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Terlu didn’t mention it was the one she’d picked out for herself.

Clearly Yarrow’s offer of any cottage she wanted didn’t stand anymore, now that the original owners were back.

She was surprised how pleased she was at that.

She wondered how he felt about having a more-permanent roommate.

He hadn’t mentioned fixing up the other cottages since that first day, so she liked to think he’d be fine with it.

I should ask instead of just hoping he’s okay with it.

He’d probably just shrug, though.

Or maybe he’d say it was warmer.

She wondered if he knew about Laiken’s ghost.

“When did you last see your brother?” Terlu asked. “I mean, before yesterday.” And the follow-up question: Why hadn’t Rowan stayed on Belde too, with her father and brother? Yarrow had been clear that it was just him and his father at the end.

“Five years ago? Six? My aunt and uncle wanted help in their florist shop, and Dad thought it would be a good opportunity… Aunt Rin and Uncle Ubri offered to send me to the university, and I always wanted that.”

“As it turned out, she already knew more than most of her class,” Ambrel said with a fond smile. “That’s how we met. I was assigned to tutor her, to bring her up to speed with the rest of the first years, but she didn’t need my help.” She caressed her wife’s cheek fondly.

“I did need your help,” Rowan said. “Just not with classes.”

Ambrel grinned broader. “Zero sense of fashion.”

“I knew how to dress to work in a greenhouse,” Rowan said. “But in Alyssium…”

Terlu remembered when she’d first arrived in the capital city.

It had been overwhelming to view the wide array of what people wore.

It only clicked with her when she realized that it was its own kind of language.

What clothes people chose communicated what they expected of their day, what they thought of themselves, and how they wished others to react to them.

She’d been delighted to discover that librarians wore a standard kind of tunic but had the freedom to adapt it however they’d liked.

She took to wearing brightly colored ribbons that reminded her of the bright birds and fruits and people of Eano.

It occurred to her that the clothes Yarrow had provided her probably originally belonged to Rowan or one of his other relatives. She hoped they didn’t want them back. She had no interest in wearing her old librarian tunic. That wasn’t who she was anymore.

“On our first day off from classes, I took her shopping,” Ambrel said.

“You bought me a scarf. Prettiest thing I’d ever seen.”

“For the prettiest thing I’d ever seen,” Ambrel said.

Rowan smiled as if her wife was the sun, the moon, and every star, and Terlu caught herself about to sigh in envy.

She wanted to be looked at in that way, with so much trust and faith and joy.

“It was decorated with flowers and vines that reminded me of the greenhouses, and Ambrel guessed that—she knew I was homesick and wanted me to have a piece of my past that also fit into my future.”

Ambrel smiled back at Rowan with just as much adoration.

“I wore that scarf at our wedding,” Rowan said.

“And now we’re here,” Ambrel said, “back where you came from, and I want to see and experience everything that made you you, except the clothes. I do not want pants like that.”

Rowan grinned at her own pants. “They’re thorn-resistant.”

“They’re like wearing solid wood.” Ambrel turned to Terlu. “Fashion aside, I am thrilled to be here. Rowan has never once stopped talking about all the wonders in the Great Greenhouse of Belde. Like the dream flowers.”

“You tell her,” Rowan said to Terlu. “The dream flowers are the best.”

Terlu shook her head. “I don’t know what those are.”

“What! Yarrow hasn’t shown you…? Well, we need to fix that,” Rowan said. She looped one arm through Terlu’s and then looped her other through Ambrel’s. “Both of you need to see this right away.”

“What about breakfast?” Ambrel asked.

Stepping out of Rowan’s arm, Terlu delivered the honey cakes to the nearest relatives—Harvena and Finnel, she remembered—to distribute, along with the tea. “From Yarrow,” she told them. “He… He’ll see you all later. Sometime. Maybe. Anyway, enjoy your breakfast!”

Well, that could have been less awkward.

At least no one had asked why Yarrow hadn’t come himself.

She hoped they assumed he was just busy.

Or shy. She thought of the story he’d told her and wondered if any of them had known young Yarrow had been abandoned in a cave.

Had they known about it, either before, after, or during?

Had they tried to intervene or stop it? Had they yelled at Rorick and Yarrow’s father afterward, or just accepted it?

She wondered what other childhood stories she didn’t know and if they were better or worse.

With a smile, they thanked her for the honey cakes and resumed work. Retreating quickly, she joined Rowan and Ambrel as they strolled toward the greenhouse.

Rowan was chattering about how the dream flowers were her favorite—she’d encountered them first when she was a little kid and prone to nightmares. “You know, the usual falling off a cliff while naked and being eaten by flytraps kind of nightmare.”

“That is a very specific you nightmare,” Ambrel told her.

“It’s not that unusual,” Rowan said as they reached the greenhouse. Each of them shed their coats as they crossed into the bubble of summer. The air smelled of warm, earthy soil and the sweet lure of just-bloomed flowers. “Terlu, what about you? Do you have that kind of nightmare?”

Mine is being unable to move, unable to speak, left alone for years to lose all sense of time, of place, of self… She lied, “Sometimes I have a nightmare about falling.”

“It’s the flytraps,” Ambrel told Rowan. “That’s what makes it unusual.”

“Have you ever seen a flytrap? They dissolve their prey. An insect will take ten days to be digested.” Rowan shuddered.

“I’m not saying that they aren’t fascinating and precious and whatever Yarrow would say about them—he’s never met a plant he didn’t like, and I suspect that hasn’t changed—but they make my skin itch, thinking about it. ”

“The one I met was nice,” Terlu volunteered.

“I will strive to be polite if I ever meet them,” Rowan said.

“Now… if I remember correctly… Ah, yes, this way to the dream flowers!” She tugged them toward the next door, and they walked into a room that was filled with lilacs: deep purple, lavender, and white.

The aroma filled the air so thickly that for a moment, none of them spoke; they walked through, breathing in the lilac.

Thick, the bushes grew up to the ceiling, their branches weaving together, tangled behind their green leaves.

Clusters of lilac flowers cascaded from the green.

“Beautiful,” Ambrel breathed.

“Did you know any of the sentient plants?” Terlu asked Rowan.

“I mean, from before you left?” She couldn’t remember how old Yarrow had said he was when they fell asleep.

A child? From the order of Laiken’s notes, she knew that he’d already begun to dismiss his gardeners when he’d begun to experiment with the sleep spell.

She wondered if any of the gardeners at the time had suspected it wasn’t a natural sleep.

“Dendy used to babysit me when I was younger. Keep me from falling into the ocean or ingesting any poisonous berries, that sort of thing. He was great.” Rowan opened the door to the next greenhouse, which was filled with row after row of leafy bushes.

“And Hosha—they’re the prickly pear—they used to offer up their flower, whenever they grew one.

I didn’t know Lotti. Guess she was already dormant by the time I was old enough to be loose in the greenhouse, or else he kept her in his tower, away from us.

Anyway, when their magic failed and they all stopped talking… yeah, that wasn’t a good day.”

She missed them. Had she missed her brother? Had she ever planned to come back? Would she have come back if Alyssium hadn’t fallen? Would any of them? “If you don’t mind me asking, why didn’t anyone come back to Belde before now?”

“Why didn’t Yarrow ever come to us?” Rowan countered.

An edge crept into her cheerful voice. She marched faster through the greenhouse into the next one and then the next, without pausing to look at the blossoms that overflowed their pots, the towering trees whose leaves kissed the ceiling, the delicate vines that wound up the pillars, or the countless flowers that bloomed around them.

“Do you have any idea of how many letters I wrote him that he didn’t answer?

How many times I begged him to come to Alyssium?

Even if it was just to visit? I saved up.

After school, I worked in the florist shop, and I saved every little coin that I earned so that it could pay for Yarrow to take a boat to come see us.

Enough for a return trip, if he didn’t want to stay.

I just wanted him to come. Do you know how many times he wrote back to me, to explain why he wasn’t coming? ”

She could guess, but it was a rhetorical question.

“I needed my brother with me. And my father. When at last Dad came and Yarrow wasn’t with him… I wrote him a big letter after that, explaining all the reasons he should join us.”

After two more lefts through greenhouses that Terlu had never seen (one full of decorative cabbages of various shades of green, white, and purple, and one full of thick greenery that was speckled with caterpillars who resembled tiny stretched-out cats), they reached a door with smoky glass.

Or maybe the greenhouse on the other side was dark and hazy?

Squinting, Terlu tried to see through—she saw shadows of pillars and trees. It was oddly dark.

Stopping, Rowan stared at the glass door as if not seeing it. “Not once. He didn’t write a single letter back to me ever.”