Bryony and Roses (26 page)

“You have been here for nearly two hundred years,” said the birch gently. “I could give you your human shape back, yes. And all those years would come due at once, and you would be dead before you passed the gates.”

“No!” said Bryony, gripping the Beast’s shoulder.
Like the brother and sister turned into a swan,
she thought.
I could not stand it if he turned to dust in front of me. It is not fair that I won him back from the rose to lose him ten minutes later.
 

“It need not be,” the birch assured her. “You will no longer be immortal, Beast, but you will wear your age lightly. There is at least a normal human span left to you, if not a little more.”
 

“That’s fine,” said Bryony. “With me, anyway. Beast?”

“I have lived longer than I wished,” said the Beast, “but I find that I am not quite eager to die yet. But are you sure?” He glanced down at Bryony. “It will not be easy, I imagine, living with a monster.”
 

“If you don’t mind being a Beast then I certainly don’t mind being with one. Truth be told, if you turned into a human, I’d have a hard time getting used to it.” She grinned. “And if any of the townspeople complain, we’ll set Holly on them.”

“Then I have no fears at all for the future,” said the Beast, and turned to the birch tree. He nodded.

The silver-haired woman smiled. “Let it be so,” she said, in her old, creaking voice. “And if the blessing of a tree matters, may you have many, many springs together.”
 

She turned away from them, and lifted a hand. The plants in Bryony’s garden parted before her, bowing down as if before their queen.
 

Through the gap in the wall of leaves, Bryony saw the green-eyed man. He was no longer beautiful. His skin had gone grey and weathered, and his hair had turned to dry, brittle stalks. He lifted his head and snarled at the birch woman.

She walked toward him and put her arms around him. He shuddered, and seemed to sink into himself.
 

“Come,” said the birch tree to the wild rose, “it’s time to go.”

When Bryony regained consciousness, she was lying on the Beast’s chest in the middle of the garden.
 

It was warm and rather pleasant, but even the most comfortably padded lover has ribs and elbows and so forth, so she sat up reluctantly. The Beast smiled up at her and climbed to his feet.
 

“About time you two got up,” said Holly, poking her head around the corner of the hedge. “I didn’t get much of a look at it before, but this place has really gone to hell in a handbasket.”

Bryony and the Beast, hand in hand, went to look.

The manor house had fallen in on itself. Great holes had been torn in the masonry, and fallen beams lay strewn like bones. The roses that had climbed across the front porch were not just skeletal but charred and black.
 

“Well,” said Bryony. “I don’t think we’ll be living here any time soon.”

The Beast frowned. “I would just as soon never see this place again. If we can reach my workshop, there are a few things that I would like to retrieve, but otherwise it may fall into ruins with my blessing.”

It took them most of the morning to locate the workshop. The Beast had lost none of his strength with the ending of the enchantment, and he pulled stones loose bare-handed that would have taken Bryony a crowbar and a hard day’s labor.

The workshop was partly intact. The back had fallen down and one wall leaned crazily inward, but there were tools scattered around the floor, still gleaming brightly. The Beast swept as many as he could find into a makeshift sack made of his old robe, and slung it over his shoulder.

He surveyed the ruins and sighed. “I would like to have buried the servants,” he said. “If there is anything left of them after all this time. But I don’t know where they might be, or how to start looking. I hope that they passed quickly and without pain.”

Bryony remembered the bodies in the windows and kept her mouth shut.
 

“I’m surprised so much survived,” said Holly. “The rest of this place looks as if it’s been abandoned for centuries.”

“The original house had been,” said the Beast, “and now it is reverting, I expect. But I made most of these tools myself, with my own labor instead of magic, and so they have survived.”
 

“If you can carry a
bit
more,” said Bryony, “if you don’t mind terribly—”

“I will carry you to the ends of the earth if that’s what you wish, love.”

Bryony ignored Holly’s rolled eyes. “I can’t bring all the plants home, I know, and I hope that some of them will sink their roots here and make it their home. But I can’t just
leave
them. Not after they worked so hard to save me.”
 

“Completely understandable,” said the Beast, and stood patiently while Bryony loaded him down like a pack mule with a dozen transplants: the sage and the lamb’s-ears and the opportunistic oregano.
 

In one last way, the birch had helped her. Those plants that had moved aside under her hand had gone to seed as if it were high summer.
 

Well, she had been a tree. Trees understood these things, presumably, as well or better than gardeners.

So Bryony harvested the seeds of the faithful rutabagas, the basil and verbena, and tucked them away, first into the little pouches that Iris had made for her, so long ago, and then, when those were full, into scraps of paper torn from the books that House had made and printed with gibberish.
 

She left the rest of the annuals to their fate. “I hope you re-seed,” she told them. “I hope you re-seed a
lot,
and if anybody ever finds this place, it’ll be wall-to-wall basil and peas and there won’t be a scrap of lawn left. I hope they find
weeds.”
 

And then she scrubbed her cheeks with both hands and turned away, trying not to feel as if she were abandoning her friends.
 

“This is how it starts, you know,” Holly told the Beast. “She’ll have you out turning compost heaps and digging up rocks before you know it.”

“I hope so,” said the Beast. “I eat a great deal, after all.”

Bryony leaned her cheek against his arm. “I will grow lots of vegetables,” she promised. “And we will build you a workshop so that you can make little clockwork creatures.”

“I wish I was as certain as you are that your villagers will welcome a Beast,” said the Beast.
 

“They will deal with it,” said Holly. “And if they do not deal with it,
I
will deal with
them.”

 
“It will work out,” said Bryony firmly. She reached out and took his hand. It was very large and rather furry, but the fingers that curled around hers were warm and alive. She squeezed and he squeezed back.
 

She and the Beast walked hand in hand through the ruined gates, and into the world beyond them.
 

Every time I write one of these acknowledgment thingies, I am amazed that books ever get written at all.

I wrote this one as I write most of mine—I started somewhere, fiddled with it off and on for a year or two, and then suddenly finished it off in a mad sprint to the end. For whatever odd reason, that mad sprint took place about four years ago, and
Bryony
sat in my computer as a nearly finished novel that just needed some poking for quite a long time.

It is very comforting for an author to have a nearly finished novel around. If your agent comes up to you and says “Have you got anything we can send them?” you can say “Funny you should ask…” If there is a hole in your self-imposed self-publishing schedule and that novella you were going to write went sideways on you, you can pull out your nearly finished novel and suddenly you are golden.
 

I am a little sad to lose this one to publication. I very much hope you enjoyed reading it, but now I no longer have the security of knowing that I can call on Bryony and her Beast in case of emergency.

Oh, well. It’s a weird job, and nobody does it alone.
 

To my proofreaders, who will see this before anyone else—
thank you.
 

Particular thanks to Cassie Dail who has read it more times than I care to contemplate because she had to read it once when I was panicking that it was too much like
Rose Daughter
which inspired it, and then once again looking for typos and for all I know, another time after I write these words because something will probably have gone wrong somewhere. Also, she came up with the title.
 

To my editor Brooke, who made me take out about sixty percent of the dashes and who is, as always, practical, invaluable, and snarky. (Wait, was I supposed to use a semicolon there? Brooke…!) She took the nearly-finished novel and filed off the “nearly” part.
 

To my friend MCA Hogarth (you should buy her books) who says smart things about self-publishing and draws honey badgers with me. Sometimes you need that.
 

To my readers, who actually buy these books, thank you! You are the reason I keep writing them. No, literally. If people didn’t buy them, I would have to get a job and I am unfit for most forms of employment. I am very grateful.
 

And finally, to my husband, who reads the manuscripts and tells me if I am on the right track and also recently acquired a tiny tortoiseshell kitten who is making it really difficult to type this acknowledgments page. I love you very much, but about your cat…!

As T. Kingfisher

Nine Goblins (Goblinhome Book 1)

Toad Words & Other Stories

The Seventh Bride

As Ursula Vernon

From Sofawolf Press:

Black Dogs Duology

House of Diamond

Mountain of Iron

Digger
Series

Digger Omnibus Edition

It Made Sense At The Time

For kids:

Dragonbreath
Series
 

Hamster Princess: Harriet the Invincible (forthcoming)

Castle Hangnail
 

Nurk: The Strange Surprising Adventures of a Somewhat Brave Shrew

Comics Squad:
Recess!

T. Kingfisher is a pen-name for the Hugo-Award winning author and illustrator Ursula Vernon.
 

Ms. Kingfisher lives in North Carolina with her husband, garden, and disobedient pets. Using Scrivener only for e-books, she chisels the bulk of her drafts into the walls of North Carolina's ancient & plentiful ziggurats. She is fond of wombats and sushi, but not in the same way.
 

You can find links to all these books, new releases, artwork, rambling blog posts, links to podcasts and more information about the author at

 
www.tkingfisher.com