Тэд Уильямс - The War of the Flowers

As the hand that had temporarily blinded him lifted free, Theo saw green depths rushing up to meet him, incalculable depths.

So that was it. That was a life . The thoughts were like bubbles, rising and popping. Goodnight nobody. Say goodnight … Then the water flooded into his startled, open mouth and blackness rushed in behind it.

In his dream he floated in thick, cool space, surrounded by streamers of green movement. In fact, almost everything was green — the light, the shadows, his own hands where they drifted slowly in front of his face, stained a sickly color like old lunch meat. Fish, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, floated amid the rising bubbles just as he himself was floating, watching him with more curiosity in their glassy eyes than seemed decent.

Sometimes the green went away completely, swallowed by darkness, and when it came back he was surrounded by women instead of fish, all of them lovely in a strange sort of way, hair furling and waving, moved by invisible currents. These women watched him as the fish had watched him, smiling (some of them seemed to have very sharp teeth) and whispering among themselves. Through it all, through the green light that came and went, he was aware of nothing about himself except weightlessness and a feeling of unconcern that seemed to make his thoughts as buoyant as his slowly kicking legs.

Only occasionally did it occur to him that he should be drowning, or might even already have done so.

He had been staring at her for a while before he realized her black hair was not drifting, but instead hung down beside her pale, pretty face in what once would have seemed a perfectly ordinary manner. He stared a while longer before he realized he recognized her, although something about her was different and her name was slow in coming.

"His eyes are open!" the dark-haired young woman said. "I think he's waking up!"

Another face, this one less familiar, leaned in. "It is sooner than we would have guessed, but he has a strong constitution. Good breeding."

"Don't say that!" the young woman said. "I hate that."

"Poppy… ?" He had the name now, although some of the details were still wrong; his vision remained cloudy, as though he had not entirely left the lake bottom. She seemed to have lost her eyebrows. No, he realized, they were there, but they were so pale as to be almost invisible. It gave her a strangely Japanese look, the face a white oval, like a geisha's. One thing was certain, though — just seeing her made him feel good. "Poppy, is that… ? Am I… ?"

"You're fine, Theo. You're alive!" She suddenly climbed up on whatever supported him — it had a certain give, and he momentarily feared tumbling back down into whatever green depths he had escaped — and kissed his face. She hugged him and he let out a little huff of pain. "Oh! Sorry!"

"I think… did I break a rib?" He was trying to make sense of his surroundings. A tent? Whatever it was, the only light came from one of the glowing witchlight spheres. The other fairy woman had gone somewhere — he could just make out the light of what might be a doorway, but he couldn't lift his head high enough to be certain. "What else did I do? I can hardly move. Everything hurts."

"No one's quite sure. You were bruised all over, but by the time we saw you they were all old bruises. The Duchess treated you well down there."

"Duchess?" His head was quite remarkably empty of any useful memories, although it felt very full of something else, swollen and aching.

"The one who had you. The nymph. Oh, Theo, I thought we'd never get you back!" She had a tight grip on him again, and he found that the pleasure of it was such that he could even ignore the pain in his side.

"What… what happened?" He was starting to remember a little of it now, and the dominant image was a column of billowing lavender light and the terrible shrieking of… of… "Hellebore, Lord Hellebore. He's dead. And that child-thing, too." He looked up, worried by her expression. "They are dead, aren't they? They have to be. But doesn't that mean… we won?" But the memory of Applecore's last brave moments had returned and winning suddenly didn't mean as much as it should have. "Did we win?"

She shrugged. "Yes, I suppose. Everything is a mess, but it's a lot better than it would have been." A noise distracted her and she looked up toward the doorway. "There are people here to see you. They've been waiting as long as I have, hoping that Primrose could make a bargain."

"Primrose? Bargain?"

"Wait. You'll find out everything. And I'll be right here with you."

"What happened to your eyebrows?"

"What do you mean?" But she knew. "Oh, the color? It's nothing — they were always white like this. I decided to stop dyeing them, that's all. To stop pretending I wasn't a Thornapple."

"Ah." He lifted a hand to touch the pale white stripes, although it seemed a long distance to reach. She took the hand before it reached her face and held it, as though it might hurt her to be touched there.

"You do still care about me, don't you, Theo? No, that's not fair, to ask you that right now."

"Just try to leave and you'll find out how I feel." He gave her hand the strongest, most reassuring squeeze he could muster — which in his present state, he guessed, was something like being humped by a very old starfish. But for all his growing joy at realizing that by some mysterious means he was back in the world again, and that Poppy was in it and waiting for him, there was a hole inside him that could not be so easily filled. "Oh, Applecore," he said quietly, speaking to a ghost, a memory. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"Sorry for what?" someone said. "Being a great, hulking eejit? That's not entirely your fault, now is it?"

Cumber Sedge was sitting on the foot of the bed, and unless he had become an amazing ventriloquist, the tiny shape sitting on his shoulder had to be… "Applecore!" Theo tried to sit up but couldn't manage it. "You're not dead!"

"And neither are you, you daft thing, but not for lack of trying." She stood and Cumber picked her up and set her carefully on Theo's chest. She was paler than usual, with pronounced dark rings under her eyes and some healing burns on her face and even on parts of her head, as displayed by her very closely cropped hair, but otherwise she seemed to have all her limbs and her old personality intact. "What are you staring at? Have you never seen a good-looking woman before?"

"Not one I'm as surprised to see. And Cumber, thank God! I mean, sorry, thank the Trees or whatever. Didn't mean to make you flinch. We all made it! We're alive!"

Cumber nodded slowly. His smile, too, took a while to come. "We are. Not everyone was so lucky. There were many deaths in the City before the end. Zirus Jonquil, among others, and hundreds upon hundreds more. In fact, Zirus died trying to save you."

"I'm sorry to hear that. He was nice to me — nicer than almost anybody else of his kind. But what do you mean, trying to save me?"

"He and a bunch of folk from the Flower houses fighting against Hellebore's lot were following all of you," Applecore said. "The goblins helped them track you, but it gets very hard in the center of Midnight. I found them in the woods, trying to get to the lake, but I knew they wouldn't make it in time. That's why I came back by myself. Then, when they did get there, the rest of the constables and Foxglove and… and Poppy's father… sorry, Poppy…"

"Nothing to apologize for," Poppy said, but her expression had gone stiff and cold.

"Well, they fought back, even though Lord Hellebore was dead. Lord Foxglove was killed, and some of the guards, and Poppy's father was wounded, but Zirus and several of his troops were killed, too." Applecore sighed. "Anton Hellebore threw himself into the Well instead of letting himself be captured, the pig. At least they say it took him a long time to die. And of course, thousands were killed in the City, and there were terrible fires even after the dragons died. So nobody's felt much like celebrating these last few weeks."