To leave by making his way through a house he did not know seemed insurmountable, while just outside this window began the slanted roof of what looked like a portico of some kind. It would do. He climbed out, his mission giving him surety of hand and foot. His desperation to leave the dream behind gave him incentive to clamber down to the ground. He had to drop the last bit but he landed softly in the grass.

The scent hit him first.

Lysander had long repressed his sense of smell, for it seemed that everything in the world was tinged with the metallic stink of blood, from the coal soot and carthorse droppings of the London streets to the dusty bookshops he'd used to love to visit.

Now, with the drop from the roof pushing the breath from his lungs, he inhaled the full and heady scent of rose. He drew back from the power of it, but there was no escape. It was all around him. He'd dropped into a small grassy patch in the middle of a rose infestation the likes of which he'd never seen.

No tame city garden this! The canes towered and tangled in a wall that began in a fall down the side of the house and wound all about him. He blinked and hesitated. How to escape the entwined vigor of it? He could not climb them, for even a brief touch informed him that the arching staves that absolutely dripped with blooms also carried thorns with intent to bodily harm.

Helplessly, he peered up at the moon only to see the leafy canes silhouetted black against the light. The richness of the air was as heady as wine, and he felt near to drowning in it. It was mad. It was ridiculous. It was an aggressive wealth of overgrowth and extravagance, especially after the monastic cleanliness of his room.

Iris would adore this.

Lysander, however, did not appreciate the confinement, no matter how potently scented. The high walls nearly formed a tunnel, and the very thought made him break into a sweat once more. Thorns or no, he was leaving this floral prison and he was leaving it straightaway.

His eyes began to make some sense of the shadows — it was not a tunnel, he reminded himself grimly — and he saw a slightly grayer distinction in the darkness off to one side, heading away from the house. Careful exploration led him to a curve in the wall and a paler grassy path leading onward. The passage through the riotous blooms didn't appear to go anywhere at all, until he found another turn, and then another. A few more yards and he'd freed himself from the mad profusion to see nothing before him but the moonlight on a grassy hillside stretching onward into the night.