Roses in Amber: A Beauty and the Beast story

by C. E. Murphy

  I scrambled backward, out from under him, until my back hit the brambles. It was a greater distance than I had expected: we were in a proper clearing now, and also all alone. "Beast?"

  He sat on his heels—he was no taller than an ordinary man now, and shaped beautifully through the waist and hip, where more fur clung, offering an appealing amount of modesty to an astonishing creature. His forearms were furred as well, and his hands no longer massive paws, but slim fingers ending in unmistakable claws. He had not, I thought, looked at himself yet: his bewildered gaze was fixed on me, as though I had done something more impossible than break a faery's curse. "Amber?"

  "It's me, Beast, I'm—oh, you can see me clearly for the first time, can't you? It's me," I repeated. "But you're—" I made a gesture, trying to encompass what had happened, trying to indicate that it had somehow gone wrong, and, catching sight of my own hand, froze.

  My fingers were branches. Slender and knobbly with knuckles, still able to bend, but unmistakably branches of golden-hued wood. So were my arms, my legs; I scrambled to my feet, looking down at myself, and discovered my clothes had been torn away entirely as I'd struggled through the brambles the night before. It hardly seemed to matter: the whole of me had taken on an aspect of a living tree. Not bark-like: my torso shone more like polished heartwood, and I was dressed at hip and breast in wreathes of roses. I was warm to the touch, and the hair that fell around my face cascaded like petals, velvety against my cheeks. My toes gripped the earth like I could put down roots. My heart still beat like a woman's, fast with shock, but I was not, I realized, afraid. Startled, but not afraid, and, in digging my toes against the earth, I almost felt right, as if I had long since known where a path of roses might lead me, and had only been waiting for this moment.

  Not this moment, though: I hadn't transformed when the Beast did. Memories flooded back: Eleanor's sharp laugh and her claim that Iwas her daughter, after all. The way my throat had not slit like a mortal's would, under Eleanor's attack, and Pearl and Opal's exchange of glances upon seeing me. I had been other for some little while already, although I'd been too occupied to know it. I lifted my hands to my cheeks, trying to feel if my face was at least shaped as it had been, but I wasn't' sure: I had never tried to memorize myself with my fingers before. I turned a helpless gaze at my Beast, who was no more what he had been than I was, and found him presenting a wolfish smile.

  "Beauty," he said, and despite everything, I made a disparaging face.

  "Beauty is our horse."

  "You are a beauty." He came toward me, extending his hands, and then he saw what he had become, and stopped as short as I had, turning his palms up and down, watching the ruff of fur at his wrists fall and drape, and the light catching his deadly nails. As I had done, he spread his hands a little and looked down at himself, taking in the mane that stretched in a V down his chest, and the heavier fur at his hips. Fur grew more heavily on his calves, too, falling around his ankles very like Beauty's feathered feet, though the long clawed toes beneath it were nothing like her hooves. He looked up at me, his golden eyes wide, and I whispered, "You should see your face. It's beautiful."

  He touched long fingers to his cheeks as I had done to myself, but he, who had worn a Beast's massive head for decades on end, found more changed with that touch than I had. In particular he tested the shape of his mouth, no longer overbitten from below and or weighted with tusks. He took three long strides, suddenly standing before me with a question in his eyes.

  I answered it by throwing my arms around his neck and kissing him, again and again, until we were together a loving tangle of beast and botany on the earth, and the sun had risen high into the sky above us.

  "So," the Beast said then, in an amused murmur against my skin, "this has not gone quite as we imagined. We may have some explaining to do."

  I turned my face against his mane, inhaling his scent. Still musky, and the khemet perfume had vanished with his transformation. I would have to make more, if the ingredients could be found. I wasn't at all sure they could be: the palace had been lost to roses, and I had no idea if it would rise again. I sat up, examining the clearing as if it might hold answers.

  It had grown while we were tangled in one another's arms. The sky was larger than it had been, brambles withering to dust, and some distance away, lay Eleanor's body. It had gone all to amber with roses captured inside, like some great sculptor's work. A sculptor, though, would likely have left his creation her head, and Eleanor's was missing. A thin layer of sparkling white quartz crystals glittered where her neck had been severed, as if Pearl's moonlight sword had left traces of itself behind. The moon was a barren, bright place: surely nothing slain with its light could return to life.

  The head itself was gone, and a path through the collapsing brambles led away from our little clearing. Although the ground had writhed with roses when I'd noticed it last, it was now soft earth, rich and loamy and, along the pathway, marked with two sets of footprints. Quartz droplets shone against the ground, too, as if blood had fallen and crystallized. I shivered, glad my sisters had escaped and in awe of what they had done. I wondered what one did with the head of a wicked faery to quell any residual power it might have, and concluded that between them, Pearl and Maman would find an answer. I stood, and rickety branches fell in waves. Rose-scented dust lifted into the air and tinted the sky pink. I could see foundations amidst the eroding roses: something, at least, was left of the palace. Not much, but something. "I wonder what's happened to the servants."

  "Gone now, with the palace. With the enchantment." The Beast—Timmet—I could not decide what to call him, even in my mind—rose and came to stand beside me.

  "Were they not real?" I looked at him. "I mean, were they not transformed as you were?"

  "I never thought so. I didn't know any of them from their behaviors or opinions, as I'd known my own servants. I think everything here was made of Nell's magic. Everything except me, and I was shaped by it. Everything except you."

  "I was born of it," I said a little dryly. More than a little, perhaps: my voice had altered somewhat to my own ears, both deeper and more rustling, as if the creak of an old tree spoke along with the whispers of wind in its leaves. It lent a depth to my asperity that hadn't been there before. I thought Pearl would like it.

  The Beast, whether he liked it or not, at least chuckled. "There is that. So nothing here is…real."

  "Or everything is, and ever was. I think I can..." I extended a hand, calling life from the exhausted and dying roses around us. One single runner came to me, climbing into the air to offer me an amber-tinted thornless bloom. I offered it to the Beast. He took it gingerly, but his golden gaze remained on me.

  "What has happened to you, Amber? This was never part of the curse."

  "This is the price of wakening faery blood to save a prince." I flexed my toes in the soft earth, feeling it accept me in a way it had never done when I wore human skin. "I didn't know this would happen, but I wouldn't undo it. I don't feel much different. A little stronger, maybe. I'll have to figure out how to brush my hair, and whether sitting in a bath will ruin my finish."

  The Beast laughed with surprised. I grinned back at him, then turned my attention to the failing brambles. "I feel as though I can call green things to me. Not just the roses, but everything, I think. The earth is…hungry. Needy. Not just here, but throughout Irindala's country. I think I can feed it. I think I have to. If you and I are born, in our own ways, of enchantment, then…" A breath escaped me and I opened my hands to encompass the ruins we stood in. "Then maybe this is only enchantment in need of caring, just as all of Irindala's country needs care. I hate to lose it, after all of this. I feel as though I have a duty to it. Your mother warned me there would be a price for breaking a curse so old and heavily weighed on the land. Perhaps this is it."

  "My mother?" The Beast turned to me with a graceful movement, lithe and very unlike the Beast he had been, but also familiar in its power. "You've seen my mother?"
>
  "I—oh." I reached for his hand. "Your mother is my Maman, my stepmother. I didn't know until yesterday." I glanced uncertainly at the sky, with its rose-colored sun, then back at the Beast. "If it was yesterday. When I left you, whenever that was."

  I had learned to read the Beast's expressions well, and Timmet's were far easier to read, for all their still-inhuman cast. He blinked slowly, clearly nonplussed. I curled my arms around him and breathed his scent again before chuckling. "We will have a great deal of explaining to do, not just to our family, but each other. Beast—Timmet—"

  He exhaled, a curiously small sound. "I haven't heard that name in a very long time. I wonder if it fits me anymore."

  "It does," I said with brash confidence, and then, more softly, "but so does 'Beast', and so might something else entirely, if you prefer it. I don't understand what went wrong, my love. I thought you would be brought back to yourself. I'm afraid—I'm afraid I did this to you somehow. Because I loved the Beast. And because I'm—" I looked down at myself, then back at my Beast.

  "Mmmn." He shook his head. "What is 'myself'? I was human for eighteen years and a beast for over a century. Anyone might change in that time, even so much that they no longer knew the mortal form they once wore." He extended a clawed hand, so much more human than it had once been, yet still so animalistic. "I think you could not have done this to me, no matter how changed you are. Not alone, at least. If I were not content to be some of one and some of the other, I think no matter how much you loved the Beast, I would have become what I once was. But the Beast is my most familiar form, and I feel connected to it still." A smile, much more clearly a smile than that which his more beastly face had expressed, curved his lips. "Connected, but much less lumberous."

  "I believe I'm the one who is now lumber-ous," I said with a brush of branch-like fingers, and earned a withering look worthy of Pearl, had it not also been laced with amusement. Smiling in return, I said, "Pearl and Opal will tell Maman and Father that we're all right, but we should probably go to them. Maman has waited so long to see you again. And we should figure out where a living tree and a beautiful beast belong in this world."

  "Together," the Beast said softly. "We will never, ever be apart."

  "Together," I agreed, and then because I could not help it, I added, "except perhaps when we require the necessary. Or I wish to have a gossip with my sisters, or you a wrassle with your brothers, who will be most taken with your extraordinary form. Or—"

  "Enough!" Timmet roared, and if he lacked the volume he once had, it was easier to hear the humor in his voice. We laughed together until the tears came, and I thought us the better for it.

  I took his hand in mine, and together we went to see what the world would make of us.

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  Also by CE Murphy

  The Austen Chronicles

  Magic & Manners * Sorcery & Society (forthcoming)

  The Heartstrike Chronicles

  Atlantis Fallen * Prometheus Bound (forthcoming) * Avalon Rising (forthcoming)

  The Walker Papers

  Urban Shaman * Winter Moon * Thunderbird Falls * Coyote Dreams * Walking Dead * Demon Hunts * Spirit Dances * Raven Calls * No Dominion * Mountain Echoes * Shaman Rises

  & with Faith Hunter

  Easy Pickings

  A Walker Papers/Skinwalker crossover novella

  The Old Races Universe

  Heart of Stone * House of Cards * Hands of Flame

  Baba Yaga's Daughter

  Year of Miracles

  Kiss of Angels (forthcoming)

  The Worldwalker Duology

  Truthseeker * Wayfinder

  The Inheritors' Cycle

  The Queen's Bastard * The Pretender's Crown

  Stone's Throe

  A Spirit of the Century Novel

  Take A Chance

  a graphic novel

  Roses in Amber

  A Beauty and the Beast story

  & writing as Murphy Lawless

  Raven Heart

  Acknowledgements

  Beauty and the Beast has always been my favourite fairy tale. My Negotiator Trilogy (Heart of Stone, House of Cards & Hands of Flame) is a shout-out to it, but a not-so-secret part of me always wanted to write a Proper Version of the tale. I recently discovered I hadn't, after all, read the oldest extant written version, which proved to be by French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, and was written in 1740, almost twenty years before the better-known adaptation written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. There were wonderful elements in de Villeneuve's book that had been excised by de Beaumont, and I knew I'd finally found the basis I wanted to build my own Beauty and the Beast story on. Writing it was a joy, and I hope you've gotten as much pleasure from reading it as I did from writing it.

  I'm exceedingly grateful to Tara O'Shea, who turned the cover art around in record time, as well as to my father, Tom Murphy, editor-and-copy-editor extraordinare, and to Catherine Sharp, Sherilyn Petterson, Ruth Long and Alethea Kontis, all of whom have shown great support for this book. You're all my heroes.

  Finally, but not at all least-ly (look, I'm an author, I can make up terrible words if I want to), all my love to my husband and son, who keep me going when things get tough.

  About the Author

  According to her friends, CE Murphy makes such amazing fudge that it should be mentioned first in any biography. It's true that she makes extraordinarily good fudge, but she's somewhat surprised that it features so highly in biographical relevance.

  Other people said she began her writing career when she ran away from home at age five to write copy for the circus that had come to town. Some claimed she's a crowdsourcing pioneer, which she rather likes the sound of, but nobody actually got around to pointing out she's written a best-selling urban fantasy series (The Walker Papers), or that she dabbles in writing graphic novels (Take A Chance) and periodically dips her toes into writing short stories (the Old Races collections).

  Still, it's clear to her that she should let her friends write all of her biographies, because they’re much more interesting that way.

  More prosaically, she was born and raised in Alaska, and now lives with her family in her ancestral homeland of Ireland, which is a magical place where it rains a lot but nothing one could seriously regard as winter ever actually arrives.

  She can be found online at mizkit.com, @ce_murphy, fb.com/cemurphywriter, and at her newsletter.