Bryony and Roses (17 page)

“These must have taken you forever!”

The Beast lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I have had much time. And whoever stocked the library in the house had many books on the subject. I believe it was a hobby of theirs.”
 

“So you didn’t create the library?”

“No, it was here when House—”

A candle went out. The Beast stopped talking immediately and bent his head over the worktable, moving the ladybug’s small gold antennae around in a circle.
 

The pressure in the room eased.
 

“These are beautiful,” said Bryony. “My bee is the most beautiful of all, but these are wonderful too.”
 

The Beast ducked his head and smiled. If you had told Bryony a month ago that a monster could look sheepish, she would not have believed you. “I am glad you like them. I should concentrate more on finishing them, but it is easy to abandon a project partway through.”

“Tell me about it,” said Bryony, with feeling. “I’ve lost plants because I couldn’t get it together to dig a hole soon enough.” She smiled down at the grasshopper.
 

“Here,” said the Beast, picking up a small volume from the desk. “Speaking of books, and plants, I found this, and thought that it might interest you. It’s about gardening.”
 

Bryony took it. The frontispiece said
A Brief Monograph On Flora Of The Northern Forest Regions.
When she opened a page, the writing was very small.

She smiled. “A subtle way of telling me that you are tired of Master Irving’s poetry?”

 
“Not at all,” said the Beast. “You may read me anything you wish, at all hours if you like. But I thought you might find it…interesting.”

Something about his emphasis on the last word caught her attention. She flipped several pages and halted.
 

The Beast had underlined something. When she turned another page, there was another underline, and another.
 

She looked up at him sharply, to find his eyes boring into hers.

Throughout the book, the Beast had underlined two phrases, wherever they appeared.
 

The first one was, “birch tree.”

The second was, “wild rose.”
 

Her dreams grew worse. She chased the green-eyed man through hallways and faceless crowds. Things chased her in return. Sometimes she wasn’t sure who was running and who was seeking, or the dreams blended together without an end.
 

Once she managed to catch up with him.
 

“I found you!” she said, breaking out of the crowd.
 

“You haven’t found me yet,” he said. His face was sad, but his eyes gleamed. “If you find me—if you
help
me—”
 

“Help you what?” she asked, half-mad with frustration.

He put a finger over her lips. The touch jolted her, intimate and shocking, and she woke immediately.
 

Catching him did not seem to help.
 

The next night, she did not chase him. She turned her back, when she saw him, and pushed her way through the crowd. Was she at a ball? It looked a little like a ball. The people around her wore elaborate clothes, but they faded away when she looked in their faces.
 

There is always a refreshment table at a ball. I will go find it and I will have a glass of punch. I will not chase anyone.
 

She was so determined on this course that she reached a wall of the chamber—was it a ballroom? The walls did not seem quite right. She had the feeling that there was something outside the windows, something dangerous.
 

I will not look through the windows. I will walk along this wall until I get to a corner.
 

The wall went on for miles, it seemed, and she was pushing her way past dancers in taffeta and lace. Their dresses rustled and brushed against her as if she were walking through leaves.

She looked up and saw the corner of the room. Leaning against it, his face in shadow, was the green-eyed man.

He lifted his hand, almost in salute, and she woke.
 

The next night she caught up to him easily and walked alongside, not speaking, not wanting the dream to end before she got answers or—well, something.
 

His eyes flicked to her as they walked through the hallways. The windows were stained glass and she did not want to look too closely at them.
 

“I can help you,” he said. “If you help me.”

“Help me how?” she asked.

“We can leave this place,” he said. “If you can help me.”
 

“But what do you want me to
do?”
she cried, and woke up speaking the word aloud into the empty room.
 

During the day she would nap near her garden. (Occasionally, she thought of simply pitching a tent out there, but the notion that she might have no walls between her and whatever might roam the grounds at night was too much to bear.) The hum of the clockwork bee seemed to guard her sleep. She occasionally thought of taking it inside with her, to buzz at night, but she was afraid the metal roses on the candlesticks might confuse the poor creature, or worse yet, the intruder in her room might return, and some terrible fate befall it.
 

At night, she kept herself awake reading.
 

The Honorable Matthias Irving became a dear, if imaginary, friend. She pictured him as a tall, gawky man with a mild, hopeful expression, wearing clothes with far too many ruffles. She took to holding conversations with him in her head, the way that she sometimes did with her absent sisters.
 

“What would you say about this situation, Master Irving?” she asked. “A maiden—well, sort of a maiden—held captive in an enchanted manor—”

“Promising,” he replied. “O captive maiden, lily fair, fairer far than flower’s flare—”

“Try saying
that
five times fast.”

“I’m a poet. I get to do these things.”

Bryony was aware, even as she argued poetry with herself, that this was more than a little mad.
 

I’ll be having tea parties for him next. Likely it will all end with me wearing men’s clothing and standing on the battlements, proclaiming. I wonder if the Beast will even notice?
 

Leaving aside the nightmares, inactivity chafed at her. The garden needed nothing beyond the occasional snip of the shears. She had honed every blade and edge of her tools to wicked keenness.
 

At home she would have been harvesting the second crop of peas and putting in the beets, doing her share of the cooking and fighting back weeds. The old chicken coop needed re-building. She wondered if her sisters had gotten to it, or perhaps they had taken the money she brought them and hired a man to do it.

“Inelegant,” said Master Irving, sniffing. “Three lovely maids,
like shining flowers upon the grass, a-thwart with dew!
reduced to building homes for fowl. There’s no poetry in it.”
 

“There’s not much poetry in chickens. It’s mostly eggs and poop,” she said, and her imaginary poet clutched his ruffles in horror.
 

She was, if not grateful, at least relieved when a weed appeared in the garden.
 

It was not a terribly large weed, a little spike that appeared on the edge of one of the flowerbeds. The stem was dark red and it had tiny fuzzy spines and dark knobs that hadn’t yet turned into leaves.
 

“Huh!” said Bryony. “Where did
you
come from?”

Well, you were halfway hoping for one. Don’t be surprised when you get it. Not in this house.
 

She thought about leaving it just to see what would happen, but it was too close to the sage, and something about the shape made her suspicious. It had come up too suddenly.

“You’re a runner, aren’t you?” she said. “Let’s find out…”

She grabbed the weed in her gloved hands and began to tug.
 

It resisted for a moment, then came up easily, and sure enough, it was not an isolated plant but the end of a long, pale runner. Bryony kept the pressure up, seeing the root zigzag up through the bed, trailing tiny root-hairs.

“Don’t you dare break…” she muttered.
 

She followed the runner to the lawn, still pulling. She expected it to break off in the grass, but it had grown thicker and apparently sturdier. It continued to come up through the grass, leaving a broken line of soil behind it.
 

“What in the name of God are you doing?” asked the Beast, coming up beside her.
 

“Don’t stop me,” said Bryony. “I’m pulling a weed. This is amazing.”

He raised an eyebrow. “If you say so…”
 

There was really no way to explain to a non-gardener the sheer visceral joy of pulling a weed up and getting every last inch. Bryony kept tugging, hand over hand, waiting for it to break.
 

By the time it finally snapped, she had tracked the runner nearly twenty feet and left a scar in the lawn. She held up the end of the weed like a snake and laughed out loud.

“Well, you’ve killed it,” said the Beast. “Shall we ask the house to cook it for dinner? Or do you mount weeds like trophies over the mantelpiece?”

“I might,” said Bryony. “If I were going to, it’d be this one. Look at this thing!” She brandished the end at the Beast.

“Very nice,” he said. “Err. Is that the right thing to say about a weed? Very fierce?”

“It’d like to be fierce,” she said, examining the bit that had come up. “Teeny little thorns…hell, I think it’s a rose!”

The Beast went very still.
 

“Some of the big swamp roses send out runners, but I’ve never seen one go that far,” she said. “I wonder where the main root is…”
 

“Does it matter?” asked the Beast, his voice suddenly harsh. “Burn it, or throw it away.”

She looked up at him, startled.
 

“I’m sorry?” she said, not sure if she should apologize or get angry. “Was I—oh, Lord! Your roses! Should I have left it?”
 

The Beast stared at her for a long moment. There was a thin rim of white around his eye, like a horse about to bolt. It was unsettling to see.
 

She was suddenly aware, as she had not been for weeks, how large the Beast was, and how thin the air around him seemed. Her lungs labored and only force of will kept her from panting.
 

“No,” said the Beast, turning his back. “No. Weeds should be pulled.”
 

He stalked away.
 

One night, days of troubled sleep later, she heard the footsteps again.

She was awake instantly, and had time to think,
Goddamnit, I wasn’t actually having a nightmare that time, I don’t think I was even dreaming yet, why am I awake?
before she recognized the stealthy tread.

Bryony had been keeping her knife under her pillow at night. She inched her hand under her head and clutched the hilt, listening to the footsteps outside the bed-curtains.
 

It sounded like the intruder was pacing back and forth this time. Bryony lay under the blankets, not daring to move.

She’d rehearsed this in her head while tossing shovels of chicken manure about. When the intruder came back, she would draw her blade, fling the bed-curtains back dramatically, and demand to know who he was and why he was there. She’d point the blade at him and shout. She would be furious and bold.

It appeared in practice that she would do none of those things.
 

Actually, I think I might pee the bed.
 

The footsteps reached the desk, turned, and went back toward the door again. She could hear them rounding the foot of the bed while her heart crashed in her ears.

What if he comes to the head of the bed? What if he tears down the bed-curtains? I can’t see anything through them, so he shouldn’t be able to see me, but what if he does? Oh God, what do I do?

She bit down hard on her lower lip.
 

Any thoughts, Master Irving?

Master Irving was apparently hiding somewhere safe. She thought of her sister Holly instead.

Don’t panic, obviously. If the curtains come down, stab anything you can reach and start screaming for the Beast.

The vision of the Beast running on all fours, faster than any human, comforted her a little. Wherever he was, if he heard her, he’d come. Hopefully that would be soon enough to staunch the bleeding or keep the intruder from dragging her through the window or
something.
 

But the curtains did not come down. The quiet footsteps walked back and forth, from the window to the door, and then finally she heard the sounds of the window being unbolted, and then silence.

What if it’s a trap? What if he’s standing there, waiting for me to move?

She waited for what seemed like an eternity, all too aware that time was probably moving in a crawl, and what felt like a year might be less than five minutes. At last, when her choices were to move or to go completely mad in the bed and save everyone the trouble, she slid the knife free of its sheath and moved as quietly as possible to the edge of the bed.

Still nothing. No sounds.

She set a foot down on the floor. Her stomach clenched nauseatingly, waiting for something to clutch at her ankle from under the bed.
 

Nothing.

She got both feet on the floor, took a deep breath, and flew across the room. She fumbled with the lock for three agonizing seconds, then flung the door open—or tried.

The door hit something heavy and only slightly yielding.
 

Panic clawed at her throat. She slammed her shoulder into the door, forcing it open, screaming something, she had no idea what. The door moved another few inches, and then the pressure was gone and a dark shape filled in the hallway. In the dim moonlight through the windows on the landing, she saw only a looming shadow.