Peony on a stem down the forearm

Above the snow line there was once a woman called Orla Penhallow who kept a ledger of every flower the frost had not killed. She drew them with a steel nib, each petal cut in lines so fine you could feel them with a fingernail. Her brother Tom called it wasted ink. She told him the frost did not care for ink, and a drawing could outlast a bloom by a hundred winters if somebody was patient enough to hatch it.

The peony grew on the Tessel shelf, a crimson head as big as a man's fist, and it opened only once in a decade. Tom went up in June with a lantern and a root wrapped in wet moss, meaning to sell it to a lowland garden for enough silver to buy the valley farm. The stalk gave way in the sleet near the cairn. He came down with the stem in one hand and the bloom in the other, and the petals were still closed tight as fists.

Orla drew it that autumn, the leaves cut so densely the paper looked like frosted glass. When the ink was dry she folded the sheet into Tom's coat and said the flower would never need the mountain again. He carried it every winter after, and each time he crossed the col he held it up to the light until the shadows of the petals showed through like breath on a window. You are standing in his footprints now, so mind the stone.