Bryony and Roses (9 page)

“You startled me!”
 

He took a step back. “Forgive me. I should have called out.” He spread his hands. “It has been some time. One forgets the niceties.”
 

Bryony had not been expecting an apology. “Oh. Well. It’s your manor, after all.”

The Beast made a noncommittal sound.
 

“Is this—do you object?” She waved a hand at the newly outlined garden, and the lone sage plant sitting plunk in the middle of it. “You said I could put it anywhere.”

“I meant it,” said the Beast. “You can tear up the entire lawn if you wish.”
 
He gazed down at her handiwork. “Is this all?”

“All for this season,” said Bryony. “I imagine, depending on how long I am to stay, that I may expand it.”

The Beast said nothing.
 

After a moment, Bryony wiped her hands on her pantlegs and said “You said I should close my eyes and ask for a shovel?”

“I find it easier,” said the Beast. “The house will make whatever you ask, if it can, but magic is...not always comfortable to watch. It will put it behind you, most times, but if you close your eyes, it will often be right in front of you.”
 

Feeling a bit foolish, Bryony closed her eyes and said “May I have a shovel please, House?”

“Ah,” said the Beast, sounding pleased, “there you are.”
 

She opened her eyes, and a shovel was leaning against the wall. She picked it up and found the handle smooth and contoured. The blade was already sharpened, which was a great relief—sitting with a file trying to put a bit of edge onto a shovel was one of the least pleasant parts of gardening. She set it against the grass experimentally and stepped on it, and felt it sink smoothly into the ground.
 

“Before you begin digging your escape tunnel,” said the Beast, “would you like a tour of the grounds?”
 

She raised an eyebrow. He was smiling, she thought, although it was mostly around the eyes.
 

“Certainly,” she said, setting down the shovel. “There may be an even better place to escape from.”

“This way, then,” he said.
 

She took a few steps toward him, and found herself reluctant to get any closer. Certainly the last few feet would make no difference in how dangerous he was. He could take two strides and twist her head off, probably before she knew he’d moved.
 

It was simply that he was so very large, and there was an aura around him like the air before a thunderstorm. Bryony felt that her lungs were working harder to breathe the air around him, and was grateful when he began walking and she could fall back a pace without being obvious.
 

“How are your rooms?” asked the Beast.
 

“Oh,” said Bryony.
Dreadful,
she thought. “Very…err…pink. And grand. But mostly pink.”

“You don’t like pink?”
 

“I shouldn’t think anyone likes pink as much as that room does,” said Bryony. “I’ve seen color-themed rooms before. There was a friend of my father’s who had a suite done entirely in cloth-of-gold, but it wasn’t quite so…so…” She waved her hands, unable to come up with a description that did not involve uteruses, and that was not a conversation she wished to start with the Beast.

“Your father had very wealthy friends, then,” said the Beast. “For a gardener of Lostfarthing.”

Bryony froze. The Beast stopped walking and turned his head toward her.
 

“You are looking at me,” he said, “with eyes like an animal in a trap. It does not suit you, so we will assume that cloth-of-gold is found in every front parlor in Lostfarthing and there is nothing extraordinary about it. If the pink troubles you, you need only ask the house to change it. I expect that it would be willing to compromise.”
 

“Compromise,” said Bryony, finding her voice with difficulty. “Mauve? Or lavender, perhaps?” She shrugged. “I shall try to drag some other colors in, and perhaps it will mute the pink somewhat. I don’t want to hurt its feelings.”

As soon as she said it, she thought that this was a foolish thing to say. Did an enchanted house even have feelings? But the Beast nodded gravely.

“It is wise not to hurt the house’s feelings.”
 

For a moment the silence around them seemed to sharpen. When she looked up at the house, she half-expected to see it bent toward them, listening.
 

The moment passed. They came around the back of the house. More lawn, more hedges. Off in the distance, marking the lines of an old carriageway, were rows of chestnut trees.
 

They had nearly reached the carriageway when Bryony, who could see to the far wall by now, said “No vegetable garden.”

“No,” said Beast.
 

“What do you eat?”
 

The Beast shrugged. “The house creates the food, as it created your shovel.”
 

Bryony shivered, remembering the bacon and the grapes. “And that…works? You don’t starve? It’s real?”

The Beast nodded. “The things it creates are real enough. If you take your shovel outside the gate, it will still be a shovel. The coins that I gave you for your sisters are not fairy gold, and will not melt away.”

“Magic,” said Bryony, who hadn’t even thought to worry about the coins.
 

“Yes.” The Beast spread his hands. “But if you grow a plant to eat—a tomato, or a lettuce or even a rutabaga—”

“Ha.”

“—it is made of sun and earth and water. The house is much the same way. In fact—”

The listening silence settled upon them again, a silence so thick that Bryony could hear her heart beating in her ears.
 

The Beast snapped his mouth shut. She heard the click of teeth, and the rustle as he shifted from foot to foot.
 

It’s his fur against his clothing. That’s the sound. And that other sound is me running my hands over my trousers, and that’s the calluses catching on the fabric, and I’d scuffle my feet in the grass but I don’t think I’d hear it because the grass is part of this place and I think it’s listening to us talk.
 

I don’t like this.
 

It faded again, more slowly this time.

“Forgive me,” said the Beast. “There are things I should not speak of. I do not mean to alarm you.”
 

“I’m not alarmed,” snapped Bryony. “Troubled and homesick and more than a little angry at being kidnapped—but not
alarmed.”
 

“Good,” said the Beast. “Hold on to that for as long as you can.”
 

He left her at the front gate. “I shall see you at dinner,” he said, and bowed, then turned and strode away.
 

Dinner. Well. I suppose it’s possible that he’s waiting to eat me in a more civilized fashion, but this seems a terribly roundabout way to do it.
 

Bryony picked up another plant and trudged with it over to the garden. Her earlier enthusiasm had drained away. Now she just felt like an ant crossing the endless lawn, with the strange house hunched over her, listening.

She had moved a half-dozen plants and was starting to sweat when it occurred to her to ask House for a wheelbarrow.

After that strange silence earlier, she wasn’t entirely sure that she wanted to ask House for anything, but still, it made all the food, and if she had to live on the proceeds of her garden, it was going to be a week before she even had a handful of sprouts.
 

Best get used to it.

“House,” she said, closing her eyes, “may I have a wheelbarrow please?”

When she opened them, at first she didn’t see a wheelbarrow.
It’s mad at me,
she thought, feeling oddly guilty. The house might be very strange, but it had seemed so eager with the dress, perhaps she had offended it in some fashion.
 

Then she turned around and there it was, a bright red wheelbarrow.
 

“Thank you, House,” she said, nodding her head toward the manor, where dozens of windows watched her like eyes. “This is perfect.” She picked up the handles and grinned involuntarily as her arms dropped into the correct position. “And you have even noticed that I am rather short. That is very kind of you.”
 

“At home,” she continued, talking to the house, because there was clearly someone there listening, “at home my wheelbarrow is made for someone taller. My sister Holly can use it just fine, but I am always having to keep my arms crooked up to keep it from dragging, and it’s not very comfortable.”

She filled two wheelbarrow loads with her plants and pushed them to her corner. Spread out, even with the promise of seeds to come, they seemed very widely spaced. “Well, you’ll have plenty of room to grow,” she told them. “Tomorrow I will start digging, and perhaps House can find me some mulch.”

She peeled her gloves off and stuffed them in her back pocket, patted the wheelbarrow absently, as she would Fumblefoot, and began the long trudge to the house and her room.
 

On the landing above the stairs, she paused at a lovely celadon urn. It would have been even better with something growing in it—stonecrop, perhaps, or a tumble of pansies—but it was very graceful, and most importantly, not pink.
 

Hmm.
 

“House,” she said aloud, “this is quite a lovely urn. Would it be okay if I took it to my room?”

She raised her eyes to the ceiling, listening. There were no strange rumbles or heavy silences. Apparently House did not object.

When she lowered her eyes, the urn was gone.

“Oh. Err. I could have moved it myself, but…thank you?”

Bryony went to her room, saw the door opening before she even touched it, and went inside. The urn was now proudly displayed by the window, with a spray of feathery pink grass in it.
 

Compromise. This is a compromise.
 

She peeled off her sweaty clothes and laid them across the bed. “Um. House, do you think you could have these cleaned? Do you do that? I’d be grateful.” She turned to the basin to lave water over her arms, and when she turned back, the clothes were gone.
 

I just hope it gives them back afterwards.
 

House had left a robe hanging by the washstand. There was a tray on the table by the window with a bunch of grapes, some cheese, and a small loaf of bread. Bryony pulled on the robe and investigated the tray.

Well…I suppose I have to eat the food sometime. And it’s not like I didn’t already eat the bacon and the eggs, and they didn’t kill me…

She popped a grape off the stem and ate it.
 

Nothing horrible happened. It tasted like a grape.
 

The second one also tasted like a grape, as did the third. The bread was still warm. (Presumably if you were conjuring bread out of thin air, it wasn’t much more work to make it taste fresh from the oven.) The cheese was perfectly good cheese.

Bryony made short work of the lunch. Feeling exhausted—
it has already been an extraordinarily long day, and surely it cannot be much past noon—
she lay down on the big pink bed and fell instantly asleep.
 

When she woke, it was growing dark outside the window.

“Good lord,” she said, sitting up, “did I sleep that long? Was I that tired?”
 

She washed her face in the basin. The water was still warm and perfectly clean, as if invisible maids had been flitting about while she slept.
 

Perhaps they are. If there are servants here, they are invisible, assuming they’re anything so separate as servants, and not…err…tendrils of House.
 

This was a somewhat uncomfortable mental image.
 

When she turned, the green-striped dress was arrayed across the bed in all its excessive glory.
 

Bryony sighed. She had never much liked dressing up in the old days, not like Iris, who would have worn ball-gowns to breakfast given the chance. Still, this was what the house, and presumably the Beast, expected her to wear.
 

There were underthings hidden under the dress. She pulled them on, glad that they all hooked up the front. She was growing used to House’s habit of making things appear, but the thought of having magic hands touch her, even just to lace up a corset or do up a row of buttons, made her skin crawl a little.
 

She imagined that it would feel like a centipede wiggling over her arm. She hoped that House didn’t see her shudder.

It is not wise to hurt the house’s feelings.
 

The dress went on easily enough. She had to do one little sideways shimmy to get a snap fastened at a particular spot on her back, but the old skills came back to her easily. They had had a maid in the capital, but she had spent most of her time either helping Iris or trying to make Holly more presentable and less pink. Bryony had learned to fend for herself.

She put on the bracelets and the horse-collar necklace, but drew the line there. “You’ll tear my earlobes off with those things,” she said, waving to a pair of emerald earrings the size of a trowel blade, “and I am
not
going to wear a tiara. Tiaras are for princesses and little girls pretending to be princesses. I was a merchant’s daughter, not a princess. The only princess I ever met was nearly forty and had a squint.”
 

When she glanced back at the bed, the tiara was gone. The bed had straightened itself, pulling the sheets and blanket tight. The pillows had been plumped. Bryony wondered if she would have actually seen it happen, if she’d been looking.

Is it better to see it happen, or to catch it out of the corner of your eye?

I have no idea. I suppose I’ll probably have an opinion in a week or two, though, if House keeps straightening itself when I’m not looking.