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The royal botanical gardens never change. The seasons come and pass, the spring brought over the land in gold and green that widens the rivers with rain and where each droplet falls bloom wildflowers, daisies and wisteria, and the flowers with their sweet smells lure the insects to appear from what plane they disappear to when the world is blanketed in snow to carry the spring into the summer, when it is hot and wet and endlessly bright, and the birds screech across the sky in shimmering feather downs a thousand colours splintered in the sunlight. And softer come the butterflies, grace after summer storms ravage the fields and tear up the sootblack clouds in the tattered sky and then the leaves tire of the discord and fall, sighing in the wind, expelling their last breath in yearning for winter’s chilling numbness and from its glittering maw come great breaths of wind to rend the sky naked of clouds. And for all that nature comes round and round again, and the spring brought over the land in gold and green, what withered in the wasteland of sorrowful winter all the better for it come the morning of the next year, the royal botanical gardens never change.
It is like magic, thinks the King. In all his troubles and duties, when he steps into the garden it is as if everything else falls away. Beyond the glass walls covered nearly entirely by vines, strange flowers with petals broad as shields painted in all the colours of the earth and the hanging boughs of trees weeping to be let free and taste the changing outside air, there is the sky, but it is not his sky. It is the walls of another dimension. Within it, he is safe. He loves and can be loved. The air is sticky, humid and still, shared by so many living things all trapped together, and yet it is the clearest thing he has ever breathed. It washes over him and his crown falls to the floor and the metal melts into the ground. He brushes past a curtain of vines and sees his beloved reclining upon the stone lip of a fountain, a verdant king of his own amongst the flowers.
Elwik is weaving a crown of daisies in his nimble hands while the water trickling from a dragon-carved spout into a fishpond behind him hums along with him. He looks like a fairy, which Regian supposes, he partly is. The King comes to join his lover, taking a seat beside him and listening to his song. They stay that way for a while, as they always do when they sit here, free to be together in peace at last, until Elwik finishes his crown, dons it and speaks.
‘Reigan,’ Elwik says simply. ‘Something has changed.’
‘What is it?’ Reigan’s expression hardens. ‘Do you need me to take care of something for you?’
‘In a way,’ Elwik continues humming. He dips the tips of his fingers into the pond and the fish nip at his cuticles. His eyes flick to Reigan’s. ‘Oh, as cute as that grave look of yours is, you needn’t sport it. It’s something…’ The way the sunlight diffuses through the near-opaque glass ceiling makes it appear as if he is an ephemeral glowing spirit. ‘Something beautiful.’
‘Like you.’
‘You bard,’ chuckles Elwik.
‘Would you believe me if I said you were the most gorgeous creation nature has ever given this earth?’ Reigan sighs. ‘I know it sounds like simple lover’s talk. I hope you know I mean it in my heart, for I don’t know how else to describe how I feel when I look at you.’
‘Of course I know.’ Elwik tilts his head. ‘Dearest, a mirror couldn’t be more honest than you.’
‘I love you,’ says Reigan.
‘I love you too.’
‘What has changed?’ Reigan looks almost sad in how earnest he is.
‘I’d like to tell you a story,’ Elwik whispers. The fish have captured his attention again, ripples disrupting the algae-stricken surface of the water. ‘An elven myth.’
‘Tell me.’
‘The elves say humans live too short a while to know art in all places. They see it with their eyes, and see it in their minds. They paint and admire paintings. But elves know art in every breath of the universe.’ Elwik’s smile is small and wry. ‘It sounds pretentious, I know. But what else to do with centuries at one’s disposal? You start making things up to entertain yourself with. And so the story goes; before there was anything, there was a void. And from it first came two beings. The sky, and the earth. They loved each other very much, you see. The sky reached out with its clouds but could only brush the earth’s surface, and so it wept in torrents and flooded basins into seas. The earth’s pain at being separate from its lover was so arduous to bear that it manifested in the form of earthshattering rumbles and volcanoes erupting in indignant rage. They were lovers, but they could not be together.’ Elwik casts his eyes to the shadows in the undergrowth surrounding them and with the turn of his head his hair dances and then settles much like blue streams of sky between skin-pale swathes of moving cloud. ‘But they never faltered in their love. The sky made art for the earth to behold in the form of its stars. The earth’s rumbles became songs. Sorrowful ballads, like those sometimes performed in your court.’
Elwik pauses and peers at Reigan. The King is listening intently.
‘Do they get a happy ending?’ he asks.
‘I haven’t finished yet. But you’ll see.’ Elwik reaches out to the flowers as he speaks. His other hand settles over his stomach. ‘The sky and the earth could not love in the view of others. To them, it was… heresy. The sky was one thing, and the earth another. And so their promises and serenades to each other were kept secret, hidden in the goings-about of nature. But love is a powerful thing. A force that cannot be stopped. They came together at the highest mountaintops and created something beautiful.’
‘Life?’
‘Yes.’ Elwik cradles a single magnolia, white with a coppery-pink centre, in his hand. He strokes the petals like they’re the finest silk, and gazes at it like it’s his own flesh and blood. ‘What could be more beautiful than that?’
‘It’s very poetic,’ Reigan watches him with soft eyes. ‘The elves certainly knew their way with words.’
‘Silly man,’ Elwik’s laugh is choked. A tear, the fruit of joy and some other unknowable mortal emotion, falls from his cheek onto the petal. ‘I’m trying to tell you something.’
Reigan cups his lover’s face in his hand, stroking away the wetness with his thumb. Elwik is fresh and gold and green. His hair is backlit and blue fire clings to him like an incandescent halo. He is the beauty of a raging storm and the clarity of a winter sky. Elwik gazes back at Reigan and sees a man made of mud breathed to life by some creator god, beneath his skin layers and layers of richest soil and further beneath, hardest mettle, a molten core. There is no man more man than he.
Reigan cries, too, and embraces him. He understands.