The uneasy truce held for two days.
It was a fragile thing, woven from Rowan’s grudging acceptance of Kael’s help and his own carefully constructed facade of a mild-mannered volunteer.
They worked in a state of charged silence, a bubble of awareness around them so potent that the usual chatter from other gardeners seemed to fade at its edges.
Rowan assigned him the most grueling, least glamorous tasks: turning the compost heap, hauling bags of mulch, weeding the stubborn crabgrass that crept in from the sidewalk.
She watched him from the corner of her eye, expecting him to complain or quit. He did neither.
He worked with an unnerving, silent efficiency, his movements economical and precise, his brow never breaking a sweat in the humid August air.
It was infuriating.
Liam’s warning echoed in her mind: He’s a ghost, Ro. No records, no history. He’s a plant. A corporate plant, sent by Vex to learn the garden’s weaknesses.
But the man hauling a wheelbarrow full of soil didn’t look like a spy.
He looked… solid. Grounded. His focus on the earth was absolute, and a traitorous part of her couldn’t help but admire it.
The trouble started, as it often did, with the roses.
Her ‘Brooklyn Belles,’ a variety she’d cultivated herself, were the undisputed queens of the garden. Their petals were the deep, velvety red of a theater curtain, their fragrance a heady mix of spice and honey.
They were her masterpiece, her bid for a blue ribbon at the upcoming borough botanical show.
But this morning, they were sick.
“No, no, no,” she whispered, her fingers hovering over a leaf. Where there should have been glossy green, there was a creeping blackness, an oily, web-like blight that seemed to drink the light.
The thorns on the stems looked longer, sharper, crueler than she remembered, tipped with a venomous-looking purple. She touched a petal, and it felt brittle, like old paper, crumbling to dust under her thumb.
Panic, cold and sharp, pricked her skin.
This wasn’t a normal fungus. Not black spot, not rust.
She’d seen it all, and this was alien. Wrong.
She spent an hour trying her trusted remedies—neem oil, a copper fungicide spray, even a desperate mix of baking soda and soap. Nothing worked.
The blight seemed to mock her efforts, spreading from one bush to the next as she watched.
Kael found her kneeling in the dirt, her shoulders slumped in defeat.
He’d been clearing stones from a new bed at the far end of the garden, but he must have sensed her distress.
Or perhaps, she thought bitterly, he was just here to document her failure for his Vex paymasters.
He stopped a few feet away. “What is it?”
“My roses,” she said, her voice tight. “Something’s killing them.”
Kael stepped closer, his shadow falling over her.
He crouched, his gaze fixed on the diseased leaves. Rowan watched his face, expecting to see the detached curiosity of a consultant. Instead, she saw a flicker of something else in his cool grey eyes.
Recognition.
And a cold, controlled anger.
His glamour couldn’t completely hide the shift in his posture.
He leaned forward, and for a split second, the air around him seemed to hum, the light bending just slightly.
He inhaled deeply, not through his nose, but as if tasting the air itself. Rowan blinked, shaking her head.
The humidity must be getting to her.
“This is not a natural pestilence,” he said, his voice a low murmur.
“Of course it is,” she snapped, her defensiveness rising. “It’s just… an aggressive new strain of something.”
He looked at her, and his gaze was so direct, so full of ancient knowing, that it stole the breath from her lungs. “No,” he said softly. “This is a wound. It’s deliberate.”
Before she could process the strange pronouncement, he was standing up, his mind clearly working. The Unseelie. Morwen.
This was a probe, a poisoned dart aimed at the garden’s heart to test its defenses. And its primary defender—Rowan—was armed with nothing but horticultural sprays.
The thought of her facing this dark magic alone sent a surge of fury through him so potent it almost cracked his human guise. He had to act.
“My grandmother… she was from the old country,” he began, the lie tasting like ash in his mouth. “She had remedies for things like this. Blights that defy modern science.”
Rowan’s eyes narrowed. “The old country? Liam said you didn’t have a history, let alone a grandmother from ‘the old country.’”
Kael kept his expression placid, a mask of calm he’d perfected over centuries. “Your friend is skilled with computers. My family has always preferred to keep to themselves. Some things aren’t found on the internet.”
He gestured to the roses. “Do you want to save them, or do you want to debate my ancestry?”
The ultimatum hung in the air. Her pride warred with the desperate love she had for her plants. Looking at the wilting Belles, she felt their silent pain like a physical ache in her own chest. Her love won.
“Fine,” she clipped out. “What do we do, witch doctor?”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “We need mint, lavender, and yarrow. And a stone mortar and pestle.”
They gathered the ingredients from the garden’s herb spiral.
Rowan watched as he selected the plants with an expert’s touch, choosing the most vibrant stalks of mint, the most fragrant lavender blooms.
In the potting shed, a cramped space that smelled of damp earth and fertilizer, he set the stone bowl on the workbench.
“Crush them,” he instructed. “All together. We need to release the essential oils.”
The shed was small, forcing them into a proximity that felt both suffocating and electric.
Rowan took the pestle, her knuckles brushing his as he steadied the bowl. Her skin tingled where they’d touched.
She ignored it, focusing her frustration and fear into the grinding motion. The herbs broke down, releasing a clean, sharp scent that filled the small space.
“Harder,” Kael urged, his voice close to her ear. “Bruise them until they weep.”
He placed his hand over hers on the pestle.
His palm was warm and surprisingly calloused, blanketing her hand completely.
A different kind of heat bloomed in her chest, confusing and unwelcome. Under his guidance, the grinding became more efficient, a steady, rhythmic pulse. As they worked, Kael closed his eyes.
He wasn’t just guiding her.
He was channeling a sliver of his own power, a thread of pure Seelie magic, into the poultice. He disguised it with the scent of the herbs, weaving the golden light of life into the green mash.
He could feel the garden’s own magic, the faint thrum of the Heartseed, responding to his call, recognizing a kindred energy.
The effort made his temples throb, but he pushed on, feeling the blight’s foul tendrils through the very soil beneath his feet.
When they were done, the bowl contained a thick, fragrant green paste. “Now we apply it,” he said, his voice a little strained.
They carried the bowl back to the rose beds. The blight had spread further, the black veins now crawling up the stems toward the remaining buds.
“You have to coat the base of the stem and the afflicted leaves,” Kael instructed. “Directly onto the plant.”
Rowan dipped her fingers into the cool paste.
It felt soothing against her skin. She knelt and began to gently massage the remedy onto the lowest leaves of the first bush.
Kael knelt beside her, mirroring her actions on the next. They worked in tandem, a silent, focused team. The shared, rhythmic work was almost meditative, breaking down the walls between them piece by piece.
She found herself watching his hands. They were strong, deft, moving with a reverence for the plant that she recognized because it was her own. He wasn’t some corporate stooge. No one could fake that kind of care.
The afternoon sun beat down, turning the garden into a humid sanctuary.
They were working on the final bush, their shoulders brushing, their breaths mingling with the scent of mint and ozone. Rowan reached for the last dollop of the paste in the bowl at the same time he did.
Their hands met.
It wasn’t a brush. It wasn’t static. It was a jolt, a blinding white-hot spark that leaped between their fingertips.
A current of pure energy shot up Rowan’s arm, making her gasp, the hair on her arms standing on end. For a dizzying second, the world dissolved into pure sensation: the smell of lightning, the taste of honey, the sound of a single, resonant bell chime.
She saw an image flash behind her eyes—a forest of silver trees under a twilight sky—and felt a profound, aching sorrow that was not her own.
Kael flinched back as if burned, snatching his hand away.
He stared at her, his grey eyes wide with shock, the carefully constructed mask of the human volunteer completely gone. In its place was the raw, unguarded astonishment of a Fae prince who had just touched a sun.
He had felt it too—not just his own Seelie magic arcing back at him, but her power, raw and untamed, rushing to meet it. It was the energy of the Heartseed, yes, but it was intrinsically, irrevocably her.
It was wild and green and fiercely protective, a force of nature sleeping in the veins of a Brooklyn botanist.
They both scrambled to their feet, putting space between them. The air crackled, thick with unspoken questions.
“What was that?” Rowan breathed, her heart hammering against her ribs. She rubbed her fingers, which still tingled with a phantom warmth.
Kael swallowed, his composure returning, but not before she saw the flicker of panic in his eyes. “Static,” he said, his voice rough. “The humidity.”
It was the most ridiculous, flimsy lie she had ever heard. They both knew it. That was no mere spark. It was a connection, a live wire they had stumbled upon in the dark.
She looked from his guarded face to the rose bush. The change was already visible. The oily blackness was receding from the edges of the leaves, like a shadow retreating from the dawn. A faint, golden-green light seemed to pulse from the stems where they had applied the poultice, a healthy, vital glow that was undeniably magical.
The remedy was working. His impossible, old-world remedy was saving her roses.
The pestilence was gone, but in its place, something far more dangerous had taken root.
Standing there in the golden afternoon light, surrounded by the scent of healing herbs and wet earth, Rowan looked at the stranger in her garden and felt a terrifying bloom of her own—a tangled, thorny thing mixing suspicion, gratitude, and a bewildering, potent attraction.
And Kael, Prince of the fading Silverwood, looked at the mortal woman whose power had just answered his, and knew with chilling certainty that his mission, his duty, and his heart were all in calamitous, undeniable peril.