To call it a lawn still would be a disservice. Where once nobles spent leisurely time walking among the thin, artisanal waterways carved into immaculate grass, a garden had replaced it. The waterways made only to impress now provided great irrigation to a dozen acres of vegetable gardens, flowerbeds, grain fields, and fruit orchards. After he’d entered the ruins of Vetris, after he’d cried enough and shouted enough and stared long enough at the last memories of his childhood, it had been the first thing he converted—a food supply for his people. The fish of Vetris held what survivors he gathered well enough until the first sprouts of quick-growing sugarleaf began to blossom, and then followed the young beans, and the red lentils, and even the weeds between the garden gave them sustenance—bitter dandelion greens and pithy butterbur filling grateful, hungry mouths.

He could scarce believe, somedays, the bounty such a garden had become. He remembered shoveling barrels of manure, of what horses still lived, into fertilizer until his whole body ached. He remembered pulling water up from the broken irrigation channels, carting bucket after bucket under the sweltering sun, Malachite and Yorl and every refugee citizen healthy enough to work at his side. He remembered most keenly the moment they’d realized they had grown enough greenery to supplant the mulch with vegetable chaff. A luxury, truly, that had now become almost laughably commonplace.

He breathed deep the smell of ripening cherries, almond blossoms, swathes of young garlic and green onions and the honey of the beehives just beyond the vegetable garden. Potato flowers grew thick and white, covering the ground in spring snow, and rows of sweet radishes and strawberries had begun to shamelessly peek their rosy countenances out for all to see.

From the scorched soil of hopelessness, they’d together made New Vetris bloom. And so did his heart learn to heal. To move, when it wanted not. To beat, even if all it desired was to stop. What kept him moving, shoveling, eating, breathing, was the thought she’d chide him for thinking such things.

You have a heart in that handsome chest of yours, and you don’t want it? So terribly ungrateful!

He smiled at a daisy, the words coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. But he didn’t want them to stop. They’d be with him for the rest of his life, of that he was sure.

Of that, he hoped desperately.

His fingers wandered of their own accord to the breast pocket of his vest, in which he kept the empty bag. He pulled it out, studying the rough burlap and, most importantly, the golden threads that sloppily stitched out the word Heart on it. The mere sight of the bag and the word brought back a flood of memories, held by the tenuous dam of time and work and distraction.

But the jewelry inside, he had no dam for.