Page 156 of Artemysia
My own words come back to haunt me.Love doesn’t last, not with death hunting us down.
Death—victorious and conquering.
“Love isn’t a weakness,” Throg says softly, as if reading my mind. He places his large hand on my shoulder.
“Love is worth shit,” I throw back at him, angrily shaking him off.
His blonde brow arches at my harsh words—words I never use. He doesn’t reply. Perhaps this time, he sees that I am right.
“Nothing I did made a difference. Someone I cared about still died,” I wail out.
Throg doesn’t look away.
He wipes one side of my face with the back of his broad hand. More tears replace the ones he erases.
“You two saved South Kingdom. The Syf will stay away from the river until they figure out how to clean it or cure it. The attacks onhumans will stop.”
“In the end, he got his escape.” I can’t say his name out loud without crying again. I’m furious at the world. At the injustice of it all.
“Poor soul,” Throg echoes. “It’s fucking wrong.”
I kick out at the grass in front of me, and a clump of dandelion weeds goes flying.
I glare scornfully at the banks of the river. The river of death. I hate that it rushes by, oblivious to the destruction it brings with it.
Small blue flowers dot the edges of the water where it laps up onto shore.
Delphinium. The small poisonous flower I’m named after. They reminded my mother of her idyllic childhood growing up by the West River.
Prince Toryl said nothing blooms anymore along the river. He’s right. Nothing grows along the banks, not even the green dandelion puffs that are able to sprout between cobblestones.
Nothing—except the light blue delphinium, the color of a robin’s egg.
No other plants survive along the banks.
Delphinium.
I survived.
But I’m poison. I live on, while those around me die. How am I making a difference in the world when I can’t keep those I care about alive?
I push off the log and walk toward the water. The delphiniums aren’t affected by the river water.
Perhaps…because the flowers themselves are poison?
You burn like poison in my veins. Riev’s dark words of desire strike at my heart.
But…
Delphinium. Is it immune then? Unaffected by the runoff? It blooms, while other flowers die.
“Elphie, did you hear me? Let’s head back,” Throg hollers after me. “What are you doing?”
I recall Ivy’s reason for killing her commander.
We saw a Syf child feeding on flowers by the East River. She fell in when she saw us, and I fished her out.
Ivy never said the child was rabid. She’d been consuming flowers by the river.
