Page 13 of Roses in Amber
Beauty stood fat and glossy in a stall, so full of hay and grain that she leaned lazily against one of the box walls with her eyelids drooping sleepily. She'd been brushed to a shine, and her feathery leg hair was fluffed and lovely. I got her an apple she absolutely didn't need, and she slobbered it from my hand more graciously than usual. Then I pushed the stable door open, finding the estate outside a glittering wonderland under icy clear blue skies. Father came to stand with me at the door a moment before letting out a long, relieved breath. "I'll harness Beauty, and we can begin to find our way home."
"What, and offend our invisible hosts?" I asked, amused. "Wait five minutes, then turn around, and I bet you'll find her harnessed and ready to go. I wonder if the road is clear, though." Not that there'dbeena road, or not one worth mentioning. Just the rolling patch of shallow snow attending us so we could make our way to the hidden palace in the woods. "Or if the enchantment will clear a path…."
"The enchantment brought us this far. We may as well trust it to the end." An odd note came into Father's voice. I looked askance at him, but he shook his head, passing it off, so I let it pass as well.
"Five minutes," I wagered. "I'm going to take that five minutes to look around a little. I might skate across those ponds."
"In your boots?"
"I wouldn't be surprised if there are skates waiting for me," I said blithely, and went forth into the blinding morning.
It was quiet until I picked the rose.
There were, in fact, skates waiting for me at the pond. I fastened them to my shoes and flew across ice that had been blown or swept clear since the storm's end, spinning clumsily and laughing. The ponds took me all the way to the palace's other wing, using considerably more than five minutes I'd promised Father, but rather than turn back, I removed the skates and marched onward through the snow, eager to see the gardens that lined the estate's perimeter. Even now, in the dead of winter, they were lushly green, that darkest green of winter blooms, and splashes of red and white stood out against them, like holly berries and snow in clumps the size of my hand. I waded through shallow snow—regardless of the storm's ferocity, it appeared the palace allowed only a few inches of accumulation—until I'd reached the climbing bushes, but long before that, I knew it wasn't holly at all, but roses.
The blooms came in every color from snowiest white to the deepest crimson red, and theywerethe size of my hand. They grew together indiscriminately, no apparent care for whether blooms of different colors should appear on the same bush; some, in a nod to their unusual situation, blushed red to white, or white to red, while others ran a gamut of pinks with their hearts or their outer petals curling to blood tones. Their scent was enriching, delicious enough to drink and so heavy I felt I could climb the sweet smell all the way to the sky.
If I could make perfume ofthese, we might wend our way back into wealth after all. A cuttingmightsurvive, if I kept it close to my heart on the drive home, and tended it carefully in a warm spot for the winter. Without any particular thought of wrongdoing, I chose an especially gorgeous, sturdy-looking bloom, and plucked it from the bush.
A roar of crippling weight broke the morning's quiet and drove me to the ground. I knotted my hands over my head, the rose tangling in my hair, and screamed as if my smaller cry could break the power of the large one. Wind howled around me, smashing petals and leaves to the snowy ground and breaking branches over my back, so wicked thorns snagged in my borrowed clothes. Shards of snow and ice drove into my hands where they covered my head, and I clenched my eyes tight against the turmoil, whispering a prayer to the sun and her sister moon that I might be saved from the storm.
Whether it was the power of my prayer or—more likely—that a little time accustomed me to the dreadful weight of the roaring, I began to hear words in the wind, distorted by powerful rage, but words none-the-less:Howdareyou take my rose,the wind demanded.Is it not enough I have warmed you, fed you, clothed you? Is it not enough to have saved you from the storm? Are you so ungrateful a wretch as to require the very heart of my garden as well?
No: it was not prayer, or even time that accustomed me to the terrible sound. It was that the soundapproachedme, clarifying as it came closer. Little by little I unwound from the earth, eyes still fastened on the ground, until I sat on my heels with the offending rose piercing tiny, agonizing holes in my palms. As the roaring came to an end, I closed my fingers around the thorny stem, as if the pain would lend me strength, and with that borrowed strength, I lifted my gaze to look upon a Beast.
From my vantage, kneeling on the ground, the Beast looked some eight feet tall, and half again that wide at its terrible shoulders. It fell forward onto all fours, thrusting a huge, massive face with fetid breath at mine, and I was, of all things, reminded of little Jet, trying to get Maman's attention, and putting his face so close to hers that her eyes would cross and she couldn't properly see him at all.
Undone by a combination of that thought and terror, I laughed.
The Beast reared back, confusion and offense obvious even on an utterly inhuman face. I could see it more clearly from the little distance, and whatever laughter I had died in my throat, but for that moment I had taken, if not an upper hand, at least an equal one, and the Beast did not know how to respond.
Neither, in fairness, did I. Its face was a mockery of a man's, as though its maker had begun with that template but had no idea of what features were meant to rest on a human form. Heavy brows, like a ram's, furrowed over small, boar-like eyes, and short, thick twisting horns swept back from its brow, giving its head too much length and the look of something that could batter down a door, or face a bull. Its face was flatter than a boar or ram's, with highly rounded cheekbones framing a muzzle that could have been a lion's compressed to the depth of a man's profile. A hare lip gave way to an overbiting lower jaw, from whence tusks as long as my finger protruded, and I wondered that it didn't cut its own face with the motion of its jaw. A tangled mane of fur flew back from its face and jowls and ran freely over its shoulders, only becoming shorter along hugely muscled arms. Brutal-looking clawed hands dug into the earth not three steps away from me, and made it clear that I could be as easily rent as the soil.
I concluded in that moment that I preferred to die on my feet, and lurched to them, still clinging to the rose. With the Beast on all fours, and me on my feet, I was the taller of us, though its shoulders were nearly at the level of my eyes, and its mane bristled some distance down its spine, lending it more height. Its neck, though, was not suited to looking up from a position of all fours, and so in order to see me, it backed up several steps. Although I knew better, the effect was of its retreat, and my confidence regained a little ground again.
At least, it did until the Beast shook itself, growling, and rose to a human stance again, teaching me that itwasnear enough to eight feet tall. Its torso was as misshapen as its face, a deep bullish chest whittling to a waist strangely narrow by comparison; beasts were not meant to stand as men, and to do so threw its dimensions off in a way my mind could not entirely accept. Its haunches and knees and ankles were lion-like, bent all around the wrong way for a man, and massive clawed back feet suggested it could leap across half the estate in a single effort.
It was wearing trousers.
Everything else, its mismade form, its violence, its earth-shattering roar, came to a stop in the face of that unexpected discovery. Beasts—animals of the forest and jungles, or even the farmlands—did not wear clothing. Whatever this Beast was, he—and it was, I felt certain, ahe, as it lacked any kind of breasts and a female Beast would, in my estimation, wear a dress to cover herself in the same way this male one retained his modesty—he was not an unthinking monster. A monster, yes, but not a mindless one.
Nor could he be, if he had been roaring words at me, so I might have realized sooner that he was not entirely an animal. On the other hand, my heart had not yet calmed and I still swayed with fear, so it had not, perhaps, been very long since his tumultuous arrival. Before I could speak, another of his bellows split the air: "How dare you take my rose?"
I took a step back, more from the force of his shout than fear; somehow the trousers had restored my equilibrium to an astonishing degree. My voice, however, was more tremulous than I preferred when I replied. "How could I possibly know I wasn't meant to?"
He continued to roar as if he hadn't heard me, but I hadn't expected him to. I continued anyway, my voice still shaking, determination pushing it forward, if not volume. "I suppose I might have realized that everything had beengiven, without us asking for it. I suppose I might have realized that totake, under those circumstances, was ill-mannered. But I didn't. I'm sorry. You saved our lives, and I've repaid you badly. I hope you can forgive me."
"How much?" His tenor changed so quickly, the mighty voice dropping from a roar to a rumble so smoothly, that I almost didn't recognize the words as ones I knew. Even when I did, the meaning escaped me, and I made a small, confused gesture with the rose. "How much do you hope I can forgive you?" he clarified.
I stared up—and up, and up—at him, and wondered what he expected as an answer. Wondered what I daredgivehim as an answer, and wondered whether it mattered at all. "I wouldn't die for it."
"Would you stay?"
Perhaps it was that a voice came from the Beast at all: maybe that was what made understanding the meaning of his words so difficult. "Stay? Stayhere? Withyou?"
The Beast made a motion of surprising grace, encompassing the gardens, the palace, and himself. "Yes."
"I would rather not!"
