Page 36 of Roses in Amber
She met the attack with her moonlight blade, severing thorns and runners alike. They fell to the ground writhing, and did not take root again. Where they landed blows against her, moonlight sparkled, taking the brunt of the hit: in one moment, when a dozen lashing branches struck her at once, I saw the shape of the enchanted armor she wore, bright and pearlescent under the moon. I backed away, breathless at what my sister had become, then scrambled onto the plane of moonlight across the roses, and ran, determined to take the space Pearl had given me.
Not only her power came to the fore: roses tried to catch me as I ran, but weaved away again as I whispered curses at them. Not curses, not like the one Eleanor had cast, but ordinary, mortal curses:by the earth and sun and stars, stay away from me; get off, you donkey's arse; may you wither in the sun's embracing light.The curses, breathless as they were, helped to keep me moving forward; repudiating Eleanor's work felt as powerful as the magic awakened in my veins. In that endless run, all I wanted was to be different from her, a creature of my own, worthy for being myself alone.
I hardly knew the palace grounds when I finally broke free of the avenue of roses. A barricade of forest had risen, tall and tangled as all the spots where the Beast had gone forth to try his hand against the roses. The branches parted for me and I stumbled inside them, breathless and gasping.
Wreckage met my eye. The beautifully kept pools looked like aged ruins, torn apart by Eleanor's swiftly-grown roses, and now littered with their carcasses. A ring of empty earth, appearing nearly scorched in the moonlight, lay between the new trees behind me and the palace. I stood where I was a moment, hardly believing the damage that had been wrought, then started forward again, trying to understand what I saw at the palace. Dry, dead rosebushes crackled beneath my feet as I walked, and I slowly began to understand that the palace as I knew it was no more.
It had become a writhing, squirming mass of living roses, and at its center, I could feel the faltering heartbeat of my Beast.
I broke into a run again, not knowing how I would fight my way to the castle at the heart of the enchanted kingdom, but determined that I would. I raced heedlessly up the brambles, searching for a way in, and was instead met by a fist of branches that caught me in the jaw and knocked me the long way back to earth again.
My breath left me with the impact, my whole body stunned and numb. Above me, outlined by the crescent moon, I saw thorns spiraling together into a lance, but I could not force myself to move. Behind the lance, Eleanor reshaped herself into a monstrously vast form, all roses and rage.Did you think a little girl playing with moonlight could stopme?she roared in my mind.Did you think a creature as endless as roses could bedistractedby a little sword and shield? You have chosen your lot, daughter, and you will pay for it with your—
"Am I ordinary, Eleanor?" asked the sweetest voice I had ever known. The rose-being swung around, losing petals as it searched, but Opal was—of course—nowhere to be seen. "Such a disappointing child," she said in the most gentle mockery of a chiding tone that I had ever heard. "Perhaps that answers why I'm so biddable. Perhaps I was trying to earn the love of a mother who had no use for me."
For an instant she appeared, perfectly lovely in the moonlight. Then she cast away the aged bay leaf and wrapped her opal in a new one, in barely the time it took for her to wink at me. Her voice came again from yards away, sending Eleanor in another swirl. "Or perhaps I'm simply kind by nature, and was granted early release from a mother who might have driven it out of me. Best of all," and though her voice remained sweet as roses, acid dripped through it as well, "best of all is that in time I gained a new mother, one who did love me, and whose name I have recently learned is Irindala."
Eleanor's roar of fury was so great it carried true sound, the explosion of branches and the collapse of whole trees. The palace shook beneath that roar, falling in on itself. I swallowed a scream, knowing Opal was distracting Eleanor from me and not wanting to lose the advantage. My heart hurt, though, with terror for Opal and fear for Pearl, whose fate I could not know. My breath came back at last, and I forced myself to sit, moving as quietly as I could.
"Irindala was a good mother," Opal caroled from the safety—not that I dared think of it as such—of her invisibility. "She loved us even though we weren't her daughters by birth, and our father has never been happier than with her. Do you know, he realized you hadn't died? But he never went looking for you. Why would he? You had abandoned us, and he had earned Irindala's love. He did well, don't you think? Trading a wicked faery wife for the true love of a queen?"
Her voice danced from spot to spot, much more quickly than mere invisibility could account for. I wondered what other properties the opals had as Eleanor slammed lances of rose spirals into the earth, trying to pierce Opal's wandering voice. Opal only laughed, and I thought perhaps my kindest sister had a villainous streak after all.
Gathering courage from her mocking bravery, I plunged my hands into the palace's foliage, and became Amber in roses.
These roses did not take me kindly, as the ones at the lodge had done. Even then I had been in danger of losing myself; Eleanor's roses wanted to tear mefrommyself. The thick cloying scent of them, tinged with rot, made my mind float outside my body, growing ever-more detached. I could feel myself gagging on the smell and had little desire to return to that sickened body. It would be easier to let go, dissolving across Eleanor's roses.
A spark of triumph shot from them, either at my own thoughts or—worse by far—at some battle won beyond the endless thicket I had entered. I snapped back into my body, dizzy again at the sickening scent of roses, and clung to the notion of sap in my veins. I offered a desperate conviction that Ibelongedwith the roses, that I was not an enemy for them to spurn or destroy, and they did not listen. They rejected my presence, forbidding me to become part of them. I felt as though I retained my human shape, which I had not felt at all when I traveled beneath the earth withmyroses. I fought for each forward step, runners and thorns digging into my shins and forehead and squeezing tightly, until I thought I couldn't possibly be moving ahead at all.
But Pearl was out there, battling roses with a sword made of moonlight, and Opal was closer still, taunting a faery monster with no protection of her own save invisibility. And the Beast lay somewhere ahead of me. If I failed, all three of them would die, and so failure could not be considered.
Things that had sap in their veins also had bark as their skin. Sometimes paper-thin bark, delicate and fragile-seeming, but even birch paper had to be peeled away in layer after layer to reach and damage the wood beneath. And I was Amber, after all: amber, which came most often from within rough-barked pine trees. If amber itself ran in my veins, surely I could convince my body that its skin was as tough as pine bark, all but impervious to the thorns. The scoring on my skin roughed it up already: I imagined those little wounds layering on top of one another like bark did, thickening like scarred wood, and bit by bit the thorns lost their bite. I kept my eyes closed, pressing forward, and finally felt brambles breaking under my feet as I regained the ability to move.
All I needed was a direction to move in, and I had no sense of that at all. The palace was enormous even when visions and memories didn't expand it beyond reality, and now it was being dismantled by the weight and fury of roses. I had entered the roses nearest, I thought, the round room that had been the library—for a moment my heart broke, thinking of all that had been reclaimed in that library, and was now lost again—and I had felt the Beast at the heart of the palace. That, to me, would always be the sitting room and adjoining hall, where Father and I had first been ushered and where the Beast and I had taken meals together. I struggled onward, but I struggled in darkness: I had no idea if I was going the right way or not, and every suspicion that the roses would force me in the wrong direction. I dragged in breath through my teeth, trying not to taste the overwhelming smell of roses, and somewhere at the back of my throat, a hint of cinnamon caught.
I froze there amongst the unforgiving roses, opening my mouth like a cat trying to find more scent. Cinnamon and myrrh, and the latter made me suddenly laugh. The roses pulled back a little at the sound, then attacked again, but in the moment they retreated, I turned toward that scent and pushed forward.
Cinnamon and sweet wine and myrrh: I had my Beast's scent, the one I had made for him, and best of all, what was myrrh but a resin? Not as hard or ancient as amber, but made from the seeping skin of trees, and thus within my demesne. Half a dozen resins were used in perfumes; I had known it without thinking it through, and now thought that Eleanor had been mistaken about us all. Even as children we three girls had played toward aspects of our unawakened magic, strengthening bonds that we would later need.
I moved faster, with the Beast's scent in my throat. The brambles grew more frenzied but less effective as I gained confidence, lashing at me, trying to tangle my feet, but also bowing to my will as I thrust them away. They scraped at my skin, but no longer pierced it: I was too much one of them, a creature of imagined bark and wood and sap. Nothing so clear as a path ever opened up, but as with the forest when I'd escaped earlier, justenoughspace cleared in front of me, and if it stitched together again behind me, that was a problem for another time.
I stepped free into what might once have been the dining hall, but which was now the eye of a bloom-laden maelstrom, rising clear to the now-moonless sky, so that all that looked down upon us were stars. I saw what Eleanor had done, how she mastered such enormous power, and I cried out in horror for my Beast.
Eleanor's roses themselves took their life from him: roots dug deep into his withered body and pinned him to the earth. The storm's eye was hardly larger than he was, just enough to let him breathe and continue to live. I did not have to be well-versed in magic to understand the wicked cleverness of what she'd done: I knew enough of Irindala, and the curse, to recognize it clearly.
Irindala was bound to the land by blood and bone and magic, and the Beast, her son, was as tied to it as she was. Through him, Eleanor could draw on the very strength of Irindala's country, and though Maman had drained it nearly dry of magic, it still hadlifein it. To take the country's very life would nearly satisfy Eleanor, I thought. Nearly, but not quite.
But the curse lay on top of that, and curses broke laws of mortality. Eleanor had cursed the Beast to lonely immortality, and Irindala had only been able to lessen its impact. He could be made a mortal man again by a lover's willing touch…but until then even Eleanor couldn'tkillthe Beast.
She could use him, though. Any mortal creature could never have survived what the Beast now endured: the fact that he was silent, half unconscious beneath the writhing, hungry roots spoke to the pain he must have been in. But the Beast would not, could not, die, and so long as he lived, Eleanor could use his bond with the land to grow her power and wreak havoc on Irinidala's country.
Here, at the heart of her power, at the heart of his, Eleanor stepped out of the roses and I saw her true form with my own for the first time.
I had seen her repeatedly in Irindala's memories, and even through her own eyes, reflected in water, and yet she did not look like I believed her to. I had thought her tall: she was not, especially. But then, Maman was quite small indeed, and by comparison, Eleanor might be thought tall. She was rounder, too, more curvaceous than I expected; more like Opal in bosom and hip than I'd imagined.
Save for her figure, though, she was hardly like Opal at all. Opal was pretty, whereas Pearl and I were beautiful and interesting, respectively, and Eleanor was both of those things. Her features were like mine, a little asymmetrical, but the shape of her jaw and cheekbones lent her an arrogant elegance that Pearl had inherited and turned to beauty. None of us, though, shared her eyes, which were huge and angled and not at all human. Her hair was ivory, with a yellow undertone that Pearl's didn't share, and slender pointed ears poked through the straight locks. In the starlight her skin was so golden it could be mistaken for green, like the green of new growth in roses.
Her mouth curved in a deadly smile when she saw me, and the laugh that broke from her throat sounded like the scrape of thorns. "Oh, youaremy daughter," she said in pleasure. "My foolish little Amber, throwing it all away for a Beast."
