The lavender that Eri gave me before the dream ended was still on my nightstand three days later.
It was one sprig, tied with a thread the color of old gold. It had not wilted or dried, which I should have found strange and didn't, because by then strange had stopped surprising me. Every time I passed, its scent drifted up in a faint purple breath, and I caught myself stopping to breathe it in.
Eri had pressed it into my palm in a field that did not exist, under a sky that was too wide, and told me to keep it somewhere I would see every morning. "So you remember you are still here," she had said.
But the ones that were delivered at The Belle, that one went to the trash can.
I had not told anyone about the field. Not really. Only Duncan.
~~~~~
I told him on the third night after, in the kitchen of the Keep. He was making tea, and I stood at the counter with my cold coffee, the condensation was showing.
"I met Eri," I said.
