Shaded rose design with stem and leaves

I worked through the spring at the back of the forge. Each petal I beat from grey sheet until it held the ridges of a bellows fold, then I drew its edges outward with a file so the bloom looked as if it were opening in a draught. The leaves I cut from cooling plate and notched with a cold chisel. For the stem I twisted a single length of wire and let it curl at the foot, the way a tendril does when it has nothing left to climb.

On the last morning the steward came with his ledger and said the petals were too dark, that a queen's rose ought to be pale. I said roses are grey in the dark, and that I had made this one for the hour before sunrise. She came down the stairs in her nightdress to see it, and she set her palm flat against the top petal. It was cold as a pump handle. She said nothing for a long while.

That night I walked home past the orchard wall and found a real rose had opened on the bramble there, pink at the edges and already going brown. I thought of the queen's tin bloom standing in the hall with nothing to fade. It would look the same in a hundred years, and I found I did not envy it.