“Why roses?” Kara asked.
“Why not?” he said lightly as he mixed potting soil with his favorite concoction of rose food.
“Why not orchids or daisies or geraniums?” Her voice was thoughtful. “My mother has a greenhouse, and she grows all sorts of flowers.”
“I have many different flowers here,” he told her. “And I grow vegetables.”
“Most of the greenhouse—all of this room and half of the other one are all roses,” she said.
He opened his mouth to give her the easy answer, the one he used for everyone. He knew roses. It was better to be an expert in one thing than a dabbler in dozens. But he thought better of it.
“We all know about your trouble, do we not?” he said. “Your life has been spread out for total strangers—even though we are pack, we are still, right now, strangers—to look at and make judgement calls. You are not allowed secrets anymore—and we all should have things that we may keep to ourselves.”
Her mouth tightened. “It’s okay. Hard to hide that my parents are separated because my mother is scared of me, and my father is mad at her about it. Hard to hide what I am.”
“All true,” Asil said. “But here I think you need some secrets in return. So I will tell you something about me that no one else knows.”
“Okay.” She hesitated. “But what if I forget it’s a secret and tell someone?”
“It is not a harmful thing,” he said. “Only a tender thing that is hard for me to talk about. You are welcome to shout it on the streets—though I would rather you did not.”
She nodded.
“I am very old, and once I had a mate,” he told her. “She was everything to me. I would have filled her arms with jewels or gold if I could have. I would have destroyed the world for her—I was young and dramatic, you understand.”
Kara’s eyes widened. “You meant that. That you would have destroyed the world for her—it wasn’t just exaggeration. The Marrok is teaching me to smell when people lie or tell the truth.”
He gave her a formal nod. “Indeed. Being dramatic does not mean you do not have honest intentions. But destroying the world would not have saved her. She said, once, shortly before she died, that roses smelled like happiness. Whenever she smelled a rose, she thought of the day we met.” He brought a bloom up to his nose. “And after she told me that, I also think of that day when I smell roses.”
He cleared his throat and brought their conversation out of murky water. “And it is also true that with roses I am a genius, there are no others who breed roses such as mine. Why would I not choose to share my genius with others?”
“Okay,” she said. “And I won’t tell anyone the other reason. It is private.”
She was not a chatterer. The rest of the afternoon she worked quietly at whatever task he gave her. Someone, probably her mother, had taught her that, which made her more useful than he expected.
When Devon came, as he did sometimes, she didn’t look at the ragged old gaunt wolf or talk to him—though she kept a little closer to Asil than she had been. Devon settled on the ground with a sigh and didn’t look at Asil or Kara, either.
Devon was not as old as Asil, but like Asil, he was on his last years. If Asil were being honest, which he didn’t always choose to be, Devon was a lot closer to the end than he was. In all the time Asil had been in Montana, he’d never seen Devon use his human form. Like Asil, he sometimes shadowed the pack’s moon hunt, but he never participated. Devon’s presence in the pack spiritual weaving was dark and murky.
Several years ago, he’d started to come to Asil’s greenhouse. Usually, he’d sleep for an hour or two, but with Kara there, he just curled up and rested. His head turned away from them both.
“Bran says,” Asil told Kara as they began to clean up, “that all wolves need company. Devon is worried that he’ll hurt someone, so mostly he stays by himself. Me?” He told her grandly. “I am the Moor. He does not have to worry about hurting me. So he comes here.”
Devon got up, shook himself forcefully, stretched—and then gave Asil a look.
Asil raised his eyebrows and opened the door so the wolf could leave. When he was gone, Asil looked at Kara, who was biting her lip nervously. He’d scared her again, and he meant only to twit Devon.
“Because I like you,” he told her, “and because he cannot hear me, I’ll let you in on the real reason Devon comes here. He was once a gardener almost as good as I.” Devon, under a different name, had grown roses that rivaled Asil’s own a hundred years ago. “The Alice Vena rose in the corner”—he gave her a mock-disappointed look—“the burgundy rose next to the ‘stripy’ ones, as you call them. That Alice Vena descends from one of his roses. Devon misses his flowers and comes here to remember.”
That was true—and Devon would probably rather not have anyone but Asil know it. But it was also true that if Asil had not been so much more dominant, or if Asil had been the least bit afraid of him, Devon could not come for his little visits without risk of bloodshed. But Kara would be safer if she thought Devon was just here for the roses. Fear was not useful when keeping company with the oldest of the wolves. And Kara’s safety had become important to him.
“You will come here to me tomorrow,” Asil said as she put her coat back on. “Bring your schoolbooks, and you can teach me what they are doing in school since I was last in a schoolroom—which was several centuries ago. We shall make breakfast and prepare my outdoor gardens for the cold that is coming. You shall do this until after the moon is done with her singing, yes?”
“All right,” she said.
“Do you need a ride home?” he asked her. “There are no school buses from here.”
“I’m staying at the Marrok’s house until he finds a better situation for me.”
Asil grimaced in sympathy. “Let me know if Leah troubles you.”
Kara frowned at him. “She’s been very kind.”
“Really?” Asil took the notion of kindness and the Marrok’s mate and tried to put them in the same room together, but they wouldn’t fit. Maybe she had other rules when she dealt with children? He found that unlikely. “If that changes, feel free to let me know. In the meantime, I will give you a ride today—and you can catch the school bus in the morning and run here from school.”