IV. The Flowers and the Food

Vaelira's version of the same simile ran differently, the way most things about Vaelira ran differently — sideways, unbothered on the surface, hiding its full depth beneath a posture too lazy-looking to be taken seriously by anyone who hadn't already learned better.

She complained, loudly and often and with theatrical, well-rehearsed indignation, about what she called his gardener's habits — his tendency, in any given week, to disappear from her side for hours at a stretch, off tending some other corner of the enormous household he had planted himself in the middle of, watering some other flower's particular grief while hers, she insisted, wilted unattended on the vine.

"You have been gone four hours," she informed him, on one such afternoon, from her habitual boneless sprawl across the chaise in her own private wing of the castle, not bothering to open both eyes to deliver the accusation. "Four. I counted. I have never counted anything in my entire existence because counting is beneath me, and I counted these four hours specifically so I could report the injustice of them to you with precision."

"I was with Flora," Eremos said, entirely unbothered by the accusation, crossing the room to fold himself down beside the chaise the way he folded himself down beside everyone, everywhere, in this household, apparently allergic to the concept of furniture built for two separate people. "She wanted help identifying which of the new plants in the garden were actually flowers and which ones were just very convincing rocks."

"You are neglecting your actual flower," Vaelira said, cracking one golden, clock-ringed eye open just far enough to fix him with a look of profound and entirely performed betrayal, "in favor of teaching botany to a woman who is herself a flower and therefore should not require your instruction on the subject at all. The logic of your priorities escapes me completely."

He laughed — the easy, unguarded laugh she had spent centuries privately collecting, the way some people collected stones or letters, cataloguing each variation of it in some private inner ledger of her own that she would never, under any circumstance, admit to keeping — and reached into the loose fold of his sleeve, producing, with the small deliberate flourish of someone who had planned this moment several hours in advance despite every appearance of spontaneity, a single flower he had clearly gone some considerable distance out of his way to find: pale violet, star-shaped, its petals catching the light in a way that suggested it had been grown somewhere that received actual, unfiltered daylight rather than the castle's careful artificial gold.

"For the neglected flower," he said, offering it to her with a small, teasing bow of his head that did absolutely nothing to disguise how pleased he was with himself.

Vaelira did not immediately reach for it. She let it sit there, offered, for a long calculated moment, studying it with the exaggerated, narrow-eyed suspicion of a woman deciding whether a peace offering was sufficient to the crime it was meant to answer for.

"This does not undo the four hours," she informed him, finally accepting the flower and tucking it, with far more care than her tone had suggested she intended, into the loose fall of her indigo hair.

"I never said it would undo them. I said it was for the neglected flower. Undoing hours was never part of the arrangement."

"You are insufferable."

"You keep saying that. You never once say it like you mean it."

She did not dignify that observation with a response, mostly because he was, infuriatingly, correct, and instead reached over — with the same lazy, unhurried economy of motion she brought to nearly everything — and pulled a length of the delicate golden gauze from the small chest he kept beside her chaise specifically for this purpose, holding it out to him without comment.

He understood the wordless request immediately, the way he understood most of her wordless requests, and set to work with the same infinite, unhurried patience he brought to everything that belonged to her — carefully draping the gauze across her shoulders, adjusting the fall of it with small, precise motions, tucking one errant fold behind her ear alongside the newly acquired flower, taking, as he always took, considerably longer over the task than its actual difficulty required.

"You do this on purpose," Vaelira observed, watching him work through half-lidded, entirely unbothered eyes. "The slowness. You could dress me properly in a tenth of the time."

"I could," he agreed, not slowing down in the slightest. "But then I'd have to stop touching you sooner, and I've decided I'm not interested in that particular efficiency."

She said nothing to that, though something in her chest did the small, treacherous lurch it always did at the particular unhurried devotion of his hands, the same lurch she would have died — had, in fact, once literally died — rather than admit to out loud.

The food, when it came, was entirely her domain, and she guarded that domain with the same fierce, theatrical possessiveness she brought to everything she'd claimed as hers.

Dinner in the household's smaller dining hall was, on any given evening, a chaotic and cheerfully lawless affair, plates passed and stolen and redistributed across the long table with a total disregard for whatever original owner the kitchen staff had intended them for, and Vaelira had, across the centuries, established herself as the undisputed and entirely unrepentant queen of this particular anarchy.

"That's my bread," Flora protested, not for the first time, watching her carefully buttered slice vanish from her plate and reappear, moments later, in Vaelira's own hand.

"It was your bread," Vaelira corrected, taking an unhurried, deliberate bite. "Ownership of bread, like ownership of most things, is a temporary and largely theoretical condition. I find that redistributing it periodically keeps everyone appropriately humble about their attachments."

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"You just like stealing things."

"I like stealing things," Vaelira agreed, entirely without shame. "It is one of my very few remaining hobbies, and I intend to keep it. Eternity is extremely long, Flora. A person needs something to look forward to at dinner besides the food itself."

It was, Eremos had come to understand over the centuries, less about the bread than about the ritual — Vaelira's particular way of insisting, night after night, meal after meal, that this household belonged to everyone equally, that no single plate or portion or claim was so fixed and so sacred that it couldn't be gently, laughingly, redistributed in service of the larger, warmer chaos of everyone simply being fed and teased and included. She had spent, before this household ever existed to claim her, centuries wandering a version of the world with no table at all to sit at, no plate that was reliably hers, no guarantee that the food she found would not simply run out before it reached her. He suspected, though she had never once said so directly, that stealing bread from Flora's plate with theatrical, unrepentant glee was, in its own strange upside-down way, her method of proving to herself, meal after meal, that there was now more than enough to go around — enough that taking a little from one plate did not actually threaten to leave anyone hungry, enough that scarcity, the old cold companion of her wandering years, had finally, permanently, lost its grip on this particular table.

He never once told her he understood this. Some truths, he had learned from Ilyrisse without either of them ever discussing the lesson directly, were kinder kept quietly observed than spoken aloud and made to answer for themselves.

There was a particular evening, early in their long history together, when he had come closer than usual to breaking that private rule. She had stolen a piece of fruit from his own plate — a small, ordinary theft, indistinguishable from the hundred others she performed weekly — and had gone suddenly, uncharacteristically still after taking the first bite, her golden eyes fixed on some middle distance that had nothing to do with the dining hall around her.

"What is it?" he'd asked, quiet enough that no one else at the table noticed the question.

"Nothing," she'd said, too quickly, and then, because lying to him had never once come as easily to her as she pretended it did, amended it. "It tastes like something I used to eat. Before. When there was a before that had food I didn't have to go looking for myself."

He had not asked her to say more. He had simply reached over, without comment, and set the rest of his own portion onto her plate, and gone back to his conversation with Flora as though nothing at all had passed between them. Vaelira had eaten the rest of it in silence, her golden eyes bright in a way she did not explain and he did not ask her to, and neither of them had ever mentioned the exchange again. It had simply become one more small, wordless entry in the long private ledger the two of them kept between themselves — not written down anywhere, never spoken of directly, but understood, the way most of the truest things in this household were understood: through the plain unglamorous evidence of what a person chose to do with their hands when they thought no one was keeping score.

The evening the two women's parallel devotions finally crossed paths directly, it was Ilyrisse who found herself, without quite intending to, the subject of Vaelira's particular brand of wordless care.

She had gone two full days without eating properly — not from any deliberate abstinence, but from the particular consuming distraction of a set of visions that had arrived, unbidden and unrelenting, sometime in the small hours of the previous night, showing her fragment after fragment of futures she did not yet know how to prevent, each one demanding its own exhausting arithmetic before she could set it down long enough to attend to something as ordinary as hunger.

She noticed the emptiness of her own plate only distantly, some considerable time into dinner, her attention still half-caught in the unresolved calculations of the day, and did not immediately register the small domestic miracle occurring directly across the table from her.

Vaelira, without comment, without so much as glancing up from her own meal, reached across and refilled Ilyrisse's plate a second time — not with any dramatic flourish, not with the teasing theft-and-redistribution routine she performed for the rest of the table's entertainment, but with the quiet, unremarkable efficiency of someone who had simply noticed a need and moved, without ceremony, to meet it.

Ilyrisse looked up, startled out of her calculations, and found Vaelira's golden, clock-ringed eyes already waiting for her, entirely without their usual performed laziness.

"You've been doing the arithmetic face for two days," Vaelira said, quietly, in the low register she reserved for the moments no one else at the table needed to overhear. "I don't know what you're calculating. I don't need to know. I only know that a person cannot solve for the future on an empty stomach, and I refuse to let you try."

Ilyrisse did not trust her voice for a moment. She looked down at the plate, refilled without her asking, without her even noticing the asking was necessary, and felt something in her old, calcified, endlessly calculating chest loosen by another careful degree.

"Thank you," she said finally, quietly, and meant it as more than gratitude for a plate of food; meant it, she understood even as she said it, as gratitude for the plainer and rarer gift underneath — the gift of being seen clearly enough, by someone who loved the same boy she loved in her own entirely different register, that her hunger had been noticed before she'd found the words to name it herself.

"Eat," Vaelira said, already returning her attention to her own plate, already reaching, with characteristic shamelessness, for a piece of bread that did not belong to her. "Whatever future you're arguing with tonight, it will still be there tomorrow. It is extremely persistent, futures generally are. But you don't have to meet it hungry."

Ilyrisse ate, slowly, feeling the small ordinary comfort of it loosen something in her chest that the visions had drawn tight over two long days, and found herself, halfway through the meal, watching Vaelira with an attention she did not quite try to hide.

"You do this for him too," she said, not quite a question. "The food. I've watched you do it for years and told myself it was simply mischief, but it isn't only mischief, is it."

Vaelira did not look up immediately, occupying herself instead with an unnecessary and unhurried rearrangement of her own plate. "He would forget to eat entirely if left to his own devices," she said, eventually, in a tone that worked very hard to sound offhand and did not entirely succeed. "He gets so occupied carrying everyone else's grief that he simply loses track of the fact that his own body still requires ordinary maintenance. Someone has to notice. It might as well be the someone who has appointed herself in charge of noticing everything he's too devoted to notice about himself."

"That's not mischief," Ilyrisse said, gently. "That's the same thing I do with the ledger. Different rooms. Same arithmetic."

Vaelira's golden eyes flicked up at that, something briefly unguarded moving across her usually careless expression before she resettled it into its habitual laziness. "Don't make it sound so dignified," she said. "I steal bread. You keep philosophical accounts in an empty room at midnight. I refuse to be compared to something that sounds so exhausting."

"And yet," Ilyrisse said, allowing herself the smallest smile, "here we both are, keeping the same account in our own separate handwriting."