by C. E. Murphy
Not only her power came to the fore: roses tried to catch me as I ran, but weaved away again as I whispered curses at them. Not curses, not like the one Eleanor had cast, but ordinary, mortal curses: by the earth and sun and stars, stay away from me; get off, you donkey's arse; may you wither in the sun's embracing light. The curses, breathless as they were, helped to keep me moving forward; repudiating Eleanor's work felt as powerful as the magic awakened in my veins. In that endless run, all I wanted was to be different from her, a creature of my own, worthy for being myself alone.
I hardly knew the palace grounds when I finally broke free of the avenue of roses. A barricade of forest had risen, tall and tangled as all the spots where the Beast had gone forth to try his hand against the roses. The branches parted for me and I stumbled inside them, breathless and gasping.
Wreckage met my eye. The beautifully kept pools looked like aged ruins, torn apart by Eleanor's swiftly-grown roses, and now littered with their carcasses. A ring of empty earth, appearing nearly scorched in the moonlight, lay between the new trees behind me and the palace. I stood where I was a moment, hardly believing the damage that had been wrought, then started forward again, trying to understand what I saw at the palace. Dry, dead rosebushes crackled beneath my feet as I walked, and I slowly began to understand that the palace as I knew it was no more.
It had become a writhing, squirming mass of living roses, and at its center, I could feel the faltering heartbeat of my Beast.
I broke into a run again, not knowing how I would fight my way to the castle at the heart of the enchanted kingdom, but determined that I would. I raced heedlessly up the brambles, searching for a way in, and was instead met by a fist of branches that caught me in the jaw and knocked me the long way back to earth again.
My breath left me with the impact, my whole body stunned and numb. Above me, outlined by the crescent moon, I saw thorns spiraling together into a lance, but I could not force myself to move. Behind the lance, Eleanor reshaped herself into a monstrously vast form, all roses and rage. Did you think a little girl playing with moonlight could stop me? she roared in my mind. Did you think a creature as endless as roses could bedistracted by a little sword and shield? You have chosen your lot, daughter, and you will pay for it with your—
"Am I ordinary, Eleanor?" asked the sweetest voice I had ever known. The rose-being swung around, losing petals as it searched, but Opal was—of course—nowhere to be seen. "Such a disappointing child," she said in the most gentle mockery of a chiding tone that I had ever heard. "Perhaps that answers why I'm so biddable. Perhaps I was trying to earn the love of a mother who had no use for me."
For an instant she appeared, perfectly lovely in the moonlight. Then she cast away the aged bay leaf and wrapped her opal in a new one, in barely the time it took for her to wink at me. Her voice came again from yards away, sending Eleanor in another swirl. "Or perhaps I'm simply kind by nature, and was granted early release from a mother who might have driven it out of me. Best of all," and though her voice remained sweet as roses, acid dripped through it as well, "best of all is that in time I gained a new mother, one who did love me, and whose name I have recently learned is Irindala."
Eleanor's roar of fury was so great it carried true sound, the explosion of branches and the collapse of whole trees. The palace shook beneath that roar, falling in on itself. I swallowed a scream, knowing Opal was distracting Eleanor from me and not wanting to lose the advantage. My heart hurt, though, with terror for Opal and fear for Pearl, whose fate I could not know. My breath came back at last, and I forced myself to sit, moving as quietly as I could.
"Irindala was a good mother," Opal caroled from the safety—not that I dared think of it as such—of her invisibility. "She loved us even though we weren't her daughters by birth, and our father has never been happier than with her. Do you know, he realized you hadn't died? But he never went looking for you. Why would he? You had abandoned us, and he had earned Irindala's love. He did well, don't you think? Trading a wicked faery wife for the true love of a queen?"
Her voice danced from spot to spot, much more quickly than mere invisibility could account for. I wondered what other properties the opals had as Eleanor slammed lances of rose spirals into the earth, trying to pierce Opal's wandering voice. Opal only laughed, and I thought perhaps my kindest sister had a villainous streak after all.
Gathering courage from her mocking bravery, I plunged my hands into the palace's foliage, and became Amber in roses.
These roses did not take me kindly, as the ones at the lodge had done. Even then I had been in danger of losing myself; Eleanor's roses wanted to tear me from myself. The thick cloying scent of them, tinged with rot, made my mind float outside my body, growing ever-more detached. I could feel myself gagging on the smell and had little desire to return to that sickened body. It would be easier to let go, dissolving across Eleanor's roses.
A spark of triumph shot from them, either at my own thoughts or—worse by far—at some battle won beyond the endless thicket I had entered. I snapped back into my body, dizzy again at the sickening scent of roses, and clung to the notion of sap in my veins. I offered a desperate conviction that I belonged with the roses, that I was not an enemy for them to spurn or destroy, and they did not listen. They rejected my presence, forbidding me to become part of them. I felt as though I retained my human shape, which I had not felt at all when I traveled beneath the earth with my roses. I fought for each forward step, runners and thorns digging into my shins and forehead and squeezing tightly, until I thought I couldn't possibly be moving ahead at all.
But Pearl was out there, battling roses with a sword made of moonlight, and Opal was closer still, taunting a faery monster with no protection of her own save invisibility. And the Beast lay somewhere ahead of me. If I failed, all three of them would die, and so failure could not be considered.
Things that had sap in their veins also had bark as their skin. Sometimes paper-thin bark, delicate and fragile-seeming, but even birch paper had to be peeled away in layer after layer to reach and damage the wood beneath. And I was Amber, after all: amber, which came most often from within rough-barked pine trees. If amber itself ran in my veins, surely I could convince my body that its skin was as tough as pine bark, all but impervious to the thorns. The scoring on my skin roughed it up already: I imagined those little wounds layering on top of one another like bark did, thickening like scarred wood, and bit by bit the thorns lost their bite. I kept my eyes closed, pressing forward, and finally felt brambles breaking under my feet as I regained the ability to move.
All I needed was a direction to move in, and I had no sense of that at all. The palace was enormous even when visions and memories didn't expand it beyond reality, and now it was being dismantled by the weight and fury of roses. I had entered the roses nearest, I thought, the round room that had been the library—for a moment my heart broke, thinking of all that had been reclaimed in that library, and was now lost again—and I had felt the Beast at the heart of the palace. That, to me, would always be the sitting room and adjoining hall, where Father and I had first been ushered and where the Beast and I had taken meals together. I struggled onward, but I struggled in darkness: I had no idea if I was going the right way or not, and every suspicion that the roses would force me in the wrong direction. I dragged in breath through my teeth, trying not to taste the overwhelming smell of roses, and somewhere at the back of my throat, a hint of cinnamon caught.
I froze there amongst the unforgiving roses, opening my mouth like a cat trying to find more scent. Cinnamon and myrrh, and the latter made me suddenly laugh. The roses pulled back a little at the sound, then attacked again, but in the moment they retreated, I turned toward that scent and pushed forward.
Cinnamon and sweet wine and myrrh: I had my Beast's scent, the one I had made for him, and best of all, what was myrrh but a resin? Not as hard or ancient as amber, but made from the seeping skin of trees, and thus within my demesne. Half a dozen resins were use
d in perfumes; I had known it without thinking it through, and now thought that Eleanor had been mistaken about us all. Even as children we three girls had played toward aspects of our unawakened magic, strengthening bonds that we would later need.
I moved faster, with the Beast's scent in my throat. The brambles grew more frenzied but less effective as I gained confidence, lashing at me, trying to tangle my feet, but also bowing to my will as I thrust them away. They scraped at my skin, but no longer pierced it: I was too much one of them, a creature of imagined bark and wood and sap. Nothing so clear as a path ever opened up, but as with the forest when I'd escaped earlier, just enough space cleared in front of me, and if it stitched together again behind me, that was a problem for another time.
I stepped free into what might once have been the dining hall, but which was now the eye of a bloom-laden maelstrom, rising clear to the now-moonless sky, so that all that looked down upon us were stars. I saw what Eleanor had done, how she mastered such enormous power, and I cried out in horror for my Beast.
Eleanor's roses themselves took their life from him: roots dug deep into his withered body and pinned him to the earth. The storm's eye was hardly larger than he was, just enough to let him breathe and continue to live. I did not have to be well-versed in magic to understand the wicked cleverness of what she'd done: I knew enough of Irindala, and the curse, to recognize it clearly.
Irindala was bound to the land by blood and bone and magic, and the Beast, her son, was as tied to it as she was. Through him, Eleanor could draw on the very strength of Irindala's country, and though Maman had drained it nearly dry of magic, it still had life in it. To take the country's very life would nearly satisfy Eleanor, I thought. Nearly, but not quite.
But the curse lay on top of that, and curses broke laws of mortality. Eleanor had cursed the Beast to lonely immortality, and Irindala had only been able to lessen its impact. He could be made a mortal man again by a lover's willing touch…but until then even Eleanor couldn't killthe Beast.
She could use him, though. Any mortal creature could never have survived what the Beast now endured: the fact that he was silent, half unconscious beneath the writhing, hungry roots spoke to the pain he must have been in. But the Beast would not, could not, die, and so long as he lived, Eleanor could use his bond with the land to grow her power and wreak havoc on Irinidala's country.
Here, at the heart of her power, at the heart of his, Eleanor stepped out of the roses and I saw her true form with my own for the first time.
I had seen her repeatedly in Irindala's memories, and even through her own eyes, reflected in water, and yet she did not look like I believed her to. I had thought her tall: she was not, especially. But then, Maman was quite small indeed, and by comparison, Eleanor might be thought tall. She was rounder, too, more curvaceous than I expected; more like Opal in bosom and hip than I'd imagined.
Save for her figure, though, she was hardly like Opal at all. Opal was pretty, whereas Pearl and I were beautiful and interesting, respectively, and Eleanor was both of those things. Her features were like mine, a little asymmetrical, but the shape of her jaw and cheekbones lent her an arrogant elegance that Pearl had inherited and turned to beauty. None of us, though, shared her eyes, which were huge and angled and not at all human. Her hair was ivory, with a yellow undertone that Pearl's didn't share, and slender pointed ears poked through the straight locks. In the starlight her skin was so golden it could be mistaken for green, like the green of new growth in roses.
Her mouth curved in a deadly smile when she saw me, and the laugh that broke from her throat sounded like the scrape of thorns. "Oh, you are my daughter," she said in pleasure. "My foolish little Amber, throwing it all away for a Beast."
"Even if I didn't love him," I said as steadily as I could, and in a voice that didn't sound quite right, "you would need to be stopped."
"And you believe you can."
"I believe it's worth trying."
The attack came without warning, innumerable sharpened branches racing as one to pierce me. I let them, gasping as too many broke through my skin: my thoughts of bark-like protection were not, it seemed, enough to ward off killing attempts. Eleanor laughed, surprised at the ease of taking me to my knees, but I had no interest in taking her on directly. Not while she was tied to the power of the land, at least. On my knees, I was able to worm one hand through the rose roots and curl my fingers against the Beast's shin. I felt his weakening life force, and the strength of the roses, and I whispered, "No," to them.
They had bowed to my will before, parting just enough to let me pass through them. A shock trembled them now, and under my resolute command, they began to withdraw from the Beast's body. Eleanor shrieked in outrage, more and more spears raining down on me. Some struck home; more did not, as the roots pulled away from the Beast and the roses struggled to decide which of us was their master. I extended my other hand, head lowered, and thought of my thornless roses, racing now along a pathway between the hunting lodge and the palace's front gates. I called them to me, and they began to grow ever-faster. They peeled Eleanor's roses off the copper-worked gates and ran forward, moving more and more quickly as I pulled the other roots from their hold in the Beast's flesh.
He awakened screaming, a sound so terrible I wanted nothing more than to stop and comfort him. I didn't dare, knowing that if I did I would never have the chance to start again. I told myself the pain was good: it meant he was alive, and it meant Eleanor's roses were losing their grip on him.
Eleanor seized my hair, ripping my head back and slashing at my throat with nails made of thorns. They connected: I had no way to stop them. But my throat didn't slit open; it felt more like rough chunks of flesh were torn away, without any terrible pain accompanying the blows. As surprised as she was, I smiled at her. I couldn't fight her without taking my hands away from the Beast and my call to my roses; all I could do was smile, and so I did, confused and bright and helpless. Her eyes went mad with rage. She seized my jaw and the back of my head as a tunnel opened in her roses, my power bringing what it could to the fight.
It brought nothing visible, but before she could twist my head around, something struck her, knocking her away from me. My head was yanked forward as she staggered away, but my neck wasn't broken, and Opal appeared in front of me.
My sweetest sister wore a maniacal grin matched by the fierce smile on Pearl's face as she came striding down the tunnel I'd carved through the roses. They had both taken a beating: Opal limped and bled, and Pearl was scored all over by rose thorn lines. But they were neither of them defeated, and my heart soared to have them with me. As if joy fed my magic, the roots loosened from the Beast ever-faster. His screams lost strength, not as though he was losing strength, but as if the pain was no longer as unbearable. I cried out in relief and my sisters turned their smiles on me, then both paled and stepped back before exchanging looks and returning, resolutely, to the battle.
Eleanor made a sword of thorns and struck not at Pearl, whose moonlight armor had faded with moonset, but at Opal, whose magic was the least of all of ours. Pearl, with a sword shaped like the crescent moon itself suddenly in hand, leapt to her defense, thorn meeting pearl-drop shield. I knew from the clatter that the shield was unlikely to last long.
The final threads came loose from the Beast. Eleanor's power weakened suddenly, obviously: she staggered with the loss of it, and Opal leapt on her with driving elbows and knees, more ferocious than I had ever imagined she could be. It created the briefest lull for Pearl, who shot me a wide-eyed look that jerked to the Beast and back, as if to say get on with it!
I did not want to leave my sisters to fight a mad faery, but neither would the curse break if I left the Beast to help my sisters. I let the power of the roses go, surprised that the tunnel remained open, and crawled up my Beast's body to catch his huge face in my hands. "Beast. Oh, Beast, my love, my Beast. Wake up, my love. Listen to me. Listen, beloved. Wake up, and tell me: will you sleep with me?"
&nbs
p; Eleanor screamed. From the corner of my eye I saw Pearl's crescent sword sweep down, and light exploded all around us as the Beast transformed in my arms.
I had seen so many beasts in my Beast: the ram, the boar, the bear, the cat. His arching, writhing form transformed into each of them, fighting me with tooth and claw and tusk and horn. I hung on, sobbing, as he became too big, too cruel, too fierce to hold. Injuries opened on my arms, my torso, my legs: everywhere and in every way that a beast might strike in rage or fear, I was scored. I held on, afraid that if I released him I would lose him forever. Then he began to shrink, but in shrinking radiated heat, until it was as though I clung to an iron bar. A burning woody scent filled my nostrils. I screamed, but I did not let go, and suddenly the pain and the power were gone. The Beast made an ungainly whumph of sound as he collapsed on top of me.
He ought to have crushed me. That he did not took some consideration; the thought that we had succeeded, that the curse had ended and his transformation had been undone, took some time to reach. My heart clenched in sudden terror: I had become quite accustomed to my Beast, had fallen in love with him. I had seen the prince in a vision, but I had never thought of what he might be like, or if I would care for him. I pressed my eyes shut against the oncoming sunrise—the sky above the tunnel of crumbling roses was gold and pink and streaked with blue—and tried to tell myself that Timmet was the Beast, whether in an ungainly monstrous form or in his own.
A voice, his voice, but much thinner and lighter, no longer coming from a chest as broad as my arm, said, "Amber?" with much the same confusion I myself felt.
I set my teeth so I might gather my nerve, and opened my eyes to see—
—to see a Beast, albeit not the same Beast I had known, propped above me. His shoulders were no more than a man's in breadth, though like before a dark mane cascaded over them, and down his chest, like a lion's. More of a mane than before, in fact, as it had less inhuman features to struggle with, and could frame them more magnificently. His face was slim, all planes and angles softened by the loose long fur of his mane, through which the ears I had liked so much still swept upward. Like Eleanor, his eyes were huge and slanted, though his were the amber shade of a beast's, and his lips, parted in astonishment, showed teeth sharper and more deadly than any human had ever owned.
