my father. My father loved your mother. He never hid it. In fact, shortly after your dad died, he petitioned to end his marriage to my mother so he could wed Henrietta.”
My jaw drops. “End their marriage?” I’d never heard of such a thing.
“Yeah.” He sounds as disgusted as I feel.
Imagining Gryphon ending our betrothal to wed someone else elicits a sharp and sudden pang of empathy on Misia’s behalf. And I don’t evenlikemy fiancé. Much.
I think about my mother being courted by Jarek. Could two people be more opposite in temperament? As far as I know, he never visited, except for the one incident he’d confessed to this morning. The moment Mom was killed, I believed I’d seen raw grief on Jarek’s face, but he’d immediately covered it. Of course, I’ve since learned he is a man who hides a lot. He could have been pretending to be sad to throw off any suspicion about his involvement.
Yet it’d seemed real. “The Record Keeper denied his request?” I ask.
Gryphon spreads his hands. “Didn’t have to. He asked your mom and she said she was content to remain a Caster for the rest of her life. I overheard my parents fighting about it.”
I feel a surge of fierce pride. My motherhadstood up to Jarek. Maybe, and it’s agony to think it, he’d been so offended by her rejection that he’d arranged her death and Jonas’s setup. The thought roils my gut. But no, I think, quickly dismissing the prospect. It sounds like my mother rejected Jarek over a decade ago. Her recent murder wouldn’t be related to that, right?
“Why did your father ban us from watching you train?” That restriction had come with the curfew.
Gryphon shrugs. We’ve left the village and are now hoofing it through the fields, the golden wheat surrounding us shorn as close as a haircut. “You don’t want to watch the Blacksmiths ply their trade, do you? Or the Plumbers plumb?”
“But Icould,” I say. “If they were doing it in front of me. Say they came to my cottage to fix something, or I went to the Blacksmith to request a tool made.”
He shoots me a bemused glance. “You’re that eager to watch the Guardians exercise? Have our midday demonstrations not satisfied your appetite?”
My blush mortifies me, but it seems to delight him. Before I can think of a comeback, we step onto a narrow path at the farmland’s end and are forced to proceed single file into the woods. We’re hiking for several minutes when I hear an unfamiliar sound, like a drumbeat, right before we break into a clearing.
A huge barn stands straight ahead, whatever’s making the noise just beyond it. But Gryphon wants us to look inside the building first.
“My father’s toys.” He pulls open the double doors.
