Chapter 129 Moonvine
Sera had been inside for four days and her legs had decided they were done cooperating with the healer’s instructions.
She was not bedridden. That was what she told Belphegor when he came to check on her that morning, sitting up with her arms crossed and the expression of someone who had made a decision and was not accepting counter arguments. She was recovered enough to walk and she wanted air and she wanted to see the garden and she was going with or without company.
Belphegor looked at her for a moment.
“Give me a few minutes,” he said.
He came back with a light wrap for her shoulders because the morning air in the demon realm carried a chill that the human body felt differently, and he held it out without making it a discussion and she took it and put it on and they went downstairs together.
The garden was quiet at this hour.
Sera stepped through the door and stopped just inside it, breathing the outside air properly for the first time since she had been back. She had forgotten how it felt, the particular quality of the demon realm’s air, cool and faintly luminous, different from anything in the human world. She stood there and just breathed it for a moment and Belphegor stood beside her and let her.
They walked slowly, which was not a choice but a necessity because her body had opinions about speed that she was not yet in a position to argue with. Belphegor matched her pace without commenting on it, moving beside her through the inner path, past the planted beds and the low stone border of the herb garden.
She saw the tree before she saw anything else.
It was not large, not yet, but it was real and it was there, a moonvine tree planted in the center of a small clearing just off the inner path, its vine already climbing the stake Belphegor had put beside it, and around its base the white flowers grew in a full ring, round petaled and ordinary looking and entirely out of place in the demon realm.
Sera stopped walking.
She looked at the tree for a long time.
It had not been there before she was taken. She knew every corner of these gardens from the months she had spent walking them and this tree had not existed when Malachi pulled her through that portal. Someone had planted it while she was gone, chosen the spot and dug the earth and put something new into the ground in a place that had been empty before.
She looked at Belphegor.
He was looking at the tree.
“You planted it,” she said.
“Yes.”
“While I was gone.”
“It gave me something to do,” he said, simply, the same way he said most things, without decoration, just the plain truth of it laid out where she could see it.
She looked back at the tree and felt something move through her that she didn’t have a name for, something that was grief and gratitude and something warmer than either of those things all at once, and she let it move through her without trying to manage it.
“Where is he,” she said quietly. “Morpheus.”
Belphegor moved to the base of the tree where the white flowers grew thickest and crouched down and put his hand flat against the earth.
“Here,” he said. “Under the moonvine. He liked to sleep under things.”
Sera crouched beside him slowly, her body protesting the movement, and she put her hand next to his in the soil and felt the cool earth under her palm and thought about Morpheus, the small bright weight of him, the way he had stolen warmth from wherever he could find it and given it back doubled.
“He was a good one,” she said.
“The best,” Belphegor said.
She took her hand from the soil and sat back and looked at the tree and felt the grief settle into something she could carry. Not gone, not smaller, just shaped differently now that she had somewhere to put it. Something had been planted here while she was in the dark counting heartbeats and that meant the dark had not won completely and she was going to hold onto that.
After a while Belphegor stood and helped her up carefully and they walked back along the inner path toward the palace, slower than before, and she leaned against him slightly because her legs were done pretending and he put his arm around her without being asked and they walked like that the rest of the way back.
She missed Lilith.
That was the other thing sitting in her chest alongside everything else. Two days gone to Asmodeus’s kingdom to train, a brief note left on her bedside table that said the finest warrior Asmodeus knew was waiting and she would be back in two days and not to do anything reckless while she was gone, which Sera had read three times and felt both reassured and alarmed by in equal measure.
She wanted her back. She wanted to sit in the same room with her and argue about nothing and feel like the world was the size it was supposed to be instead of the enormous terrifying size it had been for months.
Two more days.
They were back in her room when the tiredness caught up with her properly, the walk having used more than she had budgeted for, and she sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Belphegor standing by the window.
“Stay,” she said.
He turned from the window.
“You need to sleep,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “Stay anyway.”
He looked at her for a moment and then came and sat beside her on the bed and she leaned against him and he put his arm around her and she closed her eyes and listened to his breathing and the faint movement of air through the window and the distant sounds of the palace going about its morning.
She thought about a moonvine tree planted in empty ground while she was somewhere in the dark.
She thought about someone who had done that because it gave him something to do while he waited, because waiting without doing something was a kind of suffering he had decided not to accept.
She fell asleep like that, warm and held, and outside the window the garden was quiet and the moonvine moved in the morning air over the small patch of earth that held something they had both loved and lost, and it was the most peaceful she had felt since before any of this began.