by C. E. Murphy
"She cannot." The Beast's voice was strange, and I looked up at him with fingers pressed against my mouth. "The breaking of the enchantment is quite specific, and I cannot imagine Pearl succumbing to its requirements in any usefully timely fashion."
"But she's a witch," I said helplessly. "I don't understand." And then I did, Irindala's amelioration of the curse coming back to me: the form could be undone by a lover's willing touch. I stood, swiftly, and the Beast, with a desperate ache in his voice, asked, "Amber, will you sleep with me?"
I opened my mouth to cry yes!, and rose vines smashed through the observatory windows to snatch me away.
Thorns sank into my skin as the roses held me, kept me from writhing away. Within a heartbeat I didn't dare struggle, as the runners reared back from the palace and fell toward the ground. Roses, even enchanted roses, weren't meant to hold a human's weight four or five stories above the earth, and all that kept me from plummeting were the numbers of runners rising to catch me. I felt them weaken and buckle beneath me, and others take up their slack. Those that pulled away left scores in my dress and across my limbs, though the pain wasn't as great as I would have imagined. It stung and tingled, but the roses I'd picked had caused me more discomfort.
I glimpsed the Beast leaping through the broken observatory windows and pouncing after the runners, his claws glittering sharp and his roar so loud and endless I briefly mistook it for the wind. He skidded to a halt at the roof's edge, slate tiles shattering and flying free beneath his weight, but I was already out of reach. Screaming, reaching for him, but out of reach. A runner wrapped around my face and lodged in my mouth, muffling my screams. I bit it, trying to catch a breath to scream again, and felt leaves tickling the back of my throat. I bit down again, tasting bitter sap, and a story exploded inside my mind.
I was Eleanor, and I never left the borders to Irindala's country, always testing them with my thwarted rage. They could not hold: Irindala had spent too much magic in altering my curse. I knew it, and yet they held. For years I paced, hatred sustaining me, and then it came to me that an active enemy lent strength to any magic. I gathered power into myself, transforming until my roots ran deep and my blooms rose to the sun: a hedge of roses that crept along the border, adding beauty as it searched for weakness. I grew tenaciously enough that in time the area I patrolled became known as the Rose Border, and it was at the Rose Border that the Border Wars both ended and began.
She ought not have lived that long, my old lover the queen. No mortal could, and no spell, no matter how flawlessly wrought, could forever survive the price of a single person maintaining it. Its burden had been meant to pass from queen to child, its strength invigorated by new blood. It took decades longer than I expected, but one day my wandering tendrils pressed into the border, and the border gave.
I plucked and picked, weakening it, though the banishment held: I couldn't cross the border myself. When I was sure of its weakening, I gathered myself together again, reshaping my form to the faery I had once been, and went into the Border Kingdom with news that the human border had finally begun to fail.
It could hardly be thought of as an invasion. Fae whose memories were long and whose pride stung at having been pushed back by a human army merely went to see for themselves, and, where they could, edged into Irindala's country. Elsewhere, where the border fell between Irindala's country and other human realms, there were invasions. Irindala's people had lived in undisturbed peace for seventy years or more, under the guidance of a queen believed to be a witch; invasion was inevitable. Having spread my knowledge, I returned to the border to sit and shiver with delight at each new piece of gossip about the slow fall of Irindala's country.
She fought for seven years, an ancient unaging queen struggling to retain her country, and in the seventh year, in a lull, retired from the field. That, finally, was when the faery king attacked, pushing hisy kingdom forward like an arrow meant to pierce the heart of Irindala's country. I thrilled to it, feeling my banishment weaken as the king advanced: I could not be kept from a conquered country whose land no longer belonged to its former queen. I thought her too old, too defeated by the long-ago loss of her son, to rally, and yet somehow, I was wrong.
Irindala returned to the battle as an implacable shield to her people. Everywhere she went, the border strengthened again, strengthened as it had not done in the previous seven years of war. Strengthened as though the aged queen re-cast the spell I had taught her nearly a century ago, though to do so was impossible. It required royal blood and royal bones, and unless she plucked the very bones from her own body, I could not see how she managed, for she had never again married, and had sworn for all this time to hold the land for the prince's return.
I entertained the glorious idea that she had sacrificed him, her beastly child, but I would have known that in my own bones, and knew it to be untrue. I had never tested the spell I'd given her, though, and thought that perhaps after all this time, her own blood renewed the magic after all. It did not much matter, perhaps; what mattered was that she pushed the Border Kingdom back, and back again, until the bloodiest battle of the war was fought at the Rose Border, and I, architect of it all, nearly died beneath a mortal's steel blade.
It was not that I was a female that stopped him; there were women a-plenty amongst Irindala's army, and the blood on his blade said he'd killed without hesitation before. Nor was it that I was not obviously a combatant: innumerable of the fair folk went into battle with no visible armor, relying on their magic to protect them more thoroughly than metal ever could. No: it was something else, a sudden focus in his gaze, and then a far-away look that ended with his sword lowering, and his deep voice saying, "Go."
I rose, and ran, and that night reshaped myself, for the first time in decades, to a mortal form. I kept those aspects of myself that I was most fond of: the slight asymmetry of my face, my height and my bosom, but I squared my jaw and cast off the white fairness of my hair for a honey gold, making of myself a creature that Irindala would not recognize if she met me face to face—
—though, remembering that she had known me in my sweet Helen form, I thought it best that I never encounter the queen again. Nor did I need to; all I needed was to find the man who had not slain me. And so I did, by putting myself to work in the roving hospital the queen's army had set up on the faery kingdom's side of the border. I listened and watched and waited, and soon enough he came in with an injury he said was no more than a scratch. He smiled at me as if I might be someone familiar as I tended the wound, and ten weeks later when Irindala closed the border for the second time in her long life, I returned to her country as Jacob's bride.
I finally knew, when Jacob carried me across the border into the country I had been banished from, how Irindala had survived a century and more. I put my feet into the soil, and felt how the earth, while fit for crops and building, had no magic in it. All life had magic, and we faeries, more than that, but Irindala's country had been drained of its power. The only place I felt any at all was along the re-established border, and that was new magic, fresh, recently cast. It had not yet spread into the land, and I thought it never would, not with Irindala drawing on the land to sustain her life. Here and there the earth was even spoiled, barren with too much having been taken from it. A thrill shivered through me. Irindala might well be her own undoing, and never know what horrors she had wrought. But that was only probable, and I intended her downfall to be inevitable.
I had no excuse to ask my new husband whether witches abounded here, but it took little enough time to confirm what I suspected. Witches were almost as unheard of as faeries, and even those who fought in the Border Wars only half believed in the fair folk at all. I dared not draw attention to myself as a witch, then, though I had been known as one while at Irindala's side. I did what I could, growing lush roses along the walls of the merchant's mansion Jacob earned his way to owning, and when he shook his head at them, I laughed and said, "Our own rose border, my love. Did the last one not bring u
s together?" We seduced one another amongst the roses, in the heart of my power, and I, forgetting caution in my hunger for a long-absent touch, became careless, and thus round with our passion.
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 though I knew the cost it might wreak from her country should she gather her power to destroy me, she seemed 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, cooed daughter at 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 running away. 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 believed could, 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's awful!"