file:J|sci-fiNieuwe%20mapKage%20Baker%20-%20The%20Queen%20in%20the%20Hill.txt by Baker Kage

Author:Baker, Kage
Language: eng
Format: epub

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The only thing I could do then was work, desperately, and how I loved my work for the peace it gave me. Can you understand? There was so much to do after the winter, but it wasn't enough; I paced out the area for the wonder I was going to make, Maeve's night-garden, and cut the terraces myself and laid the forms for the concrete retaining walls and the stairs and balustrades. I spoke at length with the Botanist Lord and we prepared seedlings, slips and shoots. There were fine big hedges and trees in pots, that could be moved on rollers to the locations I wanted and set in place, to shade my darling's pleasaunce as though they'd grown there thirty years. The Lord was impressed when he saw my designs.

But Maeve was not impressed, when I would come to the Infirmary in the evenings to tell her what file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Kage%20Baker%20-%20The%20Queen%20in%20the%20Hill.txt (7 of 12)16-2-2006 21:28:30

I'd been doing. Sometimes she seemed barely to remember me. Sometimes she was impatient and disdainful. Sometimes the Lord Aegeus was with her, chatting intimately when I'd come in, and he'd scold her when she was rude to me.

All the while our son kicked in her womb.

So in the morning I couldn't rise early enough, and the lawns had never been so perfectly in trim, and Maeve's own exquisite garden took on such form all the immortal Lords and Ladies came out of the mountain to wonder at it. They took me aside and told me how proud of me they were. They told me I was going to far surpass old Claude. They gave me commissions for designs, pot gardens for their private suites. I devised a way to build a running stream and ferny grotto in a sitting room for the Lord Marcus. I devised an arbor of roses black as ink, approached along a walk framed by black irises and black velvet pansies, for the Lady Ereshkigal. I devised an apple with the savor of Black Elysium Liqueur for the Lord Nathan. Immortals have eclectic tastes. But I had their respect, and that was a great consolation to me.

I was hard at work when our little boy was born. Lord Aegeus was with her.

It was the Lord Victor who came to me with the news. I was setting the framework of the arbor in place, down on my hands and knees packing in the earth with a maul, when I looked up and saw him there.

He was a cold-looking young man, Lord Victor, with his green eyes and his pointed red beard; so when I saw that coldness laid aside and real compassion in his eyes, I knew something terrible had happened. I scrambled to my feet.

He said, "Master Simeon, Maeve is delivered of a son." And I said, "Has she died?"

He shook his head. I said, "What is it, then?" and he cleared his throat before he answered me.

When he spoke it was with such delicacy, and such chill, and such anger I was almost more concerned for his discomfort than my own.

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