The summer flowers were just beginning to die. Ilse wandered so deep in the Forbidden Forest she was nearly through it. Her legs and arms bled freely, and her dress had half torn from her ever-thinning frame, but her face still shone clean. Her hands touched everything in her path, tree trunks and spiderwebs and the few sunbeams that took their chances and slipped in before the canopy closed its defenses.
Finally, without one in mind, she came to her destination. As the trees thinned into meadow, a cluster of tents and canopies sprung up among them, and with them the smell of wood and cigar smoke. A man with bare feet discovered her first. "Good evening," he said, extending his arms to her. "Welcome."
"What is this?" she asked as the other inhabitants appeared from their haunts and greeted her.
"Priapia," said the man. "Sanctuary to the lost of body or soul. We live outside the Ministry and create beauty where they can only create order. Will you stay awhile?"
The wrinkles around his mouth reminded her of her father. "I can't."
She wove through the camp toward the open grass. A young woman draped in floral cloth gazed on her from a carpet-hung doorway, then said simply, "My muse." Ilse smiled. "Stay."