by C. E. Murphy
I laughed in surprise and hugged him. "Thank you. I'm sure that made me feel better than an 'it's not so bad'."
"It is so bad," he continued with that same good cheer. "You've got half a rosebush in your hair, Amber." He reached to pluck a thorn from the tangles. I caught his hand with a swiftness that startled both of us, and shook my head. "Don't. Don't touch them. I don't trust them."
"Amber," Pearl said, her voice heavy, "what's happened? Did the Beast do this to you?"
"What? No! Stars, no. No, it's—" I looked at Father, whose eyes were still bright with tears, and whose mouth was a grim anticipatory line in a beard he had not worn the last time I'd seen him. "It wasn't the Beast," I said again, firmly. "Father, I have to know. What did you know of your first wife?"
Father's grimness swept away in a flood of astonishment soon replaced by aged resignation. "Less than I should have. Come, children. We'd better go inside."
Only when we stepped inside did I realize who had been missing from the crowd outdoors. "Maman?" I asked, suddenly frightened. "Where is Maman?"
"Resting upstairs," Opal said quietly. "She took to her bed over a week ago, and has hardly been aware of us since. Amber, what has happened to you?"
A tremor of relief raised hairs on my arms. Maman had always been fragile, all of her strength drained by the boys and the letters she wrote, but the prospect of her loss while I had been away was too much to bear. I wanted to see her, but my story needed to be told, and would only agitate her. Opal could come up with some softer variant on it, something palatable for Maman's infirm state, and we would share that with her, instead of the whole dreadful truth.
We sat together, all of us, even little Jet, whose three years certainly should have protected him from the worst of my tale. Helpless to explain the impossible in anything but blunt terms, I told them what I had learned of the queen, the curse, and Eleanor's role in it. Pearl went and got a mirror when I spoke of the spell that had altered her hair, staring into it as if trying to understand that the brilliant white coif she now wore was what she had always been meant to have. Then she handed me the mirror, and my story fell into speechlessness as I gazed at it.
The green was gone from my eyes, leaving them their unknown but natural, shocking, gold, and they were the least of it. My skin was a lattice of scratches, which I'd known, but seeing the scores across my cheeks and forehead was vastly more dismaying than acknowledging the ones on my arms and legs. Jasper had been kind: my hair was beyond awful, an amber-colored snarl of twigs and thorns that made me look like I was half a tree. I handed Opal the mirror, and she tilted it so I could see what I was doing as I began to work the thorns out.
Jet's curious little fingers reached for the first of the thorns as I placed them aside. I snapped, "Don't touch those," and his hand flinched back. He gave me a look of tragic betrayal that would have won laughter from me, had I not been so afraid of the thorns. My gaze skittered to the window where the bit of stained glass, the leaded rose, hung, and beyond them to the roses that covered the entirety of that wall. Opal, following my gaze, shook her head. "They're the strangest roses I've ever seen, Amber. They've been growing and blooming since before they were put in the ground, but save for the branch they grew from, they have no thorns. They're not like the ones that attacked you, even if they came from the same garden."
I nodded uncertainly. Glover rose from beside Opal and got a small-necked glass jar for me to drop them in. Grateful, I smiled at him, then told the rest of my story.
Father's face grew bleaker and bleaker as I listed Eleanor's transgressions. When I finished, he shook his head, his words weary. "I knew she hadn't died."
We sisters, especially, gawked at him, and he passed a hand over his mouth, pulling at the short beard. "Not at first, for what little that may be worth. I mourned as if I'd lost a wife in childbirth, but as you grew, Amber, and played more beneath the rosebushes…" He shook his head. "Visions came to me. More than visions; memories. I knew I had seen you there with her, and that it was more than wishful dreaming. That little piece of knowledge shook other pieces loose, memories that couldn't have happened if she had died when you were born, until one day I saw a woman who so closely resembled Eleanor's description of the queen that I remembered she had claimed to have seen her. I remembered she'd said as much on the day she left us, and I think remembering it may have shattered the rest of the enchantment. I've known since then that she didn't die, and that she bore some manner of magical power."
"Why didn't you tell us?" Opal asked in astonishment. Pearl shook her head as if she anticipated Father's answer, and when it came, nodded agreement.
"What was the purpose? A mother who had died was at least not one who had abandoned you deliberately. And if she carried witchery in her blood, I thought it better to let you forget her as much as you could. I grew insular," Father admitted. "I drew you close to me and turned the world and friendships away. I wanted to protect you, but the end that was our ruin. Had I been more open, we might have had friends to turn to when our home burned, and our lives might have gone on safely in the city."
"You got out enough to meet Maman," Flint said with a quick smile. "Good thing for us, too."
Father very nearly blushed, a thing I hadn't known he could do. "Your mother sought me out. She'd known Eleanor a long time ago, in the queen's court, and heard she'd died, with children left behind. She wanted to make sure the children were well. We became friends, and fell in love. I was grateful, at the time, that anyone else cared. Now I think I may be grateful that someone, at least, counted Eleanor among their friends. It makes me feel a little less the fool."
"We became friends and fell in love," Maman agreed softly, from the stairs. "The rest…may not be precisely true."
The family turned as one to see Maman standing tall and straight on the stairway, one hand wrapped tightly around the bannister as if it lent her the strength to remain upright. She looked, to my eyes, desperately fragile: the warmth had fled from her skin, leaving it yellow beneath its mahogany hue, and she had lost weight, leaving her magnificent bone structure sharper than I'd ever seen it. She looked older, and familiar, but not in the way that a mother did to a child who hadn't seen her in a long time.
Father and I both shot to our feet, Father to offer Maman assistance on the stairs, and myself to simply stand and sway and stare. Maman gave me a rueful smile as she accepted Father's help, and the family made way for her to sit in one of the couches beside Father. I stayed on my feet, gaping at her, and it was Father who had to ask, "What part isn't true, Felicity?" in a cautious voice.
Maman looked at me, waiting to see what I knew, and after a moment I managed a whisper: "Maman is Queen Irindala."
A commotion rose, my two sisters and two of my brothers suddenly full of demands and questions. Jet, who had no questions, felt he should add to the noise, and began to wail. Glover leapt to his feet and bowed so deeply his hair swept the floor. Then he picked Jet up, trying to comfort him. Amidst all the clamor, Father ducked his head, amused guilt pulling at the corner of his lip.
"You knew," I said to him, astonished. "You knew."
Maman's eyebrows went up at that accusation. "Jacob?" Her voice silenced everyone else's, and we watched them, rapt as children at the theatre.
Father lifted his gaze to hers, and my heart shattered with agony for him: his love for Maman was so clear, so obvious, and his regrets for what he had put her through written as largely on his face. "I suspected," he said. "From the beginning, I suspected."
A shadow of loss crossed Maman's features. "Is that why you married me? To wed a queen?"
"Maman!" Pearl burst, not, I thought, because she questioned Father's devotion, but because she had verified, with that query, that what I had said was true.
Maman arched her fingers in her lap, showing Pearl the pads, and with that minute gesture, silenced my older sister more thoroughly than she'd ever been in her life. Father, as though Pearl's outburst hadn't happened, whispered
, "Of course not. I married you because I loved you. If you wanted to keep your old self secret, what right had I to unearth it? But you did look very much as Eleanor had described you, and when you said you'd once known her…" He smiled, softer and more gently than I'd ever seen. "I am sorry, Iri. Sorry for having dragged you into this life, when you had only asked for that one."
A smile twitched Maman's lips. "'Iri'?"
"Shh," Father said, primly. "It's my secret nickname for you."
Pearl threw her hands in the air as Maman, eyes sparkling with laughter, leaned in to kiss Father. Jasper, whose thoughts had flown far ahead of mine, said, "That's why you write letters all the time. You never stopped ruling the kingdom, did you? Maman, which of us is to be king after you?"
Flint, horrified, said, "Not me!" while Jet asked, "King? King?" brightly. We laughed, and Maman steepled her hands in front of her mouth before saying, "That's a concern for another time, Jasper. For now I think I must fill in the empty spaces of Amber's tale, so she can decide what to do next."
"Why didn't I recognize you?" I asked in bewilderment. "I saw you over and over in the enchantment's visions, but I saw Irindala, not Maman."
"You said it only knew the story it had experienced up until then," Maman said. "I think it only knew me as Irindala. That it had no reason to see me as someone else."
"But I did." I closed my eyes, recalling Eleanor's impression of the queen's face to mind. "You were younger, maybe…rounder? Softer? Your hair and your clothes were different, but…well, it's obvious now…"
"But you had no reason to think it, then. I was a younger woman, a long way away, in an enchanted story. It's often easier to see the lost youth in someone older, than the old woman in someone young."
I laughed as an incongruous thought struck me. "Well. I suppose Annalise will be satisfied with her references, if she asks for them. It's not often a lady's maid gets a recommendation from the queen!"
"Maman," Flint objected over my commentary, "you're not old!"
Maman gave me a wry smile, and, equally wryly, said, "I'm very old, my boy," to Flint. "Far older than any mortal should be. I didn't know," she admitted to me. "Until now, when you told me. I didn't know what Nell knew, that I've been leeching magic from the kingdom's very land. I'm afraid I can't maintain this artificial youth much longer without irreversibly damaging the country I fought so hard to hold." She sagged a little even as she admitted it, and I remembered she'd been bed-ridden for over a week.
As had I. I finally sat, a slow sink into cushions. "You'd better tell us everything, Maman."
"I did come to check on Nell's children," Maman said to Father, then shook her head. "No, but I must start earlier than that, when the spell to bind our borders began to fail. I knew it was my own doing. My own fault. The magic was never meant to be held by a single monarch for so long, but to be passed down from child to child, renewed by birth and love. But I had sworn to never marry again, to never carry another child until my son's curse was broken and he could kneel before me to take the crown." She smiled briefly. "I was arrogant and angry, which are bad traits in a queen. But the border began to break down, and I knew I had to do something.
"For the first years of the Border Wars I fed the land with my own blood, as I had done when I buried Euard's bones so many years earlier. It helped, but not enough. It took almost seven years of fighting before I was willing to concede that I must bear another child and give this country a future beyond me."
"Maman!" Flint's eyes rounded and he looked about as if he'd been caught with his finger in the sugar. "Me?"
A bittersweet smile creased Maman's features. "No, sweet. This was fifteen years or more before you were born. I couldn't bring myself to marry again, not for convenience, but there were child-makers among the men in the fields. I had a handful of affairs, and when I was certain I had caught, I retired from battle to bear the child."
"But there is no heir." Pearl spoke with a sorrowful intelligence, and for a moment Maman seemed to lean into that understanding before gathering herself to go on.
"There is no heir. The child was born too early, and never breathed outside the womb."
Opal whispered, "Oh, Maman."
Maman's smile turned bleak with thanks, then bleaker still with what she had to say. "I'll never be sure what I did was the right thing. The baby would have been my heir, had she lived, but she did not, and I had cast the spell with Euard's bones once already."
It was I who said, "Oh, Maman," this time, with a knot of heartbreak and pity tightening in my stomach.
She nodded, reciting the next part carefully and without emotion, as if to allow emotion would be her undoing entirely. "I returned to the field, burying her bones and saying the spell all around the kingdom, as I had done before. And for the second time, it worked. The borders rose again, and we were safe. Safe," she repeated, with a weary laugh. "Safe, save for Nell having crossed back into the kingdom while the borders were down, and for her having born children to a man of my people."
"I didn't know," said Father, helplessly. She took his hand and squeezed it, all the acceptance and apology necessary.
"I know. Nor do I condemn you, Jacob. You might have slain her, you know." Maman closed her eyes, as if recalling the part of the story that I had told, how Father had stood over Eleanor's faery form and stayed his sword.
Father's chin lifted and his eyes darkened with memory. "I felt—I felt a compulsion not to kill that faery woman. A demand that rose from the bottom of me, as if it came up through the—"
"Through the earth," Maman said. "And spoke to you. I can't think I did it deliberately, Jacob, but even now I don't know what will happen to my oldest son if Nell dies. My fear of that unknown kept her alive that day, and what came after is therefore of my making as well. She found you, and began again. I know better than that Nell's love was intoxicating, so I can never blame you for loving her." Maman took a breath, as if steadying herself. "I only discovered her by happenstance. She was right, Amber. I'd spent decades traveling and meeting my people, without them ever knowing who I was. I wanted to see, and be seen, as a citizen, not a monarch; how else, I thought, to know the needs and wants of the people? So I was in the city, and we saw one another by chance."
"How did you disappear?" Jasper asked, fascinated.
Maman chuckled. "I'd had decades of practice by then. A cart went by while she was curtsying. I flung myself in the back amongst the rutabegas, and by the time she rose I had been carried safely around a corner. And I'm small, and had my hood up. It's easy enough not to notice me."
Father murmured, "I would disagree," and earned another sweet smile from her as she continued.
"I set someone to learn who she was, and it took little enough time, but Nell was no fool. She had fled already, and I let myself hope she had returned to the Border Kingdom. But I needed to know what I could about her children, too, and that," she said apologetically to Father, "is why I came to check on them. I was afraid I would find her greed and possessiveness embodied in them, that I would find young witches easy with using their magic to get what they wanted. Instead I found you three girls," she said, with a smile as fond for us as she'd had for Father. "You seemed to have no magic amongst you at all, but I could see the best of Nell in your mannerisms and glances and smiles. You, the four of you, showed me something of what a family could be; something I had known little off, with my campaigns and my politics and my lost child. I loved that life," she said simply and without remorse, "but I had lived it for a century, and wanted to try this other thing too. I was lucky that Jacob came to love me, as I had come to love all of you, and luckier still to have had three fine strong sons so very late in my life."
Jet, who had had more than enough of storytelling, shouted, "Maman!" and flung himself at her, snuggling ferociously before settling contentedly into her arms. Maman, murmuring over his head, said, "When the house burned and you proposed we retreat to this lodge, I was lost, Jacob. Terrified. I knew what the fore
st held, and I became instantly convinced that Nell had not retreated to the Border Kingdom at all. I felt in my bones that she'd come here, and I couldn't help but feel that she was drawing me back to her, determined to bring her curse to fruition at last. The forest has treated us well, but it would; it's mine. And then you found the palace, Amber, or it found you, and you chose to stay." Maman bent her head over Jet's a moment. "I dared hope that Nell had lost her strength at last, and that the curse might finally be broken, not completed.
"But then eleven nights ago I felt a terrible triumph from the wood. You've told us now what happened, Amber, but I didn't know then. All I knew was that the palace was coming under attack, and in the end, I have not lived this long to let my firstborn son go without a fight. I am sorry," she said to the rest of the family. "I know that you worry for my health, and that it's worse when I take to bed as I've done. But in many ways, this forest is me, and I have been fighting Nell in it these past ten days."
A long silence met Maman's final confession, until I broke it with the truth of what I'd seen: "If you hadn't, Maman, I think the Beast and I would be dead already." I described for them again the encroaching roses, and the fierce tangles of forest where the Beast had gone to stand his ground and the woods had helped him.
"'The Beast'," she murmured. "His name was Timmet, once."
A strange little pang, unexpectedly possessive, ran through me. "That was a long time ago."
She smiled at me before the smile turned to a soft laugh. "Yes, it was. And I was Irindala once, but not so long ago."
"Iri," Father said again, with the satisfaction of a man who had been waiting to say it aloud for years. Maman's laughter grew and she kissed him as Jet, squished between them, let out a sleepy protest. For a moment we were together and contented, before I said, "I have to go back."
