A steady flow of warm, green-scented air drifted down the corridor from the open door of Glenn’s front room, and a rectangle of butter-yellow sunlight stained the hallway floor, which was not itself unusual, except it was the middle of the night.
Inside the room he had prepared for her, lush velvet moss ran in parallel lines, sealing the gaps between the loose floorboards. Violets and bluets sprang up from the green rug, which was now thicker and shaggier than when he left it. Ivy fingers twisted through new cracks in the plaster, trickling down the walls like water. The ceiling was now irrelevant, though greenish-yellowy light filtered down from an unseen source, intrinsically warm. She had actually bothered to replace the loose-jointed chair with some monstrous, sturdy white toadstool; whether this was done from whimsy, or because she knew it would irk him, or out of a misguided sense of aesthetics, was hard to discern on first glance.
In roughly the place where the windowseat had been was now an arched leafy bower where the young queen lay stretched out on her stomach on a mat of soft rushes, her head nestled in the crook of her arm. Her eyes were closed, and her back rose up and down in an easy, peaceful rhythm. But her ears still pricked up, swiveling toward any slight noise that happened to sound like a footstep.