Page 30 of Roses in Amber
"A very long time. Over a century, and yet Irindala still reigns beyond this forest. How?"
"Enchantment." A brief smile curled his mouth at my exasperated look. "Beyond that I don't know. I was not…thoughtful…in the aftermath of Eleanor's curse. The magic has told me time and again how I was brought here, but it can't finish the story. It can only try to make the pieces it has fit the story it knows so far, and it doesn't seem to know what happened after the curse struck."
"Which is why I must go to Father. He must know something. He knows my mother—and Maman, for that matter—both knew the queen, once upon a time. He must know something more."
The Beast looked askance at me. "Both his wives knew my mother? Your father moves in high circles, Amber."
"He used to. You can come with me, can't you?" I asked, suddenly eager. "You protect this forest and its beasts, don't you? So you must be able to leave the palace grounds."
"No longer. It is your world, a world apart from mine. I used to be able to." The Beast reached toward the roses, which surged toward him with thorns sharp and wicked at the fore. He pulled his hand back again and the vines settled. "It's been like this since they began their attack. I think they cannot kill me, but I believe they can bind me. Keep me here. And that theywillkill me, if they can. Which is another reason I don't believe you're the villain, Amber. The roses have always fought the forest, never coming for me. Now they've turned their focus inward, and—can you walk?" he asked. "You should see this from the observatory."
"I think I can. Wait." I collected my mirror and the rose water, though the mirror seemed more likely to be useful. We might be able to see beyond the forest with it, or find a way through the roses with it. The rose water went into my bodice, but I had to find a reticule for the mirror, and tied the purse at my hip before we left the Beast's rooms. I meant to ask himwhyhe had brought the mirror, but between my weariness and the obvious answer—that he knew its properties, and always had—I couldn't muster the effort. Even without wasting energy speaking, I tired halfway to the observatory. The Beast unhesitatingly carried me to its narrow stairway, which I had to ascend myself; his bulk was too great for him to climb the stairs carrying anything. He stayed just behind me, in case I fainted, but we reached the glass dome in safety, and I saw at once what he meant.
It wasn't only the roses racing toward the house. The lands had shrunk beneath the forest's encroachment as well. In places it was clear a war was being waged: swiftly-growing saplings were being throttled by roses, but their branches bent to scrape the vines from the ground. Here and there they'd reached a stalemate, horrible tangles of roses and trees no longer trying to reach the house, but instead growing higher and higher, each trying to dominate the other. "All this in ten days?"
"The snarls are from when I ventured out. It seemed to help: the roses stopped where I was, and the forest was able to catch up, to hold them in place. But staying still in their midst that long…" The Beast exhaled. "As I said, I think they can't kill me, but they could bind me. And I was afraid what would happen to you, if I let them take me. So I came back." He was silent a little while before saying, "I am not certain whether I am a coward or not."
"Beast! No! Of course not. If the roses did take you, she'd have won, wouldn't she? And if she won, the palace would go to ruin and I would die too. It's not cowardice to leave a battle you can't win, not if retreating saves lives. Even one life." I considered that. "I suspect I may feel especially strongly about the matter when it'smylife."
That earned a chuckle from the Beast, which was all I wanted. "I have to go see Father," I said again. "If it was the full moon I could wait on Pearl conjuring a mirror-spell again—"
The Beast, cautiously, said, "Have you learned anything ofyourmirror?"
"I have. Oh!" I pressed my palm against the mirror's purse, then sank onto one of the low cushioned seats, putting my face in my hands. "Of course. That's why it worked for me, isn't it? We're all Eleanor's daughters. Of course Pearl's witchery didn't awaken out of nowhere. I knew—I knew, once you said the stones were bespelled, that the pearl was magic, that you hoped she would learn to use it and be able to break the enchantment here. If I go to Father I can bring her back, Beast. She can help you. She can fight the curse from within."
"She cannot." The Beast's voice was strange, and I looked up at him with fingers pressed against my mouth. "The breaking of the enchantment is quite specific, and I cannot imagine Pearl succumbing to its requirements in any usefully timely fashion."
"But she's a witch," I said helplessly. "I don't understand." And then I did, Irindala's amelioration of the curse coming back to me:the form could be undone by a lover's willing touch.I stood, swiftly, and the Beast, with a desperate ache in his voice, asked, "Amber, will you sleep with me?"
I opened my mouth to cryyes!, and rose vines smashed through the observatory windows to snatch me away.
Thorns sank into my skin as the roses held me, kept me from writhing away. Within a heartbeat I didn't dare struggle, as the runners reared back from the palace and fell toward the ground. Roses, even enchanted roses, weren't meant to hold a human's weight four or five stories above the earth, and all that kept me from plummeting were the numbers of runners rising to catch me. I felt them weaken and buckle beneath me, and others take up their slack. Those that pulled away left scores in my dress and across my limbs, though the pain wasn't as great as I would have imagined. It stung and tingled, but the roses I'd picked had caused me more discomfort.
I glimpsed the Beast leaping through the broken observatory windows and pouncing after the runners, his claws glittering sharp and his roar so loud and endless I briefly mistook it for the wind. He skidded to a halt at the roof's edge, slate tiles shattering and flying free beneath his weight, but I was already out of reach. Screaming, reaching for him, but out of reach. A runner wrapped around my face and lodged in my mouth, muffling my screams. I bit it, trying to catch a breath to scream again, and felt leaves tickling the back of my throat. I bit down again, tasting bitter sap, and a story exploded inside my mind.
I was Eleanor, and I never left the borders to Irindala's country, always testing them with my thwarted rage. They could not hold: Irindala had spent too much magic in altering my curse. I knew it, and yet they held. For years I paced, hatred sustaining me, and then it came to me that an active enemy lent strength to any magic. I gathered power into myself, transforming until my roots ran deep and my blooms rose to the sun: a hedge of roses that crept along the border, adding beauty as it searched for weakness. I grew tenaciously enough that in time the area I patrolled became known as the Rose Border, and it was at the Rose Border that the Border Wars both ended and began.
She ought not have lived that long, my old lover the queen. No mortal could, and no spell, no matter how flawlessly wrought, could forever survive the price of a single person maintaining it. Its burden had been meant to pass from queen to child, its strength invigorated by new blood. It took decades longer than I expected, but one day my wandering tendrils pressed into the border, and the border gave.
I plucked and picked, weakening it, though the banishment held: I couldn't cross the border myself. When I was sure of its weakening, I gathered myself together again, reshaping my form to the faery I had once been, and went into the Border Kingdom with news that the human border had finally begun to fail.
It could hardly be thought of as aninvasion.Fae whose memories were long and whose pride stung at having been pushed back by a human army merely went to see for themselves, and, where they could, edged into Irindala's country. Elsewhere, where the border fell between Irindala's country and other human realms, therewereinvasions. Irindala's people had lived in undisturbed peace for seventy years or more, under the guidance of a queen believed to be a witch; invasion was inevitable. Having spread my knowledge, I returned to the border to sit and shiver with delight at each new piece of gossip about the slow fall of Irindala's country.
She fought for seven years, an ancient unaging queen struggling to retain her country, and in the seventh year, in a lull, retired from the field. That, finally, was when the faery king attacked, pushing hisy kingdom forward like an arrow meant to pierce the heart of Irindala's country. I thrilled to it, feeling my banishment weaken as the king advanced: I could not be kept from a conquered country whose land no longer belonged to its former queen. I thought her too old, too defeated by the long-ago loss of her son, to rally, and yet somehow, I was wrong.
Irindala returned to the battle as an implacable shield to her people. Everywhere she went, the border strengthened again, strengthened as it had not done in the previous seven years of war. Strengthened as though the aged queen re-cast the spell I had taught her nearly a century ago, though to do so was impossible. It required royal blood and royal bones, and unless she plucked the very bones from her own body, I could not see how she managed, for she had never again married, and had sworn for all this time to hold the land for the prince's return.
I entertained the glorious idea that she had sacrificedhim, her beastly child, but I would have known that in my own bones, and knew it to be untrue. I had never tested the spell I'd given her, though, and thought that perhaps after all this time, her own blood renewed the magic after all. It did not much matter, perhaps; what mattered was that she pushed the Border Kingdom back, and back again, until the bloodiest battle of the war was fought at the Rose Border, and I, architect of it all, nearly died beneath a mortal's steel blade.
It was not that I was a female that stopped him; there were women a-plenty amongst Irindala's army, and the blood on his blade said he'd killed without hesitation before. Nor was it that I was not obviously a combatant: innumerable of the fair folk went into battle with no visible armor, relying on their magic to protect them more thoroughly than metal ever could. No: it was something else, a sudden focus in his gaze, and then a far-away look that ended with his sword lowering, and his deep voice saying, "Go."
I rose, and ran, and that night reshaped myself, for the first time in decades, to a mortal form. I kept those aspects of myself that I was most fond of: the slight asymmetry of my face, my height and my bosom, but I squared my jaw and cast off the white fairness of my hair for a honey gold, making of myself a creature that Irindala would not recognize if she met me face to face—
—though, remembering that she had known me in my sweet Helen form, I thought it best that I never encounter the queen again. Nor did I need to; all I needed was to find the man who had not slain me. And so I did, by putting myself to work in the roving hospital the queen's army had set up on the faery kingdom's side of the border. I listened and watched and waited, and soon enough he came in with an injury he said was no more than a scratch. He smiled at me as if I might be someone familiar as I tended the wound, and ten weeks later when Irindala closed the border for the second time in her long life, I returned to her country as Jacob's bride.
I finally knew, when Jacob carried me across the border into the country I had been banished from,howIrindala had survived a century and more. I put my feet into the soil, and felt how the earth, while fit for crops and building, had nomagicin it. All life had magic, and we faeries, more than that, but Irindala's country had been drained of its power. The only place I felt any at all was along the re-established border, and that was new magic, fresh, recently cast. It had not yet spread into the land, and I thought it never would, not with Irindala drawing on the land to sustain her life. Here and there the earth was even spoiled, barren with too much having been taken from it. A thrill shivered through me. Irindala might well be her own undoing, and never know what horrors she had wrought. But that was only probable, and I intended her downfall to be inevitable.
I had no excuse to ask my new husband whether witches abounded here, but it took little enough time to confirm what I suspected. Witches were almost as unheard of as faeries, and even those who fought in the Border Wars only half believed in the fair folk at all. I dared not draw attention to myself as a witch, then, though I had been known as one while at Irindala's side. I did what I could, growing lush roses along the walls of the merchant's mansion Jacob earned his way to owning, and when he shook his head at them, I laughed and said, "Our own rose border, my love. Did the last one not bring us together?" We seduced one another amongst the roses, in the heart of my power, and I, forgetting caution in my hunger for a long-absent touch, became careless, and thus round with our passion.
