we slept and watched the dead wake up
"And what color were they?"
It's not just a joke that Minoth, somewhat like a horse, will sometimes take to sleeping standing up. If he's lying down, it'll be with arms crossed behind his head and legs crossed over one another; a bed doesn't suit him.
(It probably never had, and the Praetorium's always creeping, and on, and on, and on.)
Addam has no great desire to sleep in the same bed with him anyway, so it works out fine. Before, her presence had been happy happenstance, a mistake of conservativism serving stalwart tradition, that a man could take a wife for the sake of his obligations and then leave her entirely unfettered, but for the fact of their cohabitation on a farming estate some tens of thousands of peds from anywhere and anyone, on any given day.
Oh, right. Before. But we're concerned here with after, and all the trouble that brings.
The door creaks when Minoth's boot toes it open, and Addam's sure he'd been planning on it as much as he'd been planning on it not making a sound. He's always prepared. Never surprised.
And Addam, too, isn't as surprised as he might have liked to be.
"Can't sleep, Minoth?"
A frameless question. Has no bearing on anything much that matters. Small talk, in other words, and their spirits are just that small even if their statures still aren't.
"Just out smelling the roses, Prince."
There are no roses lapped by Fonsett's waters. "And what color were they?"
"Pink," says Minoth softly. "Pink, and their stems blue."
There's no grave, either. No, no, no roses.
The floorboards don't creak as Minoth steps across them to a shelf where a vase Addam had made some years ago now sits untended. Purposeful steps, these. He lifts it down and arrays the Jellyfish Balsam into it.
A split second between the shelf and the crystal sees the vase smashed to bits on the floor, navy stems gouged and scattered.
"I'll go give these some water."
"You do that," Addam nods, knowing the flicker of light let in through the doorway will illuminate his hair and thus his gesture.
It doesn't matter how much water they get, though. They'll still be wilted within a week.