Sweep of the Blade by Ilona Andrews

Author:Ilona Andrews
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter 10

Lady Ilemina had decided to take her lunch in the Small Garden. Small, Maud decided, as she walked down the stone path, was relative.

The Small Garden occupied roughly four acres atop a tiny mesa that thrust out of the living rock of the mountain. There were several such mesas on the grounds and the castle simply grew around them, incorporating them into its structure. Some supported towers, others provided space for utility areas or other parks. Her personal unit informed her that there was a larger garden, imaginatively titled the Large Garden, almost twice the size of the small one, also the High Garden, the Low Garden, the Silver Garden, the River Garden… She stopped reading after that.

Vampires loved nature, but where on Earth a garden meant a carefully cultivated space, organized, planned, and often offering a variety of plants from all over the place, a vampire garden was basically a chunk of preserved wilderness. It was a carefully tended wilderness, pruned, managed, and well loved, but every plant in it was natural to the area. The vampire gardeners planted extra flowers and encouraged picturesque shrubs and native herbs, but it would never occur to them to transplant flowers from one continent to another. If they saw a Chinese butterfly bush in a British garden among the native daisies and marigolds, they would’ve pulled it out as a weed.

The exception was the vala trees. The Holy Anocracy brought them to every planet it colonized.

The garden around Maud showcased the best this biozone had to offer. Tall trees with narrow turquoise leaves and pale bark rose on both sides of the path. Their roots lay partially exposed and knotted together as if someone had taken cypress knees and decided to try their hand at macramé. Under the roots, delicate lavender and blue flowers bloomed in clusters, with five petals each and a spray of long stamens. The flowers glowed slightly, their leaves shimmering with a nacre sheen. A frilly shrub, emerald green, its leaves tinged with brighter green, crowded around the roots. Between the trees, where more sun penetrated through the canopy, more flowers bloomed. Tall stems supported narrow blossoms, shaped like rose-colored champagne flutes stuffed to the brim with a wealth of white petals. Translucent blossoms, as big as her head, spread their tissue thin petals, each petal a faint blue marked with a bright red vein running through it middle and meeting in the flower’s glowing golden center. Long spikes, shivering with yellow tendrils, dripped glittering pollen on to their neighbors’ leaves. The air smelled of spice and sweet perfumes.

Dina would have a field day here.

The path ended in a large circle. A stream ran in a ring, sectioning off the center of the path into a round island. A single vala tree grew in the circle, not one of the massive thousand-year old giants, but a more recent planting. Its trunk was barely four feet wide. It spread its dark branches bearing blood red leaves over the

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