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i.
Manon spots the lonely sprig of purple blossoms on the side of the mountain, and dips Abraxos into a glide downwards to land nearby. The grass here is patchy, dotted unevenly over the mountain, and changes from stern rock to soft green carpet within steps.
She hurries over to the small, near-impossible, half-miraculous sprig of flowers that grows in the wind and snows of the Frostfangs, and plucks it with one hand. Tucking it into a small pouch on her belt, she quietly thinks that she will give it to the women who wait for her, back in Orynth.
Elide, Aelin, Lysandra. One tiny, wonderful purple flower for each of them.
ii.
For someone who is supposedly the Lady of Caraverre, Lysandra spends more time than she should in the streets of Orynth. The silks and satin call to her, the aromas of the restaurants are like a beacon drawing her home, but most of all it is the flower-shops that pull Lysandra to them.
Flowers, she learns, mean many things, and are even more. There are flowers that are delicate, wavering easily under her touch, and flowers that will duck away. Flowers that stand proudly through the wind, and flowers that stay on the earth, unwilling to face the world.
Lysandra learns the meanings of each of them, and the qualities that each flower possesses. She learns them as well as she has learned her three lovers, until her fingers trace the contours of their bodies the same way she traces the stalks and petals of the flower. And, at last, she buys flowers, one bunch for each of them: Manon, Elide, Aelin.
For Manon, red carnation and yellow pansy. She is away so often that it is a treasure for them to have any stolen time with her, and Lysandra wishes for her to have something to carry with her on her travels as Queen of the Witches. A token of her love, a yearning in the red-pink petals and bursting-yellow flowers.
For Elide, hyacinth and red tulip. Some days, Elide seems an eternal mystery, beyond the reach of Lysandra’s words, distant and yet so, so beautiful and lovely. Lysandra hopes that the flowers will find Elide where Lysandra herself cannot.
For Aelin, wild rose and honeysuckle. Aelin will know why she chose them: she has always seen Lysandra clearly.
Lysandra spends much of her money on the flowers, but every coin that rattles into the florist’s bag is worth it for the chance to give flowers to the women who have made her life so full of joy and wonder.
iii.
The Lochan estate is surrounded by gardens, the rich scent of the flowers and earthy, always-moist grass rising into Elide’s bed chambers at night through the window that she keeps open as a reminder of her freedom. They are most brilliant in summer, and that is when Elide invites her lovers to her estate and joins them on a walk around her gardens.
“Your gardens are beautiful,” Lysandra murmurs, trailing her fingertips along one bush and lifting her gaze to the sky. “Not as beautiful as all of you, of course, but close.”
Elide laughs, close-mouthed. “Thank you.” She looks to Manon and Aelin, arm-in-arm, and to Lysandra’s lovely, cunning green eyes. “You look so pretty here.”
“The sun has always been kind to me,” notes Lysandra. Idly, she flicks long, luscious brown hair over her shoulder, closing her eyes and letting the sun wash golden over her brown skin.
Struck by inspiration in the curl of Lysandra’s neck and the greenery surrounding her, Elide darts over to one of the bushes that is laden with flowers and snatches a bunch of them in a snap of stems in one giant handful. She runs over to where Aelin and Manon walk together, and proffers the flowers to them.
Manon’s smile is moon-wide, white rows of sharpened teeth, but it is kind despite the fearsomeness that her smile once held for Elide. “Is this for us?”
Elide nods, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth, and holds the flowers out to them. Manon takes several, and offers one to Aelin, and Elide watches as her flowers, picked from her garden where the roots go down to good, rich Lochan soil, tokens of her love for the three of them, are handed around from hand to hand.
“I love you all,” she tells them, the sun bringing gold and hope and joy to her spirit. “I love you forever. And that won’t change, no matter what happens to us.”
iv.
Aelin gives her flowers, and with them her love, in secretive ways. In petals gently pressed into the pages of the letters she sends to Manon in the mountains, with her clan, in flowers left in a vase at the gate to Elide’s estates. In flowers embroidered by her messy needlework into the hem of Lysandra’s dress.
She is not one for grand gestures of her love. That belongs to Lysandra, and sometimes Elide and Manon, who all swoop in to impress her with lavish gifts and affection. No, Aelin was once an assassin, and she has kept the same tendency for subterfuge and secrecy even as she has left the black mask to conceal her face and the constant training that makes her bones ache deeply in the past.
The rings are bought from a skilled goldsmith from the Southern Continent, each of them made for one of her lovers alone. A blood-red ruby, hidden within the petals of dried red roses. A dark gemstone, but one that glitters when held up to the light, tucked within a garland of bright daisies and flowers in full bloom. An emerald that sparkles even under cover of night, arranged subtly within the stems of violets. So much love, hidden away, waiting to be discovered.
Aelin sends all the flowers out on the same day, and the response that she receives comes in a slow wave, stretched out over a week. But they are all the same.
Pink blossoms decorate every corner of Orynth’s palace. They will remain there when the decorators come in to dress the castle in pink and white for the queen’s wedding, and will remain there longer, until they rot away into nothing but dust.
The flowers may rot, with time, but Aelin knows that her love will not do the same.