Mara Kellison's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

The blue rose held its color for three more days. Mara watered the roots at dusk and watched the cloth strips snap in the wind. But one morning she stood back and saw the truth. Her entry was one bush. One bloom. The other gardens would roll in on carts, heavy with hundreds of flowers. Against them, her rose looked like a single candle in a dark hall. A rare flower could still lose to a wall of color. She needed more blooms, and she needed them fast. So she walked to the tavern, where the festival talk ran loudest. Maybe a grower would sell her cut flowers to fill out her display. Inside, the matchmaker sat near the fire with his worn ledger open. Gus Oller looked up and wagged a finger. "Mara Kellison, buying flowers from strangers? Your rose should stand alone, girl. Crowd it with common blooms and the judges see only the crowd." He tapped the page. "You don't need more flowers. You need more hearts on your side." Before she could answer, a man rose from the corner table. Dark cloak, a sword at his hip, dust still on his boots. Mara had never seen him before. He crossed to her with an easy half-smile. "I heard you grew a blue rose," Lucian Hawthorne said. "I've walked through forty villages. Nobody has ever managed that." "It's one rose," Mara said. "One rose can't win." "One rose that shouldn't exist can win," he said. "If people believe it. I tell stories for my bread. Let me tell yours. Not the Kellison everyone frowns at. The woman who crossed a wolf's woods for a flower." Gus leaned in, scratching a fast note. The firelight caught the hope on his face. Mara weighed it. A full display would blur her into the pack. A story might lift the one thing no rival could match. She made her choice. "Tell it," she said. "But tell it true." Lucian did. By market day he had carried her tale from tavern to stall. A weary trader came to buy herbs and spoke of the brave grower with the impossible bloom. The whisper spread faster than any cartload of roses. People wanted to see the single blue flower, not the hundred red ones. Then a stranger in black armor reined his horse near the square. Scars crossed his bald head, and villagers stepped back from him. Kargoth Ironbane. He stared toward Mara's land. "A flower worth forty villages of talk," he said. "I'll have it, or I'll burn the field it grows in." Mara's throat went dry. She had solved one problem and bought a worse one. Her rose no longer looked thin beside grander gardens. The story had made it famous. And fame had drawn a warlord to her gate.