They just looked at him, too stunned to speak.
The youngest Landscaper wrapped her arms around herself. “The school is gone. We can’t go back to our gardens. How are we supposed to take care of Ephemera if we’re all alone?”
“You are not alone,” Yoshani said, looking at each of them in turn. “You have each other. So you find a place where you can build again, begin again.” And hope the Eater of the World does not find you again. “Come. I will escort you to the bridge that, I believe, will still be able to take you back to your landscapes.”
Glorianna kept her eyes fixed on the koi pond. She wanted to go back to the Island in the Mist and wrap herself in the comfort of solitude. But she sat on the bench and watched the koi while waiting for Lee to find her.
Except it was Yoshani who sat down on the bench and watched the golden fish.
“Where is Lee?” Glorianna asked, her voice husky from the storm of tears that had broken inside her after she’d run from the guesthouse.
“He has gone to spend a little time with Sebastian,” Yoshani replied.
“But…” She pushed down the feeling of disappointment. Lee had to be upset about that meeting. He was entitled to venting in whatever way he chose.
“I suggested he leave for a little while,” Yoshani said. “As close as you are to your brother, I think there are some things that you cannot say to him.”
Glorianna didn’t answer, so they sat together and watched the koi.
“Heart wishes are the most powerful magic that exists in our world,” she finally said. “They can reshape the world, cause a cascade of events.”
“Is it not true that any heart wish, no matter how powerful, can be thwarted by another heart wish that alters or disrupts that cascade of events?” Yoshani asked. When she didn’t respond, he added, “What is it you fear, Glorianna Dark and Wise?”
Fear. Yes, there were things she couldn’t discuss with a brother—or a mother. But here, now…
“I’ve known for sixteen years that I was different,” she said softly. “I’ve known I wasn’t like the other Landscapers, even before I was declared rogue. But I’ve wanted to be one of them. I’ve wanted to belong and have friends and people who would understand the challenges and frustrations of being a caretaker of the world.” She hesitated, then pushed on to the thing that had to be said. “Did I cause this, Yoshani? Did my own yearning to belong ripple through the currents of the world and set all this in motion, freeing the Eater and destroying the school so that the survivors would need to see me as one of them?” Tears welled up, stinging her eyes before they flowed down her cheeks. “Did I do this?”
“Glorianna, I say this with honesty and with the love of a friend.” Yoshani took her hand in both of his and leaned toward her. “You are being a conceited ass.”
She blinked at him, trying to see him clearly through the tears.
“Did you free the Eater of the World?” he asked.
“Maybe I—”
“Did you go to the school and set that evil free?”
“No, but—”
“Did you deliberately, and with malice, use your influence over Ephemera to cause whatever was done to set the Eater free?”
“No.” Using her free hand, she wiped the tears off her face.
“Let me tell you a story about the world.”
“I don’t think there’s time for a story,” Glorianna said, feeling surly. He had called her a conceited ass. What kind of help was that?
“There is time for this one.” Yoshani released her hand, braced a foot on the bench, and wrapped his arms around the upraised knee. “I wasn’t a bad man, more of a youth whose wildness could have led him down a dark road. If there had been a place like the Den of Iniquity in those days, I might have chosen a very different life.”
Glorianna studied him. “Teaser still gets hysterical when your name is mentioned.”
Teaser was an incubus who lived in the Den and was Sebastian’s closest friend. When she had gone to Wizard City to trap the Dark Guides, Yoshani had returned to the Den with Teaser to help that landscape remain balanced. The incubus was still having trouble accepting the fact that a man who lived in a Place of Light had been comfortable—had enjoyed—visiting the Den of Iniquity.
Yoshani smiled. “As I told him many times during my visit, I was not always a holy man.”
“So why did you become a holy man?”
“Because of you.”
Glorianna didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to think, what to feel.
“My wildness was making things difficult for my family. At the core of that wildness was anger. Within my extended family there were several professions I could have chosen, several trades I could have apprenticed in. But none of them touched my heart, and in my own way I fought against being yoked into a life I wasn’t meant to live.
“Finally my grandfather took me aside and told me I had a choice: I could go up the mountain and live in the community that served the Light and remain a member of the family, or I could continue my wild ways alone, shunned by all who had loved me. If at the end of three years I had not found my place or my purpose with the Light, I could come home and take up my old ways with no familial penalty.
“So for three years I worked in the community and studied with the elders and tried to find my purpose in the Light. And every day I prayed that something or someone would show me what, in my heart, I knew I was missing.
“And then you appeared one day, a girl from a strange part of the world, trying to make herself understood. The elders decided that you suffered from a sickness of the heart, a…poisoning. I was twice your age, and most unwilling, but the elders assigned me the task of staying with you as you wandered the land that made up our holy place. So I followed you through our gardens, through the fields and woods. Then you stopped suddenly, lifted your face to the sky, closed your eyes…and drank peace. I watched the Light fill you, felt it rejoice in the vessel, saw you bloom like a plant responds to rain after a dry spell.
“I watched, and I felt something shift in my heart. I understood the kind of work I could do in the world—helping others find that pool of calm, that moment of peace when they can truly hear the wishes of their own hearts and see the paths that are open to them for their life’s journey. Because I was asked to watch over you, I found my place in the Light.”
“If I hadn’t gone to your community that day, the Dark Guides would have succeeded in sealing me in my garden at the school,” Glorianna said. After a silence that seemed to fill the world, she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me this story before?”
“Until we became friends and trusted each other enough to talk about delicate matters, I didn’t know how you, as a Landscaper, saw the world around you. After I began to understand how you saw the world, it never felt like the right time to tell you this story. Until today. So now I will ask you, Glorianna Dark and Wise. Were my prayers, my heart wish, the reason Ephemera created a way for you to reach my part of the world? If they were, am I to blame for the sorrows in your life?”
“No, of course not,” Glorianna said. “We make a hundred choices every day, and each of those choices, no matter how trivial, changes the landscapes we live in just a tiny bit. Enough tiny changes can change a person’s resonance and open up another landscape as the next part of their life’s journey.”
“Or close a landscape?” Yoshani asked gently.
She nodded. “Sometimes people cross a bridge and never find the way back to a landscape they had known because they have outgrown that place. They have nothing to offer that landscape, and it has nothing to offer them.”
“And sometimes when they reach that point, they know it is time to leave.” Yoshani took her hand again. “You reached that point today. I think, in your heart, you never truly left the school. I think that by holding on to a landscape that was not yours, you denied your own heart’s attempts to manifest a heart wish.” He gave her hand a little squeeze. “You spoke the truth, Belladonna. You are not like them. You never were. Let them go. They have their own journey. It’s time for you to look for the people who are like you.”