by Kevin Hearne
Darting across the keep, Argabella was careful to keep hidden, skidding behind a slumbering horse here and a wagon there and carefully skirting the frozen, wizened dingus of the old man who’d been preparing to pee on the same patch of mud for many years. As she neared the steps up to the Rose Room, which had once been the countess’s sitting room and the site of a rather dastardly curse by a very diabolical but annoyingly glamorous witch, she slowed and checked to see if the arrow was properly positioned in the little clippy thing on the crossbow. It seemed to be, so she pointed it away from herself and took a deep breath, her heart hammering and her buck teeth chattering. She smelled something, a strange stink, not unlike when dogs get their anal glands impacted and start butt scooting all over the cobbles, much to the embarrassment of any area wolves. Whatever was in the queen’s room was far more beast than Argabella was, and that was saying quite a lot.
She steeled herself and swung into the doorway.
“Halt, knave!” she cried, but it came out as more of a question.
The cloaked figure looked up from where it crouched over the heart rose, which is what Argabella had named the beautifully glowing flower from which all the poison-green vines grew before multiplying and snaking away in their quest to envelop the castle. With a gasp, the figure withdrew from the rose and unfolded to stand.
And kept unfolding. It was, in fact, a very tall figure.
“I don’t wish to hurt you,” the figure said in a husky but female voice that promised violence. “But I must have this rose.”
Flipping back the hood of her cloak, the figure revealed acres and acres of woman, her clipped black hair nearly brushing the stone ceiling. Her golden eyes, the eyes of a cat, met Argabella’s eyes, which were more like the watery eyes of a patchy rabbit that preferred to live in a cage because free-range grass could be scary. Slowly, carefully, the woman knelt and unhooked shears from a belt that didn’t fasten around a tunic, hold up a pair of pants, or appear to serve any function except to hold those shears and a bottle opener. She honestly wasn’t wearing much under her muddy cloak, and Argabella winced to think of how cold the poor girl must be. As Argabella watched, the woman’s thick, callused fingers stroked the velvet petals of the heart rose most scarlet and effulgent, and—
“No! Don’t touch it, I said.” Argabella swallowed a ball of fear. “Please.”
“I will have it.”
“Absolutely not!”
“Then fight me.”
The intruder’s grip on the shears changed subtly, and she brandished them in a decidedly less horticultural and more murderous fashion. Argabella went cold all over as she considered her own brief, failing forays into the realm of violence. She couldn’t even properly destroy a lute.
The figure flipped her cloak onto the ground in a cloud of stink, which cleared up one of Argabella’s big questions. But her next question was something along the lines of “How do I not get murdered just now?” because the woman began twirling the shears around her branch-sized fingers and growling.
Argabella squeaked, and she might have accidentally hit the switchy thing on the crossbow that made the bolt do the thwacky thing, which it did, with a thwack.
She’d barely muttered, “Sorry!” before the intruder rolled smoothly out of the arrow’s path and came up with the shears in one hand and a sword in the other. The arrow, for its part, thudded into the countess’s favorite dog’s favorite ottoman and quivered, shedding its remaining kinetic force.
“I said fight me, not shoot me while I was preparing for battle! You’re supposed to wait your turn. There are rules for this sort of thing. Initiative and all that. Or are you a coward?”
“Uh.” Argabella’s toe claws raked over the stone in embarrassment. “I am a coward, actually, but please, still, don’t touch the rose, maybe?”
Argabella blushed and fought tears as the figure looked her up and down, perplexed. This was a new sensation, for no one had seen Argabella since the witch’s curse had…changed her. She was a beast now, and it spoke to the intruder’s fortitude and courage that she hadn’t immediately run away screaming. Argabella had been shy and insecure before the curse, but now she felt as if anxiety and nervous twitches ran in her very blood.
“What are you supposed to be?” the intruder asked. “A…like a giant bunny?”
“Uh,” Argabella said. “Kind of.”
Because although she was a beast, she was nothing like a werewolf, a bear, a lion, or even a slightly frightening badger. The castle mirrors had revealed long ago that she looked more like the thin, fidgety woman she’d once been, mixed with a sickly rabbit, all watery eyes and dandelion-puff fur and quivering ears and an adorable if awkward poofy tail. The first time she’d beheld her own visage, she’d growled in rage and attempted to break the mirror glass, but she’d only succeeded in bruising her hairy knuckles. She’d been neither pretty nor ugly before, but now she just looked like she needed to be put out of her misery. The intruder was watching her carefully, still twirling her shears, so Argabella dropped the empty crossbow, and her claws clicked together fretfully.
“My name is Argabella. I’m the court bard. Sort of. And I honestly don’t know what will happen if you take the heart rose, but I suspect it will be terrible, considering that the witch who laid this spell sent a postcard saying something to that effect.”
“Which witch?”
“Why?”
“Why which witch?”
“I don’t see why it matters which witch was the witch which cursed me.”
“I know some witches, and I’m curious.”
“Grinda the Sand Witch.”
The tall intruder shook her head. “Never heard of her.”
“She lives to the south at Malefic Beach,” Argabella added helpfully, having learned as much from the letters she’d been reading all these years as the postman just kept tossing them through the letter slot in the wall. He never took her letters crying for help, though, merely scrawling “Insufficiente Postage” on each envelope and tossing it right back. She’d run out of stamps ages ago, and he refused to accept gold pieces without proper change.
Argabella had dashed off several strongly written letters to the Postale Service, but the postman predictably refused to deliver complaints about his Jerkful behavior.
“Well, then. Greetings, Argabella the bard. I am Fia, a fighter for hire. And an amateur rosarian.” Fia shrugged, looking much less lethal. “I wasn’t going to take the whole rose, you know. Can I just take a cutting?”
Argabella collapsed inward like a blancmange, clawed fingers over her eyes. After five years of complete silence, this was all a little much. “I don’t know, but I can’t stop you, so go on. Go on and kill us all. Over a leggy little species with a slightly crumpled heart.”
“Wait,” Fia said, rising to her full seven feet of slabby muscle. “You…speak flower?”
“Kind of hard not to. Thanks to the curse, I can’t wake anyone up, and I can’t leave, and I must protect the heart rose until the lady wakes and the spell is broken. So here I am. I’ve read all the books in the library on flowers, trying to better understand this cultivar, but it’s honestly more magical than sensible. Still, I think you’ll find, if you look closely, that it’s an imperfect specimen.”
Fia raised an eyebrow and knelt, making a show of hanging her shears back on her belt. Argabella noticed that they were rather a nice pair of shears and that someone with such well-honed blades probably knew their way around a flower or two. She relaxed a little and stopped with all the claw clacking as Fia inspected the rose and stood again, her brow drawn down.
“You’re right. It’s not as perfect as it seemed.”
“Not much reason to lie. I’m doomed either way.”
Fia paced around the room, considering the vines that twined through the windows and doors and pried between bricks and stone flags l
ike a greedy child sticking their fingers in the lattice of a pie. “So why are you…”
“Furry?”
“I was going to say ‘cursed,’ actually.”
Argabella shrugged and fetched the countess’s watering can, giving the rose just enough water so that she had something to do instead of just standing there being stared at.
“Like I said, I’m the court bard. The countess didn’t invite this Grinda the Sand Witch to the lady’s sixteenth birthday party, so the witch just popped into the room in a cloud of sand, right when they were cutting the cake.”
Fia winced. “Ew. So sand got in the frosting?”
“Exactly. It was awful. And then the witch suggested that she should’ve been invited to the party, and the countess said that she had been invited, and Grinda said that her postman was very forgetful, and the countess sympathized because her postman was also wretched—which is totally true, he’s super Rudeful—and so the countess asked the witch why she’d messed up the cake over a simple postal mishap, and Grinda said the cake wasn’t the point, and…honestly, I’m surprised they didn’t start pulling each other’s hair. In the end, the postman somehow never got fired but the lady was put under a spell. The witch said that one day the lady would prick her finger on a rose thorn, and then she’d fall into an enchanted sleep until awakened by true love’s kiss. So the countess and the earl ordered everyone to destroy all the roses in Borix. But some absolute fool who’d been out of town during the party gave the princess a single rose they found lying about on the ground in the keep.”
Even though she was fighting the tears, they welled up, and Argabella started to snivel as her claws scratched the stone.
Fia shook her head sympathetically. “It was you, wasn’t it? With the rose?”
Argabella fell to her knees, pulling her long ears and moaning. “Yes! But she was always so kind to me and said my songs might actually be not terrible one day, and I’d been away at bard school, and I didn’t know! Nobody meets you at the door on your way home to do laundry and tells you roses are suddenly public enemy number one! It was just lying there!”
“So you gave her a rose…”
“You can guess the rest. There was a thorn, then a bead of blood, and then she just fell over asleep. As did everyone else, exactly where they were. I picked up the rose and ran to bring it to the countess and tell her the lady had some sort of rose allergy or clotting disease, but her room here was empty. Everyone was in the throne room to celebrate the destruction of every rose in the kingdom. The flower fell from my hands, right here, and it put down roots and spread, and here it’s been ever since.”
“So the fur…?”
“Nobody told me that part, either! The witch sent me a brief postcard beginning with, ‘Welcome to being a scapegoat!’ and warning me of the terms of my curse, but everything else I pieced together by reading everyone’s mail! Even though that’s illegal! The curse has marked me a beast, a lady killer, a mail thief, a castle ruiner, a bad bard, a very very very bad bard—”
Fia caught Argabella’s hands before she could shred her own long ears with her claws.
“Hey, now. It’s not your fault. Nobody accidentally curses a lady for fun.”
“Except witches.”
“Well, yes. Except them. But look at the bright side. You have this amazing rose!”
Argabella snorted. “It’s not the nicest one I’ve seen, anyway. Toby the Dark Lord has much nicer roses, and he’s been able to breed some amazing hybrids, but he’s never shown them because he doesn’t leave his tower.”
“Toby? The Dark Lord?”
“Oh, well, he’s not that dark. He’s really quite nice. I call him the Crepuscular Lord, and he’s never even hit me with lightning for doing so. His tower is halfway to the bard school, and I often stopped to bring him bits of mail that had accidentally been sent to the castle instead. And cheese. He’s very fond of cheese. I hope he’s still alive and not cursed.” Argabella blinked back yet more tears. “I don’t know how far the curse goes. I haven’t seen anyone I like in five years. Haven’t had a bit of cheese for most of that time because I ate that first. I wish I were asleep like everybody else.” Clattering across the room, she threw herself dramatically on the countess’s divan.
“So let’s go see him.”
“See who?”
“Whom.”
“Bless you. But really, who?”
“This Crepuscular Lord with the cheese and the roses. I need a rose to take to the annual Pell Smells Rose Show so I can reimburse this halfling, and I’ve already paid the entrance fee because I was counting on this rose, and…never mind. Let’s just go. This place is pretty creepy. I think I can actually hear the thorns growing.”
“Wait until they start whispering.”
“Never mind that.” Fia’s face lit up. “Because if this Toby is a real wizard, maybe he can wake up…your sleeping hairy lady. And this boy, Worstley, who is also currently sleeping in her tower.”
“There’s a boy in the tower?” Argabella perked up, hopeful. “A boy who might wake the lady with true love’s kiss?”
“Yes, but he’s mostly dead.”
Argabella deflated again. “But I’m not supposed to leave, so I can’t take you to see the Dark Lord. I must guard the rose.”
“Or else what?”
“Or else I don’t know, but it could be bad.”
Fia knelt in front of the divan and gave Argabella a sad but beautiful smile. “Can it possibly be worse than being stuck alone in a creepy tower with a bunch of sleeping people and absolutely no cheese?”
Argabella’s heart lifted. Something about Fia emboldened her. Made her dream again of a world of cheese and properly delivered mail and songs that just naturally happened and didn’t require weeks of work and headaches and calluses. She suddenly realized what would rhyme perfectly with then: Again. Also Sven and glen, but that wasn’t as useful.
“It probably can’t get worse than that, no.”
“So let’s go.”
“Should I bring my lute?” Argabella asked with some trepidation, for her father had always warned her that no worthy adventurer left home without a bard to herald her path.
Fia considered, hand on her chin. “Do your songs wake bravery in the hearts of heroes, heal wounds of the flesh, and help strength bloom in the souls of the weary?”
Argabella jumped up, now filled with nervous energy and a strange feeling that she soon recognized as hope. She hadn’t felt hope in a long time.
“No, not really. Not yet. That’s more graduate-level stuff. My songs are mostly about roses and dairy products and sleeping people.”
“We can work on it,” Fia said. “Now come on.”
Together, they retrieved Argabella’s nicest unsmashed lute and hurried up the steps to the lady’s tower. Argabella did her best to tamp down her guilt and instead tried to take some pride in the lovely set-up she’d created so the Lady wasn’t slowly suffocated in her tangling hair. She showed Fia the lady’s closet full of lovely thick cloaks that didn’t smell like goat dung, and they each selected something warm for the road. Argabella looked upon Worstley and agreed that he was indeed rather dead and would pose no threat to the lady and the heart rose as he was. And then Argabella climbed onto Fia’s broad but feminine back and clung to her as the mighty fighter climbed down a braid of the lady’s magically preserved hair. It was a very intimate sort of feeling that woke new sensations in the bard, but the fact that they were both yelping with pain as thorns shredded their flesh kept some of the awkwardness at bay.
At the bottom of the tower, scratched and torn but exhilarated by the upcoming adventure, Argabella leapt to the ground amid a puddle of thorn-scratch blood and old halfling bones and laughed a mad laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Fia asked.
“I’m out of the castle, and nothing
horrible is happening. The thorns aren’t reaching for me, and the halfling bones aren’t turning into angry skeletons to haunt me. I’m not even becoming more rabbity! I’m out! I’m free! And I’m apparently hallucinating a goat. A bedraggled and bony billy goat.”
“My name is Gustave,” the goat said. “And honestly, you’re not one to go insulting people’s looks.”
Argabella skittered behind Fia, terrified and trembling, but Fia just sighed.
“Goat, why are you still here?”
“Again, it’s Gustave, and I’ve been napping and eating old halfling boots and pooping little halfling boot poops. But now that you’re back, I still think I’ll go with you.”
“But you don’t know where we’re going,” Fia said, sounding altogether more annoyed than she’d sounded with Argabella, Argabella noticed.
“Does it really matter? I’m a goat on the move, and I might as well go with someone more likely to protect me than eat me. Besides, I’d make a great spy for whatever sort of adventure you’re on.”
“How can a goat be a spy?” Argabella asked.
The goat looked her up and down as if assessing the nutritional value of her clothing. “People always suspect goats might have eaten almost anything they can’t find at the moment, but they never expect goats to be listening in on their conversations. They reveal their most horrid secrets. And now I can tell them to you.”
“Oh, I like him,” Argabella said.
“You’ve been locked in a castle for five years. You’d probably like anybody,” Fia said, but not unkindly.
It was probably true. But Argabella wasn’t about to argue with someone brave enough to walk around in a chain-mail bikini.