Page 20 of Growing Memories (Valley of Sylveren #2)

Chapter Twelve

It had to be obvious to anyone who saw him that Ollas didn’t need her assistance anymore.

He got around well now, no longer needing his cane.

His limp only became pronounced late in the day, and even then, only if he’d been rushing back and forth between his office and the greenhouse several times.

Which should’ve been part of Eunny’s job, except he went out of his way not to ask.

But he didn’t mention her role as his helper becoming obsolete, so neither did she.

The arrangement was always meant to be temporary.

Whenever the end came, she’d accept it. Hopefully, with grace.

Regardless, she wouldn’t be seeking it out, either.

By the end of the week, Ollas’s secret plant project showed a marked difference due to his experimenting.

The leaves had all converted to their more traditional leaf shape, whereas the overgrown patch outside still mostly resembled grass.

He and Eunny had scoured the greenhouse records for any reports that might shed light on the provenance of the plants, but had come up short.

Annoyingly short, according to Ollas. Unreasonably so.

“We have documentation, I know it,” he’d said after they’d spent an afternoon poring over old ledgers but had found nothing aside from a short entry from when he’d first started the seeds. “Earthen take me, I swear I remember logging more than this.”

Pointing out that maybe his memory had become a little hazy in the six years that had passed didn’t change Ollas’s mind. Which left the Sentinels’ records as their last option, and Eunny couldn’t help with that. With midterms approaching, their search for the missing records was put on hold.

But, though she’d been reluctant to get involved, Eunny couldn’t deny that the nebulous “feeling” Ollas spoke of when it came to the plants; she felt it, too.

A sense of being drawn in. Called to, but in a way she couldn’t accurately describe.

With growing frequency, she found herself stealing into the greenhouse during Ollas’s office hours to check on the two little pots stashed away on the bottom shelf, or peeking through the window at the patch outside.

Which was how she found herself there one rainy afternoon, slipping into the greenhouse as rain lashed the windowpanes.

Eunny chanced a look around, but Trunk was empty, per usual.

She donned gloves, though that was more for her own false sense of security—she suspected that the plants’ unnamed pull defied physical barriers—then picked one of the secret pots up and set it on the rack’s upper shelf.

Ollas had observed how the plants seemed to take up the magic in their substrate. They wanted it, but they put nothing out in response. No growth spurts or setting buds. No adverse reaction either, of rot or wilt or yellowing leaves. They were stubbornly steady in their continued existence.

But the pull remained. Took the form of a soft humming, both a sound and a sensation in her mind.

It called to her in a way that had no right to feel so natural to someone who didn’t have a lick of earth magic.

True, all the arcane disciplines stemmed from light magic, but Eunny had never had an affinity for earth.

In her old life as an apothecary, her magic had resonated with the body side, light magic tuned for healing.

She was no elementalist, yet something emanated from the plants and drew her in, even though they remained as nondescript as ever, just with different leaves.

No striking variegation, no glimmer or visible aura. They were simple and green.

Ignoring how silly she felt, Eunny let her eyes drift closed, focusing on the invisible pull.

She followed it, trying to map the nature of it in her head, searching for anything recognizable.

There was a familiar note to it, though she couldn’t place how she’d have known.

She delved deeper, gently pinching a leaf between her gloved fingers.

Through the barrier of her leather glove, the pull evoked a restless curiosity that plucked at her memory.

She’d felt it before, and not just the night she’d gone to convince Ollas to let her assist during his recovery.

This feeling of certainty went beyond that.

Had persisted for weeks, maybe a month. All summer long, but in a softer, vaguer sense.

Building in momentum, or intensity, yet still incomplete.

Something was missing, such that even as she stood here with the plant in her hands, Eunny couldn’t make sense of the puzzle.

She didn’t recognize how the pulling sensation grew to form a pulse until it was too late.

Heat slithered across her skin as two pinpricks of golden light gathered on her fingertips.

A startled jerk of her wrist shed them like water drops onto the dirt; one blink of her eyes and they were gone, absorbed into the surface.

Eunny inwardly braced, ready for a flurry of eye twitches or for her magic to go berserk like the first time she’d encountered the plants.

She waited, heartbeat pounding at her throat.

Nothing happened. The tension left her shoulders as she breathed out in a shaky exhale. She glanced toward the antechamber door, but no one was around to witness her standing there like a fool.

Eunny replaced the pot on its lower shelf, and as she straightened, motion in her periphery caught her attention.

Through the smudged greenhouse windows, she spied a pair of riders as they trotted toward the school’s stable.

She only saw them through a gap in the greenhouse complex’s hedge, and then they were gone again.

It might only have been a glimpse, and at a distance, but she knew that dark-haired head, the indigo cloak.

She bolted for the door.

Eunny caught up as the couple was leaving the stable on foot.

“Dae!” she called, hurrying toward them.

The dark-haired woman turned, a smile already lighting her face before she’d even spotted the source of her name. “Eunny! What are you?—”

The rest of the question cut off in an “oof” as Eunny launched herself at one of her best friends in the world, Anadae Helm.

“What are you doing here?” Eunny asked, recovering enough to hold Dae out at arm’s length. “Are you sick? You’re sick. Why haven’t you said anything?”

Eunny searched her friend’s face, but it gave nothing away.

Sure, being of both Hanyeok and Graelynd descent, Dae’s complexion was always a shade or two lighter than Eunny’s own, but it had a healthy enough look.

Her cheeks were a bit pink and wind-chapped, the dark circles under her eyes a bit pronounced.

Her gait seemed a touch stiff, but if she’d arrived from Rhell then that meant over a week in the saddle, and Dae was no seasoned horsewoman.

All valid excuses to look slightly ragged at the edges, except, perhaps, for their current direction.

The path the trio had stopped on wasn’t bound for the administrative area of the Dome or even the Towers, where elementalists like Dae and her partner, Ezzyn Sor’vahl, studied.

Instead, they were on the road leading toward the House of Syvrine.

There’d be no cause for two elementalists to head toward the domain of light magic unless?—

“Goddess break. Are you…are you sick- sick?” Eunny fought the urge to reach for her magic and send it questing into her friend. At Dae’s scoff, Eunny looked instead to the pale blond man standing beside her. “Sor’vahl?”

The Rhellian man’s lips pinched together as he exchanged looks with Dae. “She needs to spend some time outside of Rhell.”

“I do not. This is just?—”

“Why?” Eunny narrowed her eyes, head flipping back and forth between the two. “It’s the poison, isn’t it? You have the sickness we’ve been?—”

“I’m not— I don’t have anything serious,” Dae said.

“What have you been hearing?” Ezzyn demanded.

“That more people are getting sick from the containment.” Eunny released Dae enough to loop their arms and begin towing her toward the Healing Hut. “It’s all hush-hush. I only know about it because I’m helping with the elective the Restorers funded.”

“You are?” Surprise tipped Dae’s voice up.

“I’ll explain later,” Eunny said. “Why are you coming all the way back to the Valley? Couldn’t you just take a break outside a contaminated zone?”

“Perhaps this should wait until we’re somewhere more private,” Ezzyn murmured, indicating a gaggle of Initiate level students walking toward them on their way to class. He glanced upward. “And dry.”

Though the downpour had lessened to a drizzle, Eunny took his point, asking instead about their journey and how their work in Ezzyn’s homeland of Rhell was going.

Dae and Ezzyn had spent the summer making their way across the small kingdom, aiding the implementation of a new ward system to fight the poison that had continued spreading across Rhell in the six years since the Eyllic War had ended.

Dae’s Adept One research dovetailed with Ezzyn’s Magister-level work, resulting in wards that could finally contain the spread instead of merely slow it.

The danger of the Eyllic-made poison was twofold: magical in nature, the poison had an ability to endure and return despite the strongest cleansing efforts made by the brightest minds throughout the Alliance of Empyrean Territories.

Even worse, the poison fought back. It drained all who came into contact with it, whether they did so simply by treading upon corrupted ground or actively trying to remove the poison.

From the land, the water, a living body—treating the poison drained the mender in a manner unlike any other.

Prolonged exposure to it eroded the body, and healing could only do so much for so long.

Magic worked until it didn’t, but thus far, no one had determined the magic-born poison’s breaking point.