Hummingbird and flowers on the upper back

One August a miller's boy called Ewan Tarrow climbed the broken stair to steal lead from the gutters. Instead he found a red lily as tall as himself growing from a crack in the flagstones, a trumpet bloom the colour of marmalade beside it, and past that a purple peony with its head heavy as a bell. The bird came to drink from them and stopped to scold him for standing on the roots.

"You'll not touch what's hers," it said, and Ewan was so startled he sat down hard on the step. The bird explained that the daughter had dropped a silver ring into the well before she left, and that each summer the flowers grew tall enough to fetch it up, and each summer the lord's men tore them out. Ewan asked what it wanted him to do. The bird only said the well was deep and his arms were long, and then it flew off over the wall.

Ewan went down with a rope and a bucket and came up with the ring, cold and green at the edges. He carried it to the village that night, but nobody could say whose it was, so he hung it on a string round his neck. The next morning the lord's gate stood open under a peony the size of a cartwheel, and the bird hung above the well, humming, as if it had been waiting all along for someone brave enough to reach.