Page 179

I leaned down and kissed him. He pulled me into his lap. I won't describe everything that happened afterward. I'll only say that my father's study had a door that locked, Guy's old injury had finally healed, and neither of us felt particularly inclined to apologize for how we spent the evening.

The garden was the first thing I restored.

Before the roof.

Before the stables.

Before any of the repairs Little John insisted were more urgent. He'd made a point of mentioning that decision several times.

I ignored him.

Two workers and I spent four days clearing the paths, cutting back the lavender, and removing years of weeds.

The plants had grown wild, and we'd needed to cut some of them back so severely that they probably wouldn't look particularly beautiful the following summer.

But they'd recover.

By the year after, I expected the lavender to be glorious. We uncovered the old gravel paths. The nettles and dock were removed from the herb beds.

And whenever I walked through the garden, the scent of lavender rose around my boots. It smelled like my grandmother.

It smelled like home. Guy found me there at sunset on the last day of that week. He'd been helping Little John review the repairs and still had ink on his fingers from the accounts. We walked together toward the old yew tree, where the garden met the family burial ground. I took my grandmother's compass from beneath my shirt.

The brass had darkened with age, and a fine crack ran across one corner of the glass.

But the needle still worked.

I turned it over in my palm.

Guy looked down. "Are you going to keep wearing that?"

"Of course."

"Even now that it's led you where you needed to go?"

I smiled. "Especially now."

He slipped his hand into mine. I looked at the compass again. I remembered my grandmother standing in the kitchen passage on the day Fitzwalter's soldiers arrived.

Her hands had shaken so badly she'd dropped the compass twice before managing to place it in mine.

I remembered the sound of horses on the drive.

The fear in her eyes.

And the words she'd told me to remember.

Roots hold when kingdoms fall.

For so long, I'd thought she meant I should hold on to everything I'd lost. I'd believed surviving meant refusing to settle anywhere, refusing to trust anyone, and never allowing myself to build something that could be taken away again.

I'd been sixteen and frightened.

Those beliefs had kept me alive.

I couldn't regret them.

But standing there in her garden, with Guy beside me and the house slowly coming back to life, I finally understood.