Lotus flower with swirls on skin

She found the seed head in February, pressed flat inside a tin that once held barley sugar. A note in her grandmother's hand said only: for the water at Corrow, when it is ready. Nobody had lived in the keep since the fire, and nobody had written to Nell since the funeral. She took the tin down to the shallows anyway, knelt on the cold stones and pushed the seeds into the mud where the old drawbridge chains disappeared. Spring came grudgingly. Rain beaded on the lichen and ran in thin silver threads down the walls, curling round the broken arrow slits the way ink spreads on wet paper. Nell watched the surface every morning with her tea going cold in her hands, and on the thirtieth day a green point broke the water, then another, until a pad as wide as a dinner plate lay flat and proud on the brown moat.

The bud came in June. It opened slowly over a week, petal by petal, each one lifting from the centre like a lamp being turned up, and the colour was nothing like anything she had seen grow in Corrow: coral at the heart, then pink, then a bruise of purple at the edges where the light struck hardest. In the middle sat a crown of golden threads, dusted and busy with a bee. Nell understood then that the castle had never been ruined for lack of things worth keeping. She walked back up through the gatehouse with wet knees, and left the tin open on the wall with its label facing the water.