Page 26 of Roses in Amber
"Perfumes," I said to myself, and resolutely stood to check my mixtures and their scents, testing them for strength and potency. Some of them wanted rose water, and what little I had had left after the city was all but gone. I gathered a cloak and, at the insistent murmuring of the invisible servants, a scone, and went out to the gardens.
The roses, which had never stopped blooming, had grown ferocious in the oncoming spring sunshine, and now covered the garden walls in relentless color. Loose petals drifted to the ground on every breath of wind, until a carpet of color greeted my feet. I began gathering the petals in my skirt as they fell, determined to use them in rose water: I would have my perfume yet, even if the garden didn't like me picking its roses.
Behind me, and without warning, the Beast said, "I believe you're safe enough picking them now that you're a guest here."
I shrieked and spasmed, narrowly keeping my grip—and thus my collected petals—in my skirt. "Could you please make somenoise!"
"Evidently not. Are you all right?"
"Fine, save for a heart seizure!" I glowered at the Beast, who failed to look at all threatened. Piqued, I pulled a rose from one of the bushes, and aside from a piercing pain where I hadn't been careful enough of the thorns, suffered no ill effects. "Why didn't you tell me I could pick them?"
"I didn't know you wanted to."
"How maddeningly reasonable." I turned my palm up, examining a startling well of blood from the thorns. "I don't think the roses like me. Does this look strange to you?" The Beast hesitated, but I thrust my hand at him, displaying the blood rising from it. "It's got a golden sheen," I insisted. "It happens every time one of those thorns gets me."
He sat on his haunches like an enormous dog and lifted one paw to not quite cup my hand. I still felt his body heat, tremendous compared to my own, and resisted the impulse to settle my hand in his and feel if the pads of his palm were as rough as they looked. "Perhaps," he said after a careful look. "My eyesight isn't what it might be, but you may be right."
I'd quite forgotten about my injury by then, so intently was I studying him from so close. He was nearly as tall as I, sitting as he was, and I could see the short, velvet-like fur on his nose. It stretched into longer tufts at the bridge, thickening to a visible depth over the brow ridges before lengthening into the coarse mane that only parted around the twisting horns that swept back from his forehead. "Where are your ears?"
The Beast drew his head back, focusing on me with apparent effort. "My ears?"
"I assume you have them. But they're not…where they belong. Bears, boars, lions, goats, antelope…everything you remind me of has ears up here." I gestured vaguely along the outer lines of his forehead and skull, where animals tended to keep their ears. "Where are they?"
Moving slowly, and still watching me as though I had perhaps lost my mind, the Beast sat all the way back on his haunches and pawed through his mane until he'd exposed an ear far more human than animal, though it swept into a pointier tip than any human had ever sported. It struck me as delicate and unsuitable for his enormous rough form. "Well. You have lovely ears."
The Beast's laughter, from this close, shook the petals of my rose. "Do I?"
"Very. And if your eyesight is poor, I think they would support glasses very nicely. Have you ever asked the servants for any?"
His incredulous look said he had not. "My face is hardly shaped for them."
"If we trimmed this up," I said, not quite touching the longer fur at the bridge of his nose, "I think they might work fairly well. And this only needs trimming so the glasses don't push the fur into your eyes."
"Amber," the Beast said after a pause, "are you proposing to barber me?"
A flush ran through my whole body. I said, "I suppose you could ask the servants," stiffly.
The Beast ducked his head, making his bulk as small as it could be compared to mine, and leaned forward toward my hand, like a dog seeking forgiveness before he seemed to remember himself and pulled back again. His voice, though, was low and remarkably apologetic. "I would be honored if you were inclined to do so."
"Very well," I said, wondering what I'd gotten myself into, "let's go see if we can make you presentable."
A downright genteel barbering area awaited us in the sitting room beyond the foyer. A copper bath large enough for me to swim in and filled with steaming water sat in front of the fire, with bath sheets big enough for most beds hanging nearby to gather the fire's warmth as well. The Beast's usual chair, which was of preposterous size and allowed him to curl up in a variety of cat-like positions, had been replaced by a proper tilting barber's chair, which made me laugh. "Can you even sit in that?"
"I believe so," the Beast said dubiously. "Whether I want to or not is another question entirely. And then there is the bath."
I regarded the bath, which had to weigh two or three hundred pounds empty. "Do you suppose invisibility lends unexpected strength and efficiency to the serving class?" I expected, and got, no answer, but the comment avoided the topic of the Beast bathing in my presence. He was a Beast; it should not, in any meaningful way, matter. But he was also, it seemed, a prince, and he was certainly a thinking being either way, and also male. I was not unfamiliar with either male anatomy or—the phrase that leapt to mind made me wince—animal husbandry, but somehow the entire activity seemed fraught. "Perhaps there could be bubbles."
"Bubbles," the Beast echoed so swiftly that I thought I wasn't the only one finding the situation questionable, and shortly thereafter I politely turned my back while the Beast settled into a tub full of bubbles.
I turned around again when he gave an unusually human-like groan, and found him jaw-deep in the foam, with his mane floating around him like spiderwebs. "I'd forgotten what a hot bath felt like. I don't usually bathe," he said. "Beasts…don't."
"No, I suppose not." He didn't, as I'd half supposed he would, smell of wet dog. His usual muskiness was strengthened, but not unpleasantly so. I smiled suddenly. "You soak there for a few minutes. I'll be right back."
He gave an agreeable grunt and sank a little farther into the bubbles. I hurried off to my room, there to test the khemet perfume on my wrist and to think of its spicy warmth melding with the Beast's scent. Yes: I thought it would do nicely. Pleased with myself, I returned to the sitting room, where the Beast was now little more than a blunt face ringed by bubbles, and on impulse put my fingers in the water to touch his mane. His eyes opened, meeting mine, and I asked, "Will I wash it for you?"
I believed that for a moment he actually stopped breathing, though it was hard to tell with the bubbles. Then he nodded, and sat up with a minimum of spillage. I found lightly scented soap and worked it to a lather before sinking my hands into the warmth of his mane. A quick laugh caught me off-guard and shattered my self-consciousness. "And here I'd thought my sisters had a lot of hair."
The Beast breathed laughter, but said nothing. His skull was huge and heavy under my fingertips, like a mastiff's, and the sheer mass of fur meant it took a long time to massage soap through it. The water never got as dirty or as cold as I thought it should. Nor did the bubbles fade, which I found both considerate and vaguely annoying. I was certainly notpeeking, but neither could I deny a certain prurient interest that slowly intensified as I washed and rinsed and combed his mane with my fingers. My mouth was dry and my cheeks hot as I went through the ritual again, working my way from his scalp through to the ends. Coarse strands clung to my fingers and floated in the water until I captured them into a snarl and set them aside. A jug of warm lemon water appeared at my elbow and rinsed his mane with it, working it through to remove the last of the soap. When I was finally done, I set the jug aside and lowered my mouth to beside his ear, where I murmured, "Are youpurring, Beast?"
