"Flowers have their own language, you know," Zelda says in the tones of one imparting a great secret. They sit in a slant of light, shoulders touching. A book is spread open in Zelda's lap, flowers dried and pinned to the yellowed pages. Zelda brought it along with her, reverently brushing her fingers over each one, smile small and secretive. I've been pressing them since I was a girl, she'd confided, making Hilda wonder at the difference in their childhoods, that Zelda could freely indulge in such a silly practice. Such things were not possible in Lorule.
Hilda's eyebrows raise. "Do they now?" Zelda nods, and Hilda's lips curl, more amused than derisive. "And I suppose you are quite fluent in this flower language of yours."
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," Zelda laughingly protests. "I'm adequate, not fluent. I took it up not long after flower pressing, you see. It was an endless source of fascination to me, flowers possessing a language of their very own. I devoted more time to learning the different meanings behind them than I did my studies, which of course delighted my tutors to no end."
Hilda smirks. "I'm sure."
Really, it was all rather quaint. In Lorule the only certain thing is—was—death.
The mind dulls with age but certain things will never leave you. Sensory memory; impressions of impressions. She remembers this: her mother's thin wrists and the sweet soap smell of her hair; a flower that hadn't yet withered crumbling under her touch; tears on her lips, her tongue, dripping down her chin to splatter onto aged parchment, the hard, painful truth blurring before her eyes—there is no happy-ever-after, not for us; magic so dark it tastes like ashes in her throat, one thought echoing above the thrum in her blood, pulsing in perfect counter rhythm with her heart: I will make it so, I will, I will, I must.
Silly, she thinks, watching the bend and curve of Zelda's wrist as she flips through the pages, smiling down at each flower revealed as if they're not wasteful, not dead. Fanciful. But perhaps not wrong—not really. A kingdom full of happy endings can afford such frivolity, she realizes.
And hasn't enough been lost to Lorule already?
Hilda inhales, steadying her nerves. "Teach me," she says, skin prickling into goosebumps when Zelda's eyes flick up, "this—flower language of yours."
Zelda's smile is a slow, delighted thing, brilliant like morning sunshine. "I'd hoped you'd say that."
There is a language here too, Hilda thinks, in the press of Zelda's thigh and brush of Zelda's fingers, a dialect she is not yet fluent in but is slowly cultivating all the same. Zelda looks at Hilda from under her lashes, all softness and languid warmth, and Hilda wants to tuck hair behind Zelda's delicately pointed ear, whisper the things her heart sounds out at night.
She traces the flower before her instead—laburnum, she dimly registers Zelda saying, and there is something of validation when it doesn't crumble under her touch.
"This one always rather reminds me of you. Pensive beauty. Fitting, don't you think?"
She thinks she might be fluent yet.