Chapter 24 #2
I turn. She's leaning against the frame with her arms folded, watching me stare at the dress with an expression that's somewhere between proud and nervous.
She's already changed. Her armor is gone, replaced by a gown of deep emerald green, the fabric woven with the same living-plant technology as everything in this city.
The bodice is fitted, structured with thin vines that trace her collarbones and climb her shoulders in delicate green-gold lines.
The skirt falls to the floor in heavy folds that shift when she moves; the fabric rippling with a subtle luminescence.
Her dark hair is down, falling past her shoulders in loose waves.
She looks beautiful. She looks like her parents and something entirely, fiercely her own.
"You're stunning," I say, and the words come out thick.
She shifts her weight. The nervous edge sharpens for a second before she smooths it away. "The green is traditional. The leader of the Verdance wears the city's color during Bloomfall Eve."
"It suits you."
"You haven't tried yours on yet."
I look back at the dress on the bed. Touch the fabric with my fingertips. It's warm, like touching living skin, and the prismatic shimmer intensifies where my fingers press, colors blooming outward from the contact like ripples in a pond.
"The Verdance grows one for the Bloom-marked every cycle," Thalia says. "It chooses the design. The color. The cut." She pauses. "It's never made one this white before."
"What does white mean?"
"In the Verdance? Beginning. A new branch. Something that hasn't existed yet."
I pick up the dress and hold it against my body. The fabric adjusts immediately, the waist tapering, the shoulders widening slightly, as if the material is measuring me through contact.
"Will you help me?" I ask.
Thalia uncrosses her arms and crosses the room.
She takes the dress from me and holds it open while I step into it, and her hands are steady and careful as she draws the fabric up over my hips and settles the bodice into place.
The dress finishes the job itself. The living material tightens where it needs to, loosens where it should, the hem lengthening until it just brushes the floor.
I feel it settle against my body the way the Verdance's paths settle under my feet: with attention, with warmth, with the quiet intelligence of something alive.
I turn to look in the polished root-panel that serves as a mirror, and I stop breathing.
The dress is extraordinary. The white fabric follows my body in clean, flowing lines; the shimmer catching every movement and colors scatter across the walls.
My marks are visible through the fabric in some places, golden lines glowing faintly through the translucent material at my shoulders and collarbones, and the dress seems to have been designed around them, framing them rather than hiding them.
I look like someone important. I look like someone who belongs here.
Thalia is standing behind me in the mirror's reflection. Green gown and dark hair behind my white dress and red hair. We look nothing alike and we look completely alike. The same set of the shoulders. The same stance. The same slight furrow between the eyebrows when we're trying not to cry.
"I placed a flower for you," Thalia says. "Every cycle. In the gratitude circle."
"For me?"
"For you and for Dad. Even the cycles where you didn't come. I put a flower in and I said your names and the Heartwood took them." She looks at her hands. "It was the only way I could talk to you. For most of my life, it was the closest I could get."
I put my arm around her. She stiffens for half a second, the way she always does when someone touches her without warning, and then she leans into it.
She rests her head against my shoulder, and the green of her gown presses against the white of mine, and I hold my daughter in a room that grew itself to hold us.
"This year," I say, "we'll place them together."
She nods against my shoulder. She doesn't speak. She doesn't have to.
The festival begins at sundown.
The Verdance transforms. The golden veins in the root-paths flare to full brightness, turning every pathway into a ribbon of light.
The flower garlands overhead burst open in synchronized waves, thousands of blooms opening at once, releasing clouds of luminous pollen that drift upward and hang in the air like golden dust. The effect is a city wrapped in a soft, shimmering haze, every surface glowing.
Flower lanterns rise from the plazas. Living flowers the size of dinner plates, their petals curled into cups that hold globes of trapped, glowing orbs.
They float upward on stalks of heated air, hundreds of them, rising slowly through the canopy and clustering in the sky above the Heartwood like a second set of stars.
Each one was grown by someone in the city.
Each one carries a wish, a memory, a name.
People fill the streets. Families move through the glowing pathways together, children riding on shoulders, couples holding hands.
Everyone is dressed in fabrics of every color woven with the Verdance's living-plant fiber, each one unique, each one grown for the person wearing it.
Greens and golds and deep purples and warm reds.
Tables line the plazas, long communal spreads full of food set on living wood surfaces, heaped with dishes the city has been preparing for days.
The temperature-shifting pastries from the market are here, along with platters of glazed fruit and roasted root vegetables, and something that looks like bread but tastes like cake, sweet and dense and warm from the inside.
People eat standing up, sitting on benches, or cross-legged on the root-paths.
They pass plates to strangers. They pour drinks for people they've never met. The entire city is one table tonight.
Music pours from every plaza. The bodhrán-style drums I heard at the tavern are everywhere, keeping a pulse that matches the Heartwood's rhythm, and layered over them are stringed instruments, flutes carved from living wood, and voices.
The singing starts soft, individual, someone humming a melody in a corridor.
By the time it reaches the main plaza, it's a chorus.
Hundreds of voices singing in a language I don't know, the melody rising and falling in patterns that feel old and certain and defiant.
They're singing because tomorrow might be the end.
Peeble lands on my shoulder as I step out of the residential corridor. They take in the lanterns, the singing, the golden haze, the thousands of people dressed in living color, and for once, they say nothing. They just sit there, their small weight warm against my neck.
"Peeble?"
"Give me a moment," they say quietly. "I'm memorizing this."
I give them the moment. I take one for myself, too.
The gratitude circle at the base of the Heartwood is already half-full with white blooms. People approach one or two at a time, kneel at the edge of the golden mandala, place their flower, and speak a name.
Some of them whisper. Some of them say the name out loud, set the flower down, and stand, and the Heartwood's pulse brightens for a single beat in response.
Thalia finds me at the edge of the circle. She's carrying two white flowers, and she hands me one.
"Together," she says.
We kneel at the edge of the mandala. The sun is warm on my knees through the fabric of the dress. I set my flower down and I say the name.
"Jo."
Beside me, Thalia sets hers down and says two.
"Elle. Kaelren."
The Heartwood pulses. Bright, steady, warm. The golden veins carry the names into the roots, into the city, into the living architecture that has held this place together for longer than anyone alive can remember.
We stand. Thalia's hand finds mine and squeezes once, brief and firm, and then she lets go.
The first lights of the aurora appear on the horizon.
It starts as a thin line of violet above the treeline, barely visible through the canopy of the Heartwood.
Then it spreads. The violet deepens, widens, bleeds upward through the sky in slow, rolling waves that shift from purple to blue to a pale, electric green.
The aurora fills the sky above the Verdance, and the flower lanterns floating overhead, each one becoming a tiny mirror that multiplies the color until the whole city is bathed in it.
The singing gets louder. The drums pick up. The aurora pulses in time with the Heartwood's rhythm, or the Heartwood pulses in time with the aurora, and the boundary between the city and the sky dissolves into a single, living thing.
Somewhere behind us, Kaelren is watching. I can feel him.
I don't turn around. Not yet.
I reach for Thalia's hand again. She takes it. We stand there, mother and daughter, watching the city hum around us like a heartbeat that has no intention of stopping.