The garden changed with the seasons, but the statue remained constant.Caelum had measured this, in his way. Spring brought lilacs that framed Seraphina's marble shoulders like a coronation. Summer heat softened her white stone to gold. Autumn leaves collected at her feet, red and orange and the particular brown of decay, and winter snow filled the crevices of her sword-arm, making her appear to weep frozen tears.He was nine now. He had visited daily for five years, through all weathers, through the nightmares that still woke him screaming, through the secret training that had made him strong in ways no one measured. The nurses had stopped scolding, the tutors had stopped assigning essays about "appropriate use of leisure time," and his family had simply accepted that the youngest Valorian was strange, solitary, obsessed with his grandmother's memory.They did not know that he argued with her.Not aloud—he was careful, always careful—but in the space between his thoughts and her frozen expression. He brought her questions, accusations, fragments of memory that did not match the stories. He waited for answers that never came, only the wind through the lilacs, only the settling of stone that might have been imagination."You're always here," a voice said.Caelum did not startle. He was practiced at stillness, at awareness of his surroundings. The speaker was old, familiar, leaning on pruning shears with the relaxed posture of someone who had outlived his superiors.Tomas. The head gardener. Seventy, perhaps older, with hands that shook slightly and eyes that saw too much. He had been a boy when Seraphina died, a young apprentice assigned to maintain her memorial. He had known her, in the way of servants who observe without being observed."You speak to her," Tomas said. Not accusation. Assessment. "I've watched. Five years, you've come daily. You speak, you listen, you wait.""She doesn't answer," Caelum said."No." Tomas shuffled closer, lowered himself to sit on the grass near the demon's base. "But she spoke, at the end. To the garden, to the stones, to shadows no one else saw. They called it madness. I called it... seeing something."Caelum felt his pulse quicken. This was information. This was what he had been searching for, in books and whispers and the spaces between official histories."What did she see?"Tomas knocked ash from an unlit pipe, a gesture of habit. "I was there, the day she died. Not in the room—nobody, a boy with a rake—but I heard her. Through the window. She was shouting."He paused, finding words, or finding courage."She said, 'The king was not the enemy. The shadow wore his face. We killed the wrong one, we sealed the wrong door.'"Caelum's hands tightened on his knees. He forced them to relax, to be small, to be nine years old and not a king hearing his worst fears confirmed."The shadow," he whispered."She said it wore faces. That it wasn't the Demon King, but something that used him, used her, used all of us." Tomas looked at Caelum with ancient eyes. "She left something. Buried it, beneath the lilac roots, the year she died. I saw her plant it, was told to forget. I've tried, for sixty years."Caelum looked at the lilacs. The third from the east, with the split trunk. He had noted it, filed it, waited for the right time."What is it?""Don't know. Evidence, perhaps. Proof. Or just... a letter. An explanation." Tomas stood, joints creaking. "I told myself I'd wait for someone who asked the right questions. Who argued with her, like you do. Who saw something wrong in the story they tell."He began to leave, then paused."Don't dig yet. You're too young, and the ground is watched. Wait until you can explain why you're disturbing the garden. Wait until you're stronger.""I can be patient," Caelum said."Patience is survival," Tomas agreed. And he was gone, absorbed into the green shadows of his domain.Caelum sat alone with the statue and the weight of sixty years of waiting. He had confirmation now. Seraphina had known. Had tried to warn them. Had buried truth where only someone who argued with statues might find it.Check the grave, she had whispered in his dreams. He is not dead.Not Malphas's grave. Her own. The evidence she had planted, waiting for someone who would listen.He would wait. He was nine. He had time. The lilac would survive, the secret would survive, and he would become strong enough to claim it.He wrote to her that night, the letter different from the others.Someone else saw. Someone else knew. You were not alone in your seeing, and I am not alone in mine.I will wait. I will grow. I will become someone who can dig beneath your tree without being stopped, without being punished, without being called mad.Your grandson, patient,CaelumHe buried it with the others, beneath the loose stone, and he continued his waiting.
End of Chapter 6