by C. E. Murphy
"Amber!" Opal protested, and Maman's gaze grew serious.
"It might cost you dearly, Amber."
"Maman, already, wherever I go, he is with me in spirit. Nothing can cost me as dearly as losing my Beast will."
"He's your stepbrother," Pearl said, suddenly mischievous. I gawked at her, then blushed furiously, enraged but unable to argue the fact. Maman came to my rescue, saying, "He is no blood relation to you, Amber. Pearl, be kind."
Pearl, who did not default to kindness, said, "Hnh!" and settled back, still smirking. "I'll go with you."
I shaped the word, soundless with surprise: what?
"At least I'm a witch, Amber. I have the pearl. And she's as much my mother as yours. More. I remember her, and you don't. There must be something I'll be able to do, but mostly I'm not letting my little sister go into battle against a faery all on her own."
"Neither," Opal said softly, "am I." She rose, smiling at our collective astonishment, and fetched the opal the Beast had sent. "I wondered, Pearl," she said as she did so. "I wondered why—if—the Beast would send you alone a gift with magical properties only you could unlock."
"They're all enchanted," I said. "Protection charms."
Opal nodded, crossing the room to the rose window, where a few small herb plants grew, and broke a leaf off a bay bush. "But a protection charm isn't the same as magic within, and he sent no instructions for Pearl. I thought perhaps I might unlock some power, if I experimented. I read the book of stones, the one the Beast replaced our lost copy of." She smiled at Father, whose eyebrows drew down in recognition, if not understanding. "Opals are reputed to have a cunning gift, if wrapped in a bay leaf and held in the hand." She held up the leaf, wrapped it around the stone, and, palming the two items together, disappeared.
Glover jolted to his feet with an anguished, "Opal!" while the rest of us shrieked in various levels of surprise. Poor little Jet began crying again, and Opal reappeared with the leaf and stone held separately again. She displayed them a second time, put them back together into her palm, and disappeared. Her laughing voice said, "I'm still here. But surely an invisible sister might be of use in your battle, Amber," before returning to our view.
Father said, "No," weakly, as if he knew he'd lost the argument before it even began. Glover said it more strongly, but with greater despair; and Pearl said, "At least Lucinda isn't here to try to talk me out of it."
"Lucinda," I echoed, far more able to grasp that than Opal's sudden resolve and magical talent. "Lucy? From the village? The one you were always sneaking off to read the cards for? When did that happen?" I considered what I'd just said, and smiled. "I suppose while you were sneaking off to read the cards."
Pearl actually smiled, and I realized once again how beautiful my oldest sister was. "Reading the cards is as nice a phrase as any."
I laughed, then extended my hands toward both my sisters. "I don't know what you can do, but I won't turn away your help. Eleanor is disembodied, but I'm not sure that doesn't make her stronger. And the longer I'm gone the more danger my Beast is in. I must go. Maman, can you send us back, through the forest?"
"I'll go with you." Maman spoke with resolve, then startled as every adult voice said, "No," firmly. "It is my battle," she said, suddenly fierce, as she had never been in all the time I'd known her. For the first time I truly saw a queen in my fragile mother, and yet I denied her with a shake of my head.
"I don't think it is, anymore. Eleanor sees me as her avatar, and the Beast has always been the piece over whom this battle is fought. This is a war for the next generation, Maman, and you have three sons to raise to princedom. Our country has no leader but you, and none of the boys are old enough to take the throne without your guidance."
"I don't want the throne!" Flint wailed. "I want to breed the finest line of horses this land has ever seen, with Beauty as its strong stock backbone!"
"That's all right," Jasper said. "We have an older brother who might want it anyway."
"Timmet has been long apart from the world," Maman said. "I don't know what he might want, when the curse is broken." She held my gaze a few hard seconds, studying me before nodding. "You may be right. My duty may be to my younger children, not to the oldest. But if I don't go with you, Amber, I cannot guide all of you through the forest."
"The moon rose this afternoon," Pearl said thoughtfully. "I think the pearl might make me a moonlight path. So that's one of us you don't have to send."
"A moonlight path," I said, half incredulously.
Pearl gave me a flat look. "Asks the woman who has just come from an enchanted castle housing a beastly prince?"
I breathed, "Fair point," and looked at the roses beyond the rose window. My hands began to itch. More than itch: a sting grew worse as I rubbed at my hands, and spilled into the scratches and scrapes all over my body. I reached out, and the roses visible at the window bent toward me, as if eager to feel my touch. I took a deep breath and stood. "Send Opal, Maman. I think I can get there myself."
We did not go girded for war. Had we been in the castle, we might have: the servants would have whisked armor around us, finding pieces that fit just right and required no effort to lift or move in. But despite being placed near the heart of an enchanted forest, the hunting lodge was only that, a lodge meant for ordinary people doing ordinary things: it had no armor, no swords, no shields. Just three sisters determined to do right by one another, and a worried family to leave behind. We gathered outdoors, beside the roses, for our leave-taking. I had the mirror at my hip, and removed it to hesitantly offer it to Maman and Father. "I don't know if it works here—show me the Beast, please, mirror?"
The reflective surface swirled, but rather than my Beast, I saw only roses and thorns plundering the palace gardens. They slithered like snakes, and although the mirror carried no sound, I felt like I could hear them moving, hissing against one another as they grew and explored. Maman reached out and pressed the mirror down, shutting its pictures away. "I'll need to fight with the forest, from here. If I have that to watch, I'll be too caught up in fearing for your lives. All of yours. Take it with you, Amber. Maybe it will guide you."
Opal tucked bay leaves all about her person, into her bodice, into her sleeves, even made a wreath of them for her hair. Glover, who had done so much for us, who had gotten us through our first year in the lodge and helped us thrive in our second, stood by helplessly, despair written across his features. Opal, once satisfied with her leaves, extended one hand toward him, and with the other touched the small glimmering opal necklace at her throat. "This is how I know I'll be safe," she said easily. "The Beast's opal is a thing of his palace, and for all I know, it might shatter under the pressure of enchantment there. But I carry yours with me, and its only enchantment is love. It will keep me safe." She pressed a kiss against his lips, leaving him stunned as she said, "I'm ready," to Maman, and walked confidently into the forest.
Pearl had been murmuring to her pearl for some time, a quiet discussion with it and the sliver of a daytime moon; tomorrow the moon would be new, and this venture, too late. She said no goodbyes, merely left moonlight shining under her feet.
To my surprise, the boys fell on me with hugs and tears. "You've already been gone for ages," Flint whispered. "I don't want you to go away again."
"I know, but I have to." I kissed his hair. "I'll come back, I promise."
He nodded, but looking at his face, at Jasper's—even at Maman and Father and Glover—it was clear that the only one who believed I would return was Jet, whose three years were not enough to inure him to falsehoods told to ease the heart. I hugged them all, hard, before facing the roses. Maman asked, "What will you do?" and I discovered I had to act, rather than lose my nerve by answering.
I knew they would respond to me, that they seemed to want to touch me as much as I had always wanted to touch their velvety petals as a child. It felt vulnerable, reaching for the roses—even thornless roses—with my scored arms and the blood-flecked amber that had
dried on them. These roses were my roses, I told myself as fiercely as I could. These roses, I had paid for with my freedom, with my blood, and, I was prepared to accept, possibly with my life. They were made of my mother's faery magic, born of her rage, bent to my will, shaped by my love. I knew what could be done with roses by a true faery, and I knew what could be done with the land by a mortal woman, and I knew that somewhere between those things, an answer would be met.
They grasped me, the runners and the petals and the leaves. Not as Eleanor's roses had done, not violently, not snatching me away from the person I had come to love, but eagerly, a lover's touch in and of themselves. They ran up my arms, engulfing me, and grew up my throat and cheeks and hair. Too late, I thought that Jet, especially, shouldn't be there to see this, but I could do nothing about it now, as the rose plants writhed and wrapped themselves around my legs, fitted themselves to my groin with breathless intimacy, and wound around my torso to make a bodice of their branches. I caught a last breath, quick and shallow, and then the roses drew me in.
I lost all sense of self: I was not an I, but a them, rooted in the earth and reaching for the rain and sunshine. My roots traveled underground, finding new places to send shoots upward. I reveled in the magnificence of it, of the life that pounded through the earth, and I felt, in the distance, a darkness. A place of no life, or stunted life, and I remembered myself, and my mission.
The roses had no desire to curl in on themselves, to dive deep into the earth and race toward that dark place, but I whispered to them the truth: that there were other roses there, and that they were dying.
I didn't know how long I traveled through the soil. Far less time, certainly, than it should have taken a wandering rose to cut its way through miles of forest in search of an enchanted garden. I burst from the ground like a sapling unfurled all at once, shaking dirt from my hair and shoulders and gasping for air that I hadn't realized I missed.
Night had fallen while I was underground, the moon high in the sky. But then, the moon had risen in daylight anyway, and its placement was of no particular help to me in judging the time. Nor did it matter: late was all that mattered, and I had a fear in me that I wastoo late.
I stood before the palace gates. Their copper roses were all tarnished now, much worse than they should have been even after months of neglect, and I doubted they'd been neglected at all until the past ten days. Real roses throttled the copper ones, with pieces of metal already crumbling beneath the pressure. I stepped forward, and unlike the first time I'd encountered them, the gates did not swing open, silently welcoming. I pushed, then put my weight into it, and earned a reluctant, creaking handful of inches just enough for me to squeeze through.
Runners sprang to seize my legs. I spread one hand, hissing at them, and they backed away in angry confusion: I was clearly not meant to be able to command them, yet they were obliged to heed my wishes. It was more difficult than with my roses, and every step I took had grasping thorns tearing at my ankles.
The driveway itself was hip deep in rosebushes. They climbed the vast oak trees, working to strangle them; the oaks bent and scraped with no assistance from the wind, clearly trying to rid themselves of their attackers. I wanted to go to one, to help it fight the climbing roses, but I couldn't sacrifice everything for the sake of one tree. I whispered my sorrow, and received a sense of benediction in return: they—or Maman, conducting what she could of her own battle through the forest—forgave me for the choices I had to make.
I waded into the roses, afraid to give myself up to the plants again. There were too many of them: even breathing in their thick scent made me feel as though I was losing my sense of myself. But I went so slowly on foot, and I dared not ask Maman for help, not inside the palace grounds. In the forest itself, perhaps, but here, Eleanor now reigned, and I couldn't risk Irindala's kingdom for a battle I had claimed as my own. Teeth gritted against the scrape of thorns, I extended my hands. They were swollen with sap and scratches, my blood more gold than red, and they were the only way I could think extend my power: reaching out physically, so that I might reach out with magic as well.
To my shock, the roses parted before me.
I ran forward, relief blinding me to the possibility of a trap until suddenly the roses closed around me again, and Eleanor's floral shape emerged from the thicket. She was taller now than she'd been, and her breath fetid with decay: the weight of the roses themselves were causing them to smear together and rot. Daughter, she cooed again. You have returned to make the bestial prince yours, and thus mine.
"I've come to break your curse." The words, spoken aloud, seemed like the impotent threat of a child. All around me the roses rustled with laughter, clearly no more threatened than they would be by a child.
How, Eleanor wondered. How will you, thornless Amber, break a curse that has held for a century? Even if you could lie with him—and how would that work, she asked, throwing my own words back at me—even if you could, how can you think that I would not simply destroy all of this in retaliation?
"Maybe you will," I admitted. "But maybe you won't be able to. I intend to find out."
Or die trying! Thorn-laden branches lashed at me, scoring mark after mark and drawing blood that ran slow and thick with sap from my skin. You don't understand, Eleanor hissed. The roses that waken your power are mine. The blood that they draw is mine. You tried to freeze me in amber once, little girl. Feel the power of a faery queen!
"Are you?" I could hardly ask the question, my breath stolen from me with each bramble slash. The next time they came at me I flung my hands up, crying for them to stop, and they at least fell away for a moment. More followed, though, and I lacked the strength to stand under the onslaught. But curiosity drove me forward a step, as I tried to see whether her flowery form granted itself a crown. "Are you a faery queen?"
I might have been! Roses were suited to rage, with their flushed colors and heavy petals. A storm of blossoms swirled around Eleanor's unshaping form, as if anger made her lose her grip on herself. Had Irindala not turned against me, I might have ruled her land at her side!
I could not help a brief, sharp laugh. "I know little of faeries, Eleanor, but I think a faery queen, and a queen who is a faery, are not the same thing at all."
I paid for my humor: so many runners slashed toward me at once that I could never block them all. Still, it had been worth it, and I began to feel not just the lashing, but the power of the sap running within me. She had wakened me, I thought; she did not know she empowered me. I forced myself a step forward, a grin stretching my features as she struck at me again and again. I pushed away what I could, but I let as many blows land, the sap rising in me.
And then, very suddenly, I couldn't move at all, and I realized she'd known what she was doing all along, after all. She couldn't stop the blood in my veins; she needed it to be sap, so that my wounds might freeze into resin and harden into amber, as I had done to her before. Letting me struggle forward, gathering the sap in my blood, had given her enough to seize me. And she had had an entire garden of roses to draw from, and the full power of a faery, where I had only my own body and the half-magical blood she had granted me with at birth. Shecould escape my trap, but hers, for me, was deadly. I saw all of that in her inhuman smile, and cursed the stars for my foolishness.
But my blood was was only half of hers. I pulled that thought back, clinging to it. Unless she saturated me even further with the sap, perhaps I could hold on to my mortal aspect long enough to cast off the stiffness that had overtaken my limbs. All at once I stopped struggling, no longer straining to move myself when we both knew I couldn't. I would have collapsed, weeping, had I that much control over my limbs, but the defeat of my posture was enough: her runners withdrew to dance in the air like serpents deciding if they should strike. I gave them no reason to, my breath nothing more than broken sobs.
You see the folly of fighting a faery queen, Eleanor murmured. You are my daughter, my only child with any love for the roses. Let me
take you, little Amber. Let me fill you with my spirit, and you will know power unlike any you have ever dreamed of. You will have your Beast, and so shall I.
A shudder ran through me; I hoped it looked like resignation, and not revulsion. My blood, my body, my soul, were mine to command, not my birth mother's, and if sap ran in my veins, then sap, too, was mine to command. It was not to be crystallized inside me, but rather to flow freely, warming my skin as easily as it might bring life to a rosebush. I twitched my toes, simply to see if I could.
I could, and yet that did me no good at all, not unless I could find some way to avoid her fresh attacks; we would be here for months and years with me fighting forward a single step at a time, while my poor abandoned Beast lay far ahead of me.
I had not yet laid in any kind of plan when Pearl came stalking across the brambles on a path of moonlight, a teardrop shield of glowing pearl on one arm and a moon-bright sword in her hand.
Moonlight walked with her like a carpet, spreading across the tops of the brambles to create a shining path that cut past Eleanor and rolled on toward the palace. Her hair swept upward as if drawn to the thin moon, and I swore that her ears, too, had taken on a faery slant not unlike the Beast's. She planted herself in front of me and shouted, "Go!" as thorns lashed toward us both.
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.