A flower for every soul. Some housed in glorious gardens, but she kept hers close always, in a little pot clutched against her chest. Wilted sometimes by wind or heat, but never killed, and she had no place safer to keep it.

No one who would watch over it. No one to trickle sweet water over its roots. She had walked so far with it, feeding it the rain of a half-dozen countries instead. And now, just maybe, she stood before her destination.

A goal she had never known. A grand stone house on the edge of a town she couldn’t have named at the start of her journey, which those who lived in smaller houses would only whisper of. A place they would never willingly visit, a mistress they would never look in the eye, whose soul spilled from the windows and climbed to the eaves and whispered in the thorny voices of a thousand roses.