The Hollow Heart by Marie Rutkoski
THE GOD
FINALLY, SOMEONE CAME DOWN THEpath. I leaned toward the sound of footsteps the way a normal flower would toward the sun. How many human years had I been trapped inside this form? Time means little to the gods, but loneliness affects each member of the pantheon, and the god of games had deprived me of companionship, of speech, of being seen for what I truly was. Anyone would pity me, surely, if they knew my lot, but of course a rose cannot speak.
The young woman’s black hair shone in the sun. She wore what the people of Ethin had come to call Middling clothes: a simple sleeveless dress, dyed green as many Middling dresses were, with light decorative touches—in this case, embroidered pockets and several hot-pressed pleats. I heard her sandals scuff the dirt path. She hummed, the sound mingling with the birdlike chirrup of frogs hidden in the jungle. Over her shoulder, the sea sparkled. She consulted a badly drawn map made by the hand of her High-Kith mistress. She was to meet with the Middling farmer who oversaw the mistress’s cane fields and bring a report of the harvest to come. Thick greenery framed the path, and flowering vines threaded through the trees. Were this woman to step off the path and wander into the thick vegetation, she would find a strangely vacant plain, a blank space made as if cut from the trees and vines. No mortal hand had created this emptiness, this square where blue sky could be seen above instead of leafy canopies, climbing pink frogs, and the dart of slender birds with frilly crests upon their heads.
Fortunately for me, she did not stray from the path. I nodded in the light breeze, exhaling a lovely perfume. Roses do not normally grow in Ethin. I enticed her, and it was enough.
She stopped, tracing a finger over my petals. I shivered. Take me, I willed … though, of course, possession is not compassion. To be plucked by her was not to attain the pity I needed to be free.
She reached for me. Roses, however, were unknown to her, and as her fingers gripped my stem to break me, one of my thorns pricked her.
She cried out in surprise and pain, a drop of blood beading on her thumb.