Page 31 of Roses in Amber
Jacob's reverence at my swollen belly surpassed any love or awe Irindala had ever held me in, and I loved him for it. A daughter we called Pearl was born, and when it became clear to me that her hair would come in as white as my own naturally did, I worked the smallest enchantment on her, that it should be strikingly sable: worthy of attention, but not accusations of witchery. I set it to last so long as she wished to confine herself to the expected and the ordinary, which was as close to forever as any spell could be set, and was satisfied to see her grow up a cool and quick child who judged with a scathing glance.
Time and again I returned to lie in the roses with Jacob, and from those unions came the second daughter, Opal, who even at birth was so mild and ordinary that I lost interest in her immediately, and in due time, the third, Amber, whose golden gaze earned her the name and upon whom I cast a spell like Pearl's, softening the gold with green so she should not be thought a witch even in childhood. Unlike with Pearl, the spell seemed to reduce her fire and ambition, but she was the only one of the girls who loved the roses as much as I did, and so I was fond of her despite her dullness.
Irindala discovered me when Amber was two.
A queen was not meant to visit her demesne without fanfare; she was not supposed to slip from city to town and village, meeting the people as another, ordinary person. Afterward, I suspected that at some time or another nearly everyone in her kingdom had met their queen, and that almost none of them knew it.
I descended from our carriage outside an acquaintance's home, prepared to do the necessary duty of smiling and praising that seemed useful to Jacob's business. As the footman released my hand, I looked up from watching my footing and gazed directly into Irindala's eyes.
She had changed hardly at all, wearing her decades as a bare handful of years. Her beauty and resolution were undiminished, her carriage proud, and her dress of modern style, a detail I, who still loved the gowns of old, felt a flash of admiration for. I had for years worn a disguise, a face different from the one she had known, but, as she had done before, she saw through the enchantment in an instant, as evidenced by a hatred as potent as the day we had parted.
I had only one weapon at my disposal in that moment, and curtsied low, crying, "My queen!" in ringing tones that could only alert all who heard me of the illustrious presence we were in.
By the time I rose from my curtsy, Irindala was gone, and everyone in earshot looked at me with sympathy-tainted amusement: clearly they believed me to have lost my mind, and I received no small amount of mockery for it upon alighting in my acquaintance's sitting room. No one, it seemed, had seen the woman fitting my description, and I was obliged to concede, in public at least, that I had been taken by some fit of amusing madness.
I did not stay where she might find me. She had weakened my curse and lived a century since, and thoughIknew the cost it might wreak from her country should she gather her power to destroy me,sheseemed not to, and I never doubted that she would hunt me like a dog and end me in the street, if she could.
I cast the greatest magic I had in years, and left Jacob and his daughters believing that their wife and mother had died giving birth to dull little Amber. Then I fled, not toward the border where she might expect me to run, but deeper into her kingdom, until at the edge of the enchanted forest, I flung myself into the earth and traveled farther, until I could rise as roses around the palace that held Irindala's beastly son.
I came to myself, once more Amber and no longer Nell, retching in the heart of a rose thicket. Sap clung to my throat, clogging my breath, while tears and snot ran from my face as I tried again and again to purge the sap from my body. The roses, which had never had a voice before, cooeddaughterat me, and I gagged on the word. Petals shivered like laughter and leaves stroked my back, a motherly touch that made sobs break through the sap plugging my throat.
You are, though,the roses said.Lift your hands, child. See your blood.
I didn't want to. I couldn't stop myself. My hands rose, thorn pricks and scrapes all over them. The blood was gold and sticky as sap, with flecks of red swirling through like roses in amber. I had enough breath now, and screamed, "No!" with such force that I doubled myself, then fell to my knees coughing bloody sap.
He belongs to me,the roses purred.The bestial prince is yours, and you are mine, so he belongs to me.
I panted, "No," again, and pushed to my feet, knowing I pushed my hands against thorns and hardly feeling the pain. Nor would I look at the wounds, at the wrongness of my blood, and I feared what the mirror at my hip would show me of my eyes. I turned in the thicket, waiting for Eleanor to appear in a mortal form. Instead the roses gathered together, creating a shape of petals and stems that had some approximation of a human face. She could see me: of that I had no doubt. But why she chose to remain roses lingered in my mind as a mystery for a few heartbeats, before I laughed roughly. "You're stuck, aren't you? You came into the queen's forest and even all your power can't bring you back to your faery form, not at the heart of the enchantment. You're stuck."
Runners lashed out and struck my face, scoring wounds and narrowly missing my eyes.Stuck, but not helpless. Watch your tongue, daughter.
"I'm not your daughter." But I was, of course. I was, and that had to give me some kind of weapon to use against her, if only I could think of it. My blood was half hers. More than half, perhaps, I thought, looking at sap rising from my stinging scrapes.
The rose runners had known me, when I'd reached toward them in the palace. They'd reached back. Maybe they knew me still. I turned from Eleanor, not trying to escape her notice, but for the moment's respite from her strangely formed body. It began to shape itself again in front of me, but I whispered, "I want out," and extended both my bloody hands.
Pearl would have been better at it. Pearl had spent months already in the pursuit of witchcraft. All I could do was think I had sap in my veins, as there was sap in the living roses, and ask them to let me pass, as sisters might.
They didn't. Eleanor swirled into being in front of me again, laughter in her rose-petal eyes. Anger rose in me, different from before. That, though voiced as denial, had been born of fear. This was calmer, born of defiance, and felt stronger for it. "What is amber but the resin of healing wounds?"
A flicker of something curled Eleanor's leafy lip, and my own mouth curled with cold anger. This time I reached out not with the hope of moving the roses, but holding them still. The rustling branches protested, then slowed, then held. I couldn't freeze them as solidly as true amber, but I had seen innumerable lumps of half-frozen resin trickling down trees, hard enough to poke and dent without easily regaining their shape, and that was enough. I didn't try to make a passage with magic, only ran into the brambles, trusting that I would survive the scratches and regrow the hair caught and pulled free. I pressed and pushed branches out of my way, careless with my skin, and knew there would be a price paid for every puncture. Where I could, I dropped low, crawling through the thicket, and it was on my hands and knees that I made my escape.
It was not a clearing that I reached, but rather a different kind of tangle: I had reached a border where the forest and the roses fought each other. Here, though, the undergrowth lifted for me, tree roots carving a tunnel of themselves and the forest floor that I could scramble through. The passage collapsed behind me, and for voiceless blooms, the roses screamed quite well, their rage reverberating in my very blood. I cast my thoughts forward, thinking of my magic-born sisters, and of Father, and of what he knew. I followed those thoughts as if they were a lifeline, scrambling ever onward, denying the part of me that was drawn back toward the roses.
Somewhere beyond the distance I knew the palace walls to be, the forest let me surface, and the ground beneath my feet remained curiously clear of roots and lumpy hillocks. I ran, and then I walked, and then I ran some more, not so much choosing a direction as simply runningaway. I had stood above the estate in the observatory, and knew that the hunting lodge was not, by ordinary travel, within a day's journey of the palace. I had little hope of finding my way home, but I remembered the Beast had told me Father would be home before nightfall, and I thought maybe the forest might have enough magic left to guide me.
I had been running—and walking and gasping and limping—for an hour or two when I burst onto a small, wealthy farmstead. A handsome barn stood at one corner of a very large garden; at the corner diagonal rose a whitewashed house whence happily raised voices could be heard. The far side of the house was covered in roses, huge rich flowers that had no business blooming this early in the season, but bloom they did. Land had been cleared beyond another corner, with the foundations of a new building already built, and between that building and the barn lay pens with pigs and goats. The earth hazed with the green of new growth, and it all seemed prosperous and safe.
It wasn't until Beauty plodded out of the barn with Flint in tow that I realized the prettily whitewashed house was the hunting lodge, and the farm, our own. I let go a cry of relief and thanks to the forest, and plunged down toward the oldest of my little brothers, who gaped at me as if I was a ghost appearing from the woods. Then he cried, "Amber!Amber!" and before I'd reached him, almost the whole of the family had spilled from the house to meet me. Even Pearl, whom I had not believedcould, spilled tears as the family captured me in hugs, all of them shouting questions.
Opal finally shushed them by saying, beneath the uproar, "But look at the state of you, Amber," in dismay. I did, and wondered that they'd been willing to approach me at all. My dress, which had only been a sleeping gown to begin with, was in tatters, and thorn scrapes criss-crossed my skin until I appeared hardly more than a walking welt. I touched my hair, hardly able to imagine its condition, and Jasper, with a forthrightness bordering on uninhibited delight, said, "It'sawful!"
I laughed in surprise and hugged him. "Thank you. I'm sure that made me feel better than an 'it's not so bad'."
"It is so bad," he continued with that same good cheer. "You've got half a rosebush in your hair, Amber." He reached to pluck a thorn from the tangles. I caught his hand with a swiftness that startled both of us, and shook my head. "Don't. Don't touch them. I don't trust them."
"Amber," Pearl said, her voice heavy, "what's happened? Did the Beast do this to you?"
"What? No! Stars, no. No, it's—" I looked at Father, whose eyes were still bright with tears, and whose mouth was a grim anticipatory line in a beard he had not worn the last time I'd seen him. "It wasn't the Beast," I said again, firmly. "Father, I have to know. What did you know of your first wife?"
