Chapter 25
The suit fits like it was grown for me, which it was.
Dark fabric that the Verdance shaped overnight, tailored through the shoulders and chest, the material warm and faintly luminous in the way everything in this city is.
I adjust the collar as I walk the corridor toward the central plaza, the distant pulse of festival music filtering through the root-paths beneath my feet.
The golden veins in the walls are running at full strength tonight, turning every surface into something that glows.
I step into the plaza. The Bloomfall Eve festival is in full swing around me, the air thick with pollen and the scent of garlands opening and closing in synchronized waves overhead.
I catalogue none of it. My attention goes exactly where it always goes, with a precision that borders on involuntary, and it takes me approximately two-tenths of a second to find her.
The sight nearly brings me to my knees.
Elle is standing at the edge of the central plaza with Thalia beside her, and she is wearing a dress that is actively dismantling my ability to function as a rational being.
The fabric is white, and it catches every source of light in the plaza and fractures it, throwing back fragments of color that shift with each breath she takes.
Her red hair is loose over her shoulders catching the aurora light, and she is smiling at something Peeble just said from their perch on her shoulder, and I have to stop walking because my lungs have apparently forgotten how to perform their single designated function.
I have seen her in mud-caked pants and torn shirts.
I have seen her in Wynmire’s formal wear and the rebellion’s makeshift armor.
I have seen her naked in a room where the walls bloomed and petals fell from the ceiling.
None of that prepared me for this. She is the most devastating thing I have ever looked at.
I cross the plaza. I don’t remember deciding to move.
One moment I am standing at the entrance to the central ring, and the next I am in front of them.
I'm close enough to see the aurora light shifting in Elle’s eyes, close enough to smell the clean green scent of the Verdance in her hair.
Peeble’s antennae swivel toward me and hold.
“Incoming,” they announce. “The brooding one approaches. Prepare for intense eye contact and a probable loss of motor function.”
I ignore them. I turn to Thalia first, because I am trying to be the kind of man who acknowledges his daughter before losing himself entirely in her mother, and because she deserves that.
Thalia is wearing deep emerald green, and she looks like the city grew her from its spine, and my chest does something complicated that has nothing to do with tactics or threat assessment.
I lean down and press a kiss to her cheek. “You look lovely,” I tell her.
She blinks. The expression on her face cycles through surprise, warmth, and something fragile that she covers quickly. “Thank you,” she whispers.
Then I turn to Elle, and everything else ceases to exist.
“Hi,” she says. The same word she used the first night in our chamber, and it undoes me the same way, every single time.
I take her face in my hands and kiss her. When I pull back, her cheeks are flushed and her eyes are bright and a small cluster of white flowers has bloomed spontaneously on the root-path directly beneath our feet.
“Hi,” I say.
“You just kissed me in front of the entire city.”
“I did.” I haven't let go of her face. My thumbs trace her cheekbones. “You are wearing a dress that makes it physically impossible for me to be reasonable.”
“So, what are you?”
“Yours. Violently. Irrevocably.”
Peeble clears their throat with theatrical emphasis. “And on that note, I’ll be at the food tables. Drowning my discomfort in pastries. Pretending I didn’t just witness a man’s soul leave his body in real time.” They hop off Elle’s shoulder and are gone.
Thalia watches us with an expression she’s trying very hard to keep neutral and failing. Her mouth twitches. “You two are exhausting.” But her eyes are warm.
“Get used to it,” I tell her.
She shakes her head. “I’ll be with the musicians. Try not to cause a scene.”
She walks away toward the music, and for a moment I watch her go. The emerald gown. The loose dark hair. The way she carries herself through this city like it was built around her bones.
My daughter.
Then Elle takes my hand and pulls my attention back to her, where it belongs.
“Dance with me,” she says.
“I was about to ask.”
“Liar. You were going to gawk at me all night with your mouth open. I’m saving us both the time.”
Fair.
The music has shifted from the fast, bright rhythms of earlier into something slower and deeper. I pull her close. Her hand finds my shoulder. Mine finds her waist, and the dress shimmers under my fingers, warm and alive, the material responding to contact.
“The dress is flirting with you,” Elle says.
“The dress has excellent taste.”
We dance. Slow, turning circles in the aurora light, surrounded by couples doing the same. I am not a natural dancer. I learned the Spiral of Seasons as a child, the formal steps of court, but I never enjoyed them. Dancing requires surrender, and surrender has never come easily to me.
With her, it’s different. With her, I don’t have to think about the steps.
I hold on, following the music and let her body tell mine where to go.
She’s warm against me, and the dress shifts colors with every turn, catching the aurora, the lantern light, and the gold from the root-paths.
She looks like she’s wearing the night sky.
Her head rests against my shoulder. Her hand slides from my shoulder to the back of my neck, her fingers curling into my hair, and the casual intimacy of that gesture does something to me that is difficult to articulate with the limited tools of language.
I lower my mouth to her ear. “Do you have any idea what this dress is doing to me?”
“Judging by the way you’re holding me, I have some idea.”
“You have no idea. The neckline alone is an act of war. I have been calculating exactly how long I have to wait before I can take you out of here without it being conspicuous, and the answer is not long enough, because every second you’re wearing this dress in public is a second I am exercising restraint that should qualify me for sainthood. ”
She laughs against my neck, and the vibration of it travels through every nerve I have. “Sainthood. You. The man who just declared violent ownership of me in front of a city.”
“Saints can be possessive. I’m sure there’s precedent.”
“There is absolutely no precedent for you.”
The aurora overhead has intensified, the violet deepening to purple streaked with electric green and pale blue.
I spin her once and the dress catches the light and explodes into color, and for one suspended moment she is the brightest thing in the Verdance, brighter than the Heartwood, brighter than the aurora, brighter than anything in any iteration I have walked through trying to find my way back to her.
She spins back into me, and her hand finds my chest, and her eyes find mine, and we’re close enough that I can count her freckles in the shifting light.
“When we leave here, I am going to find somewhere private and I am going to remove this dress with a level of attention that will ruin you for every other experience you have ever had.
I am going to take my time. I'm going to make you forget the word tomorrow exists. And when I am finished, you are going to lie next to me and know, with absolute certainty, that you are the most thoroughly worshipped woman in any reality that has ever existed.”
Her fingers tighten on my shoulder. Her breath catches. The golden marks at her collarbones flare through the fabric, bright enough that the couple dancing nearest to us glances over.
“Then take me somewhere private. Now.”
“One more song.”
“Now, Kaelren.”
I smile against her hair. It’s not a kind smile. It’s the smile of a man who has gotten exactly what he wanted.
“As you wish.”
I lead her through a corridor as the music fades behind us, replaced by the steady hum of the Heartwood and the soft pulse of golden veins in the root-paths.
The aurora light filters through gaps in the canopy overhead, painting the corridor in shifting violet and green.
I walk ahead of her, her hand warm in mine.
I don’t speak because if I open my mouth right now I am going to say something that will result in me pinning her against the nearest wall, and I have a specific destination in mind.
We head through an archway down a staircase carved from living wood that spirals beneath the Heartwood’s root system, and into a space that makes her go still.
It’s a garden. Underground, or what passes for underground in a city grown from a living tree. The ceiling is the underside of the Heartwood’s roots, pale and massive, curving overhead. Aurora light pours through the gaps, violet, green, and blue flooding the chamber with shifting color.
A natural spring feeds a steaming pool at the center, its surface catching the aurora and reflecting rippling bands of light.
The ground is carpeted in thick, luminous moss glowing deep gold.
Climbing flowers cover the walls, white petals with pale violet centers pulsing slowly with the Heartwood above, opening and closing like breath.
Each movement releases a warm, heady scent, faintly narcotic.
“What is this place?” she whispers.
“The Heartwood’s root chamber.” I turn to face her, and the aurora light catches my eyes and turns the silver to violet. “Thalia told me about it. She said her parents used to come here before Bloomfall. Every cycle.”
I watch the understanding move across Elle’s face like light across water.