Bryony and Roses

by T. Kingfisher

  “The house does it,” said the Beast. “All of it.”

  “So who does live here?” asked Bryony, gazing up at the vast manor house. Ranks of windows marched across its face. It could have held the entire population of Lostfarthing, with an entire wing left over for unexpected guests.

  “I live here,” said the Beast. “And now you. That’s all.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Perhaps the Beast is lonely.

  That was the thought that Bryony kept returning to, all that long morning. It made a certain kind of sense, but she had a feeling that it was not the whole reason, or even a very large part of it.

  People who were merely lonely did not try to send coded messages by squeezing your hand. Something deeper was afoot.

  That the Beast was a person, Bryony did not even question, but then, she believed on some level that Fumblefoot was a person, and Blackie the goat, and the neighbor’s large and grumpy tomcat.

  It was not that she was sentimental about animals. Chickens, for example, were not people. You looked into a chicken’s eyes and you saw the back of the chicken’s eyeball.

  The Beast, however, was definitely a person, even if he looked like a nightmare.

  His feet made no sound as he walked. This was understandable on the carpet, where even Fumblefoot’s hooves had been muffled, but then they came to the end of the corridor and a pair of glass doors that led into a tiled courtyard. Bryony’s boots clomped on the tiles, but the Beast glided along as silently as snowfall.

  In the center of the courtyard was a little open circle, where a bare white birch tree lifted its branches.

  All around the base of the tree grew roses.

  Unlike her sullen rosebushes at home, these were fully leafed out, little blunt ovals of green with dark red veins. There were flowers in every stage from barely budded to blowsy and dripping petals, all of them deep, dark scarlet. Small drifts of petals lay across the tiles.

  She did not want to compare them to blood. It was a shame that there were so few dark red things in the world.

  They’re like…like very dark tomatoes. Or late sunsets. Or a very nice cut of raw meat.

  Oh dear. Raw meat isn’t much better, I suppose…

  “This is where your rose came from,” said Bryony.

  “They are not my roses,” said the Beast, and his voice was deeper and more gravelly than it had been. “They belong to the spirit of this place. They require no tending.”

  “Just as well,” said Bryony, forcing a laugh. “I have no patience to tend roses.”

  The Beast led her across the courtyard. Bryony saw that the roses were twining around the base of the birch, the great roses shining against the white bark like—well, yes, like blood spatter on snow. In a few places, the stems had bit so deeply that the bark had begun to grow over them.

  “They’ve been there a long time,” she said.

  “Yes,” said the Beast, “a long time.” The air made a little space around his words, in a way that was not entirely pleasant, and Bryony did not say anything more until they had left the courtyard.

  Through another set of glass doors lay a staircase. It was as wide and grand as any Bryony had seen in the capital, lit by sconces, with a banister that looked perfect for sliding and a spiky finial at the bottom that looked perfect for impaling anyone who tried.

  “Your rooms are at the top,” said the Beast, nodding up it. “I suspect that you would like to rest a little.”

  She looked at him. “I’ve been awake for less than four hours.”

  “Collect yourself, then?” asked the Beast. “Err—powder your nose?”

  Bryony suspected that he was trying to be kind, and took pity on him. If we are indeed the only two beings in this house, apart from the house itself, which is definitely peculiar, and I am going to be here for any length of time, we will have to make an effort to get along together.

  “Very well,” she said, taking her satchel. “Thank you.”

  “I have a regrettably sharp tongue,” said the Beast, “and you likely already despise me for kidnapping you, but as there are only the two of us, I will endeavor to be a considerate—er—captor.”

  Since this ran perilously closely to her own thoughts, Bryony felt one corner of her mouth crook up. “And I suppose I will endeavor to be a considerate—er—victim. At least until I find a way to kill you and escape and so forth.”

  “Well, naturally,” said the Beast, smiling a little. His tusks gleamed in the candlelight. “I would expect no less. If there is any way in which I may assist you with the killing and escaping and so forth, please let me know.”

  Bryony ascended the stairs. Halfway up she looked down, and saw that the Beast was standing at the bottom, still watching her.

  “There is a lock on your door,” he called, “if you wish to use it. I do not have a key to it, so try not to lock it and then fall and hit your head on the bathtub or something equally humiliating.”

  “I’ll try to avoid it,” she said. “Thanks for letting me know.” What use a lock would be in a magical house that could open doors on its own, Bryony wasn’t sure, but it was a nice gesture.

  She was glad to reach the landing, which was overcrowded with decorative urns, and go up the second flight and out of sight.

  At the top of the stairs was a round room with green wallpaper and three doors. The one in the far wall stood open, and over the top, in elaborate scrollwork, it read, “Bryony’s Room.”

  Bryony stepped up to the threshold, leaned in, said “Oh no!” and began giggling helplessly.

  Then the stress of the morning caught up with her, and she had to lean against the doorjamb with her hand over her mouth, laughing until tears came. When the tears threatened to turn into something else, she forced herself to stop.

  “I’m sorry, House,” she said to the air, “I suppose I will call you House, since I have to call you something, and a name like ‘Bob’ or ‘Tom’ doesn’t seem quite appropriate. It is a very pretty room. It’s just…well…”

  It was pink.

  The walls were pink, the floor was pink, the bedding was pink, even the furniture was rosewood and, while quite attractive, came perilously close to pink. There was a wallpaper border of pink floral designs, and the crown molding across the ceiling was white with a pattern of pink spirals, and the candlesticks were thorny black iron brambles, topped by iron roses with the candles rising out of them like stamens. There was a tapestry on the wall showing a bluebird perched among pink flowers and the dark pink carpet was broken up by a round rug in the shape of an enormous dahlia.

  Which was also pink.

  Bryony took several steps forward, around a decorative pink urn—House apparently liked urns—and gazed in dismay at the canopied bed. It stood on a little raised platform, like an altar or a stage. It could have held Bryony and both her sisters, and they could have slept the night through without ever encountering a stray foot or hand from one another.

  Lace foamed over the bedskirts and pillows and down from the canopy like pink lianas. The bedposts were carved with climbing roses. There were silk hangings about the bed embroidered with more flowers, all in shades of red and pink and vermilion.

  Bryony had never before had occasion to contemplate what it would be like to find oneself inside a uterus, but she suspected that sleeping in the bed would be rather like that. Except with more flowers.

  She tried to find someplace to rest her eyes that was not pink and rose-filled, and settled on the bluebird. The splash of blue was her only anchor in the room.

  “Right,” she said aloud, to the house, or possibly the bluebird. “Um. Yes. Very…err…kind.” Perhaps there would be some hangings elsewhere in the house to tame the intensity of the walls. She’d have to look. “Very…pink. Yes.”

  Two steps up onto the platform brought her to the bed. She looked dubiously at the space under it. The bedskirts hid the space underneath, but she had never liked beds with too much space under them, even when she was younge
r and had slept in a carved bedstead instead of on a straw-tick mattress. There was too much room for things to lurk. Merely because nothing had, in seventeen years, reached out and clutched her ankles didn’t mean that it wouldn’t happen someday if she let her guard down.

  She dropped her satchel on the bed. The brown leather was another comforting spot in the sea of pink. Perhaps she could navigate from spot to spot, bluebird to brown satchel to the window on the far side of the room. There had been some celadon urns out on the landing. Possibly she could appropriate one or two.

  She sighed. When the initial shock of the pink had faded, the grandness started to overwhelm her. There had been a time when she would have fit in such a room, but that time was long ago and very far away.

  She trudged to the window. Normally, grandness would not have bothered her so much—Bryony had learned to be grimly proud of her relative poverty, because the alternative was to be crushed by it—but there was something about the Beast’s manor that made you feel as if there was almost certainly dirt under your fingernails, and perhaps something unpleasant stuck to your boots.

  She checked her nails, sighed again, and tucked her hands under her elbows. Very well. She was a gardener, after all, and there was no shame in dirt under your nails. None whatsoever. If the house was going to be judgmental about it, it could go hang.

  The window beckoned. Bryony peered out and felt her sprits lift a little, because it overlooked the birch tree. The bare branches had not yet leafed out, but they were a shape that she understood, and which did not make her feel small and grubby and out of place. Birch trees were the same tree no matter who you were. Even the very rich did not get better birch trees.

  “I wonder if I could set some of my pots in the courtyard,” she mused. “The roses are very nice and all, but it could use some lavender and some phlox. Something to mess it up a little.”

  The Beast had said that she could make her garden wherever she liked. Much of it needed to go directly into the ground, but surely she could keep a few in pots. Perhaps House could sacrifice a few urns to the cause.

  She looked around the room. There was nothing that she needed to do right now. She could go and find the Beast again, see what he had planned for her, or perhaps go and scout out the grounds for a place with good sun and decently drained soil…

  A movement caught her eye. One of the wardrobe doors swung silently open.

  Bryony took a step back—this is it, now the monster comes out and eats me—but there were only dresses.

  Lots of dresses.

  Dresses with seed pearls and fur and tiny glittering gems and wispy skirts and very full skirts and puffed sleeves and slashed sleeves and leg-o-mutton sleeves and Bryony wasn’t entirely sure that she wouldn’t have preferred the monster.

  “Oh dear,” she said.

  When she looked away, there was a particularly excessive dress laid across the bed. It had dark green stripes and the frothiness of the petticoats rivaled that of the lace on the bed.

  “Oh, House…” said Bryony, rubbing a hand over her face. “House, are you trying to say I’m underdressed?”

  When she took her hand away, a tiara set with tiny cut emeralds and a necklace as wide as a horse collar had joined the dress on the bed.

  “I’m going for a walk on the grounds, House,” she said.

  The wardrobe door seemed to sag on its hinges and the candles flickered mournfully. Bryony closed her eyes.

  I am making an enchanted house sad. God help me.

  The skirt had been spread out to show elaborate stitchery. There were now two emerald bracelets wider than Bryony’s thumb. Bryony sighed from the bottom of her toes.

  And then, because there was something sadly hopeful about the dress, Bryony said, “When I come back, I promise, I’ll dress for dinner.”

  The wardrobe doors clapped shut cheerfully, and the candles flared up in their sconces. Apparently this was acceptable to House.

  There was an ewer of water on a low table by the wall. The basin was blessedly white but there was a pattern of pink stars around the rim. When Bryony poured out the water, it was warm. There were small white soaps and the towels were softer than any clothing that she had worn since leaving the city.

  She made a half-hearted effort to get the dirt out from under her nails. The dirt laughed at her.

  In the end, she settled for washing her face and hands, and then fled the over-pink room and the over-hopeful dress and went in search of the Beast.

  CHAPTER TEN

  She found herself unwilling to leave the rooms that she was familiar with. Who knew what House might get up to, in the far wings? Did it decorate and undecorate rooms to please itself? Were there storerooms holding dresses and buckets of mash and pink robes, in case they might be needed?

  When Bryony had gone down the large staircase and opened the door to the little parlor in the front hall (which was neat as a pin and bore no trace of having briefly been a stable) and wandered through the courtyard without seeing any sign of the Beast, she gave up hope of finding him and went out to see her plants.

  What had been a very large burden for Fumblefoot made a pathetically small knot against the vast sweep of lawn. Bryony felt a brief rush of indignation for her plants. They were good plants! How dare that lawn make them seem so trivial?

  “I shan’t feel guilty about tearing you up at all,” she informed the lawn. “Even if I can’t get very much of you at first. Hmm. I wonder if House can make decent manure?”

  This led to a brief, searing mental image of the manor house lifting one massive wing and leaving a pile the size of a haystack behind it. Bryony giggled and hefted one of her purple sages in her arms, grabbed her trowel, and set off.

  “The corner,” she said. “By the wall, I think, so that I can have a little shade for those who need it, and so that I am not looking at that awful lawn from every angle!”

  It was a long way. She shifted her grip on the sage several times as her arms got tired. The grass muffled her footsteps as thoroughly as the carpets inside the house had. Perhaps it was not grass at all, but green carpeting. It was unnaturally green for the time of year, and there were no brown spots anywhere. No weeds marred that perfect surface.

  Perhaps I am the weed here. I am certainly unruly and rather common these days….although I wasn’t always common. Perhaps my family is like one of those plants that starts out large and showy, but in a few generations the seeds revert to wild again.

  She bowed her head. The sage brushed its leaves apologetically across her face, and the scent cheered her.

  On the other hand, if we had stayed in the capital, it might have been many years before I had a garden of my own where I could get dirt under my nails and not have gardeners hovering around insisting that the young mistress not exert herself. What a lot of wasted years that would have been!

  She and the sage reached the corner of the stone wall. Bryony set her plant down and began to pace out the likely dimensions of her new garden—a broad crescent of flowers here, and two straight rows of vegetables here, and a round bed in the middle for an herb wheel. That would probably do for now.

  Using the edge of the trowel, she cut a line in the turf. It yielded smoothly to the touch of metal. The ground underneath was chocolate-colored loam, with streaks of red clay.

  Bent over, her back already complaining, she cut the outlines of her bed in the grass. It went more easily than she’d expected. (Surely she was imagining that the turf pulled its roots away from the trowel like a lady pulling her skirts back? Although in this place, who could be sure?)

  When she finally straightened, she was surprised at how much she’d gotten done, and a little discouraged at how much she had left to do. This was going to be shovel work, and a lot of it.

  “I wonder if I have to go back to the house for a shovel, or if it can produce one out here?” she asked aloud, talking to herself, or possibly the sage.

  “Close your eyes and ask it,” suggested the Beast.
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br />   She whirled around. He was standing a few feet behind her, his clawed hands thrust into the pockets of his robe. She had not heard him approach.

  “You startled me!”

  He took a step back. “Forgive me. I should have called out.” He spread his hands. “It has been some time. One forgets the niceties.”

  Bryony had not been expecting an apology. “Oh. Well. It’s your manor, after all.”

  The Beast made a noncommittal sound.

  “Is this—do you object?” She waved a hand at the newly outlined garden, and the lone sage plant sitting plunk in the middle of it. “You said I could put it anywhere.”

  “I meant it,” said the Beast. “You can tear up the entire lawn if you wish.” He gazed down at her handiwork. “Is this all?”

  “All for this season,” said Bryony. “I imagine, depending on how long I am to stay, that I may expand it.”

  The Beast said nothing.

  After a moment, Bryony wiped her hands on her pantlegs and said “You said I should close my eyes and ask for a shovel?”

  “I find it easier,” said the Beast. “The house will make whatever you ask, if it can, but magic is...not always comfortable to watch. It will put it behind you, most times, but if you close your eyes, it will often be right in front of you.”

  Feeling a bit foolish, Bryony closed her eyes and said “May I have a shovel please, House?”

  “Ah,” said the Beast, sounding pleased, “there you are.”

  She opened her eyes, and a shovel was leaning against the wall. She picked it up and found the handle smooth and contoured. The blade was already sharpened, which was a great relief—sitting with a file trying to put a bit of edge onto a shovel was one of the least pleasant parts of gardening. She set it against the grass experimentally and stepped on it, and felt it sink smoothly into the ground.

  “Before you begin digging your escape tunnel,” said the Beast, “would you like a tour of the grounds?”

  She raised an eyebrow. He was smiling, she thought, although it was mostly around the eyes.