Verity had read up on the other Chosen of Xuphin, trying to understand what it meant. One of the most important Chosen of Xuphin was an ectad engineer who was responsible for discovering a stabilizing agent that could be used to nearly triple the lifetime of ectads. Another had worked on advancements in land reclamation, expanding territory out into the seas. A third had been the architect on the largest building in Dondrian. That was Xuphin: big, splashy, expansive, always more, driving toward the impossibility of infinity. Yet some of his Chosen seemed to be nothing more than tradesmen or teachers, simple, unchallenging roles. Still, there was an expectation that came with being Chosen—and a prestige.
Whatever doors had been closed to Verity before, they were now opened. She had offers to play with all sorts of people, and for all sorts of people, enough that at sixteen she had her own wealth separate from her parents. She was given special attention at the conservatory from all kinds of people who wanted to have the distinction of having helped her, or at least being able to say that they had. A few times, she played enormous concert halls.
And through it all, Verity felt that she wasn’t making her best music. She would play and people would preen, but her magic was weaker than most adult bards, and the praise of the bardic masters toward her musical ability seemed tainted by the fact that she was Chosen, destined for greatness in some capacity, if she didn’t end up becoming nothing instead.
She had done some work to set her affairs in order before leaving. She’d talked to the Church of Xuphin, which had tried to convince her to stay, and she’d talked to her parents, who had demanded that she stay, but she was seventeen, the age of majority, and no one had the authority to stop her. She left in the dead of the night, leaving a note behind but not saying where she was going.
Alfric surely knew all of this. Her status as a prodigy and god-favored was surely why he had sought her out. It wasn’t clear what Alfric thought she would do for Xuphin or Infinity, but presumably he thought she would do something. There were infinidungeons, she knew, not places with four or five rooms like the one in Pucklechurch, but the kind that were so deep you would never get to the bottom of them, if they had a bottom at all. There were dungeons in the heart of Dondrian that had fortifications built around them and which you couldn’t attempt without all manner of mages standing guard outside and a chrononaut to undo it in case something somehow got out. Perhaps that was Alfric’s ultimate goal. Well, if it was, Verity would simply refuse. She had been doing perfectly well pretending that she wasn’t Chosen, and it wasn’t like Xuphin or his church had any particular mandate or expectation for her.
“Strawberry hair / strawberry fair,” Verity tried, strumming her lute. “Strawberry wares, and strawberry prayers.” The lyrics were getting worse as her thoughts drifted away from the music. Sometimes the songs came easily and freely, as it had when leaving that first dungeon, and other times it was like she was stuck in the mud.
“I live in a garden, abandoned so long, I sit on the ground, and I sing my sad song, but with time, the garden, shall rise up anew, and at least, in my sadness, I’ll have a nice view.” Verity sighed and set the lute back into its case.
“All right, garden,” she said to the plants. “It’s time to start getting you into shape.”
With some time to take it all in, the garden wasn’t quite as bad as Verity had thought. There were almost certain to have been casualties of neglect, but they had likely died early on, and what was left were cultivated plants hardy enough to survive and a number of weeds that had put deep roots into the rich, loamy soil.
Different areas of the garden had clearly been kept for different purposes. Close to the house, there was a large, wide pot in a place of prominence, where purple-headed chives were fighting with a thick, dark mint. If it had ever been home to other herbs, they had been consumed in the war between those two plants, which now seemed to be in a stalemate.
Further from the house, but still in a part of the garden where stone tiles dominated, there were a number of raised beds that Verity imagined had been for flowers, or perhaps decoration of some other kind, though it was hard to tell what was weed and what wasn’t. There were benches on the stone tile and an area with what appeared to be a firepit, though there was no wood anywhere nearby. Most likely, Verity would have to find a guide to local plants and pull everything that could be positively identified as a weed, but given what Mizuki had said about the history of the house, it seemed possible that some of these plants originated in Kiromo, and she didn’t want to pull anything that couldn’t be replaced.
Beyond the patio area of the garden, where most of the decorative elements were, she found a fairly large patch of ground that had clearly once been a fruit and vegetable garden. The most obvious survivors were tomatoes and possibly some potatoes, along with onions that looked like they had gone feral and, aside from those, a strawberry patch that surely had killed some other plants in the course of its expansion, with runners going outside the stone edging. It was a quite large plot, large enough that Verity thought that during times of harvest it would have overflowed the house with food. She found it interesting, in a way, to look at a garden like this, one that had sat untouched for perhaps five years. To know what to do with the space, Verity had to determine what someone else had planned. There was archaeology, of a sort, to be done. It would take some careful work to see what could be salvaged and what needed to be tossed out.
Finally, beyond the garden plot, other plants surrounded the house, though these seemed in better condition, if in need of pruning and care. There were also a number of trees, some of them clearly foreign, or at least nothing like Verity had seen during her long trip to Pucklechurch or even in Dondrian.
Gardening was different in Dondrian, and not just because of the warmer climate. Verity’s home was in the city, rather than being a country estate, and they had to make do with a greenroom that jutted out from the third floor. Verity had loved the greenroom, especially in winter, when the sun came in through the glass ceiling and walls to heat the place up, and it took on a bit of swampiness without the normal airflow from outside. It was one of the only places you could get properly humid in the winter, and the smell of leaves and soil on top of that was all the better. Of course, Dondrian winters were mild, graced with snow once in a blue moon, so the texture of it was different. In Dondrian, you could garden almost year-round, though their grounds had been quite small.
This kind of garden, in the backyard of Mizuki’s large house, was altogether different. The plants weren’t in neat little pots like back in the greenroom. There were weeds everywhere, which Verity had only occasionally had to deal with in her greenroom, usually from a batch of soil that hadn’t been properly cleaned. The plants here were subject to the winds and the rains, their water not carefully administered by a small, weak waterstone. There was, perhaps, something to like in the wildness on display, but there were so many complications that came with the true outdoors that Verity couldn’t say that it was what she would have chosen.
As with most things, a huge and daunting project could be made a lot simpler by taking it in pieces. Verity focused on the large pot next to the house that held the herbs, which was the smallest element of the rambling, overgrown garden and the most like what she had known back in Dondrian. She was searching around to see if there was, perhaps, a survivor of the war between the chives and mint that could be nursed back to health when Mizuki came back from town.