Girl of the Night Garden

“Wait and see what? Remember, Da, no more lying.”

He glances toward the house, watching the sun creep over the roof for a bit. “She may not be truly immortal anymore. She may age and…pass on, as humans do. Sigrid cast a spell before she died.”

I gulp, instantly wide awake. “What? What kind of spell? Why didn’t you say something before?”

He rests a warm hand on my shoulder. “I didn’t want to frighten either of you, not when Clara needs to focus her energy on healing. And not when Sigrid’s spell seems to have failed.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, my heart still pounding.

“Well, Clara is still with us, and you both clearly care very much for each other.” His lips curve gently up on the sides. “Any spell designed to keep the two of you apart and Clara isolated and alone until she dies an early death seems to have failed. Of course, we’ll stay vigilant, but even an ‘early’ death for Clara could be hundreds or even thousands of years in the future. She’s all but immortal, like her mother.”

I ponder that as Da makes his way carefully down the ladder and I follow, hopping off the fourth rung to land softy in the hay-scattered dust.

When he turns back to me, concern tightening the edges of his eyes, it’s my turn to shrug. “We’ll have to wait and see. But… Well, maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think Clara would mind that much. I think she’s already figured out that living forever might be as much a curse as a blessing.”

Da looks surprised. And…pleased. He claps me on the back. “You’ve grown.”

“I have,” I agree, feeling very different than the boy who fished Clara out of the ocean. Different than the boy who took her sailing past the wards, even.

“But still too young to get married,” he adds as I fetch the wooden wheelbarrow the Barolos gave us to use until we find something more suitable to move Clara.

I roll my eyes. “I haven’t even asked her, Da.”

“Yet,” he challenges as I roll around him. “But you intend to.”

“I don’t know,” I say, my lips turning down as I pretend to consider the alternatives. “Clara’s not your usual sort of girl. She might prefer to live in sin.”

My father’s jaw drops, and he makes a sputtering, choking sound low in his throat. I glance his way, intending to keep the joke going, but he looks so much like a fish drowning on land that I can’t help but laugh. “I’m joking, Da. I’ll ask her. When the time is right. And…I’m pretty sure she’ll say yes.”

And I am. Pretty sure.

We settle into life on Amaria—Clara working on her magic in secret with Da while I finish my studies. We spend the first part of our nights together visiting the creatures in the garden and the second half talking and kissing until we can’t keep our eyes open.

We wake up in a patch of giggling Earwigs far more often than we should, and I end up late to class and serving extra dining hall shifts to make up for it. Clara keeps me company as I sweep and mop, reading aloud from poetry or Shakespeare plays and asking endless questions about why the characters do what they do or feel what they feel.

I love how curious she is about everything. How she wants to know the why behind things, not just the how.

On the cool winter weekends, I teach her how to cook and explain the chemistry behind it. She teaches me some of the beginner spells she breezed through on her first morning with Da. It takes time and a lot of practice, but I eventually show some aptitude for shifter magic, which thrills Clara to bits.

“By next summer we’ll be able to shift into seal skins and go skinny dipping,” she whispers with a devious giggle so cute I can’t help but kiss her, even though Da’s in his room reading and pokes his head into the den every few minutes to make sure we’re “behaving ourselves.”

As if we couldn’t do exactly as we pleased in the hours we’re alone in the night garden.

And we do. But we stop before things go too far.

It’s not always easy. Kissing her, touching her, showing her how precious and perfect and irreplaceable she is to me is my favorite thing in the entire world. But we don’t want to risk a baby before we’re married. Clara might not be able to have children, but we figure we’re better off safe than sorry. Da’s been good to us and neither of us wants to plague his life with any more scandal than he’s had to deal with already.

Clara and I sleeping under the same roof when we clearly can’t keep our hands off each other has earned him censure from the stuffy professors on the island. But Clara can’t very well stay in a cabin by herself—not without an armed guard, anyway—and there are no other women on the island.