The Night King by Dyan Chick

Author:Dyan Chick [Chick, Dyan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Illaria Publishing
Published: 2020-01-19T16:00:00+00:00

17

Skylar

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Vera,” she says. “Are you really a master gardener?”

I laugh. “No.”

“Oh, gods,” her eyes widen, “they’re going to kill us, aren’t they?”

“What?” I blink a few times shake my head. “What the hell kind of place is this? Do you really think they’d send us out here to kill us?”

She shrugs. “I suppose they’d probably do it in the dungeon.”

“Is that a concern here?” I ask. “Killing servants?”

Her brow furrows and she looks at me as if I’m a creature she’s never seen before. Maybe I am. She’s probably never seen a human that remembers what it’s like to live away from here. Especially one that knows what freedom tastes like.

“Look, I’m new here,” I say.

“I heard about you,” she says. “You’re the one that says she was raised in the human realm.”

“Word travels fast around here,” I grumble. The kitchen servants are pissed that I got Gorrie injured and sent away. I have a feeling I’ve got a target on my back but I’m not sure what that means.

“So we’re really out here to make the garden better?” she says.

“I guess,” I say.

“I was little during the last sunrise, but I’m pretty sure you need it for most plants to grow,” she says.

“I thought you needed it for all plants to grow. So how are these still alive?” I gesture to the tangled mess of vines and leaves and other foliage. “It doesn’t make sense. In fact, none of this does. Without sunlight, it should be freezing and desolate. Nothing should survive. I mean, I’m not a scientist, but I think that’s how it works.”

Vera laughs. “You really are new here.”

Her laugh is contagious. I can tell she’s not mocking me, she’s finding joy in my words. Like one would with a child. “Hey, tell me about it.”

“About what?” she asks, wiping a tear from her cheek.

“The last sunrise. Why it’s dark. How things are growing. How things are living at all. I want to know all of it,” I say. “Teach me.”

She cocks her head as she considers my words. “Alright. Let me see. I was young when it happened. But I remember it like it was yesterday. One night, the sun set and it never came back up. It was terrifying. For a while, we questioned if we were stuck or if we’d all somehow slept through the day. But the longer it wore on, it became clear it was just gone.”

“What made it go away? Was there a super nova or something?” I knew very little about astronomy. Was there a way for a sun to die off and leave a planet without one? Am I on a different planet? Holy shit, this is getting weirder by the minute.

“It’s a curse,” she says. “It took a while to figure it out, but the old king discovered that it wasn’t just us. All the courts were cursed. We used to be the summer court, you know. It was warm all the time. We never ran out of food from our fields.

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