Bryony and Roses (11 page)

Indeed, the only monster she knew had gotten her while she was awake, and brought her to live in his enchanted manor house. Maybe there was something to the rules of childhood after all.
 

She pulled the blanket over her head, leaving a crack between pillow and blanket to breathe through. It was hot and stuffy and uncomfortable, but it was safe.
 

Happy now?

Well,
happier,
anyway…

She fell asleep like that, still listening for the sound of something at the window.
 

When she woke the next morning, Bryony did not have any moment where she wondered where she was and what she was doing there. The pinkness of the room was a very efficient reminder.
 

She hadn’t been able to draw the bed-curtains without feeling as if she’d been stuffed back into the womb, but the room was pleasantly warm, even with no fireplace in sight. She peered over the side of the bed, did not see anything—

Like pale white hands reaching out from under the bed?

—and slid her feet down to the floor.

“Well. Still alive,” she said to the house. “Didn’t get eaten by monsters last night after all.” She glanced at the window, at the white tracery of birch branches, and felt foolish.

I suppose the house is judging me now.
 

Of course, the house can see if I scratch my butt or pick my nose and it can watch me in the water closet if it wants to, so I suppose it was only a matter of time.
 

She was washing her face when she heard her name spoken aloud.

“
Bryony…”
said a high metallic voice. “
Bryony...Bryony...”

She froze with the cloth still over her face.
 

“…Bryony...Bryony...”

It’s in the room with me. It’s in the room and oh God, what if it came from under the bed, what if it was waiting and it’s going to grab me what if it’s right behind me oh God—

She yanked the cloth away from her eyes and whirled.

There was nothing, and then there was a great deal of pain because the soap had gotten into her eyes.

Bryony cursed and rubbed and blinked and by the time her eyes no longer smarted violently, the voice had stopped.

Had it been a person? A
thing?
What was it? She eyed the room with great suspicion, but there was no one there.
 

Out loud, she said “Is someone there?”

There was no reply. She suddenly smelled bacon.

It was coming from the little table by the window. Eggs, bacon, a cup of hot tea, toast with jam…

“House, you are
wonderful.”
 

She was instantly ravenous. If there was a voice, assuming it hadn’t been some fragment of a dream, it didn’t appear to be malicious. She sat down at the table and took a bite.
 

Knowing that the bacon was not, in the strictest sense,
real
did not make it taste any less delicious.
 

It can’t just be an illusion. I was full after dinner last night, and the Beast doesn’t seem to have starved to death. I wonder how long he’s been living here, eating the food?
 

She wondered if it was one of those questions that the house didn’t seem to like.

Is it the house that doesn’t like them? That does that strange listening thing when I ask?

Another thing to watch for. Bryony’s questions were starting to pile up.
 

“House, may I have paper and pen?”

Something rustled. When she turned, an armoire in the corner had folded out to reveal a rosewood writing desk. An extravagantly curled quill pen stood beside several sheets of writing paper.
 

The feather was pink. So was the paper.
 

Bryony sighed.
I should probably have expected that.
 

She sat down and dipped the pen in the ink.
 

How long has the Beast been here?

Why doesn’t he leave?

Has he always been a Beast?
 

Where does the magic of the house come from?
 

What does he want with me?
 

What was that voice?
 

She brushed the feather against her cheek and thought for a minute, then added a final question:

How do I get out of here without the house bringing me back?

“Of course,” she said aloud, “for all I know, he was lying about that, and I could walk out the front door at any time.”
 

She didn’t think he’d been lying.

“Oh well,” she said, blowing on the ink to dry it, “I suppose I’ll figure it all out eventually. Now, to see about the garden…”

The grass cut easily and there was some lovely topsoil under the sod, but Bryony was still soaked with sweat by the time she came in for lunch. She took a hot bath in a pink enameled tub with dragon feet. The bubbles were pale pink and smelled of freesia.
 

She added another question to her mental inventory—
What is going on with all of these flowers?
There were the rose candlesticks and the dahlia rug and all the little blossoms embroidered into her clothes, the enormous rosebushes in the courtyard, growing into the bark of the birch tree—

Which is pretty strange, when you think about it.
 

She liked flowers. She just liked them outside, where they belonged.

Although I should probably do something about those roses and the birch tree. That can’t be healthy.
 

It was a good soak. The bathtub was long enough to stretch out in. She hadn’t had a really hot bath since they left the capital. At home, in the cottage, she and her sisters usually filled an old wooden tub in front of the fireplace, and the water was never warm enough.

She leaned her head back. “I could get used to this, House. This is lovely. Thank you.”

She took a long nap again that afternoon and woke to find a blue dress laid out on the bed. It was the color of a late evening sky. It would have been magnificent on Iris.
 

“It’s a pity you didn’t get my sister,” she told the house, trying to manage the little puffed sleeves.
 
“She’d be much more interested in playing dress-up. No, still not wearing the tiara. No, nor the gloves either. I will wear earrings if you can make them smaller than a dinner plate—ah, yes. Perfect.”
 

She checked her appearance in the mirror. The clothing was extremely flattering, but short of a veil, there wasn’t much it could do about her face. She grinned ruefully at herself.
 

“On the other hand, Iris would probably not have stopped weeping yet, and I imagine that would strain even a magic house’s patience.”
 

She went down to dinner.

The Beast met her at the foot of the stairs again and escorted her to the hallway in silence.
 

He poured her a glass of wine without speaking. She stabbed at the food on her plate with a fork, and finally took refuge in the most banal possible conversation.

“Do you think it will rain?”

He leaned back in his chair. “It’s hard to tell with spring weather,” he said. “It changes too quickly. It could rain all morning and be clear by dinner.”
 

“True,” she said.
Well, it’s a boring conversation, but better than nothing…
 
“Sometimes in Lostfarthing, you get a light rain, and then the fog comes up from the ground so thick you can’t see your feet.”

“I’ve seen that,” he agreed. “Here and—err—elsewhere.”
 

She finished the last of her meal and pushed the plate away. “You said that there’s a library in the house. Could you show me where it is?”

“I would be honored,” he said, but made no move to rise.

Bryony raised an eyebrow.

“Bryony, will you marry me?” asked the Beast.

“Are we going to do this every night, then?” she asked.
 

“It seems likely, yes.”

She sighed. “No, Beast, I do not want to marry you. You’ve been a very considerate kidnapper, but I am not quite resigned to my fate yet.”

“I should hardly expect you to be.” He stood up and pulled out her chair. She had a brief impression that he could have picked up the chair—with her in it—in one hand and tossed it over his shoulder. She rose as gracefully as she could and took his arm.

The Beast’s library was as large as the dining hall and had a ceiling that vanished up into shadow. A ladder with wheels attached to it stood ready in case one needed the highest volumes. In the center, lit by oil lamps, stood a semi-circle of shorter bookcases arranged around two large wingback chairs.

“Good heavens,” said Bryony. “You have hundreds of books!”

“Thousands,” said the Beast. “There is another storeroom besides this one. I cataloged them once or twice, long ago. These are merely the ones I wish to have close to hand. The house cannot create new books—or rather it can, but the insides are gibberish—so I have read all of them, already.”

Bryony turned slowly in a circle. Even at a book a day, there were weeks…months…years… Each bookcase seemed to represent decades.
 

If he’s read them all—even if he’s a fast reader—that’s—dear lord…

She now had at least a partial answer to one of her questions.

The Beast had been here for at least a century.

She took several volumes to bed with her. One was of poetry. She hadn’t read poetry in years. She hadn’t read
anything
in years, and was a little embarrassed at the sheer greed that the Beast’s library awoke in her.
 

As for the notion that the Beast was a great deal older than she had suspected…Well, she didn’t quite know what to make of that. There was no grey in his fur. He did not seem particularly arthritic. Perhaps Beasts aged differently than humans.
 

And will I grow old and die here, in this strange gilded cage, while he remains unchanging?

There was an old, old story she remembered, about brother and sister turned into swans. They had lived for a thousand years as swans, and then a saint had prayed over them and changed them back. For one moment they had been human—and then a thousand years of age caught up with them, and they crumbled into dust.
 

At that point, you have to question whether being a swan is really that bad…

This line of thought was not terribly helpful.

She tried to lose herself in the novel that she had selected. A young heroine in a strange, possibly haunted house, lots of ghosts and treacherous servants, exactly the sort of thing she had loved in the city.
 

It did not work quite so well in the Beast’s manor. “At least
you
can leave,” she told the heroine. “And I’d give a lot for a human servant to talk to, even a treacherous one.” She sighed. A few pages later she added “The dear sweet children in distress are clearly the evil masterminds. Idiot.” A few pages after that she gave up entirely.
 

Bryony pulled the bed-curtains closed. It was just about as bad as she expected. They were gauzy enough that she could still make out shapes in the room, as if through a dense pink fog.
 

House extinguished the candles. She burrowed down into the pillows.
 

As she fell down the dark well of sleep, a last thought came to her.

What if I’m not the first?

“Bryony….Bryony…Bryony…”

The sound woke her. The horrible voice was back, saying her name, and furthermore
it was
right next to her ear.

Her heart shuddered and leapt. She stared into the pink depths of the bed-curtains, her eyes wide.

If I look over, what am I going to see? Is there going to be something there?
 

She had a stark vision of hands reaching up from underneath the bed, attached to a terrible creature whispering her name.

“Bryony…Bryony…”

“No!” shrieked Bryony, sitting up in bed. “
Stop!”
 

She flung her arm sideways, sweeping aside the curtains, and there, on the nightstand, stood a clock.

Golden nightingales perched atop it. As she watched, they opened their beaks and sang
“Bryony…Bryony…”
 

She sagged back on the pillow, feeling damp with relief.

“It’s a cuckoo clock. A stupid…horrible…
personalized
cuckoo clock.”
 

She rubbed her hands over her face, feeling like ten kinds of idiot.

The birds said her name a few more times, then closed their beaks. Bryony sighed.

It was odd, though. She was awake much earlier than she had been the night before. Had she slept through the clock, or was it going off at different times?

“House,” she said wearily, “please don’t…err…please make them stop doing that, all right?”

When she opened her eyes, the clock was still there. The mechanical nightingales looked vaguely reproachful.
 

Hopefully they would stop singing now. Bryony went to eat breakfast, and then to turn sod.
 

“The house would probably do that if you asked,” said the Beast, coming up behind her in the garden.

“No,” said Bryony, sliding one edge of the shovel under a square of sod and ripping it out with a heave. She flipped the sod into the wheelbarrow. Earthworms fled, wiggling, into the dirt.
 

“Certainly it would,” said the Beast.

“I’m sure it would,” said Bryony, setting her shovel down. “I don’t want it to.” She walked to a tray of lemonade being held aloft by a stone dryad statue. (She found most garden statuary insipid, but the lemonade was too good to complain.)
 

“Why not?”
 

Bryony drained a glass of lemonade and set it back down. “Because this is my garden. If I let House build it for me—and then what, weed it and mulch it and prune it as well?—it won’t be mine. It’ll be a thing that the house made for my amusement.”