Bryony and Roses

by T. Kingfisher

  She cracked the lid.

  Nestled on a black velvet sheet, like a piece of jewelry, was an exquisite bee made of brass and silver.

  It was as large as Bryony’s thumb. There was a tiny key sticking out of its back.

  “Wind it up,” said the Beast. “It should go for several hours, but it has to be wound.”

  Hardly daring to breathe, Bryony wound the tiny key. It took half a minute or more, then it made a sharp click! and the bee lifted its wings.

  She held the box out, her hand trembling a little, and the bee crawled to the edge. Its legs were fine copper wires, ending in miniature bottle brushes.

  “To carry the pollen,” the Beast said. “It seemed best not to stray too far from the original design.”

  The bee spread its wings, vibrated them, and launched itself into the air. Bryony waited, her stomach clenched—surely it must fall! Surely it was too heavy to fly!

  It buzzed ponderously through the air, circled the garden, and landed on one of the peas. The bee’s golden head vanished into a pink flower, then it pulled back and climbed up the stalk to the next one.

  “Flying takes a great deal of energy,” said the Beast. “It will walk and climb as much as it can. And it is not as fast as a normal bee, but it is tireless. If you wind it up in the morning—”

  Bryony turned and threw her arms around the Beast’s neck.

  He made a sound of surprise. “I—uh—Bryony—?”

  “This is the best thing,” said Bryony into his shoulder. “This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. Thank you, Beast.”

  After a moment, his arms came up around her, very cautiously, and they embraced together in the garden, listening to the buzzing of the clockwork bee.

  As if her first dream had been a signal, Bryony’s nights became far more active than ever before.

  It was two nights later that she dreamed of a man, with pale skin and dark red hair, who watched her from across the room. His eyes were as intense as the Beast’s, but green instead of gold, a color clearer and less muddied than Bryony’s own.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “And where am I?”

  “You are here,” said the green-eyed man, which wasn’t helpful at all. When she looked down, she seemed to be in the manor house still. The tiles underfoot looked familiar, and there was a pattern of roses stenciled on the wall. The room smelled of roses too, rich and deep.

  “But who are you?”

  He smiled. It didn’t touch his eyes. When he reached out and took her hand, Bryony felt a jolt go through her, as if she’d been stabbed by a thorn. It was not painful exactly, but she half-expected to see blood.

  “I am here,” he said, which wasn’t exactly an answer. His fingers stroked across the back of her hand. Bryony felt her heart pounding in her ears, and somewhere rather lower than her ears.

  Oh, this is going to be one of those dreams, is it?

  But it wasn’t, and when she woke up, that was almost as frustrating as not having someone to answer her questions.

  She dreamed of him the next night, too, and then woke up and stared into the dark reaches of the bed canopy and said “Really? Really?”

  This gave way to vague nightmares, the sort where no matter how hard to you try, you cannot run from the things pursuing you, but only plod slowly forward, and then to an even more unpleasant series of dreams where she could fight back and whatever nameless creatures she was fighting refused to stay dead.

  This was hardly restful.

  Her afternoon naps got longer and longer because they were the only good sleep that she was getting, and she stayed up later and later in the library with the Beast.

  “I am using you shamefully to keep myself from sleeping,” she told him. “My dreams are a horror.”

  The Beast snorted. “I do not mind being so used. If you were not here, you would likely be sleeping perfectly well, and I hold myself accountable.”

  “Even if it means that I read bad poetry to you aloud?” She lifted the volume in her hands, a work of breathtaking awfulness by a very sincere poet.

  “I shall consider it my penance.”

  “Then brace yourself for Ode To A Rose Not So Sweet As My Mistress’s Voice.”

  “I am ready,” said the Beast, and reached for the wine.

  She got through three of the poems before she choked up with laughing, halfway through My Heart Is Trapped Like A Waterbird In The First Ice Of Winter. “Oh, this poor poet. What’s his name—the Honorable Matthias Irving. Oh dear. Poor man.”

  “There are other volumes of poetry in the library,” said the Beast. “Some of them are quite good.”

  “Never say it.” She put her hands over the book’s covers. “You’ll hurt poor Mister Irving’s feelings. Besides, good poetry generally leaves me feeling melancholy and inadequate. But bad poetry is a thing of joy.”

  “Not precisely the word I would have chosen.”

  “No, truly. I love this. I do not think I can tell you how much I love this.”

  “I am beginning to form quite a good idea,” said the Beast.

  She dreamed of the green-eyed man that night, watching her in a crowd. She recognized some of the people from the capital and tried to get past them, murmuring apologies. When they would not move she became more aggressive, shoving them aside and ignoring the muttering behind her.

  She reached him finally, and he said “You have the power to help me. You must help me.”

  “Maybe,” said Bryony, who was suspicious even in dreams. “Help you what?”

  But he would not say. The crowd pressed in on her, and she woke.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It was a slow grey day, and the garden needed rain worse than it needed her presence. Bryony tried to be grateful that she would not have to water.

  Although come to think of it, the soil is so perfectly moist all the time…if I didn’t water, would it actually dry out?

  She chewed on her lower lip. She had been willing to overlook the magical nature of the chicken manure, but this was treading perilously close to the line. If her plants grew in magic soil, were they hers? Or did they belong to House?

  No. It’s mine. It has to be mine. Something in this mad place where I am given everything I want—except answers—must be mine. I will not live here like someone’s poor relation.

  In the end, Bryony went exploring in the house. The thick silence settled around her and she began humming tunelessly as she walked, just to keep it at bay.

  There were doors and doors and more doors. She had opened most of the ones by her rooms, but there were whole wings of the house that she had never seen.

  She picked one at random, because the pattern on the long carpet runner was an attractive one, and walked down the hall.

  The first door she opened was a sitting room, no different from a dozen others in the house. “We could ask how many sitting rooms one manor house needs,” said Bryony, “but we wouldn’t get an answer, so we won’t.”

  The second door was also a sitting room. So was the third.

  “If this is another sitting room, I’m trying another hallway,” she announced to the air, and opened another door.

  Movement inside caught her eye. She flinched back, startled, and the shadow on the other side of the door flinched as well, and she realized that there was an enormous mirror.

  She stepped inside the room. There were mirrors everywhere, reflecting her in an endless ring. Bryony waved her hands and watched the thousand Bryonys wave back.

  Underneath the mirrors, at waist height, were low tables. Each table was crammed with jewelry boxes, their lids thrown back, revealing bracelets and necklaces and earrings and rings as plentiful as coins.

  “No, thanks,” said Bryony, wrinkling her nose. “I get enough of that from House.” She trailed her fingers through a jewelry box and felt herself entirely unmoved.

  I suppose I could come and play dress-up some cold winter afternoon...or drag the Beast here, to play it with me. She smi
led at the thought.

  There was a bracelet in front of the largest mirror, made of flat pieces strung together and enameled with a pattern of sharp-edged leaves. House seemed to be fond of it, since it was lying by itself in a little velvet case. “Very pretty,” said Bryony, “but not very practical for a gardener.”

  There was a book lying on one table. She picked it up and opened to the first page.

  Haunch of deer, it read. Deer. Deer. Haunch of deer. Haunch of deer. Deer.

  Bryony blinked.

  She turned a few pages, and saw nothing but the same phrase repeated hundreds of times.

  Does this mean something? Is it some kind of code?

  She flipped halfway through the book and the words changed.

  Six yards of linen. Yards of linen. Yards of linen. Six yards. Linen linen. Six yards of linen.

  “It’s a shopping list,” said Bryony, with dawning realization. “Oh, House! You tried to make a book, didn’t you, and didn’t know how to fill it?”

  The Beast had told her that the house could read a little, but that it filled books with gibberish. Here was an example.

  She turned pages, discovering chapters devoted to the need for twenty cabbages, a packet of needles, and five lengths of rope.

  It should have been funny, but there was something tragic and obsessive about the words written over and over. She turned to the very end.

  Out, said the last chapter. Out out out out out. We are out. Out. Out. Out.

  Bryony set the book down, very carefully, and wiped her hands on her skirts as if she had touched something unpleasant.

  It has to mean that it’s out of—of cabbages and linen and deer haunches—normal things. That’s all. It’s a shopping list.

  She found that she had no desire to read any more of House’s books.

  She left the room behind and crossed the hall.

  The next room was full of birds.

  Bryony froze on the threshold, with her hand still clutching the knob.

  There were birds of all shapes, all sizes, all descriptions. There were enormous eagles and tiny hummingbirds, great owls and strutting peacocks. There were partridge and pheasant and robins and ravens. There were birds that she could not name, with huge crests and beaks like shears; birds walking, birds flying, birds roosting with their heads under their wings.

  And every single one of them was dead.

  “I am not opposed to taxidermy,” said Bryony in a high voice, “but this is carrying it a little too far…”

  Glass eyes glittered at her. She did not step into the room, but she reached out and touched the wing of a nearby owl. It was soft and still, the same temperature as the air.

  She shut the door, very carefully, locking away that silent aviary, and thought that perhaps she was done exploring for the day.

  “This house has some very strange things in it,” she informed the Beast that night, in the library.

  “A great truth,” said the Beast. “But what in particular?”

  She told him about the room full of stuffed birds.

  “Oh, that,” said the Beast. “Yes. There’s one full of beasts, too.” He paused. “Well, wild beasts. Not beasts like me, of course.”

  She had a brief image of a hall full of stuffed Beasts, grimaced, and cast about for a way to change the subject.

  “Will you show me how you made the bee?”

  He looked surprised, but put his book down. “Of course. Well, I can show you my workshop at least. Now?”

  “Is now bad?” She glanced around the library. “I could make an appointment if you like…”

  “It’s a bit of a mess,” he said apologetically. “I’m not in the habit of cleaning my workshop.”

  She snorted. “When we first met, I wet myself. I think you’ve still got the social upper hand.”

  The Beast smirked. “You make a valid point.”

  They went through three doors, into a hallway that Bryony didn’t recognize.

  Not that that means anything. I should sit down and try to map this place out sometime, rather than just go through the doors House opens for me.

  The fourth door opened into a room smaller than Bryony’s bedroom, and unlike every other room in the house so far, this one was a disaster.

  “I’m sorry,” said the Beast awkwardly. “I can’t let the house clean it or I can’t find anything afterwards.”

  Sheets of metal gleamed from every surface. There were three worktables, all of them of a height suited to a seven-foot Beast, strewn with strange tools and dozens of tiny cogs, springs, and gizmos. It looked as if someone had taken a hundred clocks and dropped them on the room from a great height.

  “Good heavens,” said Bryony. “What is all this?”

  “Parts,” said the Beast. “I started by taking apart a clock and then I read several books on it. Then I couldn’t put the clock back together at first, so I had to read even more books. I started punching my own gears out of metal. I have a very small forge, even, for pulling wires, but I do not use it often. Fur burns very enthusiastically.”

  A sudden, horrible thought struck Bryony. “You didn’t make the nightingale clock, did you?” She put a hand to her mouth. Had she flung the Beast’s handiwork into the closet?

  He laughed. “No. House made that. I have, I like to think, much better taste than that.” The Beast shook his head. “And it wasn’t a real clock, either. You said it kept going off at odd hours?”

  Bryony nodded.

  “House makes things that look like clocks and then enchants them to work. I am not surprised if the timing was peculiar. Whereas I make things that are actually clockwork.” He smiled ruefully. “House’s creations work, if not always reliably. Mine are reliable, if I can make them work at all.”

  It occurred to Bryony that when she had insisted on making a garden herself, and not letting House do it, that she was following the same path as the Beast in his workshop.

  If our every wish is granted, we begin to invent work for ourselves, so that we have a thing that we have earned that is ours…

  She felt a sudden rush of kinship for the Beast.

  Bryony walked up to a table and stood on tip-toes to peer over it. “But how do you do all this?”

  “Carefully. I have a great many tools.”

  She investigated the cleanest of the three tables. This one had something assembled on it. It appeared to be a large brass beetle—no, a ladybug? It looked unfinished. Several legs and a shell casing lay to one side, and part of its back was open, revealing tiny cogs and flywheels.

  “I have one that works,” said the Beast. “Here, let me wind it up—” He pulled a small bit of brass off a high shelf and set it on the table in front of her.

  It was a grasshopper. It was extraordinarily beautiful. Bryony had seen little clockwork toys in the capital, although they were expensive even for merchant’s daughters, but this one was larger than any of them. Its body gleamed as golden as the Beast’s eyes, and its legs were long and elegant and inlaid with pearl.

  The Beast picked up a tool rather like a screwdriver, with a thick handle and a delicate point. He set it in a small recess in the grasshopper’s back and began turning it. It made a soft clicking sound as he wound it.

  After a moment he removed the tool and stepped back.

  The golden grasshopper clicked for a moment, lifted each leg in turn, and then gave a short clattery hop. Bryony jumped, startled, then laughed out loud.

  It made another, shorter hop, then slowed. Its legs ratcheted downward and it sank into immobility, poised for another leap.

  “The jumping doesn’t last long,” he said apologetically. “The other ones—the ones that walk—can run a lot longer, but then I usually take them apart for parts because I’m feeling too lazy to make new ones. To make your bee, I had to make finer springs than any I have ever made before, and I wasn’t entirely sure it would work.”

  “These must have taken you forever!”

  The Beast lifted one sh
oulder in a shrug. “I have had much time. And whoever stocked the library in the house had many books on the subject. I believe it was a hobby of theirs.”

  “So you didn’t create the library?”

  “No, it was here when House—”

  A candle went out. The Beast stopped talking immediately and bent his head over the worktable, moving the ladybug’s small gold antennae around in a circle.

  The pressure in the room eased.

  “These are beautiful,” said Bryony. “My bee is the most beautiful of all, but these are wonderful too.”

  The Beast ducked his head and smiled. If you had told Bryony a month ago that a monster could look sheepish, she would not have believed you. “I am glad you like them. I should concentrate more on finishing them, but it is easy to abandon a project partway through.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Bryony, with feeling. “I’ve lost plants because I couldn’t get it together to dig a hole soon enough.” She smiled down at the grasshopper.

  “Here,” said the Beast, picking up a small volume from the desk. “Speaking of books, and plants, I found this, and thought that it might interest you. It’s about gardening.”

  Bryony took it. The frontispiece said A Brief Monograph On Flora Of The Northern Forest Regions. When she opened a page, the writing was very small.

  She smiled. “A subtle way of telling me that you are tired of Master Irving’s poetry?”

  “Not at all,” said the Beast. “You may read me anything you wish, at all hours if you like. But I thought you might find it…interesting.”

  Something about his emphasis on the last word caught her attention. She flipped several pages and halted.

  The Beast had underlined something. When she turned another page, there was another underline, and another.

  She looked up at him sharply, to find his eyes boring into hers.

  Throughout the book, the Beast had underlined two phrases, wherever they appeared.

  The first one was, “birch tree.”

  The second was, “wild rose.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE