Severn watched; if human eyes could change color to suit mood, his would have been as dark as Teela’s.

The flower unfurled, the three petals falling slowly open; at their heart, pulsing in a way that was uncomfortably reminiscent of beating hearts, was something purple.

“Do you have other images of flowers similar in shape and size?” Teela asked Helen, without once moving her gaze from Helen’s projection.

“I do, but I believe you are looking for a specific flower.” She frowned then and turned to Severn. “You are certain?”

Severn nodded. To the group at large, he added, “Helen is asking my permission to search my memories of the West March. I’ve told her to take anything of use that she can find.”

“I can see why she wanted confirmation,” Teela said. “It’s not an offer I could make.”

“No, and I wouldn’t ask it of you. I didn’t intend to ask it of anyone.” Helen could be anywhere in her house at the same time; she could do two things at once with ease. A second ball of light—green, and the same size as the first—appeared. It began to spin, and filaments of light formed in the same fashion, but the color the light shed was markedly different. When the shape itself had come to rest, it was—in size, in texture—identical to the first flower.

But colors, however, were different. If Kaylin saw this flower with its white-green leaves, she might have assumed it one of the prettier weeds; most flowers had more color.

“Do you want to tell them?” Helen asked Severn.

“I think Teela already knows. Terrano?”

Terrano nodded, frowning. His eyes weren’t the color that Teela’s had adopted, but they almost never were; when something went badly, badly wrong he was just as likely to let curiosity rule his actions as caution. The only time she’d seen him exercise any was when they had fled through the outlands to the fiefs, or the place that the fiefs overlapped. He had avoided Ravellon entirely; even approaching it in the outlands had caused flickers of unease in his usual ready-to-go expression.

“Sorry—I think you’ll want Serralyn for this,” he finally said.

“I thought Barrani had perfect memory?”

“For anything we happened to be paying attention to, yes. This one looks like a weed to me—how much attention do you normally pay to those?”

“The green doesn’t have weeds,” Severn told Terrano. “Not the way the carriage roads here develop them.”

Kaylin didn’t generally come to Terrano’s defense, but felt he had a point. “Pretty sure I saw weeds when I had to enter the green.”