Page 9 of Bought By the Manticore

I didn’t argue. After a full day on my back, I was ready to see what lay outside these walls.

The balcony opened onto Asphodelia, and I stopped in the archway.

The city spread below me, three or four stories down. It was nothing like the grim necropolis I’d imagined during my walk through the Blighted Lands. It was quiet, full of a strange beauty that I hadn’t been prepared for.

Black marble avenues ran between buildings of dark, polished stone. Bronze braziers lined the streets, their flames steady inthe windless twilight. Canals cut through the city, carrying sleek barges that glided on their own.

I gripped the railing and let myself look. I’d paid for this. A piece of me, cut away and swallowed by the lake. I still didn’t know if the trade was fair, if Iaso could find a real cure for my sickness. But the city was real, and that was more than I’d had when I crawled out of my cottage.

Then I looked down, and the flawless veneer of the city fell away.

Every surface I could see was covered in asphodels. The flowers climbed walls, choked brazier posts, spread in thick mats across the avenues. One of them had wrapped itself around a bronze pillar so tightly that the metal had begun to buckle.

I leaned forward and studied the growth the way Fera had taught me.Wild growth radiated outward from a root source.These asphodels didn’t do that. They moved in tendrils, reaching and probing, testing surfaces. The stems found the mortar between the stones and pried at the seams. Even as I watched, a fresh shoot crept along a windowsill across the canal and began to curl around the frame.

“Asphodels have been here since the land of the Thanatos-blessed appeared after the Shift,” Iaso said, stepping onto the balcony beside me. “They bloom the way we do, from the Moirae’s hands. The whole city feels their grace.”

I watched the shoot across the canal wrench a chip of stone loose from the window frame. “This doesn’t feel very graceful.”

“Lately, no.” Iaso folded her arms and leaned against the archway. “They’ve been spreading faster than anyone can account for. They’re more aggressive. We’ve been forced to send our best guardians to solve the problem.”

Below us, two figures were working in the densest patch of overgrowth. The first was a silver-haired giant, easily eight feet tall if not more, his body cast entirely in bronze. He carried a metallic sphere in each hand, moving through the flowers with a grace unusual for someone so massive.

The spheres glowed when he brought them close to the asphodels. The flowers began to unweave at their approach. The stems loosened. The petals separated. The physical form of each bloom came apart into threads of silver-blue energy that flowed into the spheres.

Just like that, where there had been a bloom, there was only bare stone.

The second figure was almost as large but covered in thick black fur. His head was wolven, heavy-muzzled, with pointed ears that swiveled as he worked. He moved through the overgrowth the way I’d seen farmhands clear fields, sweeping his death sphere in wide arcs that sent the asphodels unraveling in waves.

The flowers resisted. They snapped at the bronze figure’s hands, and he pried them off one by one with patient fingers before letting the spheres dissolve them. They coiled around the wolven one’s legs, and he shook them loose without slowing down.Behind them both, fresh stems pushed up from the cracks in the stone almost immediately.

The flowers kept growing back, kept reaching, kept being unmade, over and over in a futile and quietly terrible cycle.

“Who are they?” I asked Iaso, pointing at the two figures.

“Harvesters.” She watched them with a clinical familiarity that told me she’d been observing this for a while. “The bronze one is Aion. The other is Theron. They’re part of an elite unit. Normally, the asphodels don’t resist them like this.”

“They were strange at the auction too,” I said, thinking back to the corridor before the stage. “They followed me down the hall. Phix said they bite.”

“I say a lot of things, child,” a familiar voice cut in from my right. “Most times, none of you know how to listen.”

I jolted and spun around, coming face to face with the sphinx auctioneer.

She was sitting on the wide stone railing on the other side of the balcony. Her massive wings were folded against her flanks. I straightened and met those dark, ancient eyes. “I’m listening now. Thank you for carrying me off the stage.”

“You collapsed in the Agora.” She said it as casually as one might mention the weather. “Everyone who steps onto my stage is myresponsibility until they step off it. You simply required more assistance than most.”

I accepted that. Phix wasn’t a creature who wanted her kindness examined, and I wasn’t going to press the issue.

“I came to explain the circumstances in which you find yourself,” she continued, and her gaze drifted to the harvesters below. “You are a death-touched bride who entered my market. The auction was interrupted before a claim could be made. Under Asphodelian law, you are granted a period of recovery. When you are well, you will re-enter the market.”

The words were plain and clean. No malice, no softening. I let them settle before I asked the question I already knew the answer to.

“And if I don’t recover?”

“The grace period has no fixed length,” Iaso offered from beside me. Her hand hovered near my arm, not quite touching. “You will not be rushed, Ianthe. My infirmary is yours for as long as the treatment requires.”

“As long as I eventually go back on that stage,” I said.