They are all, Mary thinks as she plaits, very much like the flowers themselves - Dickon is the stems, the solid, reliable base of the entire structure, utterly and absolutely necessary to the integrity of the whole; Mary herself like the leaves, the thorns, the pollen that dusts her fingers green and yellow as she works - subtle, perhaps, but the details without which the whole would suffer and seem empty somehow, artificial, without heart; and Colin, of course, is the bright blossoms, bold and delicate and beautiful.

“It takes the three of us to make a whole, doesn’t it,” she muses, crowning her men, laughing at the way Colin tips his face up to the sun, merely faux-haughty now; at the way Dickon’s crown inevitably slips to one side, increasing his puckish aura.

“It always has,” Colin says, hot against her ear as his hands do the work of freeing her from the confines of her dress, as Dickon’s nimble fingers go to work on Colin’s trousers - or perhaps it is the other way around; she no longer knows, the three of them tumbled together in the long grass, entwined until she can no longer tell where one begins and another ends.