The Glass Garden

CHAPTER ONE: Behind the Water

Iris had followed the stream further than she meant to.

She had meant to go as far as the bend, where the flat stones made good stepping places, but the stream had curved and curved again, and the trees had grown taller and closer, and the sound of the water had changed from a cheerful rushing to something lower and steadier and more interesting.

Then she heard a different sound: not the stream, but something bigger — a wide, deep pouring. She followed it around a bend in the bank, through a curtain of hanging ferns, and stopped.

A waterfall. Not enormous, but full — a wide, steady sheet of white water falling from a lip of mossy stone into a pool below. The spray caught the light and made small rainbows.

And behind the falling water, she could see something.

Something that didn't look like stone or moss. Something that caught the light differently — in colours: deep amber, bright blue, pale green, rose.

Iris found a path of wet stones that ran along the edge of the pool and behind the waterfall. She went carefully. The spray was cool on her face. And then she was through, and she was standing in the garden.

CHAPTER TWO: The Gardener

The garden was not large, but it held more than it should have.

Every plant was made of glass — not fragile glass but a living kind, with colours that moved slowly through them the way light moves through water. The roses were amber and crimson. The ferns were deep green and clear. There were mushrooms of pale lilac glass clustered around the base of a blue stone tree, and small glass birds sat in its branches with their glass feathers folded, and if you looked at one long enough you could see its tiny chest rising and falling.

A glass fox sat at the far end of the garden, its head tilted at the exact angle of an animal listening. Its eyes were topaz.

Iris walked slowly through it all, not touching anything, just looking.

She found the gardener by the blue tree.

He was a boy about her age, with quiet eyes and muddy boots — the only muddy thing in the whole garden. He was using a small glass tool to tend the roots of a glass flower she didn't know the name of.

He looked up at her without surprise.

"You found it," he said.

"I didn't know I was looking," said Iris.

"Nobody does," he said. "That's why they're always the right ones."

His name was Cael. He had been tending the garden since he was very small. His grandmother had brought him here once and shown him how — which plants liked more light, which needed the cool mist near the waterfall, how to tell when a glass bird was content.

"Can they break?" said Iris, looking at the fox.

"They can," said Cael. "But not easily. And if they do, I can mend them." He showed her a thin glass rod he kept in his pocket. When he touched a chip in the stone tree's bark with it, the glass sealed smooth.

Iris sat on the grass beside him and watched him work, and the light through the waterfall moved all through the garden and the glass colours shifted slowly from moment to moment and it was the most beautiful and ordinary thing she had ever seen.

CHAPTER THREE: Something to Come Back For

She stayed until the light outside the waterfall went golden.

Cael had shown her everything by then: the glass bees that moved slowly between the glass flowers and carried something that was not quite pollen but served the same purpose; the pond at the back where glass fish caught the light and made small patterns on the water's surface; the single glass lantern that hung from the blue tree and always burned, though there was nothing inside it to burn.

"Does anyone else know this is here?" said Iris.

"A few," said Cael. "The ones who follow the stream far enough." He paused. "It's better with someone to show it to. I forget to look properly on my own."

Iris thought about this. "I could come back," she said. "If that would be all right."

Cael considered. He didn't smile immediately, but something settled in his expression — the way a glass bird settles when it finds a branch it likes.

"On Tuesdays the light comes through the waterfall at the best angle," he said. "Between midday and two o'clock."

Iris filed this away carefully.

She went back along the edge of the pool and through the curtain of spray and out into the ordinary forest, which looked exactly as it always had — the same stream, the same tall trees, the same path home. But something was different now in the way she looked at it.

She walked home slowly, noticing things: the particular green of a lichen-covered stone, the way the last sunlight caught the high leaves and turned them briefly golden. The world had always been doing this. She had just not been paying full attention.

She would come back on Tuesday.