Bryony and Roses (25 page)

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.
 

Irving. Thank you. For everything.
 

“Do you think we’ll be safe here?” she asked, turning to the Beast.

“From the rose, possibly,” said the Beast. “From your sister, I’m not so sure.”

He bowed very deeply, and Holly, who had come around the side of the herb wheel with her butcher knife raised, stopped and pretended that she hadn’t been about to stab anyone.

“You must be Holly,” he said.

“And you must be the Beast,” she said.

“She’s a very good guesser,” said Bryony, putting a hand on the Beast’s arm.

“So I see.”

“Three of us in one family may be entirely too much for comfort,” said Holly. She scowled at the Beast. “I’m still angry at you, but we’ll get to that later. Bryony, what the hell happened? One minute I had hold of you, and the next I feel like I’ve been turned inside out and I land in the middle of this.” She waved the knife at the garden. “I stuck my head out, but there were some really
angry
plants out there, so I thought I’d stay here and see if you turned up or if I needed to stage a rescue.”

“It is the rose spirit,” said the Beast, sitting down on the grass. “It is very angry.”

“You’re going to have to explain
everything,”
said Bryony.
 

He sighed. “What I can, I will. A long time ago, when I was young and human, I went hunting. A boar killed my horse, and I was wounded, and went staggering through the woods like a fool, until I wandered into a grove of sacred trees.”

Possibly because she was a gardener, Bryony had no trouble imagining sacred trees. Holly raised an eyebrow, but that was all.

“The spirit there took pity on me,” said the Beast. “Pity of a sort, anyway. She took human form and nursed me until I was well again. But she fell in love with me, and I—well, I was a fool. I did not think that I could love a birch tree, so I spurned her.”

“A full-on spurning?” said Holly. “Goodness. No wonder she was upset.” Bryony elbowed her in the ribs.

The Beast rubbed his arms, as if chilled under his fur. “In the wilds, there are many spirits, and some of them are very powerful. She went to a wild rose spirit, an old and dangerous one, and offered him all of her power to punish me. To possess me. I don’t think she was quite sure which herself. The rose accepted.”

Outside the protective ring of plants, there was a loud crash, as if a wing of the manor had collapsed entirely.

“As for me, I went to bed inside my hunting lodge, and woke up in the manor house. I believe it was a place that had existed before, that the rose found abandoned, but I am not sure. My servants were gone.” He sighed. “I wish that I could believe they escaped, but there were things—the house would cook some dishes like my cook had, and those dresses you wore—I cannot believe that there was nothing human behind them. I believe the rose and the tree absorbed them in some fashion. It is why the house could read a little, and why it understood some things and not others…” He ran a clawed hand over his face, and Bryony thought of the shapes in servant’s livery that she had seen through the windows, violated by the rose.
 

A moment passed, and then the Beast picked up the thread again. “I was as you see me. The birch spirit came to me and said that as I did not believe I could love one who was not human, so I would be unhuman myself, until I found love in return.” He laughed softly. “I believe that she intended to force me into accepting her affections but—well—”

“Well?” asked Holly.
 

He shrugged. “I went a little mad, honestly. By the time it subsided, the poor birch had come to realize what had happened. She and I were trapped here, and the rose with us. The rose fed on her strength and forced her spirit into the walls of the house, where she could not fight back. And I fear that houses are very different than humans, and so by the time I had learned to talk and walk upright again, the birch had fallen quite decisively out of love with me.”

Holly snorted. Bryony put a hand over her eyes. “Poor Beast!”

“It would have been a dreadful blow to my ego, but…well.” He sighed. “The truth is, I forgave her long ago, and she me. We are both of us prisoners. I was young and arrogant, and she was young and hurt, and we have both paid the price a thousand times over.”

“And the girl who killed herself…” said Bryony.

“Her name was Beauty.” He sighed. “I was still arrogant. I thought that if I could have someone here, in time they would understand what had happened. In time they might love me. I learned my mistake very quickly, but I did not correct it in time.”

“I wonder if she dreamed about a green-eyed man,” said Bryony.
 

The Beast looked up. “A what?”

“The rose. I dreamed about a man with green eyes. He kept asking me to help him. He was very…persuasive.”
 

He looked at her intently, with those endless gold eyes. Bryony sighed.
 

“I thought maybe he was you,” she said. “That you were under some enchantment and you were trying to talk to me in dreams. By the time I’d realized that it wasn’t you…”

She slumped down next to him on the grass.

“Ah,” he said. “No.” He reached out and covered her hand with his own. “Do not blame yourself. I did not realize until too late that the footsteps in your room were the rose, and that it was doing it deliberately to frighten you. I should have realized it long before, but it was a spirit, and I did not think that it would take the shape of a man. I should have guessed.”

“Well,” said Holly, “not to interrupt all the recriminations, but
now
what?”

“Can you leave now, Beast?” asked Bryony. “I don’t know how long the garden will hold. If we can get over the wall, maybe we can come back with a whole lot of fire and vinegar.” She considered. “And salt. And hedge clippers. And maybe a couple of teams of oxen to hook to the roots of the rose and tear it out. And probably priests.”

“Huh!” Holly shoved her butcher knife into her belt. “Good luck with our priest. You’d be better off with nuns. The convent might be able to do something.”

“I’m not sure if I can leave,” said the Beast. “Unless—Bryony—”

He turned to her, and took both her hands. His eyes were beautiful and golden and his face was hideous and Bryony loved him.
 

“Bryony, I know what you said before, and I realize, it may not be enough—or you might not mean it quite like that, but—will you marry me?”
 

“You didn’t do that
already?”
cried Holly, throwing her hands in the air. “Dear God!”

“Holly,” said Bryony severely, “I have had a
very
long day, possibly the longest day of my entire life and I have been cut to ribbons on magic roses and saw some really unpleasant things in the windows and been attacked by shadows and ruined a really excellent pair of shears and this is furthermore the only marriage proposal I am likely to get because I intend to accept it, so why don’t you go away for a few minutes so that I can enjoy it?”

Holly gave the Beast a look. “Are you sure you want to deal with this?”

“Of course I—” Bryony began.

“Wasn’t talking to
you.”

The Beast grinned. “I have found that it is best, at such times, to simply accept the inevitable.”

“You’ll do,” said Holly. “Fine! I’m going! I’ll be over here, waiting for the roses to come kill us all.”

She stalked over to the other side of the herb wheel. Since the plants on it had not grown explosively the way that the others had, even the tallest was only about knee-high.
 

“And you can look the other way, too,” said Bryony.

“Yes, yes…”

Bryony turned back to the Beast. He smiled down at her.
 

“Beast, I would love to marry you.”

Something exploded.

At first Bryony thought it was somewhere in the garden, and then she thought perhaps it was inside her head. The world went grey and distant, the way that it had when she was travelling between the manor house and her own cottage. Bryony could feel the Beast’s hands holding hers, and she clung to them. The silver ring on her finger blazed with heat, but it was a kind heat, and warmed the space between them.
 

Somewhere she could hear the rose screaming.

Silvery light broke up the greyness. It did not so much illuminate as sharpen, so that when Bryony looked for the source, she saw it clearly, while the world around it was pushed back into shadows.

It was the silver-haired woman.
 

“You!” said Bryony. “I dreamed about you!”

The woman smiled ruefully. “Yes,” she said. “Although I should not have come to your dreams, for it forged a channel that the rose could use as well. But perhaps all will yet end for the best.”

The Beast rose to his feet, still holding Bryony’s hand, and bowed to the woman in silver. “It has been a long time,” he said. “It is good to see you again, even under these conditions.”

The woman smiled. Her eyes were the color of birch leaves, and Bryony could have kicked herself for not realizing the truth sooner. “You were the good bits of House, weren’t you?” she asked. “Thank you. You were very kind.”

The birch tree smiled, a little ruefully. “It was not all me. Without the minds of the servants that we took so long ago, I would have been a very poor host. Ah, those poor souls. They were innocent, and we did badly by them.” She shook herself, and Bryony seemed to hear the rattle of birch leaves. “But all is not yet done, and we must hurry, for I am dying.”

The Beast made a sound of pain.
 

The birch tree lifted a pale hand. “No, no. I am ready for it. Trees are good at dying, you know, we practice it for many autumns. It is time, and more than time.”
 

A rustle ran through the garden, hundreds of leaves moving softly in acknowledgement. Bryony moved closer to the Beast.
 

“There is power when a tree-spirit dies,” said the birch tree. “Even an old and broken one like me. And the rose is vulnerable at this moment, with the severing of its enchantments. I shall die, and take the rose with me. It will destroy the house, but it will be gone. Though I do not suggest that you try to live here any more, either of you.”

“I would prefer never to see this place again,” said Bryony.

Beast exhaled slowly. “I do not know if I should leave it,” he said. “Will I regain my human form?”