Page 28 of Roses in Amber
She went away often, did my queen, and I could never quite forgive her for it, no matter how important the treaty, no matter how necessary the war. I would dress her in her armor and leave her wanting, so she would remember to come back to me, and I recalled her sensual, shameful flush when her desire was so great that mounting her horse cascaded her into release. I teased her mercilessly when she returned from that campaign, urging her to admit to the thrill she'd felt with a beast between her legs. "No one," she promised me, "no one could ever love a beast as I love you."
While she campaigned and I sated myself with her love, the prince grew from a child to a youth, always standing at my side as his mother rode away. "Why does she always go?"
I put my arm around his shoulder, kissed his hair, and replied, "Because she doesn't love you like I do, my sweet." He turned a gaze on me that would have broken his mother's heart, but I was not his mother, and never had been.
Time passed: Irindala came and went, her son growing in leaps and fits from a youth to a young man. He had his mother's look about him: large dark eyes and curling black hair, and in time, I saw all that I desired about her reflected in him. He charmed and flirted, delighting the ladies of the court, and though I taught him to dance and seduce with his gaze, he never turned that sweet look on me. A worm of envy began to grow in my breast, that others should have what I did not. Irindala returned home and to my bed, and for a little while I was satisfied, until late one night, our limbs tangled together, light and dark, she murmured to me that she would bring her son with her on her next campaign, so he could begin to learn politics in the real world, and not just from books.
My heart cracked, not with fear, but with anger. "Are you sure he'll want to go?"
"It's his duty."
"And you'll leave me here, alone, with neither of you?"
"Who better to watch over my kingdom while we're gone?" She put herself above me and showered me with kisses, but even her hunger to satisfy me could not thaw my anger. I would not be abandoned by both for the sake of politics; the son could be sent to try his uncertain hand, or Irindala could go alone, but I would not lose them both. They belonged to me, Irindala because she loved me and the boy because I had raised him for her sake. I would have no other answer but that one of them would stay and be mine. But Irindala was accustomed to leaving, and I knew I could never keep her. The boy, then, would stay, no matter what enchantment I had to work to make it so.
I had done no magic since giving Irindala the boundary spell that she had worked with her husband's bones and her own blood. I had not needed to: she had been willingly seduced, and the power of being the queen's lover and confidante was stronger in human courts than almost any faery magic could ever be. We were creatures of magic, shaped in form by our desires, and the longer we went without using our power, the stronger it became, distilled in our blood. The boy did not see me with a lover's eyes, and so I made myself into a thing that he would: sweet and bosomy, with hair like his mother's, and a boldness that would run suddenly dry and require coaxing to be brought again to the fore. I let him seduce me, leaving him never knowing that it was I who seduced him.
I came to the court by day a precious creature lost in wonderment, even foregoing the roses I so often embroidered into my clothes, so that I might not be measured against my other self, Irindala's lover. By night I went to Irindala's bed, more passionate than ever from the pursuit of her son. The same touches that brought cries from her throat elicited shudders in the youth: teasing lips plucking nipples, curved nails scraping sensitive centers. No faery was ever more sated by love and desire than I, but rage clouded my joy whenever the queen mentioned her next journey, and her intention of taking her son with her. "The courtiers say he has a mistress, my queen. Perhaps he won't want to leave her."
She laughed beneath my warning, and gasped as I took her more ferociously. Only after, her lips against my breast, did she murmur, "I've heard the rumor, but I've not seen the girl, so perhaps she doesn't exist. He'll still come, Nell. It remains his duty."
I rose from the bed cold and angry, determined to win protestations of love and promises of forever from the boy I had raised to manhood. I shed the form that Irindala loved as I walked to his rooms, replacing it with the curves and large eyes that had captured his heart, and I was welcomed into his bed by eager hands. My anger could not quite hold as I admired the beauty of his face, and in holding my breasts to his tongue, I knew I could win from him the promises I desired.
And then came a thing I did not expect: Irindala at his door, Irindala who had followed me, Irindala who saw through my enchantment, and cried, "Nell!" in horror as I rode above the lad and let his fingers work between my legs.
The saying of my name shattered the magic holding me in my young lover's preferred form. His face contorted in abhorrence as I became the minder he had known all his life. He cast me off him with the strength of disgust, and seized a blanket as he came to his feet, covering himself from my gaze. "Aunt Nell, what—what have you done to me?"
I spat, "Nothing you weren't eager for," but he shook his head, dark eyes large and horrified.
"No. No, I wanted my little Helen, not—" A shudder ran through him. "What a fool I am. Nell. You might have called yourself Cornelia, too, or Ellen, and I never would have thought. Mother, Mother, I—I didn't know, I didn't want—!"
"You areneverto blame," Queen Irindala said. For the first time I saw herasa queen, as a great and terrible warrior, and I knew that in a handful of heartbeats, her wrath would fall upon me.
"Traitor!" I shrieked at her son, knowing him to be the weaker of the two. "I raised you, I loved you, you desired me—"
"No more than I desired a beast!"
A wicked laugh shot from my throat. I pointed at both of them, Queen and Prince alike, and whispered, "Oh, but your mother knows love for a beast, do you not, Irindala? I curse you," I spat. "I curse the blood that runs in your veins, child, that it shall never let you die. I curse the body that you live in, that it should be as a beast's. I curse the walls that you call home, that they should forever be an unsolvable maze. I curse those who serve you that they should be as unseen as they are unappreciated. I curse the very land that you walk upon that it should be as if salted."
A maelstrom rose, the prince's cries at its heart. All the beasts of the forest and plains fought to become a part of him, his bones breaking and stretching, fur erupting from his skin as he screamed. Power flowed from me, ripping away the vestiges of humanity I had so long worn and revealing the immortal, ethereal beauty that was my own, for in no other form could I convey deathlessness upon a mortal creature. I shrieked in outraged pleasure, then, through the howl and the wind, through the shattering of stone and the falling of walls, heard Irindala whisper, "This land ismine," and I knew I had made a mistake.
I had given her the spell myself, told her how to waken it, how to bind the borders of the land against her enemies. She had bled for it, buried bones for it, spoken prayers over it, and made it her own. It was a spell to last forever, holding the borders of her country so long as the blood of the queen who laid it ran true in the veins of its royal family.
But as much as it bound the land to her, it bound Irindala to the land as well, and not even the faery queen herself could contain all the power of the earth within her mighty grasp.
"You can't!" I cried. "You cannot! The borders will weaken, your reign will end! You cannot, Irindala! It loses you all you have fought for!"
"It gains me my son." Soft, implacable words, and with them she tore from me the darkest aspects of my curse: that immortality should only last so long as the beastly form, and that the form itself could be undone by a lover's willing touch. That the maze of his home should become an endless palace, the servants offer what solace they could, and the land barren but for gardens of roses.
We fought, myself with the power borne within me, and Irindala with the power of the land. Forest grew around us, and a palace rose, and all the while the prince roared and sobbed and struggled with his transformation. I seized the roses, making them mine: should any traveler seeking shelter enter this sanctuary, they might leave safely unless they plucked a rose. Irindala poured strength into the forest, extending it as her beastly son's demesne; I took away his freedom to roam it, but could not prevent her making him its protector, and the protector of all the beasts within. I stole his rationality; she returned a thread, which grasped, might lead him back to thoughtfulness. On and on we went, until she cast the last and greatest counter to my spell: the land itself rejected me, casting me beyond the borders into my own land, and her voice lingering in my ears promised me that I should never return unless love itself carried me past the bone-bred barriers.
I howled protest, digging my hands into earth I had not set foot on in a hundred years or more, and wept as a rising spring showed me a face that was my own.
I opened my eyes with a head on me like a drum, and for some time lay where I was, with no idea and not much interest in where that might be. Only my head hurt. It seemed like my belly ought to, where I'd stabbed it, but when I flexed the muscles there, I felt no protest of pain, or even bandages. Looking hardly seemed worth it. Not when I could see, as if at the backs of my eyes, the vision I had been left with.
I'd known the eyes, the quirk of the lips, the unevenness that made it compelling. I had not known the highness of the cheekbones or the slight length of jaw; those things belonged to Pearl, not me. Neither had I known the ears, long and slender and pointed, not unlike the Beast's. But the face, yes. I had known that face, because it was my own.
I tried to sit up with the grim intention of finding the Beast, and discovered two things: one, sitting up was all but beyond me, and two, the Beast sat beside me as if he had not moved for hours. He was reading, in fact. He wore a carefully constructed set of spectacles, and was reading aloud, though I had hardly heard him in the midst of my own thoughts. I recalled the last words he'd said with a hazy memory: something of morning and evening mists, and now, as he made to close the book, I said, "I'm afraid you'll have to start again. I seem to have missed most of the story."
