Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 422

ARIA

"It assumes you're already a healer," I said. "Or have been working alongside one long enough to know the categories."

He turned to the third section and looked at it with the more appropriate focus of someone who'd found the relevant map.

We worked through the list. It took longer than it would have with just me, partly because finding things I wasn't familiar with required multiple checks against the book, and partly because Kael kept trying to be helpful with identifications that were wrong in instructive ways.

"This one," he said, at the fourth identification attempt.

I checked. "No," I said. "That one is mildly toxic if consumed."

He put it down.

"The silver-leafed compound specifically," I said, referring back to the list. "It should be near the secondary garden section, which is—" I checked the book's map, which Ivory had drawn herself in the back cover with the precise detail of someone who assumed the reader might be an idiot about geography, "—east of here, through the secondary gate."

"I know where the secondary garden section is," he said. "I've been in the pack grounds for—"

"Of course," I said.

We went through the secondary gate, which was a lower archway cut into the garden wall, and found the secondary section, which was smaller and denser than the main garden — the plants here more carefully spaced, more deliberately arranged, less decorative and more purposeful. The silver-leafed compound was immediately visible once we were inside: a medium-height plant with leaves that genuinely caught the light, the silver quality not reflective exactly but luminescent in the same way the nightbloom was, just in a different register.

I checked its condition against the book. Looking for the damage indicators Ivory had described — wilting at the leaf edges, discoloration in the silver quality, root exposure from impact.

It looked fine. Better than fine — the leaves had the full luminescence Ivory's notes described as optimal health status.

"She's alright," I said, to the plant, and then realized I'd said it to a plant and looked sideways to see if Kael had registered this.

He had, and he was doing the almost-not-smiling thing.

"The plants respond to voice," I said. "It's in the book. The resonance of certain sounds affects the root system's—"

"You were talking to the plant," he said.

"I was checking its status," I said.

"Out loud," he said. "To the plant."

"The book—"

"The book says to talk to them," he said, reading from the relevant section, which I hadn't actually found yet. "She's annotated this one too." He showed me the margin. Ivory's handwriting: *Voice resonance works best when you actually mean what you're saying, which is why I'm the only one who uses this method effectively. Everyone else sounds like they're doing a task. You have to sound like you care about the answer.*

I looked at the annotation.

"She expects the people reading this to sound like they care," I said.

"She's noted which ones she thinks will successfully meet this requirement," he said, turning the page to the next margin. Another annotation. A list of names. Mine was on it.

I looked at the list.

"When did she write this," I said.

He checked the date. "Three weeks ago," he said.

Three weeks ago. During the training sessions. She'd added my name to the list of people she thought could effectively use voice resonance with the botanical specimens, three weeks into sessions that she'd said were for pack resource reasons rather than personal ones.

I held the book for a moment.

"She's been paying attention," I said.

"She always pays attention," he said. "She just doesn't usually make it this legible."

The perimeter check came last. We went to the east back wall — the section where Alric Vesper had made his attempted entry, where the aggressive vines had delivered him to the gate with their particular brand of thoroughness. The evening light was going the long gold of late afternoon properly transitioning to dusk, and the wall in this light looked ordinary. Stone and mortar, the standard Shadowmere construction, with climbing plants along it that looked like decoration.

They didn't look like decoration once you knew what they were.

I consulted pages forty-seven through fifty-one and found the support compound instructions. The materials from the shed. Mixed them in the proportion the book specified, which required the clay pot the shed had also provided and a brief process that involved combining things in a specific order that Ivory had annotated with timing guidance.

Kael watched this with the specific attention of someone who was both observing and thinking about other things simultaneously.

"The three fingers," he said. Not loudly. The tone of something being said because the context had brought it up rather than because he'd planned to say it.

"The incident one," I said.

"He came back four times," he said. "Four separate attempts. After a healer took information from him and damaged his research and—" he stopped. "She took three of his fingers. She told it like it was incidental. Like the fingers were a side note."

"They were incidental to her," I said. "She was there for the research."

"He sent four groups after her," he said. "Four. Because of the fingers and the research."

"And she documented it," I said. "Color coded."

"Green tab," he said. "Green is medium threat."

"Medium," I said.

"The red tabs are highest threat," he said. "There are eleven red tabs in the folder." He was quiet for a moment. "None of them are incident one. She considered four separate assassination attempt groups to be medium threat."

I applied the support compound to the root base of the nearest aggressive vine, the way the book described, and checked the result against the description of what adequate application looked like.

"She has a different threat scale than most people," I said.

"Her threat scale," he said, "was calibrated against whatever the red tabs represent. Which means the red tabs are—"

"Things I haven't read yet," I said.

"Things I have read," he said. "In the folder." He didn't continue the sentence and I didn't push it, because the expression on his face when he said it was the one from the training complex wall.

We moved along the perimeter, me checking each vine and applying compound where the book indicated, Kael walking beside me with the dual quality of the afternoon — present in the garden, present in the folder simultaneously.

The water feature was in the secondary corner of the perimeter — a small pond that Ivory had included for specific botanical reasons involving the moisture requirements of the nightbloom and the secondary sedative compound, both of which grew better in proximity to standing water. The book had a section about its maintenance that was considerably more annotated than the other sections, which I was coming to understand meant Ivory spent more time here than in other parts of the garden.

I checked the pond's edge plantings for damage and found them undamaged, which was consistent with the attack having come over the wall further along rather than through this section.

I was crouched at the edge of the pond checking the root base of a nightbloom that had a slightly concerning leaf situation when my hand slipped on the mossy stone edge.

I caught myself. Just.

The water I'd displaced when my hand went in splashed upward and sideways and hit Kael's leg with the specific accuracy of water that had not been aimed at anything.

"Sorry," I said.

He looked at his leg.

Looked at me.

Looked at the pond.

"The moss on the edge," I said. "The book says to apply the—"

He flicked water at me.