Thread: The Castle Library
==> From the Halls of Amber.
During much of the discussion (Jade, playing at trickster), Ballad’s manner suggests pensive consideration. She’d offered Jade a brief, luminous smile when she suggested bouquets, her chin lifted daringly: Go on. If there was a vibrant gleam of easy amusement—why, isn’t there almost always?
“I do like a message delivered by herb and blossom,” Ballad replies. Didn’t she seal the note she sent down to the cousins with a sprig of some herb? Given this new context, her cousins may presume that it probably meant something additional which went unremarked. “But my favourite flowers... I like them in crowns, or I like them wild. You know, utterly unconstrained. Evening primrose, violets, moonslippers, shepherd's hearts, black-hearted Jacks, cutthroat's purses, even thyme and dandelions. Do you know those little black flowers called sailor's remembrance, Jade, which grows down by the sea? But there may be a particular soft spot in my heart for a simple rose and,” (indeed, here there's a quiet introspection: a sense that, this time when she smiles, it is a private thing entirely), "I like a geranium."