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Greta can't sleep.
The full moon is peering through her window, painting a bright rectangle on the floor, and she can hear her parents breathe in the next room. Her mother snores, only a little. Normally, all that would be comforting. She likes the moon, and she likes knowing that her parents are nearby, but tonight her blankets are too heavy and warm even for a late-winter night, and the moon is too bright. Ginseng is sitting on the windowsill; she's a dark silhouette against the sky.
The image, peaceful as it is, doesn't help lull her back to sleep. The ache in Greta's muscles from a day's work well spent in the forge isn't helping, either, even though there's an itch behind her eyes that speaks of just how tired she is, and how much of a strain it was to finish her finest work yet. She's a blacksmith, not a jeweller by trade, even though she's picked up a few tricks.
That's not the problem either, though.
Her gaze wanders to the wooden box on her nightstand. It's inlaid with a delicate circle of forget-me-nots in blue enamel to mirror the piece of jewelry inside. They're Minette's favourite flower - a few years ago she remembered, suddenly, her parents' garden, which was overrun with them, twining under trees and among rocks, running under the windows and along the fences, in the grass and even the vegetable patch - and Greta still remembers the look of incandescent delight on Minette's face that day.
It was as if someone had taken the bellows to a forge-fire in her belly.
It's still that way, though it's steadied into a constant glow whenever Minette is around, or even when Greta thinks of her. When she traipsed through the forest looking for forget-me-nots, collecting seeds that she'd secretly scatter in all of Minette's favourite places. When she worked on the rings to clip onto the base of each of Minette's antlers, and on the necklace-fine linked chain in silver with slivers of blue jewels and more enamel forget-me-nots to drape across her forehead.
She's dreamt of Minette wearing it.
If only, Greta thinks and rolls over to press her face into her pillow, so hard the quills of the feathers filling it poke through and prick her skin, if only there weren't a reason for that gift. Or the wish in every petal of every flower.
Forget me not, forget me not…
Because Minette is leaving. She's leaving Hese and Erik's tea shop, she's leaving the town and the market and she's going back home to visit her parents and the prophetess school, away from the world, for their spring festival. She'll come back, of course. At least she said so.
But Greta is scared, beyond scared, that Minette will decide to live with her own family and never come back. That all they've had will have been borrowed time, and that Greta will never get to tell her.
The thought sits bleak like a clump of ice in her stomach, dousing the forge-fire. Greta squeezes her eyes shut against the itch and sting of tears, and eventually she sleeps.
* * *
Minette can't sleep.
There's bright moonlight outside, playing on the bare branches of the trees around her garden cottage - her garden cottage, her home these past few years since she stumbled into Hesekiel and Erik and they took her in.
All things considered, she doesn't want to leave, and it takes some tossing and turning to get that thought out of her head, make it transform into a different one - she wants to leave, because she wants to see the family she's started remembering, faces and voices and smiles swimming up through the blur of her memory loss - but she also wants to stay. She doesn't want to leave Greta, and Greta has her work. She can't leave.
It's funny how thinking of Greta makes her heart pound and her stomach tingle like there's butterflies fluttering against her insides. It's not a bad feeling, not when it happens when she thinks of Greta.
Which is more often than not. It's not like she's had that feeling thinking of - or looking at - anyone else. Greta, who keeps her safe, and who'll always take her home when she's lost, and who doesn't tire of repeating things until Minette remembers.
Her cheeks grow hot. It's almost the same feeling she thinks she gets being around Erik and Hesekiel and their affectionate behaviour. She knows those two are husbands, and still very much in love. Does that mean she is - is she in love with Greta?
Faced with her leave-taking come morning - the things she wants to take, and travel provisions, and her cloak, sit packed in the corner by the door - she thinks the answer must be yes.
She loves Hesekiel and Erik as well. She loves the tea dragons, the little lump curled up under the blankets next to her. But none of them make her feel the way Greta does, when Greta slips her fingers into her palm, all rough from the forge and the scent of coal and iron still on her.
Minette is going to miss that. More than that, she's terrified that if she goes, if she stays away for too long, she'll forget, Greta's smile and protectiveness and scent all fading into the mists of her mind. The map she has, forgotten somewhere. What if her family, who have loved and lost her as well, won't let her go again? After all, it's been four years.
She'd started feeling like a grown-up, no longer a terrified fawn. Now she's all back to that, the prospect of newness overwhelms her. Minette rises, eventually, tips some pearls of fragrant incense resin into her palm out of their glass container, and sets them in her little smoker. She lights a candle, and breathes in deep as the scent begins to fill the room.
Her thoughts return to the first time she thought she might love Greta. That she'd always find her way back with Greta. Like that day on the bridge.
Eventually she, too, is lulled to sleep - or rest, at least.
* * *
They meet in the morning. Minette is clutching her travel bag and holding her cloak closed against the cool spring wind; her hooves ache in the cold of the late snow, and she waits anxiously for Greta to come down the road from the city. When she does, almost at a run, her nose and cheeks flushed, she's clutching a box in both her hands, and Ginseng is swaying on her shoulders in the brisk pace.
Greta stands before her finally, out of breath, and holds out the box with both hands, gloved. For some reason that almost makes Minette blink back tears - she loves Greta's hands, charred and calloused as they are from the forge, and their touch always is a comfort. Not with gloves in the way.
"It's a gift," Greta says. Her eyes are very shiny, but whether that's the exertion or nervousness or something else, Minette isn't sure. "Take it?"
Minette lifts the box from Greta's hands, and now that she holds it, she sees the enamel forget-me-nots in their circle. She runs her fingers over the glass-smooth surface of the flowers and the coarser grain of the wood, sanded down though it is. Greta steps from one foot to the other, and runs a gloved hand through her floppy mop of hair. She's kept it carefully short - the forge, she explained; having long hair is too much of a risk around tools and hot metal and fire - and Minette wishes she could run her hands through Greta's hair as well.
"My favourite flowers. It's beautiful," she says, and hopes that the words carry all the warmth pooling in her chest just then.
"It's not just the box," Greta says. "You can open it."
"Oh." Minette smiles, a flutter of insecurity on her tongue. What else could Greta give her that she hasn't got already? But the sight that greets her when she lifts the lid takes her breath away and rushes heat into her face. Greta made this?
For her?
"I - I - can you help me put it on?"
Greta nods her head quickly a couple of times, she fumbles with the clip-on rings for a moment, but then winds the chain with the forget-me-nots around her antlers, and finally lets it drape over her forehead, the cold metal just barely brushing Minette's skin. It feels good against the heat in her face, small chilly spots that help her focus when Greta is this close to her.
Because she hasn't really drawn back now that she's done, looking intently into Minette's face with shining eyes.
"Greta?" Minette asks in a low voice. It's heard to breathe. She's not sure what's gotten into her, a sudden rush of courage that almost leaves her knees weak with the realization of what she's about to do. "Before I go… I have something to give you, too."
And then she leans forward, anxiously watching Greta's face until their lips meet and her eyes slip closed of her own accord, and everything is good and right with the world while their mouths touch.
It's Greta who draws back first, eventually, but the goblin smile that's plastered over her face like a beacon couldn't be a surer sign of - well, that Greta likes her, too.
Minette touches the chain of forget-me-nots, and smiles. That kiss was like a flower. Like her favourite flower.
Even if she has to go - and she has, there's the spring festival at home that she wants to arrive for - she won't forget that kiss. Not if there's a hundred thousand more. And there will be, she's sure. But this is a beacon for her homeward path. She won't forget it, and she won't forget Greta.
Not ever.