AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Glowflies, like yourbraydus, were once native to the Below,” he told me. “How do you think they have all their magic? They are literally bound in it.”
I looked up at him. “You sure know a lot about the Below and all its creatures.”
“Oh, I’m an expert.”
“I’ve never heard that before,” I told him. “Glowflies are rare, yes. But I managed to collect all of them from across the Black Veil, re-homing them here. I chose this place to build my cottage because there was already a wrathweed hive lodged in the trunk of that tree there and a patch of the stuff growing wild.”
I gestured to the tall river tree on the west of the property. I’d dug out the hive and moved it years ago, but the hollow in the trunk remained.
“Peek likes to lie in there sometimes. His little hideaway,” I told Lorik.
Lorik waved his bad arm—making him wince—toward the cottage, toward the bench he’d been sitting on a couple nights ago.
“Yourbraydushas been watching my every move,” he informed me.
Sure enough, Peek was sitting on the bench, staring right at Lorik, his long tail curled around his legs. His ears were straight up in the air. Though Peek had slept in the bedroom last night, he’d always been on alert—a stranger in his domain, no doubt, making him uneasy.
“He’s keeping the Severs away, remember?” I teased.
Lorik’s jaw tightened. He looked back to the hives, evenly spaced around the night garden. “Wrathweed. Fire cup. Brightbell?”
He looked to me in confirmation as he gestured. I nodded.
“Death needle. Which makes that one the shadevine hive,” Lorik continued, looking at the pitch black teardrop-shaped mass on the edge of the garden. At night, it glowed silver from within.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Wherever did you find that one?” he asked.
Shadevines were the rarest of the glowflies.
“It was easy,” I told him. “Utterly by chance, I suppose. I was out in the forest collecting lovery leaves for my candles. Before I knew it, night had fallen. But there was a cave nearby, and it was glowing silver in the dark. I saw the shadevines creeping along the rock. I knew there must be a hive inside. I went back the next day when they were asleep and started the transfer.”
“Is the cave still there?” he wondered.
“Yes, but there was only one hive in the cave. I haven’t come across another in the five years I’ve had this one.”
“Shadevine queens are immortal,” he said softly. “You’d think there would be more since that’s the case.”
There was something in the tone of his voice that had me quieting.
“Yes, but many queens were captured to try to replicate that immortality,” I said carefully.
The Rolara villagers knew I kept glowflies or at least suspected I did. The antidotes and some of my potions couldn’t be possible without them. There were others who kept glowflies. The Healers’ Guild, for instance, kept a patch of land on the northern edge of the Black Veil and tended to it in shifts based off the season. I was the only one who had shadevines, as far as I knew. But I had never been selfish. Any request from the guild for shadevine blooms, I’d honored.
“Why are you asking about the shadevine hive?”
I’d had three trespassers on my land in the ten years I’d lived in the Black Veil. All of them had come for the glowflies. Foolishly, they’d all come at night, when the glowflies were active, and they’d been stung dozens of times each, every hive swarming as if they knew they needed to protect themselves as a single unit. The village witch’s barrier spell only worked on Severs, apparently. Not thieves.
One thief haddied. I’d heard about it in the village the next day. Wrathweed stings were poisonous. To be stung thrice without an antidote was certain death. Since then, not a single soul had tried to take the hives.
I didn’t know if the thieves had wanted the shadevines or if they’d wanted the hearts of the hives—where most of the magic was concentrated and was thus most valuable. Likely, they’d wanted both.
“Curiosity,” Lorik answered me.
“Many have tried to take them,” I informed him, keeping my tone level. “None have succeeded.”
“That’s apparent,” he replied. “They trust their keepers alone. You must have a pure soul, Marion.”
