by S. L. Huang
She wanted to cry. It was too unlikely. But she forced the thought away, forced herself to slow her breathing. Rested her elbow on her knee, the rifle on her palm, the stock snugged into her shoulder where it braced against the tree.
Just as her grandmother had taught her.
Breathe in, out.
In, out.
The pad of her finger teased the trigger, ever so slightly.
She would rescue this girl. If she did nothing else in her life, she would save this girl.
In, out. In … out …
The small bear roared at the girl again, its teeth stabbing at her, and she shrank back, but Rosa narrowed her focus, front sight, steady …
The small bear waddled back toward its fellows—
In, out, and as her targets crossed each other …
… squeeze.
The roar of the rifle ripped the night in half. The recoil slammed Rosa’s bony shoulder against the tree, and the rifle suddenly felt heavy, so heavy she almost let it tumble from her fingers before tightening them. She gulped in a ragged breath of frigid air and forced her exhausted eyes to raise back to the window.
The bears were down, their bulk collapsed in furred mountains. The small one still moved.
The blond girl stared at them, paralyzed. She wasn’t running. Why wouldn’t she run? She had to run!
Rosa half slid, half fell down the tree. Whatever frisson of necessity had kept her going, it was bleeding out of her, and she stumbled and wove toward the cottage. Get the girl out. Then she could fall.
Her boots tripped over themselves as she burst in the door. The two large bears were dead, their faces gone. Lumps of fur and claw with blood for faces, no teeth left—no teeth left—the thought made Rosa want to giggle, suddenly and inexplicably and inappropriately.
The small bear was on the ground, but it twitched, still alive. Blood marked the floorboards beneath it. Rosa’s eyes raked its fur but couldn’t find the wound. It had been the last one in line—her bullet must have been tumbling so slowly by then.
The bear turned its furred face toward her, its lips peeling back from jagged incisors. For half a moment Rosa thought the grimace was a threat until the animal bleated, “Why?” and she realized it was only trying to speak.
“When you try to eat people,” Rosa said—and her voice was shaking, why was it shaking?—she was shaking. “There are consequences.”
“We weren’t…” mumbled the bear. Its voice was higher than she would have expected.
“I’m vengeance,” Rosa said. “I’m justice.” The world was waving in front of her eyes, dripping in squiggles. She tried to find the other girl with her eyes, and couldn’t.
The bear whined, a disturbingly human sound. “You don’t under—she was—”
It stopped. Something thumped. The small bear’s mouth yawned slack, its beady black eyes now turned to the wall.
Rosa tried to look up, to focus. The blond girl stood over the bear with what looked like a slightly misshapen adz head, hewn of rough stone. It was bloody.
“Thank you,” she said, and her lip trembled. “They attacked me. They were about to do—unspeakable things. Thank you so much.”
Something felt wrong, but Rosa couldn’t …
“You saved my life,” the girl said, her eyes lowered and timid.
Where had the rifle gone? Oh, Rosa was still holding it.
“Are you okay?” The meek gratitude had straightened out of the girl’s face to be replaced with frank curiosity. A moment later it was back, like a mask. “Are you all right? They broke in, they—you saved me.”
Rosa felt like sitting down. The floor came up to meet her, much too close. Once she was sitting, it didn’t seem reasonable not to lie down, not when she was so near to the floor like this.
She lay and stared at the ceiling. The light was eclipsed by a small pale face. Lighting the girl from behind the way it did, the illumination in the cottage turned the tumble of blond curls into a glowing halo.
“Angel,” Rosa muttered.
“What? No. Not that.” The girl laughed. The frightened weakness was gone again. “Call me Goldie. And you’re my avenging angel today.” She looked over her shoulder. “Look, uh—there are beds here, and there’s some pretty good porridge. And I’m sure there’s probably some other food—you look like a skeleton.” She poked Rosa’s shoulder and wrinkled her nose. “Whatever’s wrong, we’ll get you better.”
It drifted across Rosa’s mind that the girl’s words didn’t fit together quite right for someone talking about her own cottage, but the thought was gone before she could grasp at it, a wisp in the wind. She stared up at nothing, and at the edges of her eyes loomed the two great chairs where the bigger bears had been seated, sitting like humans before she killed them.
The chairs were really quite large and sturdy for human ones. Goldie’s parents must have been very heavy.
Maybe that was why the bears had wanted to eat them.
* * *
“I wasn’t stupid,” Rosa said. “I knew—of course I knew it wasn’t her cottage. I figured later that she’d probably been stealing from them, and they surprised her, and she screamed. But I justified it to myself. Told myself they were probably going to eat her anyway, and nobody deserved that. After all, they were bears.”
The sky had grayed to night again, this one gauzed with clouds but warm. By mutual silent consent they had lit no fire this time, bedding down on their cloaks. Feng Meng might assume they followed him, but why make it easy for him?
“Besides,” Rosa continued softly, “Goldie had saved my life. I was nearly dead with fever in that house, and she got me out of there and back to where she had water and blankets. More importantly, after that … she became my friend. She shared her food with me, taught me to pick pockets and run scams, and once I shared my quest to hunt evil grundwirgen, she threw herself into finding them for me. She did it with such zeal, as if it were a game, and I—perhaps I thought she was not serious enough about something that had become tantamount to my religion, but it did not worry me. She was so slick, so sure of herself. And I … I idolized her. I would have done anything she asked of me.”
“We are always blind to the faults of those we love,” Hou Yi said.
“Feng Meng?” Rosa asked.
Hou Yi nodded.
Rosa felt no surprise. “He was more than your apprentice, wasn’t he?”
“He was like a son.” Hou Yi’s expression wasn’t visible in the dark. “Not only my son. My—legacy. Like your grandmother taught you … did you teach your daughter your skill with the rifle?”
“I taught Mei.” Reaching across to adjust her elbow, her face dipped behind the sights, so pale and serious and achingly beautiful. That sparking tingle as they touched, like firecrackers under Rosa’s skin. She gently closed the lid on the memory. “Mei taught Xiao Hong.”
They both had, to be truthful, but Rosa could not have been prouder of stepping back and watching Mei repeat those same precious words to a tiny, exuberant, perfect child, the same words Abuelita had given Rosa and Rosa had given Mei and now Mei was passing on in turn, in one long unbroken thread of love.
She felt a deep stab of grief for Hou Yi as if it were her own.
“You understand then,” Hou Yi said. “Everything I was, everything I knew, I wanted to give to him. I felt unbridled joy at his successes. If he had surpassed me, it would have been cause for celebration, but it also didn’t matter that he did not, only that we kept learning, together.”
“But he didn’t feel the same.”
Hou Yi’s silhouette was still in the night, and Rosa was not sure she had heard. But then her shape crumpled, her hands coming up to her face. “Where did I go wrong?” she whispered.
PART THREE
They started early the next morning. The air was cooler today, and the breeze carried a tang of salt. They were nearing the sea.
Hou Yi picked up the thread from the evening before, as if it had been left trailing
on the ground in the dark. “You must doubt,” she said, after they had begun their steady hike. “You must wonder if I’ll be too soft to stop him, when the time comes. I don’t know myself.”
Rosa had wondered. She had not yet known how to broach the question. She’d determined to stand with Hou Yi, to be her second, but … what would that mean?
“It’s one reason I didn’t want your companionship, and also a reason I do,” Hou Yi said. “Because you might see me fail. But I might need you to prevent it.”
This was Rosa’s gravest concern. “Do you plan to…” She wet her lips. “What do you plan to do?”
“I don’t know.”
Rosa had never killed someone in human form, though she knew that distinction was only in her mind. More importantly, she had not killed anyone at all since that day long ago when she had betrayed the person she had loved more than anyone in the world. “You saved me, you saved me,” he babbled, groveling at her feet as a toad hopped away, and then she put her rifle to his skull and pulled the trigger.
“I made a promise,” Rosa said. “It’s why I … stopped. A long time ago.”
“I would not ask you to break such a promise. We shall see what we shall see.” Hou Yi coughed. “Perhaps it is a foolish hope, but I still wonder … if I can reason with him. If I can meet him and reach out to him and tell him to come home.”
Her voice was laced with pain. Rosa did not think it very likely, but she also knew she would have hoped the same in Hou Yi’s place, no matter how slim the chance.
“I’d done such terrible things,” Hou Yi continued, almost as if to herself. “That day Feng Meng surprised me in the woods. I had … my position at the time was a very high one, because of the deeds I had accomplished protecting people, and I … after I lost my wife, I wanted them all to feel the same pain. I thought, they only have this world because I saved it, and yet they still clamored for more from me, need, need, need, want, want, want—and I was numb to all but my misery. I made them one with my grief in every way I could.”
Rosa could offer no advice, not when it came to escaping that long shadow of guilt, the one whispering that a bad death was no less than they had earned.
It might even be true.
“Feng Meng had turned from me long before then,” Hou Yi said. “His act was not one meant to protect the people from his former mentor who had gone too far. In fact, he was the reason … but I would still willingly forget it all, if he would. As I might hope the people I wronged may do for me, someday, if they can.”
Rosa would have hoped such a thing as well, but most of the people she had wronged were dead, save two. The two who mattered to her more than anything.
“Tell me about your wife, Flower,” Hou Yi said, as if she had read Rosa’s thoughts. “Your Mei. I hope you and she have a happier ending than mine.”
Their ending had already been written; Rosa was just waiting for the time to run out.
But she did not say that aloud.
* * *
The first time Rosa saw Mei was in a garden.
Rosa had come here to hunt. She’d perched in a blind where she could see over the wall, into this castle where rumor held that a fearsome beast dwelled, a onetime prince who had been cursed from humanity long ago. Holding a princess captive to his depraved needs.
And instead of the Beast, she had seen Mei.
Mei had been so young. Barely more than a girl, and not a princess at all, Rosa found out later—only an unlucky child who had been sold to someone still too royal for the laws to apply to him. She wore her hair loose, and it fell in thick, black waves past her waist. Her skin was so pale that the contrast was striking, black and white, coal and ivory.
Rosa’s sights dipped, and she stopped breathing.
Mei was making a slow circuit of the garden. She reached out and touched one of the roses, a late red bloom. Almost as if she was sorry for it.
The Beast came out.
Rosa had expected a lumbering, ugly thing, clumsy and misshapen. Instead, he was graceful. He moved like a giant cat, his bulk becoming light in his bound across the garden, and he wore the magnificent ermine-trimmed cape of the prince he had been. He whirled through the roses and approached Mei.
Such an overwhelming hate engulfed Rosa that she almost choked on it. She’d never in her life felt such a thing. Her hands went white-knuckled on the rifle.
But then Mei had reached out to the Beast and touched him, gently, with affection. She twisted the red rose from the bush and held it out. The Beast took it and cradled it to his breast, and he bowed his head to her.
Rosa’s hands trembled and hesitated. For the first time, she did not know what to do.
And so, after she’d watched the Beast leave the next day to prowl or hunt or whatever he left his remote castle to do, Rosa found herself climbing down from the blind and over the wall and into the garden.
Her step on the gravel made barely a sound. But the roses were so quiet that Mei turned immediately.
Rosa had never felt so rough or ungainly. Goldie had started calling her “my big brute” of late—affectionately, Rosa insisted it was affectionate, and it was true, wasn’t it?—but now she felt every inch of the description in a way that she wished she didn’t.
Mei started when she saw another person inside the walls with her. She stared at Rosa. Her breath quickened.
“Hello,” Rosa said, absurdly. “I saw you over the—I’m not going to hurt you.” Mei’s eyes had flicked to the rifle.
“I don’t think you will,” Mei said, as if this was surprising to her. “Who are you?”
“I’m—nobody. I didn’t—my name is Rosa.” Why was she suddenly stumbling over her tongue?
But Mei smiled, and it was like warmth coming after a long winter. “Rosa,” she said. “They are your kinsmen, then.” And she gestured to the flowers.
Later Rosa thought that was the moment she was gone. Even when Mei refused to leave with her, to let herself be rescued, even when she insisted the castle was her home, a home she had been sold to—sold to!—seven years before.
Even when she would not let Rosa kill the Beast and set her free.
It was the subject of their first real quarrel, after they’d been stealing kisses in the woods for months, after Goldie had begun to demand where Rosa kept haring off to and Mei’s increasing remoteness had begun to shorten the Beast’s temper even more than usual.
“I don’t understand you,” Rosa had snapped that midwinter day, when Mei had yet again stated that she could not leave, even for a few days, even to see the mountains or the city or people or some place that was not the walled garden and its iron-fisted master. “I don’t understand how you can let him do this to you! He’s kept you his prisoner—how can you want to stay?”
“I don’t—I don’t know,” Mei said. She pinched her hands together, the way she did when she was nervous or upset. The way she did when they came back late and she was afraid the Beast might suspect she had snuck out, the way that usually made Rosa’s hands itch for her rifle. “He’s not as strong as you think he is. If I leave him alone here … Rosa, he needs me. He says he’ll die without me.”
“Bull,” Rosa said. “And even if he would, so what? You don’t owe him anything!”
“It’s been just the two of us here, for so many years,” Mei said. “I’ve—I care for him. It’s hard…”
“You never saw anyone else because he kept you here!” Rosa shouted. She knew she was losing her temper, but it seemed appropriate. “He’s brainwashed you. He’s manipulating you. Whatever good feelings you have for him, they aren’t real.”
“Of course they’re real.” Mei drew herself up, and her voice went colder in a way Rosa hadn’t yet heard from her. “And they’re mine. I know what he has done. I’m not so naive as you seem to want me to be.”
Rosa drew back, stung. “Reading books is not the same as—”
“So, what, then? I should bow to the whims of the first person who drops into my
garden?” Mei said. “Instead of honoring what I feel myself? Is that what you would require of me, Rosa?”
“No! I’m trying to tell you what’s best for—” Rosa cut herself off. The two of them stared at each other.
“I’m not your child,” Mei said into the silence. “Nor your pet, nor some flower to be tended. And perhaps you should look to the poison in your own life before you judge mine.”
Rosa turned away and wrapped her red cloak around herself more tightly. “You haven’t met her. You have the wrong impression.”
“Then why do you lie to her every time you come here?” Mei asked. “Why do you always make excuses for what she says to you? At least I know how ill I’ve been used, even if I can’t wish away how close I’ve grown to him despite it.” She drew back, resettling herself and staring up at the white winter sky. “I can’t tell you to turn away. She’s your family. Family is difficult. I understand.”
“She’s my friend,” Rosa said stoutly, too loudly. “She’s been there for me when no one else in the world, when—I’m not going to turn my back on her. So she’s not perfect. Nobody is.”
They stood in that unhappy place together, there in the snow. Then Mei turned to go back to the castle, but her step paused, her head bent so Rosa only half saw her face through a curtain of ebony hair.
“Give me time,” she said, so softly Rosa almost didn’t hear.
* * *
Rosa trailed off in the telling, her voice rasping to silence.
Hou Yi digested the tale for a moment. Then she said, “She came from this land, didn’t she? I understand now.”
Rosa nodded. “Long ago. The Beast who had trapped her—he had been cursed to that form by a witch for his selfishness and temper, and only the love of a woman would break the enchantment. His way of forcing that love was to buy a foreign bride and keep her imprisoned until she forgot the rest of the world.” Rosa’s mouth twisted. “Mei’s father sold her to pay his own debts. She was only a child.”