Page 74 of Laced in Longing

“They’re doing better than I thought,” she murmurs. “I figured they’d hate it here. Not as much sun.”

“They would not dare.”

“Oh, they wouldn’t dare?” She glances back at me with one brow raised. “Did you threaten my hydrangeas, Ash?”

“I have an understanding with everything in this garden.”

“That’s a yes.”

I say nothing, because it is a yes, and because she laughs at my honesty. I would trade a great many things to keep hearing that sound.

It comes easier now. It used to be a rusted hinge of a thing, dragged out of her by force. Now she laughs at me before breakfast, when I bring her fruit she does not want, and she calls me a menace with her mouth full.

The hydrangeas are a favorite of hers right now. She’s waited to grow them, insisting she’d only kill them. I watched her rationalize it many times. Each time she wanted them, she talked herself out of it, and each time left a sour taste in my mouth. I need her to have everything she could possibly want.

So I planted the seeds myself and let her take over when she realized they wouldn’t perish.

Now forty of them bloom along the fountain, and she tends to them each day, only to wipe her dirt-caked palms down her thighs when she’s done. I hope she doesn’t ruin what she’s wearing—it’s my favorite dress of hers.

I asked her to wear it this morning while she was still half-asleep and pliant, my mouth against the notch of her collarbone, and she agreed to it before her mind woke enough to protest. She’s not fond of wearing her nicer clothing to garden, but I ached to see her in the backless wonder. Thin mauve silk that clings and gathers, the neckline low and loose enough that when she bends, I catch the whole length of her. Including the small scars beneath her ribs, the ones she used to hide and now leaves out in the open air without a thought.

But the best part: she wears nothing beneath it but one scrap of lace that’s promised a very short life.

She has no idea I chose it for exactly this reason. Or perhaps she does and wore it anyway.

Both possibilities please me.

“Elise sent a letter,” she says regarding Vorin’s—the God of Gluttony—promised. “Well, not a letter. She sent a list.”

“Of what?”

“Places she wants to drag me. Apparently, there’s a market at the edge of Nemoris’ territory where they sell fruit that changes taste based on what you’re craving.” Her nose wrinkles. Mine too—the God of Forgetting’s market is rumored to be a strange place. “Which sounds really gross, honestly, but she says the vendors are funny.”

“Elise talks a great deal.”

“Elise talks a great deal,” she agrees, and there’s something warm underneath it that makes my throat tighten. “I like it. She doesn’t leave any silence for me to panic in.”

The gods came in a slow parade over the first weeks. Nemoris arrived first, gracious and grim, and told my flower he was glad he’d never been permitted near her memories. Calruin brought a gift and an apology for feeding off her regret in her four hundredth life. She forgave him because she is better than the rest of us. I do not forgive him.

Acherin—the God of Despair—stood in my foyer for eleven minutes and said just as many words. Maven declared afterward that he seemed nice, which nearly killed him. The Nameless God came and went and came again, and each time it’s as if she meets him for the first time again. As it is with us all.

And Vorin brought Elise. He is the only other Dark God to obtain his promised.

I did not expect that, truthfully. He is not a generous man. But he arrived with her on his arm and let the two of them fold into a corner with wine; by the time I looked over they were laughing at something with their heads bent together, and Maven’s hand was on Elise’s forearm.

She made a lifelong friend that day.

She came to me later that night, buzzing, cheeks flushed, pacing the length of our room in one of my shirts, telling me every stupid detail—what Elise said about Vorin’s eating habits, what Elise said about the market, how Elise asked if she could come back next week.

“And she meant it,” Maven whispered, lost in her thoughts. She could always tell when people didn’t mean what they said, but Elise meant it.

“I haven’t had a friend,” she said, and then stopped in the middle of the floor with her hands out as if she’d caught herself saying something ridiculous. “Ash. I haven’t had a real friend since…I think it’s been a few lives? Is that right? There was a girl with a red braid; she made bread and we used to⁠—”

“Ismay.”

Her eyes brightened considerably. “Ismay. God, I remember her! I remember her happy little face.”

She remembers everything now. Sort of. The mortal barrier broke the moment I brought her through, but memories of her other lives are slow to flood in. She weeps through most of them and laughs through others, always needing hours to process what she’s seen. At one point she sat straight up and said, you wore a hat once and it was so ugly, and then went back to sleep.