The hike was lovely, a winding path up through the mountains, up into a region of deep forest punctuated with rocky scree. Dain took us off the main trail, using no marker that I could see, and into a section of the woods that looked almost like any other, a little slump in the land with mossy rocks and deep litter.

He started laughing, delighted, and stopped me, draping his arms over my shoulders and crossing his wing-arms over my torso. "Look," he said, his face leaning against mine. Dain pointed into the woods, his happiness all but radiating into me.

I followed the line of his hand to see a slender stalk coming up off of a patch of low, dark leaves, with spindly, burgundy flowers. Then I saw another, and another, and as I looked across the little copse I spotted at least a dozen. A smile broke out across my face, one of sheer delight. "Orchids!"

Dain laughed again, nodding, then planted a kiss on my cheek. He focused for a moment, and a boardwalk spooled out in front of our feet, a glamor to keep us from damaging the delicate home of the orchids. "They're called phoenix-tongues," he said, disentangling himself from me and nudging me down the path. "To my knowledge, they only grow in these mountains, and the majority of their population is in Stag Court, with some few in the Court of Mercy. Do you know anything about orchids?"

"I do not," I said with a grin. I wandered over to the nearest orchid and got down on my stomach to examine it, kicking my legs up into the air. It was beautiful, with five long, slender burgundy petals striped with yellow, and a sixth fringed petal hanging down like a dog's tongue, flame-orange in the center before darkening to burgundy at the edges. The orchid only had four flowers in bloom on the long stalk, with three more buds swelling at the top.

My soulmate came and lay down next to me, scooting over so that his strong side pressed against mine. He draped one of his wing-arms over me, running the backs of his fingers against my cheek, and his tails tangled with my legs.

"Orchids do something very strange," Dain said, with nothing but happiness in his voice. "Unlike most flowers, they are obsessively fussy about where they will grow, and each species of orchid has a different set of fungi they require in order to sprout—sometimes even a single species of fungus. To find their soulmate fungus, they produce an incredible amount of seeds, all of which are so small that they cannot survive on their own. If they don't land on the proper fungus, they can't even begin to grow." He hugged me close to him, turning and kissing me on the temple. "I can think of several similarities to a certain fae lying here."