She nods and moves on, offering flowers to the next group of people.
I stand at the edge of the gratitude circle with the flower in my hand and think about who I'd name. Grandma Jo. Mom. Leo and Sarah. Kaelren. Peeble. Thalia. Bryx and Sarnyx and Mora and Nimor and Vashael and Eltrien, who are somewhere on the other side of the Rootline, holding things together without us.
One flower isn't enough. I'll need to come back tonight with a handful.
The dress is waiting in our chamber when I return.
It's laid across the bed on a sheet of woven moss, and the first thing I notice is that it's white. Not cream, not ivory. White. The kind of white that looks like fresh snow, clean paper, or the inside of a seashell held up to the light.
The second thing I notice is that it moves.
The fabric isn't still. It shimmers. Not with sequins, thread, or any kind of embellishment. The shimmer comes from the material itself, which catches the light at different angles and reflects it back in prismatic fragments. When I tilt my head, the white shifts through colors: pale blue, soft gold, the faintest blush of pink, a flash of green that comes and goes. It looks like a soap bubble. Or a diamond. Or sunlight spun into cloth.
"The Verdance grew it," Thalia says from the doorway.
I turn. She's leaning against the frame with her arms folded, watching me stare at the dress with an expression that's somewhere between proud and nervous. She's already changed. Her armor is gone, replaced by a gown of deep emerald green, the fabric woven with the same living-plant technology as everything in this city. The bodice is fitted, structured with thin vines that trace her collarbones and climb her shoulders in delicate green-gold lines. The skirt falls to the floor in heavy folds that shift when she moves; the fabric rippling with a subtle luminescence. Her dark hair is down, falling past her shoulders in loose waves.
She looks beautiful. She looks like her parents and something entirely, fiercely her own.
"You're stunning," I say, and the words come out thick.
She shifts her weight. The nervous edge sharpens for a second before she smooths it away. "The green is traditional. The leader of the Verdance wears the city's color during Bloomfall Eve."
"It suits you."
"You haven't tried yours on yet."
I look back at the dress on the bed. Touch the fabric with my fingertips. It's warm, like touching living skin, and the prismatic shimmer intensifies where my fingers press, colors blooming outward from the contact like ripples in a pond.
"The Verdance grows one for the Bloom-marked every cycle," Thalia says. "It chooses the design. The color. The cut." She pauses. "It's never made one this white before."
"What does white mean?"
"In the Verdance? Beginning. A new branch. Something that hasn't existed yet."
I pick up the dress and hold it against my body. The fabric adjusts immediately, the waist tapering, the shoulders widening slightly, as if the material is measuring me through contact.
"Will you help me?" I ask.
Thalia uncrosses her arms and crosses the room. She takes the dress from me and holds it open while I step into it, and her hands are steady and careful as she draws the fabric up over my hips and settles the bodice into place. The dress finishes the job itself. The living material tightens where it needs to, loosens where it should, the hem lengthening until it just brushes the floor. I feel it settle against my body the way the Verdance's paths settle under my feet: with attention, with warmth, with the quiet intelligence of something alive.
I turn to look in the polished root-panel that serves as a mirror, and I stop breathing.
The dress is extraordinary. The white fabric follows my body in clean, flowing lines; the shimmer catching every movement and colors scatter across the walls. My marks are visible through the fabric in some places, golden lines glowing faintly through the translucent material at my shoulders and collarbones, and the dress seems to have been designed around them, framing them rather than hiding them.
I look like someone important. I look like someone who belongs here.
Thalia is standing behind me in the mirror's reflection. Green gown and dark hair behind my white dress and red hair. We look nothing alike and we look completely alike. The same set of the shoulders. The same stance. The same slight furrow between the eyebrows when we're trying not to cry.
"I placed a flower for you," Thalia says. "Every cycle. In the gratitude circle."
"For me?"
"For you and for Dad. Even the cycles where you didn't come. I put a flower in and I said your names and the Heartwood took them." She looks at her hands. "It was the only way I could talk to you. For most of my life, it was the closest I could get."
I put my arm around her. She stiffens for half a second, the way she always does when someone touches her without warning, and then she leans into it. She rests her head against my shoulder, and the green of her gown presses against the white of mine, and I hold my daughter in a room that grew itself to hold us.
"This year," I say, "we'll place them together."
