Bryony and Roses

by T. Kingfisher

  She closed her eyes after that and crawled along the floor like a blind beetle, leaving smears of blood behind her.

  How the rose would laugh if he could see her now.

  Probably he could see her. Undoubtedly he was laughing. The sounds of the rose tapping at the windows was very much like laughter.

  “Oh Beast,” she moaned. “Oh Beast, I want to find you. Help me. Get me out of this place. Please.”

  She got up eventually, keeping her eyes on the floor. When she looked up, which she did occasionally, even knowing what she would see, the wild rose spirit had arranged tableaus in the window, most of them obscene. Dead lovers penetrated one another with rose whips, were torn apart and chained together by them, in extraordinary variation.

  “The rose,” she said, dropping her eyes to the carpet, “is a bastard.”

  This was such an incredible understatement and she was so numbed by horrors that she began to laugh again. It was hacking, sobbing laughter, but it was definitely laughter all the same.

  The roses clawed at the windows. She could see the shadows writhing on the floor. Apparently her laughter infuriated the rose, and that only made her laugh harder, and gave her the strength to climb to her feet.

  “I won’t look at you,” she told the windows. “If those were ever real people, you’re a murderer, and if not, you’re very sick, and if I can lay my hands on about eight hundred gallons of vinegar, I will sear your roots until you wither away to nothing. But I still won’t look.”

  She walked on, and did not look.

  The roses smashed against the glass in fury, but the glass held. Perhaps there was some strength left to House after all.

  She had no idea how long she walked down that hall. No more than a few minutes, most likely. It felt like a hundred years.

  Horrible things always seem like they’re taking longer. Unless this really is taking longer and my sense of time is confused as well…

  If the Beast was indeed functionally immortal, perhaps that wouldn’t matter.

  Funny, it had never occurred to her to ask if she was functionally immortal while staying in the house either. Holly would have pounced on that immediately.

  She hoped that Holly was safe. Had the rose seen her? Had she made it to the Beast’s manor at all?

  A new noise intruded into her awareness, a soft ticking sound, like a very small clock.

  She looked up, and then to one side—not the side with the windows—and then finally it occurred to her to look down.

  The clockwork bee was trundling down the hall toward her.

  A little bubble of relief rose in her throat. She let out a single hacking sob and clenched her fists against her breast to keep from making another.

  The bee crept toward her, tick-tick-tick.

  Bryony knelt down, watching the little brass legs move, one after another, until it finally bumped into her knee.

  “Did the Beast send you?” she asked.

  The bee backed up a step, its antennae moving. It whirred its wings and rose an inch or two off the ground, then tumbled back to the carpet, unmoving.

  Holly picked it up and wound the infinitesimal key, listening to the small, friendly sound it made, zzzip, zzzip, zzzip, the only sound in that long hallway except for her breathing.

  She released the key and held her breath.

  It whirred its wings and took off. It circled her head once, twice, as if she were a puzzling flower, then landed on the carpet again.

  Then it turned around and began walking away from her.

  Bryony followed.

  Walking is easier than flying, she thought, as the bee trundled determinedly forward, a little gleam of light in the darkened hall. She followed. The bee was very slow compared to a walking human, but not so bad compared to a limping one.

  She had followed it perhaps five minutes, ignoring forty or fifty windows, and the clockwork bee stopped. Its antennae spun. It turned ninety degrees and walked toward a door.

  The door did not open. Bryony slammed the heel of her hand on it, and then the shears. The doorframe shivered.

  “House,” she said. “House!”

  The bee walked into the door, spun its antennae, backed up and tried again. Finding no entrance, it began to climb up the doorframe.

  “House!” cried Bryony, beating on the frame with the shears.

  The wood groaned, as if two forces struggled inside it, one trying to force it open and one determined to hold it shut. Bryony threw her shoulder against it, and it moved, grudgingly.

  It got half an inch open, then stopped, but that was enough. She jammed the shears into the gap and hauled on them, using the wooden handles as a lever and if they break, I am in a world of hurt.

  But they did not break. The door opened onto a flight of stairs.

  She had never seen these stairs before. They were narrow and steep, the sort of back stairs used by servants, or by merchant’s daughters escaping from their nurses. She scooped up the bee and put it in a pocket (its legs kicked wildly) and flung herself down them at breakneck speed.

  The door at the bottom was gone, but the doorway was filled with roses.

  They lay like a nest of serpents across the floor. Flowers bloomed extravagantly beside thorns as long as Bryony’s fingers. A sweet scent filled the stairwell until she thought that she might choke on it.

  She still had her gloves. She pulled her shirt up over her nose and mouth to drown out the stink of roses. The smell of sweaty terrified human cut through it nicely. She grabbed the first stem and began to cut.

  Pruning roses, even ordinary, decent roses, is slow work. Even the kindest of rosebushes does not yield easily to the knife.

  These were worse. Worse than briars, worse than brambles, worse than thickets of wild blackberry.

  Her leather gloves were cut and punctured by thorns. Blood ran down her arms from scratches, and sap matted down her hair. She hacked at stems as thick as her wrist, sawing at them with the edge of the shears, sometimes crying with frustration, sometimes laughing with relief.

  If I get through this, these shears are done.

  If I get through this, I will have them repaired and hung over the fireplace, like an old campaigner’s sword.

  It was surely her imagination that towards the end, the stems became easier to cut, as if the rose were retreating. But she sawed through the last stem, a monstrous tangle that wrapped around itself two or three times, and when she looked up, the doorway was clear.

  She stepped out into the courtyard at the heart of the manor.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The first thing she saw was the Beast.

  He was standing beside the birch tree. Bryony ran forward, heedless of the rose stems that coiled across the flagstones. “Beast! Beast, you’re—”

  Her throat closed.

  He was not standing after all. He was hanging suspended in a tangle of roses. The bushes that had surrounded the tree had grown upwards, coiling around the white trunk and scrambling into the lowest limbs. The birch’s leaves were thin and skeletal. The Beast hung silently below them, with rose canes wrapped around his arms and wrists and across his chest. His robe hung in tatters.

  And after all my work pruning those damn bushes, she thought, absurdly irritated, because the alternative would be to look too closely at the Beast and actually comprehend the horror of the situation.

  The rose bushes had buckled and cracked the flagstones around the base of the birch tree. There was no clear path through them, but Bryony had not particularly expected one.

  “Listen to me, wild rose,” she growled, lifting her abused shears. “You can let me through, or I can hack my way through. It’s up to you.”

  The rose leaves clattered with mocking laughter. Bryony shook her head. “All right, if that’s the way it is…”

  She started cutting. The rose keened in pain and retreated before her. Stems writhed away.

  “I warned you,” she panted. There was room enough now to get one foot on t
he flagstones at the base of the birch. She jammed her foot in. A rose thorn struck at it, and she sliced the whole whip off at the base, cursing.

  She was on the third stem—or the thirtieth—when something came chattering out of the dark at her.

  She saw it out of the corner of her eye, a big dark shape, moving fast, and jerked back, raising the shears to hold it off.

  There was nothing there.

  I’m hallucinating. I’m seeing things that aren’t there.

  There are so many things that are actually here, it seems like a waste to start inventing more…

  She went back to chopping. She had barely set the shears to another stem when another thing came at her, something with a suggestion of teeth and eyes and fury, and she had to whip around and face empty air.

  Her neck gave a bright spasm of pain. The rose leaves snickered.

  “You’re doing this,” said Bryony aloud. She gritted her teeth and went back to sawing.

  Unfortunately, knowing that the rose was doing it didn’t help as much as it could have. Bryony knew that the shapes weren’t real, but her spine and her nerves and the back of her brain didn’t believe it. When the shadows jumped, so did she.

  Her progress cutting through the rose slowed to a crawl.

  This is stupid. They’re not real. It can’t stop me with real briars, so it’s stopping me with fake monsters. This is stupid.

  Claws rose in the air and a shadow leaped at her and Bryony gritted her teeth, trying not to jump and closed her eyes…

  “This is not beautiful,” said a voice that wasn’t really there either. “This is inelegant. A fair maiden saving her beloved, that is fine, that is the very essence of poetry, but this is not acceptable.”

  “Irving?” whispered Bryony.

  In her mind’s eye, the poet looked down his nose at her. “None other. I do not approve of the garden shears, by the way.”

  “You wouldn’t,” said Bryony, smiling, and thought, I’ve lost my mind, but that’s okay, my mind wasn’t helping much anyway.

  She opened her eyes and tackled another stem. A shape leapt for her, and another shape stepped in to stop it.

  “Halt!” cried the poet. “You shall not interfere in love’s great work! Back, curs! The pen is mightier than the sword, but the sword has its uses still!”

  Bryony still could barely make out details, but the shape in the corner of her eye did look as if it were wearing a puffy white shirt, and it did seem to be waving a sword.

  This is magic. Or madness. Perhaps there’s no real difference.

  The rose screamed in rage. She didn’t know if it was inside or outside her head. The shapes were fewer and slower and Irving drove them away before they could break her concentration.

  “I shall give you such a beating, fiends, as you will bear back with you to the Pit! Tell them that Matthias Irving sent you!”

  The Beast had not moved all this time. She wasn’t even sure he was breathing. If she got to him and found that she was cutting down a corpse—well, best not to think of that.

  She cleared enough space for her other foot. The shears were so dull and streaked with sap that she was forced to saw at the thicker stems.

  Much more of this and I’ll be using my teeth…

  The birch tree was leaning sideways and one of its roots had heaved up out of the dirt. Bryony stepped up onto it.

  Birch tree and wild rose. If we live through this, I’ll have to get the Beast to explain to me how they fit together.

  She reached out and caught the Beast’s wrist and nearly wept with relief, because he was warm. There was a pulse, too fast, too weak, but a pulse nonetheless, and hers probably wouldn’t be doing much better if she were hanging from a possessed rose bush.

  “Come on, Beast,” she said, standing on tiptoes and grabbing one of his ears. “Come on. Don’t do anything stupid. I’ve got this far, but I need your help!”

  A shudder went through him and he lifted his head from his chest. His nostrils flared, and then his golden eyes slowly cracked open.

  “Bryony…?”

  She laughed out loud.

  “What…what’re you…not supposed to be here…”

  “Yes, well.” Bryony kissed his cheek. The fur on his face was fine and flat and did not feel all that different from kissing a human, and she wondered why she’d waited so long to do it.

  “What…?”

  “Next time,” she said, crouching down and sawing at the rose stems wrapped around his legs, “next time warn me if going away means that the roses get to eat you. What a colossal mess.”

  He thrashed weakly. “You…no. Get away. The rose…you have to get away from the rose.” His breath ran out on a long sigh. “Should never have tried to keep you here. Didn’t know…it had gotten…so strong.”

  “It’s a problem with wild rose thickets,” agreed Bryony. “They form these stands if you don’t pull them out soon enough, and then it’s a serious job.” She stood up again and went to work on his left arm. “Hold still, or I’ll take chunks out of you on accident. This isn’t a precision instrument.”

  “Not just a rose…” The Beast pulled his arm free and began tearing at the thorns. Bryony smacked him on the forearm.

  “Stop that! I’ll get you out.”

  “Have to hurry,” said the Beast. “It’s not just the rose. It’s more than a rose. It’s a spirit. It’s completely mad—”

  “We’ve met,” said Bryony shortly. “Couple of times now.”

  The rose leaves clattered and hissed around her, whispering obscenities.

  A rim of white showed around the Beast’s eyes.

  “If he couldn’t take me by myself, he can’t possibly take the two of us,” said Bryony, with a lot more authority than she felt. “The house is helping.”

  The Beast shook his head. “The house is dying,” he rasped. “She’s the birch tree. You understand?”

  “Not even a little,” said Bryony. She sliced through the last stem and threw the severed length aside.

  The Beast took a shuffling step sideways and swept her up in his arms. Bryony squeaked in surprise.

  “You came back,” he said hoarsely. His face was buried in her shoulder. He had quite a lot of face, so this covered a lot of territory and meant that a tusk was poking her in the collarbone, but Bryony didn’t particularly mind.

  “Of course I did,” she said. “You’re my Beast, and I love you.”

  The roses screamed.

  It was a good thing that the Beast was so tall, because otherwise Bryony was fairly sure they would have perished right then. The whole thicket thrashed and writhed around them, striking out with thorny whips, and only the Beast’s fur and the fact that he literally held Bryony up over his head saved them from being flayed alive.

  He swung her over top of the rampaging thorns and stepped over the thicket himself. Bryony clung to his arms, feeling like a very small creature indeed.

  A crack like thunder sounded above them, and she looked up in time to see several bricks separate from the manor house and come crashing to the ground.

  “That seems bad,” said Bryony.

  “I apologize for this,” said the Beast, and slung her around his back. She just had time to grab onto the collar of his robe, and he dropped to all fours and charged through the whipping sea of thorns.

  The doorways out of the courtyard were not open, but it rapidly didn’t matter, because the house was falling apart anyway. Part of the wall fell down in front of them.

  Oh, House…

  The Beast slammed through the hole into a hallway, twisted to avoid a toppling door, and went out the other side. Bryony had a suspicion that even in its death-throes, the house was trying to help them. They skidded down a long, shuddering hall, masonry crashing down behind them, but the Beast stayed ahead of the beams, and a door fell down in front of them and opened the way to the outside again.

  The roses were waiting for them, striking like snakes, but the Beast leapt and twisted and
Bryony clung tight, not letting go even when a whip cracked across her head and tore a hank of hair (and a bit of scalp) out with it.

  “The garden!” she yelled at him. “Find the garden!”

  She didn’t know why she said that—maybe nothing more than the hope that her shovel would still be there, or another set of shears—but the Beast took it as an order. He cleared the remnants of the boxwood hedge with one bound and tore towards the far corner of the lawn.

  Her first thought was that the rose had gotten here first, and she felt a sick wrench of betrayal. Sure, the wild rose was a plant, but these were hers! She’d taken care of them! They came from her very own garden! So why was there a stand of leaves, as tall as a small tree, where her little garden had been?

  Then the Beast reached the edge of the leaves, and she understood.

  Her garden had grown. The roses were shoving at the edges, trying to jam thorns through, and her plants were fighting back.

  Sage grew six feet in the air, reinforced by a wall of lamb’s-ear at her feet and tied together with the climbing stems of peas. Leaves of basil six inches long formed glossy pillars, threaded with the narrow lances of verbena. Where thorns tore at them, the smell was thick and herbal and cut through the cloying sweetness of the rose.

  And underground, forming an impenetrable wall against the suckers of even the most determined wild rose…

  The rutabagas were the size of her head. Their white and purple crowns gleamed against the dark earth.

  “Oh, my dears…” she said, her voice cracking. “Did any gardener ever have such friends?” She slid off the Beast’s back and ran forward. The roses nearest to her tried to strike, but were muffled under a coat of oregano as thick as the Beast’s fur.

  “Looks like everything but the radishes,” she said, laughing and wiping at her eyes. “And you can’t expect much combat out of radishes.”

  She laid a hand on the thickly knotted stems of sage and they opened with a soft rustle of leaves.

  She stepped through. The Beast followed her. The opening in the leaves knit together behind him.

  Through the gap, just before it closed, she saw a figure in a white shirt lift its sword in salute.