Roses in Amber: A Beauty and the Beast story by C.E. Murphy, C.E. Murphy (1)

There is a story of a beast, and a merchant's daughter, and a curse that must be broken.

This is not—quite—that story.

 

I awoke to the acrid scent of smoke. Later I thought that had I not been the youngest, condemned by two older sisters to sleep nearest to the rafters, none of us might have survived. It took two servants and often a dash of cold water to wake my oldest sister on any given morning. Our middle sister woke more easily, but slept so deeply buried in duvets that I already wondered how she did not suffocate. Smoke would have gone unnoticed by both of them until it was too late.

Our brothers, all younger, slept in another part of the house entirely. They would never have known of the fire until it was far too late for we three sisters, and probably the three of them as well: by the time it reached their wing its strength knew no bounds.

The leaded windows shattered as we ran from the house, glass splintering outward. The children shrieked, especially little Jet, whose first memory might be of the wall of fire reaching toward the night sky. I carried Jasper, whose six years had taught him a great deal about running, but very little about fear, and who had rooted with terror when the flames roared toward us. We all screamed, even Father, when the roof collapsed and threw showers of sparks so high they became indistinguishable from the stars. They came back to earth as sooty streaks, though, raining their darkness on the eight of us. We stood beneath that dark rain, watching helplessly as our wealth melted in rivulets of gold and silver that ran into the gutter, as our account books and library and letters—Maman wrote so many letters!—turned from paper to flame in searing bursts, and as our gowns and suits and jewelry burned and cracked and split.

Father, whose second wife had borne the three boys, stood beside us, clutching Maman's waist to keep her upright as she sobbed uncontrollably. He did not cry; neither could I. Not with the heat drying my throat and stinging my eyes. I wondered, in fact, that Maman could, but I didn't, at the time, understand her fragility. Or ours, for that matter. Even watching all our possessions burn, I could hardly imagine we would not somehow find ourselves returned to comfort within a few hours. We would find ourselves a comfortable hotel or salon while the house was rebuilt, and look back on the fire as a terrible moment in otherwise pleasant lives. Not too terrible, though. No one had died, not even a servant, making it more of an adventure than a tragedy, and we could dine out on adventure for years.

Flint, the oldest of our brothers, who, at ten years old, came up to my shoulder, wormed his way between myself and Pearl, the eldest of our family. She glanced at him with the expression a dozen or more wealthy suitors had tried to warm into love: irritated affection, directed down the length of a stupendously well-shaped nose. I put my arm around him and he buried his face against me, arms knotted around my middle, as if he performed the role Father did for Maman, but only on the surface. I bent my head to kiss his hair, wondering if it lent any kind of reassurance.

"We'll be fine," said Opal, and if Opal said it, it was difficult to believe it would not be true. Kindness clung to her like a cloak, earnest and gentle and impossible to dissuade. She lifted Jet higher onto her hip, and spoke to him in a reassuringly soft tone. "Amber saved us, and we cannot have been spared for nothing."

"I woke everyone up," I said, all but beneath my breath. "Save for with Pearl, that's hardly a heroic measure."

Flint snorted a laugh against my ribs, and Opal's bright-eyed mirth made a perfect counter to Pearl's withering look. She breathed out once, visible in the darkness, and turned her gaze back to the fire that refused to gutter. That breath made me realize the cold, a cold I had not felt or even imagined, with the flames driving us back another step every few minutes. But of course it was cold: winter had come on us weeks ago, and if there was no snow on the ground tonight, it was only because the inferno that had been our home had melted it all away. The stars beyond the rising sparks had the clarity of cold nights, even through smoke, and beneath my bare feet the cobblestones were slick with water that had recently been ice.

"Jasper." I had put him down once we were past the blaze, but now I called him to me and lifted him into my arms again. His feet, pressed against my night dress, were freezing wet blocks, and, looking down, I saw Flint shifting his weight from one foot to the other, warming the bottom of one on the top of the other. I spoke over his head to Pearl. "We need shoes for the little ones, at least."

She said, "Well, the servants—" and stopped, more flummoxed than I had ever before seen her. Together we children turned to look at our servants, who numbered half again as many as our entire family, and whose bleak faces reflected the red and orange of the flames. Later, I knew that they understood the situation more clearly than we girls did, but in the moment I could only think that for the first time in our lives, our servants were unable to simply step forward with the items necessary to our comfort. All of that fed the fire, and they wore no more shoes or coats than we did.

"The neighbors," I said, without conviction. We had neighbors, in the way that any large town estate had them: at a comfortable distance, separated by well-tended gardens and high walls. They were aware of our predicament: I had heard firebells ringing over the fire's thunder, and I was distantly aware that there were groups gathered up and down the street, but none of them had come near us. I looked to my father, whom I supposed should be heading a rescue effort for his childrens' toes, if nothing else, but I saw a man engulfed with his wife's grief, and an uncomfortable thought intruded on my mind.

Had it been one of our neighbors whose home was burning, my father would not even go so far as to come out of his own gates to see what the fuss was. He had coached us to mind our own businesses all our lives; other peoples' troubles were for them to deal with. I knew the attitude was born from the false sympathy offered after my birth mother's death: people who had hardly known her, or who had looked down on Father's merchant status, had appeared to shower him with false solicitiousness and to look greedily on his three motherless daughters. In his grief, it was possible he had turned away those whose sympathy had been genuine as well, but the habit of keeping to his—and our—own had been long established before I was old enough to notice it at all.

Still, had our neighbors been in such straits, Opal would have gone anyway, unless Father barred the door to her. She would have gone, carrying blankets and soup and comfort, and I would have followed, because since my memory began, I'd always known that Opal did the right thing for others. Pearl might have been shamed in to coming along by Opal's generosity, but perhaps not. The boys were too young to expect much of, but for the first time in my life, facing a moment of need, I realized that my family had not necessarily won themselves the place in the hearts of others that would compel others to offer a helping hand.

Then a stout woman I vaguely recognized, a cook from one of the homes nearby, came through the smoke with blankets and shoes and an expression of loss greater than my own, and under her mothering wing we were escorted away from the ruins of our lives.

I didn't sleep. The boys puddled around Opal, who, soothed and soothing, drifted into sleep with them. Not even our home burning to the ground could keep Pearl from her own rest; provided with a bed, she returned to slumber before even the boys had. Maman sobbed herself into exhaustion and my father never left her side, so I assumed that he, too, had escaped reality for dreams, but I couldn't. I sat in the window of the bedroom we children had been given, surrounded by a blanket and the wet scent of smoke, and watched until the orange light rising from our burning home was swallowed by the pale blues and pinks of sunrise creeping over the tops of black leafless trees. A hint of icy fog hung in the near distance, but when I went out into it, even the fog had an orange tint, smoke particles clinging to the air.

The smell of smoke was stronger outside, making me realize what I'd smelled inside was my clothes and hair. Remnants of the fire, not its actual strength. I passed through our rescuers' garden, my blanket dragging behind me through thin snow and thicker frost crystals on shards of grass that had not yet succumbed to the snow's weight. A film of ice had coated the street and I was grateful for the ill-fitting shoes I'd been lent as I walked silently toward the smoldering remains of our home.

A tremendous heat still radiated from the ruins, putting paid to any thought I'd had of searching them for surviving trinkets or knick-knacks. Instead I hitched my blanket higher so it wouldn't drag through soot, and paced the perimeter of where the heat-induced melt had reached, venturing closer where I dared. At that distance, the only thing that had survived were the occasional shards of glass, glittering blackly against scorched earth. A flutter began under my heart, wild and frightened, and I dragged in deep breaths of smoky air, trying to quell it. There was no need to be afraid now, when we had all lived through the fire, and I had already known everything we owned had been lost.

Rationality did nothing to calm the rising fear, or to slow my heart. The morning's cold fled beneath my heating blood and I moved faster, faster, until I stumbled at a run around the grounds, searching for anything, anything that might offer a link between what we had been, and what we would be. My chest hurt from the effort and the smoke in the cold air, and my eyes burned with tears born from grief and the rising wind.

A brick or a branch or a frozen lump of earth finally brought me to my knees with a wailing thud. I bent forward, fingers scrabbling at blackened earth and forehead pressed against half-thawed soil, and I cried until the ground beneath my face, at least, had softened with tears and mucus. There were brittle, burned branches in the softer soil, all that remained of the roses I'd tended in our garden.

I felt no better at all when I finally lifted my head again. There was no catharsis in sobbing; I didn't feel lighter or emptier or more able to move on. I felt cold, my shins and forearms numb against the ground, and thirsty. I sat up stiffly, wiping my arm across my nose, and gathered myself to stand. Glitters of glass shone against the soot in front of me. In them, a spot of color caught the light. I reached for it, and found, half-buried, a piece of glass the size of my palm. I recognized it instantly as a survivor of the stained glass window in our library. It had looked out over our rose garden, though its height was such the garden couldn't actually be seen through it. Still, it reflected the blooms it had faced: glass roses had spilled rich shades of colored sunlight onto my pages for all the days and months and years I'd spent reading in our library.

Our library was gone.

I closed my hand around the edges of the rose, as if the heavy lead could cut away the ache that suddenly rocked through me, and stared hard at the little piece, trying to will away any more tears. The exterior of the rose was entirely lined in heavy lead, probably explaining its survival: its smaller interior pieces had been protected by the heavy lead, and supported by the finer threads of lead between them. The colors were filthy now, but they would wash, and it was something, at least, from our home.

I rose awkwardly, the glass rose in my hand, and returned to my family.

Father, as tidy as a man could be after a house fire and no bath, was sitting with the rest of the children in our borrowed bedroom, when I returned. I did not often see all of us together, and hesitated in the doorway with a smile despite it all. Father was in his fifties and hearty, with carefully applied color in his hair that left his temples grey and a sense of reliable solidity about him. His features were excellent, deep eyes and a craggy nose set above a patrician mouth and a still-strong jaw. He had fought in the Border Wars as a youth, using his meager pay to buy a ship of his own when the war ended, and as an older man retained most of the broad build he'd developed as a soldier. Age had not yet stooped his shoulders, and his sight remained keen, save for the glasses he wore to read.

Pearl, more awake than I might have expected her at this hour, lounged near him, her own long features a flawless but feminine recreation of his. Her hair lay darker against her shoulders than Father's ever had, a legacy from our birth mother, as was the exceptional paleness of her skin; Father was more sun-touched, though no browner than the sun could make naturally light skin. Opal, still surrounded by the boys, was much prettier than Pearl, but not nearly as beautiful: dark honey-colored hair, tied back in loose waves from a round face with large eyes and rosebud lips, gave her a gentle mothering look that was easier to approach than Pearl's haughty perfection. Suitors thought so, too, and often believed themselves more successful than Pearl's beaus did, because Opal was kind to all of them, and Pearl kind to almost no one.

I lay between them in looks: my hair was closer to Father's in shade, darker than Opal's and lighter than Pearl's. Pearl had Father's nose and mouth; Opal had our dead mother's, and I had an asymmetrical combination of both that earned me the title of striking. Men and women both looked on my sisters with pleasure, drinking in their features, but they studied me, examining my face as if it was a puzzle to be solved. It had bothered me as a child, but I'd grown to find it amusing, especially when I'd learned I could often take the measure of a person by studying them in return. Most people became guilty and looked away, but a rare few would meet my gaze until we were both smiling, or breathless. Those led to my favorite dances at the balls, and once or twice to more.

The boys, puddled around Opal, all favored Maman in skin tones, sharing some degree of her mahogany coloring. Jet, barely two years old, was darker than she, and still had a baby's bridgeless nose, while Jasper had inherited much of Father's profile and a burnished depth to his skin that set him as destined to grow up as beautiful as Pearl. Flint was closest to Maman in all ways, pretty and delicate and warmly brown, with an artist's hands: he could already play the piano better than I ever would, and I loved to watch him practice. We were an attractive family, and in some way I thought that, as well as our wealth, would protect us from the world.

"Amber." Father extended his hand toward me with a welcoming, but serious, smile. "We wondered where you had gone."

"To the house." I took his hand and sat at his feet, thinking that if Maman was here, that if we were dressed as beautifully as we usually were, that the poses we all now held might have been rendered in oils, a family portrait full of affection and fondness. "There's nothing left. How is Maman?"

Father's expression became even more sombre. "Not well. The fire frightened her. I hope the warmth and safety of a salon will bring her comfort, but, girls," he said, and then, with a fond smile at Flint and Jasper, "children, as you boys are old enough to hear household truths now—"

"Some of us are hardly children, Father," Pearl said in her mildest tone, the one that warned most imminently of danger, and Father's smile broadened before falling away.

"No, some of you are not, nor have been for several years now. Still, you are my children, regardless of your age. We will not be retiring to the Queen's Corridor, nor to the Grande," he said, naming the two finest hotels in the town. I loved the Corridor, although the queen had never stayed there. It had been built along the road she took after the king died and she went to war to protect our country, and its walls were covered in mosaics that told the story of her victory…and of the loss she faced afterward, when her son the prince had vanished from the earth. She had been young then, and was very, very old now, but her health was reputed to be strong and I half believed the stories that she had sworn her soul to a witch in order to live until the prince's return.

"The Noble, then," Pearl said with a shrug. "Nowhere else could be considered fine enough."

"We will go to the Crossroads," Father said, and all three of us girls caught our breaths. Flint and Jasper, wide-eyed, looked between us, but still did not understand, when Pearl said, "But that's a common inn, Father," how far we must have fallen to choose it as our refuge.

"All of our wealth was in the house, Pearl," Father said steadily. "Until the trading ships come in, we must be frugal."

"Frugal?" asked Jasper, and Opal slipped her hand over his shoulder, gentle and reassuring.

"It means we cannot spend money freely. That we must think of necessities, instead of luxuries. Simpler clothing, no new books, plainer meals."

"We will buy fine gowns for you girls," Father said, and in the momentary silence following that surprising remark, understanding fell.

Opal, softly, said, "You mean we are to marry at once."

"You've had many suitors," Father replied. "It will help stabilize our fortunes if you marry now, and well."

"We've had suitors we've turned down," Pearl said. "I'm sure no one will think it desperate at all if we suddenly decide now is the time to wed, particularly if we are to stay somewhere so common as the Crossroads, Father. You cannot have it both ways successfully. It is either the Noble," and I noticed that she had, at least, selected the least expensive of the three finest hotels in town, "or spinsters on your hands. Surely our name will give you enough credit to await the ships."

Father took a breath, and Opal's gaze met mine. A knot bound itself in my belly, pressing upward, and I clutched the bit of rose window still in my hand. I did not want to hear what he had to say next, but the words came anyway, relentless with calm. "I'm afraid our credit is already strained, Pearl. The past few seasons have not been as profitable as I might have hoped—"

A gasp parted Pearl's lips, the sound small and sharp enough that she might have taken a blow. Father's jaw rolled, but he continued. "—and our fortunes depend on the incoming ships."

"Why did you not tell us?" Pearl's voice did not rise. She was too cultured for that, but her eyes flashed with fury.

"Because no father wants to tell his children that they verge on destitution, and because we are not so desperate that a good season would not turn it all around. If the next ships had come in with little to show for their journeys, I would have told you then of our situation. The fire has forced me to do so now. I wish it was not so."

"And yet Pearl is right," Opal said in a thin voice. "The house fire is bad enough. If our fortunes are in decline, do we not need a pretense of continuing wealth to ensure good marriages?"

"Beauty rarely requires wealth to come along with it," Father said. "One excellent marriage will offer the other two better chances, and none of you are plain."

"There's no way for us to marry without looking as though we are hastily seeking refuge in another home." I glanced at the rose, hidden in the skirt of my nightdress, then looked back at my father and sisters. "On the other hand, it might seem a perfectly reasonable time for us to do so. It will be months, even years, before our home is reconstructed, and we girls cannot be expected to live in a hotel forever. Society would accept that Father and Maman and the boys might live somewhere more modest for a while, but why would three women of marrying age remain unwed under these circumstances?" I tried to smile, though it felt weak. "You know there are those who say we only stay at home because no one else can match the luxury of our father's house. If he can no longer provide that luxury…."

Pearl examined me as though I had briefly become something new and interesting. Like the puzzle so many others saw me as, perhaps. "I didn't know you could be so mercenary, Amber."

"Well." My smile strengthened. "I do expect you to make that first marriage, Pearl. Yours is the ruthless beauty."

She lowered her lashes in a display of modesty that no one who knew her would believe, then brought her gaze to Father again. "I need at least a month at the Noble to make a marriage, Father. Even I can't do it from the Crossroads."

He looked at her and, though I could see it was against his better judgment, bowed his head. That moment was the first I truly realized my father could not tell his daughters—and perhaps his sons—no. We had always teased him about it, but I had never fully believed it, and I did not then understand the price we would all pay for his generosity.

We spent less than a day at our neighbors', and yet the retreat to the Noble came as a relief. Maman joined us, elegant with fragility as Father escorted her from the neighbors' house to the hired coach. I could not begrudge the neighbors for not wanting us, all still stinking of smoke and ash, in their own coach; it would be difficult enough for their servants to air feather mattresses and scrub the smell out of bedclothes. Should it settle into the leather of their carriage, they would carry it with them for months. I did, for the first time in my pampered life, worry a little about the expense, but that was beyond my purview, and if it did not fall out of my head, neither did it keep me from sleeping, as the days went by.

The first day we luxuriated in baths, each of us girls and father having clean, hot water poured for us, because the filth of soot and smoke blackened the tub so badly with Father's bath that we could not be expected to get clean without new water. The boys had to share a bath, but even they were glad to be rid of the smoke scent, and exhaustion claimed us all as its own that night.

In the morning we were visited by a dressmaker beside herself with concern over our displaced state. We girls received half a dozen new dresses each, with cunning overlays and wraps in different colors that could be switched around to make our wardrobes look thrice the size they were. Maman had three gowns of her own, and Papa two suits; the boys made do with a jacket apiece and two sets of new trousers, tights, blouses, and shoes, the last of which were the quickest in coming, as the cobbler had pre-cut soles ready for the stitching, and we all needed shoes badly.

Most of our servants had been let go, for we had nowhere to house them and no work for a groundskeeper or cook even if we could pay them. Father had his manservant, who helped with the boys, and we four women shared a lady's maid who fussed us into our new gowns and did our hair and made us presentable to the world. Within a week of our house burning, we were comfortable enough at the Noble, taking two rooms for sleeping and a third as our public room, that we might have visitors without being exposed to all the city who came by.

And all the city did come by: there was nothing as good as a tragedy to rile peoples' interests. It would have been, by gossips' estimations, vastly superior if someone had died, but there was a breathless interest in us having all survived, as well. Maman had not yet recovered from the shock of it all and played the role of invalid well, while Opal, the gentlest daughter, cared for her in a way that made other mamas imagine she might care well for their own darling sons and grandchildren.

Pearl proved magnificent in adversity, not by denying her aloofness but by playing to it: she sat in the window of our salon, looking shockingly dramatic as she gazed over the city. I didn't believe she had actually lost weight, but rather applied some subtle color to her cheekbones, making them all the more extraordinary. From the street she looked like a princess trapped in a tower. Our first visitors were Maman's closest friends, who went away to witter about Opal's kindness and Pearl's luminescent beauty. (I, being only seventeen, was largely expected to sit quietly, be useful, and eventually take advantage of my older sisters' good marriages.) The words deathly pale were heard on the wind, and suitors who had once been spurned now returned to see if the city's legendary beauty was, indeed, at death's door.

"Of course not," Pearl spat bitterly, and turned her face from them with the most delicate tremble, giving the lie—or at least an impression of the lie—to her words.

One of them proposed to her immediately.

Pearl, with more dignity and unspoken wrath than I would be able to conjure in a lifetime, stood and gazed at this unfortunate with a loathing she might usually reserve for a slime eel, or a fungus. "I suppose you ask so that you might have only a little time to put up with me, and a very long time indeed to fondle my fortune. I assure you, sir, I am not that desperate."

She swept from the room at the end of this speech, glancing back only once. But instead of the scathing glance I expected from her, I saw desperation instead. Desperation, vulnerability, hope, trust, and then those emotions were shuttered so fully that I thought I imagined that they had been there at all.

But then I saw the look in her suitors' eyes, and knew that somehow my arrogant sister had convinced them that her coldness was only for show, that she was dying, that she was terrified, and that she would do anything for a show of true passion in her final days.

One of the youths slapped Rafe, who had proposed, along the back of the head, half in jest and in all seriousness. "What were you thinking, man, proposing in front of her entire family? What did you expect her to say?"

Rafe, who was reasonably handsome and extremely wealthy, proved to have an excellent, if sheepish, smile. "She's Pearl Gryce, mate. I expected her to say no. She did before." His gaze lingered on the door Pearl had escaped through, though, before he turned to Father and offered a bow. "May I call again, sir?"

Father, whose eyes had bugged in near apoplexy at Rafe's rejection, made an agreeably non-committal grunt that earned a smile and a bow from Rafe, who then herded his comrades out of our salon to the noisiness of the street. I glanced out from behind the curtain and saw the other youths leaping on Rafe, razzing him and ruffling his hair, but he seemed to take no mind of it, smiling as his own attention returned not to the window I hid in, but the one next door. I imagined Pearl turning swiftly away from that window, a pretense of having been caught, and let the curtain fall as I chuckled. "I didn't know she acted so well."

"Why did she turn him down?" Father demanded.

Even Opal smiled, at that. "Had she accepted, he would have felt himself trapped and found a way out, even with all of us as witnesses. Now it's a chase again, and better yet, a rescue. It's all very romantic."

Better than romantic, it was a horse race: before evening, one of Rafe's compatriots, a tall youth with a thin mouth and hard eyes returned to ask Father for permission to pay his regards to Pearl, and by late the next afternoon two more young gentlemen and an extremely handsome young lady came to admire Pearl's reputedly dying beauty, and made their addresses known.

"Which of them will you accept?" Opal asked that second night, earning Pearl's indifferent shrug.

"Rafe is the wealthiest of them, and unlikely to try to murder me in our bed when I don't conveniently die in a month or two. At least it's easy to appear increasingly fragile, with the quality of food available here." Pearl's nostrils flared just enough to convey absolute contempt, though in fact the Noble's dining hall was fit enough to serve anyone shy of royalty. "I prefer Solindra, though. She has less money but a great deal more charm."

"Solindra Nare has no brothers or sisters," Father said firmly. "Her parents are unlikely to condone a marriage that won't produce an heir."

Pearl rolled her eyes quite magnificently. "Children can be adopted, Father, or a child-maker hired to lie with her if she must be a mother. If we're appallingly canny we might find some young rake with money who'd prefer a husband of his own, and join two more fortunes together for the child's secure future. I'll take another week or two so she doesn't think this is all too easy, and be married before the spring cross-quarter day. I suppose you'll have to come with me, Opal. You can be better presented from Solindra's manor than a hotel, and Amber can move into the Crossroads with Father, if the ships haven't yet come in."

"How thoughtful of you," I said dryly.

Pearl cast me an icy look. "Once Opal is settled she or I will take you in, Amber, but it's easier to marry one woman off at a time. Having all of us hanging about might make someone realize the urgency of the situation."

That, I could not entirely argue with. Neither, in fact, was I in any particular hurry to wed, despite understanding the necessity of it. A little delay orchestrated by my conniving eldest sister was welcome to me.

Rafe, Solindra, and several others called daily for ten afternoons. Each time cold Pearl thawed a little more toward Solindra, who grew more radiant with each of Pearl's smiles, whilst Rafe, who appeared no fool, found himself increasingly attentive of Opal. My middle sister seemed quietly pleased by this turn of events, though I thought Opal would be pleased by anything that helped secure our fortunes. Not because she was a fortune-hunter herself, but because she would worry about us until we were all safe, and think very little of attaching herself to someone pleasant to ensure that safety was engaged. To my amusement, Father became increasingly offended that none of the remaining young men seemed interested in pursuing me, though they were polite enough while trying to steal my sisters' attention. Father began to try to herd them toward me, as if he was a sheepdog and they the sheep—leaving me in a role I dared not contemplate—and I heard them chortling about it on their way out one evening. "Why not?" asked one. "She's got a face you could look at for hours, and none of her older sister's sharpness."

Pearl sent their backs a daggered look indeed: had witchery been more common they might have found themselves bleeding from her glare, but instead the other one shrugged off his reply as the door closed behind them. "Not that one. Why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?"

I murmured, "Oh dear." My sisters both looked at me, appalled, while Father turned white, then red, and went swiftly into the room he shared with Maman.

Opal said, "Amber?"

"I was very discrete!"

"Apparently not discrete enough." Pearl flung herself into a divan—even that looked graceful on my sister's long frame—and gazed at me with a peculiar mix of horror and admiration. "Really, Amber? Who?"

"Well, it hardly matters now, does it? Our wealthy young friends are still interested in you two, even if I've been, ahm." I glanced toward the door and the departed gossips. "Milked."

"It was that boy at the ball last year, wasn't it? The one who couldn't take his eyes off you. What happened to him? Maybe we can force his hand into marriage."

"For all the stars and the shining moon, Pearl. He left last spring with his parents, to sail for the Eastern Islands and their holdings there. All that gossiping snob who just left has is speculation. People talk because I won't look away when they stare at me. Anyway, if you and Opal have secured good enough marriages and Father's ships come in, either I'll be well enough off that I'm too profitable a union to pass on, or I'll be able to marry someone who doesn't care. Besides," I added with a sly smile, "it was worth it."

A blush crept up Opal's cheeks and she leaned forward to whisper, "Was it? Tell us about it."

My smile became a slow grin, and I bid my sisters nestle closer while I whispered my experiences to them, and we all of us went to bed shyly pleased with ourselves and convinced of our salvation in Solindra Nare's handsome form.

To this day I believe it would have come, had further disaster not struck.

Ships sailed all the year round, but in winter stayed as close to coastlines as they could, the better to hide from storms. We could not expect Father's ships to come in before the equinox, and perhaps not for weeks after that: they had traveled half the world away to the Eastern Islands. They might return laden with silks and gold and ivory, but not until the weather was good enough to risk the open oceans, and the long voyage home.

We could not, then, expect a wretched sailor from a smaller ship to stumble into the Noble's lobby just past the turn of the year, and to fall upon his knees before my father and begin to cry.

Even if the poor man had been more discreet, I suppose it would only have been a matter of hours—perhaps days if we were fortunate, but fortune was not smiling on us of late—before the whole city knew his tale, but as it was, the city learned it nearly as soon as we did.

Father knew the man; even I recognized him as a first mate on one of Father's largest and most prosperous ships, the Cobweb. Kneeling at Father's feet, the sailor told his tale.

The trading season in the east had been profoundly successful, so much so that the captain had lifted anchor early and set sail in mid-summer, hoping to arrive home before winter came on too hard. The experienced crew believed they could do it, for all that the journey was often eight months, and, indeed, they had come most of the way when pirates beset them only a few hundred miles from home. Even that had not been quite enough to stop them, but in the wake of the attack, a storm had risen, and men weakened and injured from battle had been unable to hold the line against nature's ferocity. The sailor—his name was Fisher—had been one of four to drag himself into a rowboat as the Cobweb and its companions sank, and none of the others had survived the next two days of storms. Fisher had come on foot across half a continent, wretched with grief and ill tidings, and now, looking on him, all I could see was a broken man whose life seemed worthless even to him.

I lifted my eyes to Father, and saw Fisher's fate reflected in his face. I had always thought the conceit of aging in minutes to be only that, a dramatic interpretation, but I saw now that it could happen. He looked heavier, brought farther down than the fire alone could have done, and between one heartbeat and the next I realized we had nothing left to our names at all.

Instead of calling on Pearl as she had done for the past two weeks, that afternoon Solindra Nare sent a polite note begging our forgiveness for her absence, and indicating that she did not know when or if she would once more be able to attend us.

Pearl did not feel the injury of lost love, only the insult of rejection, and drew herself up icy and cold as the sea that had killed the Cobweb and its crew. Within a year her dark hair turned pearlescent white, which with her pale green gaze made her presence positively unearthly, but that lay in our future, and we could as of yet barely contemplate our present.

By evening creditors and bankers had darkened our door, calculating the worth of the very dresses we wore, for they were all that we owned, and even they had not yet been paid for. Maman, unable to face their studiously judging expressions, retreated to the room she shared with Father, and for a little while the boys and I joined her. She seemed to take some comfort, especially from the little ones cuddling with her, but when Opal came to enquire after her health, it became clear I was no longer needed. I returned to Father, who sat haggard in a chair in the salon, and could not look at me when I sat beside him.

"Have we anything left at all?" I finally asked.

He shook his head once. "Nothing." Then, instantly contradicting himself, he admitted, "A hunting lodge, far from the city. It belongs to Felicia, solely to her; it was in her father's will that it could not be given to her husband. It's on none of my records or accounts, although I'm sure someone will make note of it in time, and find a way to take it too, to stack against our debts."

"How, if it is Maman's?"

"Lawyers are good at that sort of thing. Someone will press until the wretched lodge is mentioned, and…" He shrugged, a large and helpless motion.

"Then we must not let them press us."

He chuckled faintly. "You don't know lawyers, Amber. They're relentless. Sharks, save that their skin makes less fine leather. They'll learn about the lodge."

I stood with sudden certainty. "Not if we're not here to press." Father looked at me then, surprised, and I steadied myself with a deep breath. "We must leave the Noble, Father. Tonight. Immediately. I'll trade my gowns for a horse and carriage. We'll take blankets and pillows from the hotel and bundle up, and we'll leave."

"Flee?" Father asked incredulously. "Are you proposing that we flee?"

"Do we have another choice? If we stay they'll take the clothes from our backs and the one building we have left to our name. To Maman's name. Solindra won't marry Pearl now, and under slightly more forgiving circumstances Opal's kindness might win her a husband in time, but a wife who has had to live in the streets is too much for any decent man to bear, and nobody was going to marry me any time soon anyway. The boys are too young, even if we could find someone wealthy and generous enough to betroth them to, and we won't, not right now, perhaps not ever. So what choice do we have?"

Father looked at me as though I had become someone else entirely. I almost felt as though I had: running from the only life I'd ever known had certainly not seemed an option half an hour earlier, but then, half an hour earlier I hadn't known there might be one single place for us to run to. "I can't run," he said without conviction. "The dishonor…."

"We're already ruined," I said grimly. "How can running make it worse? Go tell Maman and the others to pack what they have, including the hotel's blankets. We'll need them more than the Noble does. I'll get my dresses and…" I faltered. I had barely any idea where to go in daylight hours to acquire a horse and carriage. It was after ten in the evening now, and surely any reputable place would be long-since closed for trade.

"Miss," said an unexpected voice, more gentle and regretful than I had ever heard from him before. I met my father's manservant's eyes, surprised to even see him; servants were simply not seen, unless they were necessary, and I hadn't had any idea he was there. "If you'd allow me, Miss, I think I could be of some assistance tonight."

My father burst out, "Glover!" with the same astonishment I felt. His manservant bowed to him, but kept his attention on me. Something happened in that moment, an offering of the mantle, and though I did not fully realize it at the time, I accepted its weight without hesitation.

"I would be grateful, Mr Glover. I'll pack my gowns—"

"If you will allow me, Miss," Glover interrupted, as politely as before, "I believe it would draw less attention if I were to apply a little coin to the situation, rather than half a dozen ladies' gowns."

I hesitated. "There's almost no chance we'll ever be able to repay you, Mr Glover."

"I know." Something else changed in that moment, and I almost had the capacity to recognize it: we had become equals, this manservant and I, in a strange meeting of my fall and his rise. I nodded once, but his lean, tall form was already on the move, leaving a polite excuse at the door for his departure.

My father gaped after him, then turned the stupefied expression on me. "What are you doing, girl?"

"I hope to the sun and her sister the moon that I'm saving us all. Go, Father. Pack your things. I think we don't have much time."

I do not know who was more surprised, my father or myself, when, after another moment's silence, he rose to do as he'd been bidden.

The boys were easy: the entire prospect was presented to them as an adventure, and they could hardly contain themselves with excitement about it all. Opal's resistance faded into acceptance so quickly that the former hardly seemed to exist at all, and Pearl, magnificent with rage, acquiesced to the inevitable immediately, if not precisely gracefully.

Maman fainted and would not come to. We packed around her, all of us that much more sombre for her fragility, and if Annalise, our maidservant, didn't help, neither did she hinder us, even when we began to pack the sheets and blankets that belonged to the hotel.

Midnight had come and gone and we had long since finished packing our meager belongings before Glover returned. Jet and Jasper's excitement had not been enough to keep them awake so late, and I collected Jet while Father lifted Jasper's sleeping form into his own arms. Maman, either truly in a desperate faint or in an equally determined one, refused to awaken. Glover, with a glance at Father for permission, picked her up, and it spoke to her sincerity that she did not respond. Pearl, Opal and Flint collected our bags, though there was one too many and Glover said, "If you don't come with us they'll jail you for collusion," to Annalise, who sighed bitterly and took the last bag.

Glover led us out through the servants' stair and halls, our feet treading bare wood that no one of our class had ever walked before, and out a servants' entrance to be met by an enormous, sour-faced nag hitched to a thick, heavy covered wagon. All of us save Glover stopped short in dismay; he climbed with long sure legs over the wagon's tailgate and laid Maman inside before thrusting his head out the bonnet's pinched front. "There was nothing else to be had that would carry ten people. Swiftly, sirs and madams. The watch passes by in another nine minutes, and we do not want to be seen."

Pearl threw her bag in and climbed after with constrained rage. Opal moved more quietly, as if already tired—as well she should be, in the early small hours of the morning—and Glover took Jasper from Father, tucking him into the same small bed on the wagon's floor that Maman was already settled in. Jet was placed between them, and I offered Annalise a hand up. She stared at me sullenly, then took my offer in a fit of pique and flung herself against the back of the wagon as Flint climbed in and Opal tucked blankets around the trio sleeping on the floor.

Father joined Glover at the driver's bench, and their low voices exchanged information for a few minutes before Father, expressionless, joined us in the wagon. Glover, who had not retained a driver—how could he—clambered onto the bench, drew the wagon cover closed as tightly as he could behind him, and clicked to the vast black nag, who lurched into motion with a muttered protest.

I couldn't tell, from inside the snugly covered wagon, what roads he took, only that the cobbles turned quickly to frozen dirt, and that the night watchmen did not hail us. We took blankets from the bags and snuggled together, sleep taking us one by one.

I woke when the wagon stopped just after dawn, and crept through its puckered cover hole to the sounds of the nag slobbering water from a stream. I went a little distance into the wood and squatted to relieve myself, yellow steaming against the snow, then returned to Glover's side. He handed me a tin cup and I scooped from above the horse's watering place, and drank water so cold it made my teeth ache before it slid down to coat my stomach with its chill. I spoke softly, aware of how loud the stream's song was in comparison to the winter morning's silence. "Thank you. You should ride inside for a while. It's freezing."

"And who will drive the wagon?" Glover asked in not-quite-mocking amusement. I gave him a sideways glance, examining his tall, slim form, then gave the nag a better look.

Last night I'd thought her black as pitch. In the dawning light I could see she was a dark bay with black socks, and not a scrap of white anywhere on her. She also stood sixteen hands if she stood an inch, with a belly roughly the size of a barge. Feathery fur grew from her knees down her forelegs and swept magnificently over feet like dinner plates. She rolled an eye at me, and I swear the beast sneered, curling a big lip before puffing a hot breath over the stream and returning to her drink.

I set my jaw. "How hard can it be? If she runs—and surely she won't run, not after walking all night—you'll be right there in the wagon to help rein her in."

"A beauty like this can trot forty miles in a day," Glover said cheerfully. "Plodding along at night isn't enough to wear her out. But I could do with a little warming up," he admitted. "It's a long night, sitting on a bench like that."

I nodded. "Where are we? How far do we have to go?"

"We've come some fifteen miles. It's another seven to the next village—we passed through a couple last night—and we might go on by one or two after that and still be well settled before evening. We can make better time in the light."

Towns and villages lay some seven miles apart by nature, that being the distance most people could walk to a market and get home again in the same day. Even I knew that, though on the occasions we left the city it had always been in a carriage, and seven miles had seemed nothing to me. If we passed through another three villages today, we would be close to fifty miles from the city and that much farther ahead of any pursuit. I found that I preferred, intensely, to be as far away as we could be. "Will she be all right with that much walking?"

"She will," Glover said with confidence. "But an early night will be good for her, after that. We'll rub her down, get her some good oats and some bran, and she'll be set to walk till sundown tomorrow."

"And how far is our journey?"

"Some seventy leagues, miss."

A chill that had nothing to do with the crisp air seized me. I turned involuntarily to look at the road we'd taken already. The last village was well out of sight, not even smoke from chimneys visible above the trees, and those trees closed like dark arches over the lonely frozen road. The gentle blues and pinks of a winter dawn made their frost-rimmed branches beautiful, but not inviting. Like Pearl, I thought, and shivered again as I looked the other way, at the road ahead.

The noisy stream followed the road a little way before diving back down beneath the earth, and the road itself curved gently not too far ahead. Seventy leagues was over two hundred miles, and none of us, save Father, had been more than ten or twenty from our home. Well, perhaps Maman, if the hunting lodge was hers, but Maman rarely went beyond the city walls, and certainly we children had never gone so far. I was abruptly afraid, too aware of wolves and boars and bears, all the murderous beasts that lived in the woods. Last night, fleeing had seemed the only sensible thing to do. In dawn's breaking light, knowing there was a week's journey in the winter ahead of us, I wondered if I had been a great fool, condemning my family to starvation in the wilderness.

"Come along, miss," Glover said gently. "When there's nothing left behind you, the only way through is forward. I'll drive with you a bit, and then if big Beauty here doesn't take advantage of you, I'll slip inside for an hour or two's warmth before spelling you again."

"Thank you, Glover." He helped me to the wagon's bench, and under the sun's bright reflective gaze, I learned how to drive a wagon and one, the first of many strange lessons to come.

I hadn't known, until a day of it had gone by, how tired the body could be left from riding in a wagon. I ached everywhere, my limbs were stiff, and my head seemed to bump of its own accord, even when the wagon had stopped. And I was young, and so comparatively unaffected: Father moved like an old man, creaking and grimacing as he stretched. The boys were hardly bothered, leaping about when we stopped and sometimes running alongside the wagon, even in the cold, for an hour or more. After the first day, I joined them as often as I could, and Opal emerged whenever she thought Maman could be left alone for a while. Maman and Annalise refused to leave the wagon except to do the necessary, but once in a while even Pearl stalked along beside the wagon to stretch her legs.

She would not, though, deign to touch the reins. Opal did, with shy amusement, and Flint took them with obvious pride. Even Jasper had a go, and Jet, sitting in Father's lap, held their tails while chattering to birds and rabbits. Mostly, though, Father, Glover and I took turns driving, while Flint walked beside Beauty—for so the big nag had been deemed—at her head, talking softly to her and, as far as I could tell, transforming her personality from surly to soft.

Four days along the road, at lunchtime, Annalise exited the wagon with her chin high and fierce color in her cheeks. "My home village is two miles down that track," she announced. "I'm going back there. I won't go with you to the ends of the earth. I've done nothing wrong and won't serve you in isolation when I've family and friends at home."

Maman let out a terrible cry that affected Annalise not at all as she turned and simply walked away from us. Opal gazed after the girl in pure astonishment, while Pearl's beautiful features pinched with disbelief. I was only surprised because I hadn't known she had somewhere to go; it had been clear she didn't want to be with us. "We have no way to pay her," I said to the cold afternoon air. "There's no reason for her to stay."

Maman cried out again, sending Father and Opal into the wagon to tend to her. Pearl and I exchanged glances before she said, coolly, "There will be more food for the rest of us, then," and climbed into the wagon as well. The boys, standing in a circle of surprise, looked between Glover and myself, and after Annalise, and then Glover said, "We might as well be on the way, then. No sense in losing daylight."

"Will she be all right, walking home from here?"

Glover shook his head. "We've seen no brigands and she seems to know the territory, so I can only assume so. I've a quick step, miss, but I can't walk her home and catch up with Beauty's pace while it's still light out."

"No, I…" I looked after Annalise a moment longer, watching her cloak mottle and fade with distance, and spread my hands. "No, you can't, and she didn't ask. I hope she'll be all right."

"That one lands on her feet." Glover lifted Jet into the back of the wagon. "All right, lads, let's move along."

Flint took up his place at Beauty's head, and we moved along. Barely an hour later, for the first time, we saw a boar on the road: a massive thick-shouldered beast with small eyes and long tusks. Beauty stopped dead and lowered her head, steam puffing from her nostrils as Flint slowly backed up to the wagon's bench. The boar snorted and glared at us while my heart pounded increasingly hard. Surely even a boar understood that Beauty herself was twice his height and ten times his weight, and that without the wagon's cover rising up behind her to treble her apparent size.

But then I remembered that boar hunting was done by groups of men on horseback, often with dogs, and that the boar did not always lose, despite those odds, and I reconsidered what a boar might or might not understand.

Beauty took one solid step forward, leaning her weight into her leading leg, and the boar, with another snort, turned and trotted away into the woods. Glover, at my side on the wagon bench, let go a sharp sigh of relief, and Flint's voice skirrled high with excitement. "Did you see it, Amber? Did you see it? It was bigger than I am! Do you think it would have stomped us all? Oh, but if we could have killed it we would have had boar for supper! Wouldn't that have been delicious?"

Glover chuckled and ruffled Flint's hair, a vastly more familiar gesture than he would have allowed himself a week ago. "Yes, lad, but we lack every single weapon we would need to slay such a beast. Had we tried, we would have been its supper, not the other way around."

"Boars don't eat people," Flint said stoutly, but he climbed onto the bench with Glover and myself anyway, and kept a wary eye out on the road until darkness fell.

I didn't need to have traveled regularly to know how fortunate we were in the weather. It remained clear the entirety of our journey, the roads staying frozen and easily passed. Clouds followed us on the retreating horizon, thick and grey and threatening snow, but they never caught us. I imagined they might have caught anyone who might pursue us, though, even as I wondered if anyone had. None of us spoke of the possibility; what conversation we had centered around Maman's health, which remained fragile, and how we might barter for food or drink at the next village. We scavenged more than one of our dresses, but left the boys' clothes alone, as they had fewer to begin with. We drove past farms and through villages, but mostly we were alone in the forest, until it began to seem the world was nothing but forest.

Each morning Father had a low discussion with Glover, who then drove us onward as if he knew the way well. The trees grew thicker and the road narrower, until on the eighth afternoon we passed through a village almost too small for the name, and up an ill-kept track that might once have been a road, and finally through low stone gates to a stone building two stories tall, with a peaked slate roof and windows whose sliding shutters remained tightly sealed. Beauty thudded to a halt and dropped her head to nose at ankle-deep snow. The family slowly climbed out of the wagon to stare at the building, myself with a numb disbelief that seemed reflected in the others. It was not dismay at the small size or condition of the lodge—after weeks in the hotel and then nine days in the wagon, two stories seemed absurdly luxurious to me, who had only a month ago had a room and a library of her own—but rather an inability to fully believe we had arrived.

"The door," Opal finally said. "Is there a key to the door? Maman?"

As if her question had shaken us of a stupor, we began to move again: the boys let go unearthly shrieks and ran through the snow, shouting as they explored. Here were outbuildings; there, a stable with three boxes and room for the wagon. A barn with still-standing fences around it lay some distance off from the main building, and at the back of the lodge, a patch of smooth land that Jasper declared a garden.

Before they were done looking around, Maman had produced a key, which was the most participatory action she had taken in over a week. Glover opened the door onto a single large room dominated by ghostly, sheet-covered furniture and, at one end, a fireplace broad enough for Jasper to lie down in.

A door stood on one side of the fireplace, and on the other, a staircase spiraled upward. The main room was floored with boards as wide across as Jet was tall, and oak beams, aged with time and smoke, stretched heavily across the ceiling, supporting the upper floor. Father opened the inner shutters, then worked stiff iron casings to open the outer ones, and suddenly, despite the late hour of a winter afternoon, the lodge seemed flooded with light. Opal gave a gasp that I thought represented all of our sentiments well, and we turned smiles of real joy and relief upon one another for the first time in weeks.

"Our first business will be making sure that chimney is clear enough for a fire," Glover said briskly. "Where's our lad Flint? He should be of a size to go up it."

Flint, when presented with this prospect, paled enough to turn his umber skin yellow, but Jasper would have been halfway up the flue before anyone blinked, had Glover not collared him with a warning about his clothes. Jasper looked in dismay at himself, then at the manservant. "But I haven't got any others!"

"There may well be something about that we can use," Glover said. "The house was well-sealed up and perhaps they left some necessities of that nature. Go on, upstairs with you to see if there's anything packed away." He gave the order naturally, but I saw it was followed by a certain way of carefully not looking at my father, who perhaps ought to have been the one making such suggestions.

Father, though, appeared not to notice. His attention was for the lodge, and I thought he looked better in the minutes since we'd arrived at the lodge than he had in weeks. He guided Maman to a chair without uncovering it, and held her hand as she looked around the lodge. "I haven't been here since I was a child," she finally said. "It looks smaller."

"You're taller," Father said with a smile. Jasper, upstairs, gave a yell of delight, and with eyebrows arched in amusement, I followed him.

To my own delight, the stairs spiraled downward as well. "There's a cellar! Maman, this is magnificent!" A few steps upward, I realized the stairs went much higher than the first floor accounted for, and echoed Jasper's shout. "Maman, a loft! Father, there's a floor and two-thirds up here! The roof space isn't wasted!"

"Excellent," Pearl said from below. "You may sleep in the loft, and warn us of fires."

I shot her a sour look equal to one of her own, and finished climbing to the first floor. Jasper had already opened the window shutters and was nursing a pinched thumb for his efforts, but the upstairs rooms were light enough to see a large, well-made bedframe tucked beneath the loft and chests snugged against the opposite wall. I climbed into the loft, which had two small garretted windows of its own, and which was just tall enough at its peak for me to stand up in. Pearl and Father would knock their heads on the oak beams, but the boys would have plenty of room, once something was done about beds. My heart beat faster than the climb accounted for: excitement, even joy, ran through me. This was so much better than I had anticipated that even its isolation couldn't deflate my mood.

"What about these, Amber?" Jasper waved a pair of trousers and a shirt obviously too large for him at me hopefully. I came back down to the first floor and tried them against him, then nodded.

"With a kerchief to cover your hair and face, because I don't know when we'll be able to have a bath and we must keep you as clean as we can. You're a brave boy, Jasper."

He said, "Hnh," dismissively. "It's just a chimney. I'd rather climb that than try to charm Beauty!" He changed clothes, dancing in the chill, then ran downstairs to display himself to Glover and get instructions for cleaning a chimney. Opal, having gone to explore the door beside the fireplace, returned with a broom, and Glover suggested that despite the cold we should go outside while the chimney was cleaned, to prevent soot getting all over us. He stayed to supervise Jasper, and with Flint's help I got both Beauty and the wagon into the stables before unhitching the nag and getting her some of our dwindling grain supplies.

Like the house, the stables had been exceptionally well constructed, and despite their long period of disuse, were in excellent condition. There were cracks to fill and a corner of roof to repair, but nothing that wouldn't keep a while. "I hope the barn is this well kept."

"Jasper and I couldn't get the door open," Flint admitted. "The bar and lock were too tight. But there's wood in the shed and most of it looked dry."

I hugged my little brother. "I think we've landed on our feet, Flint. How lucky we are."

"Have we?" he asked with more wisdom than I would have shown at ten. "Do any of us know how to make bread? Or raise chickens? Or what to trade for chickens, since we haven't any money left?" His brown eyes suddenly filled with tears. "All we have that's worth anything is Beauty, and I don't want to trade her."

"Neither do I." I hugged him again, then set him back with my hands on his shoulders. "We'll learn to bake bread and do all those things we need to do, Flint. We'll make it work somehow."

A sooty apparition arrived at the stables door, smiling broadly. "I did it!" The smile collapsed. "Maman says I have to wash in snow because I'm too filthy to be let in the house. Opal is cleaning up the mess I made. She borrowed one of the dresses in the chests because nothing she has is practical enough. She looks funny."

"She looks funny? Come on, cinder-boy. A snow bath will find my brother under all that soot."

I didn't envy Jasper his bath: my hands were red and chapped before we'd finished snow-scrubbing him, and far more of his tender body had to be administered to in order to proclaim him something like clean. By the time we were finished, though, Opal had swept and wiped down the lodge's main room, and Glover had a small fire building in the hearth. We came in shivering to find the sheets had been removed from the furniture, and I stopped just inside the door, staring at ivory and fur lining the chairs and sofas, and the now-revealed mounted heads of animals on the walls. "I didn't know it was possible to use antlers in all of one's decorating."

"Not all of it," Opal called from upstairs. "The bed here is unscathed."

"An oversight, I'm sure!" I shouted back as Father came from the cellar with a tightly rolled bundle that proved to be an enormous brown bearskin rug to warm the floor with. Maman had located—or someone had located for her—a fox-fur muff and hat, and she sat in one of the furry chairs near the fire, watching the little flames as though they were all that kept her alive. Glover came from the kitchen—for that was what lay beyond the door to the left of the hearth—with a dinner of thin soup and bread, making the last of what food we had stretch, and we fell upon it with appetites worthy of the greatest feast.

Afterward, Flint and I dragged the straw mattresses and seat cushions in from the wagon for makeshift beds, while Pearl, who had too much pride to remain useless, and—like the rest of us—too little skill in anything to be useful, went into the cellar and returned minutes later with another, smaller black bearskin rug, which she brought up to the loft. It would do for the little boys to sleep on tonight, at least, and we would begin anew tomorrow.

We would never have survived the next weeks—the next months—without Glover's assistance. The morning after we arrived at the lodge, we girls gave him, with varying degrees of reluctance, all but one each of the fine dresses we had left; the lodge had plainer wear that was scratchy and ill-fitting, but much more practical for everyday working life. He took the gowns and left in the wagon, returning just before sundown with a tremendous variety of materials packed neatly into the wagon.

Among them, inconceivably, were books. Most were practical: books of cooking and building, books about gardening and animal husbandry. A few, though, were for pleasure, and Glover would only look pleased with himself when I turned, speechless with gratitude, to try to thank him. I hung the little stained glass rose in a downstairs window, eliciting gasps from the family, who had not known of its survival, and though every day was long and tiring, I spent a few minutes at the end of each sitting beneath the rose and reading a little bit of a story to my weary family.

Opal learned to make bread from the flour; Pearl, her mouth flat and her hair visibly whitening at the root, proved to be adept at sewing more than just beads onto dresses, and made our homespun clothes fit better. Father took up hunting with the guns that had been stored in the barn, and Jasper went with him while Maman cared for Jet, who loved the hunting lodge and its grounds more than any of us had ever loved our home in the city. Flint, given goats and chickens to master, was rarely indoors again. I joined him outside, learning to break the earth and plant seeds as spring came on. One afternoon, elbow-deep in mulch, I sat back on my heels to look at him, hoeing elsewhere in our garden, and spoke to Glover as he passed by. "Glover, you were a manservant. How on earth did you learn all of these practical skills?"

"I wasn't born dressing gentlemen," he said in amusement. "I grew up on a farm outside the city, but I didn't want to farm. I wanted to live in a fine large house, so I learned to read and to speak well, and began as a footman before becoming a manservant."

"And now you're farming," I said in dismay.

"There's a world of difference when you've chosen to, Miss, rather than it being your unexamined fate. Mind the centipede, Miss, that it doesn't bite you."

I slapped the nasty little beast away, and, contemplative, returned to my mulching.

Glover brought us into the small village when we would not have gone on our own. Opal, with her pretty face and her open smile, was welcomed instantly, making friends and no few swains, though most of her would-be lovers were already married and—once or twice—already widowed. Pearl's beauty wasn't enough to overcome village reticence, not with her natural arrogance and her now two-toned hair, as inches of it had gone white before we were willing to venture into town. People looked at me as they always had, as if they couldn't help themselves, and as if they might find answers in my asymmetrical features. Flint's way with animals was rumored ahead of him, and Jasper's charm made him a place in the village, as did Jet's childish enthusiasm. Maman remained apart, but the villagers accepted that without question: her people had owned the lodge, and so it was not, it seemed, to be expected that she should mingle.

Father's hunting ability, though, and his permission to hunt the lands, would have made us popular even if we had all been blighted with the pox. He brought in venison for trade twice a month, and smaller game more often: rabbits, pheasants, partridges, even fat squirrels, and the opportunity for meat won the villagers over.

"But they live surrounded by this forest," I breathed to Glover once. "Why do they not hunt?"

"The lands aren't theirs," he replied, "and they're afraid."

"Of what? Maman's family are absentee landlords, at best. It's been decades since anyone has lived at or hunted from the lodge. What could possibly keep them away from the hunt?"

"There are rumors of a beast in the forest, Miss. One who protects it from anyone who lacks the right to hunt."

"Beasts," I said with an unladylike snort, "can't tell who does and who doesn't have the right to hunt."

"And yet the villagers believe." Glover smiled at me, and went to help Father parcel up rabbit in exchange for a length of nicely woven wool.

As summer wore on, my hair lightened to match my name; Opal's became bright with sunshine, and, by the summer cross-quarter day, Pearl took a scissors to her own hair and hacked off the sable length of it, leaving white flyaway curls, when it had been straight before. I watched her do it and was still stunned at the transformation from a prematurely greying beauty to an unearthly creature whose hair and skin seemed equally pale. Her green eyes were terrifying in the midst of whiteness, and she made no effort to tame her alien aspect.

Unexpectedly, the villagers became easier with her after that, as if she had been denying something they all felt was obvious, and now that she had accepted it she could belong. It wasn't long before I realized one or two of them would always approach her when we came into the village, drawing her to the side and murmuring a question. She almost never smiled when asked, but she would go away with them and come back a while later, looking serenely satisfied, which was not an expression I was much used to on my oldest sister's face. One young woman named Lucy, who was lush of form and frank of tongue, called Pearl away often, and after a few weeks I could stand it no longer. I cornered my older sister when we arrived home, demanding, "What do they ask you?"

Pearl's eyebrows had gone white, too, and they rose a little. "For blessings, mostly. On their children, or their pregnancies, or the crops."

"Why on earth would they do that?"

"They think I'm a witch."

I stared at her. "Are you?"

"Maybe," Pearl said, and would say no more.

The harvest season meant harder work than any of us—save perhaps Glover—had ever known in our lives. Opal and Father bore it stoically and Pearl, ill-temperedly, while the boys complained without surcease and yet did their fair share of the work.

I loved it. I had no idea why, but I did: the relentless effort of bending and picking and digging and packing felt wonderful. I learned to make jam from wild berries, puckering my mouth when they were tart and wondering if we might grow sugar beets with any success over the next season. The jams and parsnips and carrots and dried meats went into the cellar, where it remained cool all the year around, and before winter came on we picked apples and pears from the trees that had proven to bear them. I pickled tomatoes and sweated over rose hip jelly, stored beans and traded for spices, and, remembering my sisters' love of perfumes back when we could afford such things, delved into one of the books Glover had brought. There I found recipes for rose water and amber toilets. I conspired with Glover, who brought me vials for the perfumes, and I brewed them in the barn, where my sisters rarely went. The boys, who often ventured there, were sworn to secrecy, and, as they clearly had secrets of their own, did a fair job of keeping them.

I was leaving the barn one afternoon just before the winter equinox when I caught a glimpse of Glover standing unusually idle in the garden. We had turned the soil over already, leaving it ready for next spring's planting, and there was little enough left to be done there. Curious, I went to hail him, then saw that from where he stood, he could gaze unimpeded through the rose window in the house, yet barely be seen from indoors. I knew without error where his attention lay: on Opal, who had set a small loom near the window, and was learning the craft.

His expression was not fatuous, but soft, and I suddenly understood why my father's manservant had been willing to help us, uncompensated, for all these months. I doubted, even then, that he intended to put himself forward: Opal, being the woman she was, would marry him out of gratitude for what he'd done for us, and his was not the face of a man who wished to be rewarded unless his lover's sentiment was as strong as his own.

And still, what a strange gift it must have seemed to him, for our family to fall on hard times that he could help us through. In the city, Opal would have remained impossibly far above his station. I wasn't proud of having often not even noticed our servants, but that I had not remained fact. At least in the world as it had become, he could earn her notice, even her friendship, which was more than he might ever have expected before. He was not so much older than she: not yet thirty, I thought, and Opal was approaching her twenty-first birthday now, after nearly a year in the lodge. The difference between Maman and Father's age was considerably greater; Maman was, I believed, barely ten years Pearl's elder, although her constant fragility made me think of her as much older. Opal could do much worse than Glover, and in a village of men either already married or not yet bearded, probably would.

I stepped back and opened the barn door again so I could close it with more vigor, its thump alerting Glover to my presence. He returned to the work he'd been pursuing—fetching wood for the fire, as it turned out—and I helped, taking a load almost as heavy as his into the lodge.

The main room was warmest, of course, and we spent most of what I advisedly thought of as our idle time in it. In truth we had vastly less idle time than we once had, and it was rarely idle at all, as evidenced by Opal's weaving and Maman's stitching, and—surprisingly—by Pearl's pouring over a book I was unfamiliar with. Father held a knife and a long piece of wood in his strong hands, pare by pare creating a board for a bedframe that would in time go into the loft, and Flint sat by the fire bent over a piece of leather that began to look like a bridle. Jasper lay on the bearskin rug with Jet and a piece of slate and chalk, practicing letters with the little one, and as Glover placed another log on the fire, an overwhelming brightness filled my eyes and chest.

"Look at us." My voice cracked and I swallowed, smiling through a tightness in my throat. Pearl looked up, white eyebrows elevated, but rolled her eyes in disdain as I continued. "Look at us. When do you last remember, in the city, us all being in a single room together, bent to our individual interests but still a family?"

Glover took a discreet step backward, toward the shadow of the kitchen door, clearly dismissing himself as part of the picture I saw, but I said, "Don't leave, Glover. You've become part of this family too. An integral part, I dare say. We would never have made it this far without you."

"Miss," Glover protested, but he smiled, and ducked his head when Opal smiled her agreement toward him.

"We've done well," I insisted. "I don't know that I would go back to what we had, even if I could."

"I would," Pearl said dryly, but Father gave me an odd, approving smile while Maman kept her attention fiercely on her stitching. The boys were entirely unmoved by my emotion, and as such, caused me to release it in a quick laugh. I went happy to my next task, and if I imagined Opal's gaze lingering thoughtfully on Glover for a few moments, I enjoyed that little dream as well.

The longest night came on us only a few days later, and I, expecting nothing, brought out the perfumes for my sisters and Maman, and new winter boots that I'd traded other vials of perfume for, for all the menfolk, including Glover, whose visible surprise was worth having snuck around the village behind his back. Then Maman, who had spent nearly a year in almost absolute silence, rose and went upstairs, only to return with warm and beautifully stitched cloaks for all of us, even—as I had done—Glover.

More gifts: sleds for the little boys from Father, leather-worked pendants of our favorite animals—or in my case, of a rose, a reminder of the garden that had burned—from Flint, warm dresses and new shirts all around from Opal, who said, "Next year I'll have woven the fabric, too," almost defiantly. Glover had pretty things for each of us girls, which I thought covered the excuse to give Opal a necklace of opal, the pendant gleaming with depth, and for the boys, hand-carved horses and a carriage whose wheels turned smoothly.

Pearl produced a deck of witch's cards that I was certain she hadn't owned a year ago, and played at reading our fortunes. I believed only I caught the downturn of her mouth a few times as she pulled cards from the deck, or the sharp glances she bestowed on Maman, Father, and myself. But she offered nothing in her readings beyond laughter and good fortune, and then to our delight Jasper and Jet stood up together and first recited the Winter Enchantment, an ancient poem to bring back the sun, then sang for us the first of many solstice carols, inviting us to join them in the next as they finished the first. We nursed the hearthfire, adhering, as we hadn't done in the city, to the old tradition of lighting no new fires on the solstice for fear of angering the faeries and spirits, and we placed a candle in the eastern window, to guide the sun back home again.

The boys gradually drifted into sleep, but—again, as we had not done in the city—we adults remained awake, growing increasingly quiet as the night went on, and awaited the return of light to a world that had, at this time a year ago, seemed impossibly dark.

A traveler arrived with the returning sun.

I pretended for a moment that he had come to the village the night before, and stayed there until daylight broke again, but his face was ruddy with cold, snot dripping from his nose and frost rimming both his heavily furred hat and his beard. His horse did not look rested, or well-fed, or even warm, though its breath steamed heavily in the winter air.

Father opened the door as the traveler rode up the drive, and I could see from his expression that he knew the man. He stood in the open door, waiting, and the man swung off his horse and said, without preamble, "The Spidersilk survived."

Maman cried out, but Father's knees cut from under him; had he not held the door frame he would have fallen. It took ten heartbeats before he gathered himself and straightened, then stepped into the house and said, "You'd better come in."

Once inside and divested of coat and hat, I—we all—recognized the man as Captain Stewart, who had sailed the Spidersilk. He told much the same story Fisher had almost a year ago, save with the Spidersilk's fate being driven hopelessly off-course. The crew had come, essentially by chance, on an island with enough of a harbor for safety, and had waited out the winter storms there. The stars had guided them back toward home, but the poor Spidersilk had been so badly damaged that as much time was spent keeping it afloat every day as making headway. Stewart had limped it into port only a few weeks earlier, learned of our misfortunes and our disappearance—still fodder for gossip, it seemed—and, remembering an idle conversation with Father about the hunting lodge years earlier, had set off in search of the family without telling anyone where, exactly, he intended to go.

"The cargo," Father said.

Stewart shook his head. "Not what it was when we set out. Time and weather has taken some toll. Still, silks and spices and gems—"

Pearl made a noise at this, a rough whimper unlike herself. Opal, almost as pale as Pearl, took her older sister's hand, while Glover, at the kitchen door, twisted half a smile and glanced away. I hadn't yet moved, unable to consider what another reversal of fortune meant. Just days ago I'd proclaimed I wouldn't go back to what we'd had, but then the possibility hadn't existed. In this new light, I was no longer so certain of my convictions.

Maman rose and came to clutch Father's hand while the boys stayed silent, even Jet knowing something important was happening, though he couldn't understand what.

"You'd better come," Stewart finally said. "The goods are yours, and so are the—" He broke off, glancing at the family, and shrugged, though we could all fill in the final word: debts.

"Tomorrow," Father said heavily. "You and your horse both need rest, and there's nothing a day's delay will change."

Stewart stayed, and the day took on a shrill edge as Father packed for the journey. The boys were overcome with the idea of innumerable toys again, though Flint insisted loudly and at length that he would have to take the goats and chickens with him. Beauty, of course, was a foregone conclusion: none of us could imagine life without the enormous bay mare anymore. Maman whispered with Opal about silks and fine smalls, and Opal, who had always seemed happy enough, rubbed the callouses on her hands and wondered if they would fade. Glover said nothing, and I watched the proceedings with a conflict of desires. Strangely, so too did Pearl, though she could be drawn into Maman and Opal's talk of beautiful dresses and shoes that were for show rather than sensible.

Our guest was given a hay mattress in front of the fire, and we retired to bed early, all too aware that Father would depart before the midwinter sun rose. I was changing into my nightdress when Pearl appeared, clutching her own nightgown and the new cloak from Maman around her for warmth. "You have to go with him."

"What?" I pulled the nightdress on and, although I'd heard her perfectly clearly, repeated, "What?"

She seized my shoulders, a more physically abrupt gesture than I was accustomed to from my reserved eldest sister, and almost shook me as she said, "You must go with him, Amber." Her green eyes were alight even in the darkness, from which she stood out like an apparition, ghostly and white.

I put my hands on hers at my shoulders, then took them away from that fierce grip and held them instead. "Why?"

Pearl shook her head once. "I don't know, but I saw it in the cards. I saw a journey for Father, and a death."

"Pearl!"

"I told you," Pearl said, although she hadn't, quite. "I'm a witch."

"Pearl," I protested, only half seriously, "if every woman rejected by a lover became a witch, there would be only witches in the world."

My sister's features settled into a reassuringly familiar contemptuous look, and her tone scathed as she said, "Father's cards showed a journey and a death, and Maman's lain beside his warned of secrets told and another death. But when yours crossed theirs, the fortune changed."

"To what?" Despite my protest, I found myself inclined to take Pearl seriously. She had never evidenced much sense of humor, and most women rejected by a lover didn't go white-haired overnight, either. That she had become a witch did not, somehow, seem so far-fetched.

"A journey and a bargain, secrets told and danger faced."

Something in how she stopped warned me. "And?"

Pearl shook her head. "The last card I turned usually means change."

"But?" A cool certainty slid through me, and unusual anguish creased Pearl's lovely features.

"But crossing Father's fortune, it could yet mean death."

I had already known, so it only took my breath a little. "So if I stay, he dies, and if I go, I might die."

"It might just mean change, Amber…."

"Pearl." I hugged my older sister for the first time that I could remember, then set her back with my hands on her shoulders, and said, simply, "Of course I'm going."

The others were not so easily convinced.

I presented it as already done: my bag was packed with much more practical clothes than I'd traveled in a year before, and with vials of the perfumes I'd made, as I was of a mind to sell some. Pearl, who was not guileless, but who had never in her life been bothered to lie, said I had told her the night before that I intended to go with Father, and that she thought a younger person on the road with him was wise.

Flint, now closer to twelve than eleven, proposed that he should be the one to go, as he was very nearly the next man in the family. Glover, as an actual adult, looked torn but said nothing, for which I was grateful; my family needed him more than they needed me. Father would have none of it: he could go on his own, with Stewart, and they would be fine. The argument—if everyone else voicing an opinion while I remained silently steadfast in mine could be called an argument—went on for some while, until the sun threatened the horizon, upon which I said, "We'll be losing daylight soon. If you don't take me with you, I'll walk along behind."

I saw Father take in the possibility of restraining me, mostly with a glance at Glover, and, as quickly, reject the thought. I could not be kept tied up for weeks, and he concluded, correctly, that once I was released no one would prevent me from walking alone to the city, a journey vastly more dangerous on my own than with them. He said, "Very well," and in no more than another twenty minutes, Beauty was hitched to the wagon, which had its cover tightly drawn, Stewart's horse was tied to the tailgate, and we were on our way.

I soon learned that riding alone was vastly colder than riding in a wagon bundled with eight or nine other people, but considerably faster. To stave off both boredom and cold, I walked often, though I could not keep up with Beauty's less-laden pace as easily as I'd walked with her a year ago. On the other hand, I could walk much farther and faster than I did a year ago, and found a certain joy in pushing myself to keep up with the big horse. Stewart, who seemed to regard me as confounding and perhaps alarming, came around to my determination by the end of our journey, and joshed with me as easily as he might have one of his men. I was sorry to have the city's profile come into sight, and shocked, as we entered its gates, to realize that its sounds and smells, which had once been an unobserved backdrop to my life, were now unpleasantly loud and profound to me.

Stewart, watching my face, released a sympathetic chuckle. "I feel that way every time I come back from the sea, lass. After this past year, the worst sail of my life, I swore I'd never set foot on a ship again, but half an hour in town made me reconsider it all, despite everything."

"There are so many people," I said, a little wonderingly. They had a method to them, streams of passers-by going one way or another, but eddies and stops were created by sudden encounters, and the whole of the pattern had to shift and accommodate those changes. Children disrupted it all, going where they wanted, and voices, bells, wheels, beasts, all came together to create a cacophony that made my skin twitch. We passed through the chaos to the Crossroads, that inn which a year ago had not been good enough for my sister Pearl, and took two rooms that Father paid for with coin earned from his hunting.

We bathed that night, me in my room and the men in theirs, and in the morning, dressed as well as we could be, we went first to the docks to see the Spidersilk and its crew, and then, having assessed the cargo, Father went grimly to the bank.

Left to myself, I could have—perhaps should have—returned to the inn to wait like a dutiful daughter. Instead, thinking of the people I knew we owed money to, I went to the dressmaker whose sympathy had clothed us after the fire, and offered her eight vials of perfume as payment.

A wonderful combination of scorn and greed lit her eyes when I made the offer: in the city commerce was done with cash, not trade. But perfume was expensive, and mine was exquisitely scented, with a base that warmed to the wearer and made it unique to them. She tipped a drop of one against her wrist to test its scent and inhaled, then did her best to school her expression into disdain. But she took the offer, and with it, information worth more than coin: gossip. The Gryce family had returned, at least in part, and the youngest sister had lowered herself to engage in perfumery and trade. That knowledge would be worth as much as the perfume itself, if not more: people would come for weeks or months to have gowns made by her, just so they could hear in person about my rough hands and country dress.

The Noble, where we'd stolen blankets and pillows, would not be so easily put off. I visited cloakmakers and cobblers, inviting them to the Crossroads to see the furs we'd brought, furs that in our village we could trade for goods, but which in the city would be bought for cash. More than one tradesman leered at me, which they never would have dared to do a year ago, but several sent a journeyman to the inn to inspect our wares anyway. Father had tanned them well, and we had a handsome variety of fox, beaver, and rabbit, and a wolf skin from a solitary beast who'd thought our chickens were for his benefit.

That night it snowed, a thick white blanket muffling the city sounds, and in the morning nearly all of the journeymen returned, ploughing through the snow with their feet. One or two came with their masters, and they all, journeymen and masters alike, made offers on the furs. I sent the unaccompanied journeymen back to their masters with instructions to take me seriously, and by late evening—thanks in part to snow falling incessantly throughout the day, and the potential of a long cold season ahead—they had engaged in bidding wars that drove the prices up as far as the market would bear. The highest buyers left cards with me, asking that I come to them directly if we should return next year with more furs.

On the third morning, cash in hand, I waded through the snow to visit the management of the Noble, and with as much grace as I could present, paid them for our accommodations a year earlier, the materials we'd taken, and added noticeable but not offensively large percentage on top of that to make certain they had no interest in pursuing us toward a debtors prison. The jowly gentleman who ran the establishment looked at the pile of coin and, with business-like sincerity, invited us to stay with them at the Noble at any time in the future.

Everything else was beyond me: I didn't know who Father owed money to, or in what quantities, and could not myself go to make good the debts. The night I paid off the Noble bill, Father returned to the Crossroads to say he had brokered an agreement with the bank and his debtors that we would sell the cargo.

Given that much leeway, I insisted we bring the salt-roughened silks, in equal parts, to the dressmaker who had taken my perfumes, and to the ones we had most often frequented when we lived in the city. As with the perfume, as with the furs, the added value of gossip made them pay more than they might have otherwise, and on top of that, the silk had been through adventures. Its roughness could be seen as a fashion statement, and as such, had greater worth still. Furthermore, in only two days and despite the steadily falling snow, the story of my perfume had spread, and the other dressmakers bought vials from me as entirely separate transactions. We left more flush with cash than either of us had expected, and Father, once we were safely back at the Crossroads, looked at me in astonishment.

"If I'd had any idea you could bargain like that, Amber, I would have brought you into business with me before the troubles began. They might never have happened."

"I don't know that I could bargain like this before our troubles, Father. I learned it in the village, not the city."

Father shook his head and smiled. "The bank was reluctant to let me be the one to sell the cargo, for fear our bad name would taint it. But banks won't drive a hard bargain themselves. They see the money as already lost, and whatever they can get against it is an unexpectedly pleasant offset against the losses. They valued the silk at two thirds of what you've gotten for it, and if you can do that with the jewels…."

I could. The jewels were easier, in a way: salt didn't damage them, and pirates, storms, and having been lost at sea made a magnificent tale for any centerpiece of a necklace or ring. I traded perfume for trinkets for my sisters: a pearl ring for Pearl, and an opal necklace for Opal, and both the jewelers and myself felt we'd come out well. Little by little we paid off debts, until the cargo was gone and even the Spidersilk's remaining crew—a skeleton of what it had once been—had been paid. The evening after we paid them, my father counted what little cash we had left onto a table in our inn rooms, then sat back with the money between himself and me.

"Tell me what you would do, Amber. Send Stewart and the Spidersilk back out? Try to recoup our losses, begin again? Or take what we have and return home a little wealthier, perhaps a little wiser?" His smile had bitter edges, all his mockery directed inward.

I sat across from him, hands steepled against my lips, and considered not only his question, but the other money: the coin from selling my perfumes, and the furs that had brought cash to us free and clear of Father's debts. "It's enough," I said behind my fingers. "Perhaps only just, but it's enough to refurbish the Spidersilk and send it out again." I lifted my eyes to his. "Or we could offer the ship to Stewart for a nominal cost, let him take on the repairs and the risk of future ventures, and take what we have home again. I meant what I said at midwinter, Father. We've done well enough, at the lodge, and both my perfumes and your furs will sell if we want to come to the city once a year with them. In autumn, not winter." I cast an eye toward the window. We had been in the city two weeks now, and it had snowed nearly every day. Even Beauty would be slow, pulling the wagon home on roads filled with snow.

"Farming is a hard life," Father said quietly. "Full of new risks every season—"

"Unlike mercantile investment," I said dryly, and he laughed, surprised.

"There is that. But if I could make back our fortune, you girls could marry well. Live a gentler life."

"This," I said with a gesture at our earnings, "is nothing, here. But it is a fortune at the lodge, Father. It could buy us a cow and pigs. If we come back with furs and perfumes for a few years, and no further debts to pay here, it could buy Flint horses to breed, and a future for the boys."

"But you girls."

"None of us will be outrageously old in another two or three years, Father. If we've done well and want to come back to the city to find suitors and marry, there will be time yet." I thought, but did not say, Pearl is a witch, and in the stories, witches never seem to marry, and I had hopes for Opal and Glover, even if I was the only one sporting them. "I think we're better off without the Spidersilk. And," I added, suddenly cheerful, "if the others disagree, in the end, you can blame me. I'm sure Pearl will enjoy eviscerating me."

To my surprise, Father laughed again, and said, ruefully, "Ah, Pearl. It's good she's so beautiful."

"Perhaps if she wasn't she wouldn't be quite so…Pearl-ish."

"But imagine if she was, without the beauty."

"I suppose we would love her anyway."

"But would anyone else?" Father took my hand and squeezed it. "Very well, Amber. I'll heed your advice, and tomorrow, offer the Spidersilk to Stewart, at whatever cost he can afford. Then as soon as the weather breaks we'll go home. I miss your mother." A furrow creased his forehead, and I breathed a smile.

"Maman is my mother," I said gently. "The only one I've ever known."

Father nodded, but after a moment, said, "I miss your mother, too. You look like her, you know."

I shook my head. "I don't. I've seen paintings. She looked like Opal."

"Paintings flatter where they shouldn't always. Her smile was like yours." He gestured at my mouth, at its slight unevenness and the way it made even my sweetest smile look like a smirk. "A little crooked. The painters gave her more even features, like Opal has, but she looked more like you. Ah, I see her in all of you, though. She was often kind, like Opal, but she could be so haughty and reserved that in comparison Pearl looks like the most approachable of women."

"You never talk about her," I said softly.

"I wasn't good enough for her." Father lifted a hand, stopping my protest, and chuckled. "In truth, I wasn't. I met her during the Border Wars, while she nursed for the army. Her family wouldn't come to the wedding. She said they were furious with me for taking her away from them, and her for marrying me."

"Mother had family?" The idea struck me like a gong, reverberating astonishingly in my mind. "We have other family?"

"Her family were friends of the queen, a long time ago. Felicity knew them, too. She came to make sure you girls were all right, after Eleanor died, and after a while we fell in love." The corner of his mouth pulled up. "Her family were also furious, though she still wrote—writes—to them, and they to her. I've been graced with women who are too good for me, Amber, and that includes you girls. I'm sorry I haven't done better by you."

"The queen?" Everything else Father had said fell by the wayside with that revelation. The Queen's War—the one commemorated in the Queen's Corridor mosaics—had been years ago, so many years that the number of decades was foggy in my mind, and half impossible to believe. "Our mother—Maman?—knew the queen? But the queen is—is—" Ancient was the only word that came to mind, and though it was by all appearances true, it still seemed rude to apply to our sovereign.

"I didn't say they were age-mates," Father pointed out. "But yes, Maman, and your birth mother, did both know the queen. And I suppose you do have other family, Amber. I don't know them at all, so it's hard to think of them that way." He pulled at his chin, a gesture that would look better if he'd grown a beard, but he had resolutely kept the city's clean-shaven look, even after a year in the country. "I never thought to contact them," he admitted. "Even at the worst of our travails, I never thought of it. Perhaps I should have. For your sake, Amber. For all of you children."

"Sooner salt the earth and curse the sun," I said, offended. "If they wouldn't have you, they've no right to us."

Father chuckled again, but said, "I wonder if your sisters would feel the same way," before letting it go. "Tomorrow, Amber. We'll talk with Stewart tomorrow, and leave for home as soon as we can."

The weather had broken in the morning: sunlight reflected brightly off banked snow and cast blue shadows in its depths. Father whistled merrily on his way out of the inn, and I, mindful of the stories he'd told the night before, went to visit the mosaics along the Queen's Corridor for the first time since before our house had burned.

The elegant frames told the story of our country's darkest hour, so long ago now that even the children of its war veterans were dead, and their grandchildren old. We had been ruled then by a king thought too gentle to rule well: he preferred diplomacy to warfare, and conceded too much, too often, to those who pressed at our borders. When illness struck him down, our enemies amassed, anticipating an easy conquest of a weak country with only a young queen on its throne.

They were not prepared for Irindala's ferocity. She gave her son, the prince and heir to the throne, to her closest friend to raise safely while she rode to war, and ride she did, with an army of the people at her back. Irindala fought alongside the people, bleeding for her country as they did; the first few panels of the mosaic, depicting the king's death and the gathered enemies, then Irindala leading her army, and finally a bloody battle, had frightened me as a child. The centermost, though, had inspired me then, and, a little to my embarrassment, still did: Irindala tall and strong with light all around her, her sword in one hand and the other open to the people, upon whose uplifted hands she stood, trusting them for her strength and balance. I knew now it was a cunning piece of propaganda, but its affect was no less for knowing that.

The next frame, though, broke my heart. Irindala returned to an empty castle, her trusted friend and her son both gone. In every remaining mosaic, Irindala wore a gown with a red slash across the breast, as she was said to every day, to show that her heart had been cut out and could never heal.

She did not become a cruel mistress, though. Despite her own heartbreak, she ruled fairly, and the next panel was broken into four smaller images, showing critical moments in her reign. The last of those reflected a battle from the Border Wars that Father had fought in, pushing back against an encroaching enemy said to be infused with faery blood, so relentless and powerful were they. But Irindala's army triumphed again, as it, and she, had done all through her long reign, save in the matter of her son.

At the end lay one final open space, where the end of Irindala's story would be told with beads of colored glass and glue, marking the end of an era so extended it already belonged to the stuff of legend, and someday would be thought myth.

I could hardly imagine my father fitting into that story somewhere, his part too small to be seen in a mosaic, but still a part of it, if my birth mother and Maman had both, somehow, known Irindala herself. Nor could I imagine asking Maman about it; she was inclined to vapors over a chicken wandering across the threshold, and I thought asking her about her childhood would induce one of her month-long silences. I tried, briefly, to imagine what kind of life we might have had, if our mothers had stayed in contact with their royally-associated families, and my imagination failed me there, too, although the idea made me laugh. We girls, at least, had grown up in luxury. Improving on it would have brought our comfort to unimaginable levels. No one needed that level of indulgence. I had learned, in fact, that no one even needed the kind I had grown up with, although that thought would have once been incomprehensible to me.

I gave the mosaics an unselfconscious curtsy, and went on to the shops to buy a few more gifts—finer fabrics, newer shoes, sweets that would last the journey, and other things—for my family, and was ready to leave when Father returned from selling the Spidersilk to Captain Stewart. We wouldn't get far with only an hour or two of daylight left to us, but we were both eager to be on the road home.

Beauty, on the other hand, paused at the stable doors and glowered at us, as if the snow—packing down now, at least—was our fault, and as if a filthy enough look would make us agree to put the journey off until the snow had melted. I patted her jawbone, apologized, led her out to hitch her to the wagon, and we were on our way.

Clear, cold weather followed us, the lengthening days letting us eke a little more distance out of each day traveled. We stopped reluctantly the sixth night, knowing ourselves to be within a day's travel of home, but also knowing we were most of a day's travel from home, and that we would only exhaust ourselves and Beauty if we pushed onward that night. That was my doing; we had lost half a day's travel when I'd recognized the road our lady's maid, Annalise, had taken to the village she said was her own. Father had not objected aloud when I turned Beauty down the little track, and we had emerged into a healthy village nestled in the woods only a little while later.

We were strangers there, drawing the attention of first children, then parents and grandparents who emerged from warm houses to see what we wanted. I asked for Annalise, and followed the child who ran to fetch her; I did not want to talk to her in front of her entire village. She met me at a doorway near the far end of the village, wrapped in a wool shawl and with anger tightening the lines of her face.

"Our debts are settled in the city," I told her quietly. "I've brought the wages we couldn't pay you a year ago, and if you'd like to return to the city to work, I'll ask Glover to come in the spring and offer you safe escort. Mostly I wanted to say I'm sorry, Annalise. I'm sorry you were pulled down into this with all of us. You deserved better."

Agreement and surprise, still dominated by anger, fluttered across her face. "I did." She took the purse of coin and folded it against her belt, glaring at me. "What work could I find now, after disgracing myself by running away with you? Your references would be of no use to me."

I made a face. "Being the center of gossip got us better prices on some things than we might have expected. Returning to the city as the only intimate witness to our downfall might be enough to find you an excellent place. If you decide you'd like Glover's escort, write to us. We'll do what we can. I am sorry," I said again, then left her alone to make her decisions. The village folk didn't bother waiting until we'd driven away to converge on Annalise's home. I hoped I'd done her some good with the visit, even if it delayed us by a few hours, and left us unable to reach home the night we'd planned to.

"Tomorrow," Father said cheerfully, as we tethered Beauty and tied the wagon cover tight to keep us warm. He had been cheerful since we left the city, as if selling the Spidersilk had lifted some last weight from his shoulders, releasing him forever from the mistakes he'd made in the past.

"Tomorrow," I agreed, but we were both wakened in the smallest hours of the morning, not by the sound, but by the silence. I sat up to peek through the puckered O of the wagon cover, and cursed softly.

Snow had begun to fall again, with such swiftness that the world was already freshly buried in it. Beauty muttered and stomped almost noiselessly in eight or ten inches, scowling at me when I scrambled out to brush its depth from the wagon seat and to begin harnessing her again.

"It may be better to wait it out, Amber."

"It would have been better if we'd stayed at the last village, or gone on to the next," I replied. Neither, though, had appealed to us; the villages were more isolated in this part of the country, or farther off the track, as Annalise's had been. Staying in the last one would have lost us half an afternoon's journey, and going to the next would have lost us half a night's sleep. "Beauty will probably be all right if it just keeps coming straight down like this, but the wind is likely to pick up, and she's too exposed. Either we go into the forest to try to build a rough shelter, or we hitch up and go on."

I looked back to see that, although he'd objected, Father was clearing more snow from the wagon bench before he pulled one of the straw-filled pillows from beneath the wagon's cover to sit on. Once I had her in the harness, I gave Beauty a nose bag and a scratch beneath the forelock. She gave me an impatient eye roll in return, but she put her head down, started munching oats, and plodded forward through the snow. I leapt onto the bench to sit beside Father and, wrapping my cloak around myself, peered toward the horizon.

We were hours from dawn: there was no hint of light anywhere, only the noiseless snow softening the edges of the world and weighing tree branches until they bowed and scraped our wagon's cover. Father, breath steaming in the cold, said, "You should climb inside, so when I'm frozen through you can drive."

"Imagine how awful this would be if you were alone." I did as I'd been bade, nestling back into what warmth remained, and, to my surprise, I fell asleep to the sounds of wheels squeaking faintly as they packed snow, and of Beauty's steady footsteps.

I awakened hours later to a jolting stop and a curse. Alarmed, I pushed back out of the wagon to find Father with a lap full of snow and a disoriented expression. "Father?"

"I fell asleep." He stood, brushing snow off his lap, and shook himself. I climbed all the way out, standing beside him on the footboard, and looked around us in dismay.

Daylight had arrived in the form of dusky, snow-laden grey light that did hardly any more to light the way than full night had, but we were clearly no longer on the main road. We hadn't been for some time, it appeared: trees grew up around us almost close enough to touch, the path beneath us no more than a single track. The snow immediately surrounding us was no more than ankle deep, but five steps ahead of Beauty, it rose feathery-looking and chest deep. Beauty, undisturbed by this, took a few steps forward, then paused to look back at us, as if making sure we wanted her to go on.

The snow in front of her dropped to ankle depth for as many more steps as she'd taken, and remained banked tall and relentless beyond that. Father said, "Whoa," to her, weakly, and after a moment of gaping I scrambled through the wagon to look out the back pucker.

There was no sign of our passage what-so-ever. Five steps behind us, snow lay chest-deep again, as if it had lain undisturbed since winter began. I called, "Back her up a few steps, Father," as if there might be a way out of a thing I already knew in my bones. The wagon lurched and backed up, and, after five steps, pressed against the bank of snow. The snow gave a little, collapsing and sliding under the wagon's belly, but it most certainly did not disappear the way it was doing in front of Beauty. After another step or two backward, the snow impacted enough to stop the wagon's progress. Up front, Beauty nickered impatiently and eased forward again into unimpeded space.

l sat hard onto one of the benches, a sick flutter of missed heartbeats occupying my attention for a few unpleasant breaths. Then, cold with more than the weather, I made my way forward again to say, in a strange voice unlike my own, "We've been enchanted."

"Yes." Father sat on the bench again, heavily, and I sat beside him, the two of us staring wordlessly at the tall snow beyond us. There was nothing to be done about an enchantment, and no value in protesting that such things didn't really happen. No one properly believed they did happen, or at least, that they still happened, but sitting in a twenty foot rolling rectangle of shallow snow made it quite clear that they did still happen on occasion.

"We're going to have to go forward," I said after a while. "We might as well, before we get cold. The snow is still coming down."

Father shook first himself, then the reins, and Beauty, with a tail twitch that suggested it was about time, plodded forward. Enchantments, it seemed, did not distress enormous grumpy mares. Nor did I feel distressed, precisely. Stunned, perhaps, but—but, well, Pearl was a witch, and the Border Wars had been fought against faeries, and our country's queen was old beyond reason, and if those things could be, then a forest might be enchanted too, and we were lucky it hadn't gotten us before.

I sat up straighter. "Father, is this our forest?"

He gave me a look somewhere between amusement and the suspicion the snow had made me simple. "I suppose it is, but how do you tell the difference between the end of one forest and the beginning of another? If you mean, are we close to home, I have no idea. I don't know how long I slept, save for it still being dark when I'd last opened my eyes. It could be nine or noon, now, though, for all I know." He gestured at the indistinct sky's inability to hint at the hour. "I don't think we'll find our way home through the forest, if that's what you're asking."

"No. It's just that the villagers wouldn't hunt in our forest."

"Oh. Oh. The beast protecting it. An enchantment itself. I see." Father looked around more carefully, as if, now that he understood me, he might see a landmark to orient us with. I looked, too, and although we were neither of us talking as we searched, a different kind of silence came over us as we began to understand what we saw.

Beyond our peculiar little rectangle of safety, where the snow still fell constantly and swiftly, a ferocious storm raged. Had clearly been raging all along, but until we began to look hard, we had been as protected from knowledge of it as we were from its ravages. The more I watched, the more I realized that the trees just beyond us danced and rattled with wind, and the harder I listened, the more clearly I could hear that wind howling and shrieking, as if enraged it couldn't reach us. The snow outside of our enchantment didn't merely fall, but whipped and lashed and spun, creating a whiteout that we would never have been able to pass through safely.

I remembered Pearl's reading of the cards, and wondered, with a shudder, what would have happened if I had not been with Father. I said nothing, though, and rather than guess at our location, we rode on in silence, letting the enchantment guide us through the storm.

I looked up when Beauty stopped again as darkness fell, then stood, shaking snow off my blanket and quilt, to gape at iron gates twenty feet tall set into stone walls their equal in height. Father had gone back into the wagon to rest; I tried to say his name and produced only a squeak.

Beauty stood not two lengths from the gates, which, like our enchanted rectangle, were enveloped in a hard, steady snowfall nothing like the howling maelstrom surrounding them. I hadn't seen them before she stopped, either more magic or the storm itself blocking them until their enchantment melded with ours.

The gates were laden with a copper design that took every advantage of the metal's natural properties: golden-red roses 'grew' all over them, stems and leaves blueish-green with patina. The girl I had been a year ago admired the artistry, and the one I was now felt sorry for the servants who had to polish the roses while leaving the stems rough and green. Then again, the gates were clearly protected by charms, anyway, so perhaps the roses stayed polished of their own volition.

As if I'd guessed a secret and earned passage, the gates swung open—inward, silent, brushing snow into arches as they passed over it—to invite us down a long straight avenue lined with massive oak trees. The length of the road and the whiteness of oncoming night hid what lay at the road's end, but I remained on my feet, swaying with the wagon's motion, to await what would be revealed.

Even expecting it, it made me laugh. A manor house—a palace—with wings unfolding from a central edifice, rounded facades that spoke of ballrooms, ground level arched doors in the straighter sections, no doubt leading to storage, stables, kitchens; towers at corners, wide shallow—and currently frozen, but cleared to skate on—ponds carefully kept in beautifully sculpted basins; gardens that backed onto forest, and all of it unheard of, a hidden castle in the woods. The gates could lead to nothing else; the enchantment that had saved us could hardly lead to anything else, and I laughed again at the astonishing absurdity of it.

Father, hearing my laugh, opened the front of the wagon cover, and breathed, "Sweet mother of the stars," in genuine reverence.

Beauty ambled around the ponds, stopping, as if a stablehand came to stand at her head, directly in front of the sweeping stairs that climbed to the castle's main doors. Father and I sat there like lumps, and after a minute or so, the doors—themselves easily ten feet in height, and carved with the same rose relief as the gates—opened.

"You go," Father finally said. "I'll…bring Beauty to the stables."

"You want me to go into an enchanted castle alone?"

"Ah," Father said. "Well. When you put it that way—"

Beauty stomped a foot impatiently, drawing our attention to her. The reins slipped, causing me to lurch for them, but a pecularity in how they slipped made me look again, and then swallow. "Father, is someone…holding…that rein?"

It looked for all the world like someone was: a firm but fair hand, like Flint's, just below Beauty's dribbling chin. As we watched, the rein tugged a little, not quite enough to coax Beauty into action, but more than enough to jolt Father and myself out of the wagon to see what was going on.

No sooner than we were on the ground than the reins' tension increased, and Beauty walked placidly away in the wake of an invisible guide, leaving us alone in the snow with an inviting door already opened to us.

"It's an impossible castle in an enchanted snowstorm in a haunted forest," I said in a voice slightly more shrill than I had hoped for. "Naturally there are invisible servants to care for the horses."

"Naturally." Father sounded as rattled as I, which made me feel a little better. Together we mounted the stairs, I, at least, having already given up on an expectation of a footman or butler standing at the door to greet us.

Nor was I disappointed: the door had, by all appearances, opened on its own, just as it then gracefully closed behind us. I caught a glimpse, as it closed, of the storm closing in: the magnitude of the enchantment, it seemed, had been for our benefit, and not simply the magical manner of the place keeping its personal weather mild for the season. I tugged my cloak around me, aware, as I had not been before, that it was wet and cold, and turned to examine our shelter.

A foyer of preposterous size stretched before us, with a golden carpet nine feet wide laid over a parquet floor that glowed from the reflected light of beeswax candles lining the foyer walls. Massive curved stairways to our left and right led to ornately-railed halls on the floor above. Beneath the overhanging hallway, the foyer darkened ominously, and I shrieked when a pair of gentle hands settled on my shoulders as if to remove my cloak.

The hands, startled, disappeared at my shriek. Father and I both spun around to find no one there at all. I clutched my heart and my cloak, wild-eyed with something between laughter and fear. "Invisible servants," I said again, once more shrilly, and swept my cloak off before I could reconsider the action. There was hardly a moment's hesitation before the cloak's weight left my hands, and then, as if to entice us, the pop and crackle off a hearth fire suddenly lit the distant darkness of the foyer. Father handed his wet cloak to the invisible servant as well, and we went, with great haste, toward the fire.

By the time we arrived at it there were dry clothes waiting for us, and a changing shield with its warm side to the fire, that we might dress in privacy without sacrificing any moment of warmth. I hadn't realized how cold I was until we were out of it, nor how damp with snow all my clothes had become. I pulled on soft, thick stockings and whimpered at the warmth and comfort of them, and gratefully layered myself in petticoats, a dress, and shawls before emerging from behind the changing shield.

Fur slippers awaited me, and a hat and muff. I pulled them on and sat on a thick fur in front of the fire, shivering because I was now warming up. Moments later Father, as bundled and comfortable-looking as I felt, joined me. We hugged, as much to reassure each other of our normality, at least, and fell back with sheepish smiles. A scrape sounded behind us and I turned to find two large, comfortable chairs had appeared, and between them, a small wooden table with two enormous, steaming mugs resting on it. "Oh, stars. Is that cider?"

It was, and no other drink in all my life warmed me so much as that mug did that day. Its rich, sweet, spicy flavor needed no alcohol to bring on weariness: the long day's travel through the snow, and the tremendous warmth of the fire, did that job. I drank the cider faster, determined to have it finished before sleep took me, and later, could only suppose that I'd succeeded, as I awoke eventually nestled in the same chair, and without cider spilled on my clothes.

Father had stretched out on the fur in front of the fire and was snoring gently. I chortled and went in search of a necessary, which I would never have found if an exquisitely detailed panel in the wall had not happened to open and reveal a latrine with a chamber pot. I said, "Thank you," to the empty air, and went about my business, wondering if invisible servants had senses of smell and whether it was unpleasant for them to empty latrines.

The necessary dealt with, I crept to the tall windows by the front doors and peered outside, where the only alleviation from the pitch-black night was the snow swirling madly around the palace. I could hardly hear it, even at the window, and so returned to the fire, grateful to sleep the rest of the night and wait out the storm.

In my absence, someone had brought a chaise in and placed it as close to the fire as it would fit without resting on Father. I whispered, "Thank you!" again, and crawled on to it, asleep within moments.

The scent of breakfast woke me again some time later. Eggs, toasted bread, bacon—oh, stars, bacon!—crisply-flavored apple juice, scones with salted butter and jelly: Father woke to the sounds of my feasting, and we both ate until our bellies ached. "All right," I said when I could eat no more, "I admit there's something to be said for unadulterated luxury."

"I could marry even Pearl off, with this bacon as her dowry," Father said with a smile, then lifted his gaze to the room and added, somewhat awkwardly, "Thank you."

An agreeable silence responded, and we sighed as one with content. "The storm hadn't stopped yet, last night, but I wonder if we can find our way to Beauty. I'm sure she's fine, but I'd like to check on her."

A handful of candles lit immediately, and then, when we didn't rise, a few more beyond them came to life as well. Father and I exchanged glances, ending with me shrugging my eyebrows and stealing another scone. "Lead on," I said to the candles, and, nibbling on the scone, followed the castle's guidance through tall, echoing halls down to a modest door that led into the stables.

Beauty stood fat and glossy in a stall, so full of hay and grain that she leaned lazily against one of the box walls with her eyelids drooping sleepily. She'd been brushed to a shine, and her feathery leg hair was fluffed and lovely. I got her an apple she absolutely didn't need, and she slobbered it from my hand more graciously than usual. Then I pushed the stable door open, finding the estate outside a glittering wonderland under icy clear blue skies. Father came to stand with me at the door a moment before letting out a long, relieved breath. "I'll harness Beauty, and we can begin to find our way home."

"What, and offend our invisible hosts?" I asked, amused. "Wait five minutes, then turn around, and I bet you'll find her harnessed and ready to go. I wonder if the road is clear, though." Not that there'd been a road, or not one worth mentioning. Just the rolling patch of shallow snow attending us so we could make our way to the hidden palace in the woods. "Or if the enchantment will clear a path…."

"The enchantment brought us this far. We may as well trust it to the end." An odd note came into Father's voice. I looked askance at him, but he shook his head, passing it off, so I let it pass as well.

"Five minutes," I wagered. "I'm going to take that five minutes to look around a little. I might skate across those ponds."

"In your boots?"

"I wouldn't be surprised if there are skates waiting for me," I said blithely, and went forth into the blinding morning.

It was quiet until I picked the rose.

There were, in fact, skates waiting for me at the pond. I fastened them to my shoes and flew across ice that had been blown or swept clear since the storm's end, spinning clumsily and laughing. The ponds took me all the way to the palace's other wing, using considerably more than five minutes I'd promised Father, but rather than turn back, I removed the skates and marched onward through the snow, eager to see the gardens that lined the estate's perimeter. Even now, in the dead of winter, they were lushly green, that darkest green of winter blooms, and splashes of red and white stood out against them, like holly berries and snow in clumps the size of my hand. I waded through shallow snow—regardless of the storm's ferocity, it appeared the palace allowed only a few inches of accumulation—until I'd reached the climbing bushes, but long before that, I knew it wasn't holly at all, but roses.

The blooms came in every color from snowiest white to the deepest crimson red, and they were the size of my hand. They grew together indiscriminately, no apparent care for whether blooms of different colors should appear on the same bush; some, in a nod to their unusual situation, blushed red to white, or white to red, while others ran a gamut of pinks with their hearts or their outer petals curling to blood tones. Their scent was enriching, delicious enough to drink and so heavy I felt I could climb the sweet smell all the way to the sky.

If I could make perfume of these, we might wend our way back into wealth after all. A cutting might survive, if I kept it close to my heart on the drive home, and tended it carefully in a warm spot for the winter. Without any particular thought of wrongdoing, I chose an especially gorgeous, sturdy-looking bloom, and plucked it from the bush.

A roar of crippling weight broke the morning's quiet and drove me to the ground. I knotted my hands over my head, the rose tangling in my hair, and screamed as if my smaller cry could break the power of the large one. Wind howled around me, smashing petals and leaves to the snowy ground and breaking branches over my back, so wicked thorns snagged in my borrowed clothes. Shards of snow and ice drove into my hands where they covered my head, and I clenched my eyes tight against the turmoil, whispering a prayer to the sun and her sister moon that I might be saved from the storm.

Whether it was the power of my prayer or—more likely—that a little time accustomed me to the dreadful weight of the roaring, I began to hear words in the wind, distorted by powerful rage, but words none-the-less: How dare you take my rose, the wind demanded. Is it not enough I have warmed you, fed you, clothed you? Is it not enough to have saved you from the storm? Are you so ungrateful a wretch as to require the very heart of my garden as well?

No: it was not prayer, or even time that accustomed me to the terrible sound. It was that the sound approached me, clarifying as it came closer. Little by little I unwound from the earth, eyes still fastened on the ground, until I sat on my heels with the offending rose piercing tiny, agonizing holes in my palms. As the roaring came to an end, I closed my fingers around the thorny stem, as if the pain would lend me strength, and with that borrowed strength, I lifted my gaze to look upon a Beast.

From my vantage, kneeling on the ground, the Beast looked some eight feet tall, and half again that wide at its terrible shoulders. It fell forward onto all fours, thrusting a huge, massive face with fetid breath at mine, and I was, of all things, reminded of little Jet, trying to get Maman's attention, and putting his face so close to hers that her eyes would cross and she couldn't properly see him at all.

Undone by a combination of that thought and terror, I laughed.

The Beast reared back, confusion and offense obvious even on an utterly inhuman face. I could see it more clearly from the little distance, and whatever laughter I had died in my throat, but for that moment I had taken, if not an upper hand, at least an equal one, and the Beast did not know how to respond.

Neither, in fairness, did I. Its face was a mockery of a man's, as though its maker had begun with that template but had no idea of what features were meant to rest on a human form. Heavy brows, like a ram's, furrowed over small, boar-like eyes, and short, thick twisting horns swept back from its brow, giving its head too much length and the look of something that could batter down a door, or face a bull. Its face was flatter than a boar or ram's, with highly rounded cheekbones framing a muzzle that could have been a lion's compressed to the depth of a man's profile. A hare lip gave way to an overbiting lower jaw, from whence tusks as long as my finger protruded, and I wondered that it didn't cut its own face with the motion of its jaw. A tangled mane of fur flew back from its face and jowls and ran freely over its shoulders, only becoming shorter along hugely muscled arms. Brutal-looking clawed hands dug into the earth not three steps away from me, and made it clear that I could be as easily rent as the soil.

I concluded in that moment that I preferred to die on my feet, and lurched to them, still clinging to the rose. With the Beast on all fours, and me on my feet, I was the taller of us, though its shoulders were nearly at the level of my eyes, and its mane bristled some distance down its spine, lending it more height. Its neck, though, was not suited to looking up from a position of all fours, and so in order to see me, it backed up several steps. Although I knew better, the effect was of its retreat, and my confidence regained a little ground again.

At least, it did until the Beast shook itself, growling, and rose to a human stance again, teaching me that it was near enough to eight feet tall. Its torso was as misshapen as its face, a deep bullish chest whittling to a waist strangely narrow by comparison; beasts were not meant to stand as men, and to do so threw its dimensions off in a way my mind could not entirely accept. Its haunches and knees and ankles were lion-like, bent all around the wrong way for a man, and massive clawed back feet suggested it could leap across half the estate in a single effort.

It was wearing trousers.

Everything else, its mismade form, its violence, its earth-shattering roar, came to a stop in the face of that unexpected discovery. Beasts—animals of the forest and jungles, or even the farmlands—did not wear clothing. Whatever this Beast was, he—and it was, I felt certain, a he, as it lacked any kind of breasts and a female Beast would, in my estimation, wear a dress to cover herself in the same way this male one retained his modesty—he was not an unthinking monster. A monster, yes, but not a mindless one.

Nor could he be, if he had been roaring words at me, so I might have realized sooner that he was not entirely an animal. On the other hand, my heart had not yet calmed and I still swayed with fear, so it had not, perhaps, been very long since his tumultuous arrival. Before I could speak, another of his bellows split the air: "How dare you take my rose?"

I took a step back, more from the force of his shout than fear; somehow the trousers had restored my equilibrium to an astonishing degree. My voice, however, was more tremulous than I preferred when I replied. "How could I possibly know I wasn't meant to?"

He continued to roar as if he hadn't heard me, but I hadn't expected him to. I continued anyway, my voice still shaking, determination pushing it forward, if not volume. "I suppose I might have realized that everything had been given, without us asking for it. I suppose I might have realized that to take, under those circumstances, was ill-mannered. But I didn't. I'm sorry. You saved our lives, and I've repaid you badly. I hope you can forgive me."

"How much?" His tenor changed so quickly, the mighty voice dropping from a roar to a rumble so smoothly, that I almost didn't recognize the words as ones I knew. Even when I did, the meaning escaped me, and I made a small, confused gesture with the rose. "How much do you hope I can forgive you?" he clarified.

I stared up—and up, and up—at him, and wondered what he expected as an answer. Wondered what I dared give him as an answer, and wondered whether it mattered at all. "I wouldn't die for it."

"Would you stay?"

Perhaps it was that a voice came from the Beast at all: maybe that was what made understanding the meaning of his words so difficult. "Stay? Stay here? With you?"

The Beast made a motion of surprising grace, encompassing the gardens, the palace, and himself. "Yes."

"I would rather not!"

"And what would you exchange instead? Your father? Your family? The village, which feasts uninvited on the beasts of my forest?"

"Exch—the vill—do you mean to say an object must remain here in exchange for the rose, in order to earn your forgiveness? And what do you mean, your forest? The lodge is ours, and the forest ours to hunt! And you can't take an entire village in exchange for a rose, that's preposterous. What would you do with it?" I looked around the garden, imagining the enormous grounds beyond them, and reconsidered. "The villagers' lives would probably be much easier here, with the obliging snowfall and the invisible servants. Not that I intend to trade them for your rose, but—"

"Someone must pay. The roses are precious to me. If you refuse to stay, I will take something else in exchange. You have sisters, brothers. Perhaps one of them."

"Over my dead body!"

"That," the Beast snarled, suddenly very large and angry again, "can be arranged."

I cringed, cutting my hands on the rose's thorns again, and that was how my father found us: me quailing before a looming Beast. He threw himself between us, all his age forgotten in the defense of his child, and I saw with a shock that he carried a sword, a weapon I didn't believe he'd touched since his days in the Border Wars. The Beast raised an enormous paw to slap him away, and Father darted to one side, piercing the monster's hand with his blade. The Beast roared so deeply that snow fell from the rosebushes. He closed his hand around the sword, yanking away from Father, and withdrew it from his own paw to hold in his uninjured hand. It looked diminished in his grasp, like a trifle or a toy, but he wielded it with strange competency, reversing the blade as if he would bring it down to impale my father.

I flung myself in front of Father, screaming, "No!", and the Beast growled, "Someone must pay."

"A rose isn't worth a life!"

The Beast lifted his bloody paw-like hand, roaring, "This is more than a rose!"

I pushed Father back and advanced furiously on the Beast. "He was protecting me, which he wouldn't have needed to do if you weren't being so terrifying over a stupid rose! You'll heal! The rosebush isn't harmed for having lost one bloom! But you will not slay my father over a rose, or steal away any of my family, or the villagers, or anyone else! I picked the rose! If you're so determined that someone has to stay to pay for it, then yes, I'll stay! And I'll make you regret it until your dying day!"

Father blurted, "Amber," in horror, and the Beast began to laugh, a deep, bitter sound that reverberated off the frozen ground and distant estate walls. "If you can bring about my dying day, I will welcome your presence here more profoundly than you will ever know. Go," he said more sharply to Father. "Be grateful that your daughter is as bold as she is lovely." He turned on a massive paw and clumped away through the garden, leaving us alone.

I hadn't realized, until he left, that the Beast's presence made the air feel heavier, like a storm was coming. No wonder: I'd hardly had time to. My shoulders slumped and I curled my hand around—around the rose, thorns prickling my palm again. I'd forgotten I even still held the cursed thing, and I began to cast it away, then thought again. If it was going to cause so much trouble, then at the very least I would keep it. Not for cuttings to make perfume from, not if I was to remain here—or maybe I would grow it, and make perfume anyway, just to be spiteful—but if not that, to press and dry, and that, too, would be for spite. So instead of throwing it away, I put it down in the snow carefully, where I could collect it later, and looked at the dots of blood rising from my palm.

They sparkled faintly, as if this place made something so mundane as bleeding a magical process, too. Wonderful: that would make my moon bloods a splendid experience, here. I sighed, curled my hand around the thorn-pricks, and turned to face my father, who had been ranting since the Beast's departure, and to whom I had not been listening. I didn't need to. I knew he would be speaking of the Beast's horrors and forbidding me to stay while also demanding to know how it was I had come to promise to stay, and, indeed, such was the content of his speech. When he finally fell silent, awaiting my explanations, I only said, "You should take Beauty and leave now, Father, before any more of the day is lost."

He said, "No," with such finality that I didn't bother arguing. I had very little doubt that one way or another, the Beast would see him on his way very soon, and I was grateful for a few more hours of human company. "What happened, Amber?"

"I picked a rose. Our host objected." My mild response amused me, and I began to laugh. Not a healthy, full laugh; that I knew. It was fed by fear and absurdity and the tingling pain in my hand, but it was laughter, and I was grateful for that, too. When it ran its course, I added, "He is the Beast of our forest, and threatened the villagers for feasting on the forest's beasts, if I didn't stay. Or the family. He threatened them too. So I'm staying."

"I'll stay!"

"You didn't pick the rose."

"I'm old, Amber. My life is near enough to over already. What does it matter if a Beast kills me?"

"It matters very much to me!" I glanced behind me at the Beast's dreadful footprints. "Besides, I don't think he's going to kill me. He had ample opportunity while I was cowering and screaming, and he seemed quite specific about taking villagers, or someone from the family, not killing them."

"So you intend to remain his prisoner here forever?"

I looked toward the palace and said, "There are worse prisons," hollowly. "Perhaps he'll let me go sometime. After the lifespan of a rose."

Father's voice dropped. "These roses are blooming in the dead of winter, Amber. How long do you think their lifespan is?"

I crouched to collect the flower that had started all the trouble, and gestured with it as I stood. "Well, I should be able to make some astonishing perfumes with it, if it lasts forever."

"Amber!"

"I'd better find some humor in it, Father, gallows or otherwise, or I'll go mad before you've even left the gates." I offered him a brief, determined smile. "Now let's go back to the castle so I can write a goodbye letter to the family for you to bring home."

I heard the shape of my name on his inhalation, the protestation he wanted to make, but somehow he held it back, for which I was grateful. Instead he offered me his arm. I tucked mine through it, and we walked in silence back to the palace that was now my prison.

The letter ought to have been difficult to write. Instead it came smoothly from my pen, a recitation of facts so peculiar that there seemed no profit in trying to explain them: either they would be accepted, or they would not. Father would back my story up, and Pearl, I knew, would believe me. I wondered again what might have happened if I had not gone with Father. A death, Pearl had said. Maybe none of this would even have transpired; perhaps something would have gone wrong in the city.

I didn't believe that, though. I thought he would have died in the storm, or perhaps worst of all, been rescued by the enchantment only to pick the wretched rose himself, as a gift for me, because he knew I liked them. I thought he would have died here, at the Beast's hands, for that transgression, and just imagining that version of events was worse than staying here myself.

Father and I walked down to the stables again together when I'd finished the letter. Beauty stood ready in her harness, already hitched to the wagon, but the wagon sat lower than it had when we'd arrived. I glanced through the tightly-drawn cover and let out a sharp laugh. "Father."

He paused in climbing to the driver's seat and looked into the wagon. "Mother of stars."

For a little while we were both occupied in going through the wagon's contents, which were as generous—more generous—than the meals and clothes we'd been given since our arrival. There were books, stacks of them that beggared the few we'd bought in the city to replace those we'd lost in the fire. Prominent among the gift books was a copy of one we had been unable to find in the city: a compilation of geological and mythological information about the earth and stones. We children had all been named for rocks inside its pages, and as children, we girls had loved poring over the beautifully inked drawings that represented our namesakes. That small volume's loss had been one of the things we could hardly bear to think about, and our inability to find another copy had been quietly heartbreaking. To see it here amongst the Beast's gifts broke my heart again, in another way.

Beneath the books, well. Most of the fabric was practical: tightly woven linens and wools in varying weights, and mostly colors that would either dye well or wear well, showing little dirt. A little of it, though, was raw silk, for a few really fine dresses. Most of the coins were spendable: bits of nickel or copper, silver pennies and ingots of iron that could be spent or shaped. Some were gold, though, and only of any use to us in the city.

There was nothing practical about any of the jewels, but then, jewels were never meant for practical purposes. Some were small enough for trade, but one chest, when opened, revealed seven polished stones settled in a circle against black velvet. A rectangle of jet could only be seen against the velvet because of its shine; a round-cornered triangle of brick-red jasper threaded with white quartz looked shockingly decadent in comparison. A thick arrowhead of waxy pink flint, lined in white, completed the top half of the circle. Below them lay an opal the size and shape of a partridge's egg, a square of dark grey granite flecked with blue, and an heart-shaped garnet as large as my thumbnail.

In the midst of them, though, placed in the middle of the other six, lay a perfect tear-drop pearl four inches long. I couldn't bring myself to even touch it, my fingers hovering above the jewel. I was no witch, but I could feel the pearl's energy pressing toward my fingertips. Spreading my hands over the whole chest made both hands tingle, as if every stone in the box was laden with enchantment.

I couldn't tell if Father was angry or afraid—perhaps both—when he said, "This Beast seems to know us very well. That pearl, though. Why such a treasure?"

I heard myself say, "Because Pearl is a witch," somewhat distantly as I gently closed the chest. Father flinched when I did, as if he'd been enchanted by the jewels, but then he heard what I'd said and shook off the enchantment for surprise.

"She is?"

"I think so. You'll have to ask her. But if she is, she'll be able to focus great magic through that pearl. He does know us very well. I suppose he would, if we've been living in his forest." I was obscurely, and absurdly, hurt that there had been no jewel for me. I'd cast my lot in with the Beast, but to have him divorce me from my family so thoroughly, so swiftly, made my heart ache with a too-fast beat. "Wait. Before you go, Father." I ran back into the palace to the parlor we'd been housed in, and collected the wretched rose that had started my troubles. I brought it back to him, tucking it into his coat. "If I'm going to be condemned for picking it, then the least it can do is start a new rose garden in my name. I think Flint will have the knack of caring for it."

"Amber," Father said in dismay. "I want nothing of the Beast's roses. Or any of the rest of this. I only want you to come home with me."

"We are not to get what we want, though, Father." I took a deep breath. "You had better go. If you don't go now I don't know if I can bear it."

"Then I won't go," he said ferociously, but somehow, within minutes, we had embraced and I stood alone at the head of the long driveway, watching the wagon grow smaller with distance.

"He'll be home before dark," the Beast rumbled from behind me, and I, with all the grace and poise of a startled child, shrieked and jolted away from him. When I turned, he stood a few feet away, a huge dark blot against the snow, but with evident surprise written across his horrible face. "I didn't mean to startle you. I thought you would like to know he would make it home safely and quickly, within an hour or two."

I did want to know that. I also did not at all want to be in any way grateful to the Beast. I stared at him with the anger of having been frightened and the fear of what came next, and the abrupt, overwhelming loneliness of abandonment, even if I'd accepted the path myself. Very suddenly I was on the verge of tears, which was worse than anything else.

The Beast stared back at me, and, apparently recognizing the disaster about to erupt, said, "Let me show you to your rooms." He turned swiftly, dropping to all fours as he did so, and paced away.

He had a tail. I hadn't noticed when he'd left the garden earlies, but he had a tail. A bear's tail, short and waggily and not at all in keeping with the general size and ferocity of him. Except it was, because bears, after all, were large and ferocious. But they were also round through the waist and hip, whereas the Beast narrowed more like a lion. I might have expected a longer, lashing tail, but not the stubbly little thing that stuck out from the back of his trousers.

I wiped the back of my hand across my eyes, and followed the Beast and his ridiculous little tail back to the palace.

The palace doors swept open ahead of us, and closed again behind us with the dignity of enchantment. I remembered with a pang how I hadn't even seen Glover in the room as Father and I discussed what to do, the night we fled the city. Servants were already invisible to their masters; what real difference did it make if they were in fact invisible? "Are they real?"

The Beast understood my question, which was intriguing and uncomfortable all at once. "As real as you or I."

Given that he was an eight foot tall Beast in an enchanted castle, and I was the sister of a witch, I thought it wiser not to consider that definition of reality any farther. The Beast led me up the right side of the sweeping stairway, and only a small distance down the corridor before pausing at a door, and opening it. "Your rooms."

Considering what little I'd seen of the rest of the palace, I expected the space I entered to be sumptuous. Nor was I disappointed: the door opened on a sitting room with a fire already crackling in its hearth. Woven rugs lay beneath animal furs to keep the floor's chill well away from the feet, and there were all the accoutrements one might expect in a civilized sitting space: liquor sideboards, tables, comfortable chairs, all done in rosewoods and golden fabrics. Beyond that, through another doorway, I caught a glimpse of the bedroom, replete with a canopied bed and windows that let sunlight spill generously across the floor. All well and good; I would look to it in a moment. But something in the sitting room had caught my eye. I crossed to a six-shelf bookcase filled to overflowing, and said, under my breath, "Maybe this won't be so bad."

"You like to read," the Beast said as I took a familiar title down. I nodded, turning through the pages, and he said, "There is a library."

I turned, surprised, the book still in hand. "You mean, more than this?"

"Considerably more."

I put the book down. "Can I see?"

The Beast gave me a look that, had it come from Pearl, I would have called pedantic, and I muttered, "May I see," rather than wait to discover I had traded a beautiful literalist of a sister for a dreadful literalist of a Beast.

A sound emanated from his chest, and after a moment I judged it a chuckle. I felt my mouth pinch into sourness, and the Beast's chuckle became a laugh that reverberated in my bones. "This way," he said, and I followed him in a dudgeon warped with rueful amusement. He was a monster keeping me against my will, but, his initial rage at my picking the rose having passed, he seemed a rather reasonable captor. I was not, at the moment, either afraid or resentful: the prospect of a library and an enchanted castle were intriguing enough to allow me to pretend that this was nothing more than a temporary adventure to be embraced. The reality would settle in soon enough.

We went up another set of stairs, back across the corridor above the foyer, and a little more deeply into the hall than my room had been. The Beast opened a door on the opposite side of the hall from mine, and I stepped onto a balcony overlooking three open floors in one of the round-fronted rooms facing the front gardens.

Bookshelves and reading nooks lined the walls of each floor, heavily carpeted balconies, like the one I stood on, growing larger as they approached the distant ground floor. I glanced up at a glass domed roof, and smiled at the effect: from here, the architecture made it seem as though we were nestled in an enormous egg, its shell made of books. I drew my hand along the satin-smooth balcony rail as I walked around it, a foolish smile on my face. Almost halfway around, part of the floor dropped into a bannistered stairway that led down to the next level. I followed it down, and then the next one down again, making half-circles of the library until I reached the ground floor and walked to its middle to look up at the egg-shaped balconies. The Beast paced a little way behind me on all fours, not rising to his—hind feet, I supposed—until we reached the bottom floor. "The top balcony, just below the dome, is an iris. It can be closed, and the dome becomes an ideal spot for star-gazing."

"Doesn't your breath steam it up?"

The Beast chuckled again, that deep sound more like a growl. "I suppose it should, but no."

Magic, I thought, but didn't say. I did say, "I didn't know there were so many books in all the world."

"You are educated." That was a question, though he didn't phrase it as one. I dropped my chin in a scant nod, still gazing upward, and the Beast went on, "You know, perhaps, that over the centuries, much knowledge has been lost. Libraries have been deliberately burned or otherwise sacked."

My lip curled. "Yes."

"This library seems to have…saved…those books. Copied them, or stolen them before ruin took them, or…something of that nature. I've found books here that are referenced by other books, more modern books, as lost to time. I think it's possible that every piece of deliberately preserved writing is stored here, somewhere."

I turned to him, astonished. "Scholars from all over the world would die to come here."

"As it turns out," the Beast said, "people prefer to kill than to die for something, and I am a Beast."

I stood with that a moment, absorbing it and all of its implications, before turning away. The Beast stepped back. "If you're hungry, ask the servants. Otherwise, if you care to join me for dinner, they'll let you know when it's ready, and bring you to the dining hall."

He left, and I had to watch from the corner of my eye so I could judge the moment, just as he crossed the threshold, to call, "Do I have a choice?"

He hesitated, a massive paw on the door and his head turned a little toward me, although he made no effort to meet my eye. "You always have a choice."

I neither read nor ate, but spent a few hours wandering the library. Books tended to return to the shelves after lying fallow a few minutes, if I'd taken them down to examine. After several iterations of that, I cleared my throat. "You don't have to do that, you know. I'll clean up after myself. I mean, if you want to, go ahead, but don't feel obliged."

I felt a hum in the air, as if an urgent discussion took place just out of earshot. Then the most recent book I'd taken down rose from the table I'd put it on, and settled itself firmly back into place on the shelves. I laughed. "All right. Thank you."

The air hummed again, and I went about my business a while longer before climbing into the dome through a staircase built neatly into the shelves. Gold-painted lead joined the windows, each of which were a tremendous arching triangle of glass that ran from floor to roof. They warped a little near the bottoms, showing their age, but the clarity at eye-height and above astonished me.

The Beast's palace was a patch of tamed land in the midst of a forest that went on forever on all sides. I had no sense which direction home lay; there were no tell-tale threads of smoke rising to indicate our village, or any other, nor any cut in the forest roof to suggest a river running through it. The treetops were black and white with winter right now, but in the summer I imagined the green leaves would look like a carpet that could be walked on all the way to the edge of the world.

It was hard to tell where exactly the rose gardens ended and the forest began, even with the high stone wall that surrounded the palace grounds. At the front of the palace, along the driveway, the demarcation was clear enough, but forest and roses grew together beyond that, as if the forest intended to one day encroach upon, and defeat, the palace at its heart.

I shivered, deciding the dome was perhaps best left for night, when all that could be seen were the stars. It only took a few minutes to work my way back to my room, the long halls offering scant temptation to explore them. There would be plenty of time to do that, and I was both hungry and tired.

A fire still crackled in my room, and the book I'd taken down now sat on a table beside a chair before the fire. I brushed my fingers over it on the way by, saying, "Thank you," again, but went to investigate the bedroom I hadn't looked at earlier.

Sunset was coming on, and in its light, my room swam like a pool of gold. The bed's clothes were a dark sky blue, embroidered with fanciful beasts and birds of gold, and its frame, like the rest of the furniture in the room, was of golden oak, rich but not dark with age. The furniture covers were done in blue and gold as well, though a deeper shade of blue, and the floor, where it could be seen beneath rugs and furs, glowed as golden as the furniture. The walls were tapestry-lined, keeping warmth in, but they too were light in shade, and picked with threads of gold. It was not just the effect of the tidy hearth in one wall that made the room seem warmer than the rest of the palace, but the light and color. The Beast wanted me to like it here, which was either reassuring or disturbing, depending on how I wanted to think about it.

For the moment, I would take reassuring. I went to the vanity, which held as fine a mirror as I'd ever seen, and touched its table-top before laughing.

The mirror's frame and the table's edging were both amber, glowing pieces of polished gold that looked lovely against the table's blue and white streaked agate surface. A hand mirror entirely backed in amber lay on the table, and upon inspection, the comb in one drawer, and the brush beside it, were respectively of, and backed by, amber. "Enough," I said, as if the servants could respond. "Perhaps too much, in fact. Thank you for welcoming me, but enough."

That almost-audible hum rustled the air again. I turned as if I could see the speakers, and instead found a gown lying on the bed. It was not amber-colored, and I wondered if that had been the topic my invisible servants were discussing; I wouldn't put it past them to have somehow changed the color while I was turning around. No, instead it was blue with lighter blue roses embroidered onto it—I hadn't been wearing blue when I arrived, and I wondered how they knew I liked it—had an underskirt of a dark, handsome red, and sleeves that hadn't lost their minds with frills and scoops. I had worn much more dramatic gowns when we lived in the city, but this one seemed suitable for dinner with a Beast, especially since I could put it on by myself.

By the time I went to inspect myself in the vanity mirror, one more thing had changed: a half-moon amber necklace lay on the blue agate, the pendant set in gold wire that bound it to a delicate chain. Crescent moon amber earrings lay beside it, but it was the necklace that knocked my breath away. I sank to the vanity's stool, collecting the pendant in my palm, and whispered, "So you hadn't forgotten me, after all."

I bowed my head and cried over the necklace a long time; long enough that when I had finally wept myself dry, I supposed dinner had been taken hours earlier, and that the Beast had presumed himself stood up. But I was fiercely hungry by then, so I rose and went in search of the dining hall, or at least the kitchen, and perhaps also the Beast.

None of those three things were difficult to find: I followed my nose—or maybe the subtle guidance of an invisible servant—to the dining room, beyond which presumably lay the kitchen, but I had no need to go that far: the Beast awaited me at a table that looked untouched. Or, rather, the Beast awaited me by the fire, near a table of food that looked untouched. I stopped in the doorway, fingers folded around the necklace. I'd wanted to wear it, to remind me of my family. Too late I wondered what wearing it might say to him.

He turned his head as he'd done when exiting the library: acknowledging me, but not looking at me. "Are you all right?"

There were far too many answers to that, available in a range of tones from tragic to sarcastic. I settled, after a long moment's silence, on, "Not particularly."

The Beast nodded as though he'd expected nothing less. He was better dressed than he had been earlier: not just trousers, but a well-tailored coat that did nothing to hide his bulk but hid a great deal of fur, and a cravat tied so neatly I assumed his invisible servants had done the job. "Don't you get awfully warm in that?"

He met my eyes, startled, and laughed. It appeared I had a capacity for surprising my host, which, given his claws and teeth, seemed like it could end badly for me. He didn't leap to rend me, though, only made a gesture at himself, at the clothes, and said, "Yes."

"But you wear it anyway."

"Particularly at mealtimes," he confessed. "It helps keep fur out of the food."

I didn't want to smile, but I did anyway. "Well, if you've gone to all that trouble, and there's all this food waiting, maybe we should eat. I'm starving. Not," I said a moment later, as we sat down, "this starving…"

The table was long enough to comfortably seat my entire family and the Beast besides, and laden from one end to another with food. Roast pheasant, half a boar, a rack of lamb despite the improbable season for such; sauces ranging from mint to cranberry and innumerable in between; vegetables with crispy brown edges from roasting in goose fat, and half a dozen bottles of wine. That was just what I could easily see. I had no doubt there were more delectables hidden away.

"I eat a great deal," the Beast said carefully.

My appetite momentarily drained away. "Is that why I'm here?"

"To be eaten?" The Beast sounded genuinely horrified. "No!"

I let out a shaky breath. "I supposed not, or you'd have slain me in the gardens and hung me for dinner. Unless you were planning to fatten me up first, in which case…" I took a bite of pheasant and slid down as far into the chair as my dress would let me, groaning with delight. "In which case it may be worth it. That bacon this morning was stupendous, too."

"I'm glad." The Beast had not quite recovered, it seemed, from my presumption that I was there as a meal. He watched me eat, and after a while, when I had stuffed myself nearly silly, I realized that he had only watched me eat, and not eaten anything himself.

"I thought you said you ate a lot."

"I do. Not, however, in company."

I considered the Beast's strange muzzle, his thrusting jaw and the deadly tusks that framed his face, and thought of wolves and cats eating. That in itself was a tearing, violent action, but their lower jaws were at least wired for it, not overbiting the upper jaw to an ungainly degree. "I assume it's an unsightly process."

The Beast nodded, and so did I. "Does that mean you've been waiting here hungry all evening, afraid to eat because I might show up unexpectedly and interrupt?"

"Something like that."

I put my napkin aside. "Then I should go, so you can eat in peace."

He tilted his vast head. "Why would you be kind enough to care?"

"I don't know." I waited on myself, seeing if any other answer surfaced, but none did, so I said again, "I don't know," and rose. "Good night, Beast."

His enormous chuckle rolled through the room. "'Beast'?"

Heat shot through me. "I'm sorry. I didn't even think to ask if you had a name."

"'Beast' will do. It is what I am, after all." He chuckled again, and I fled toward the door, arrested there by the sound of my name and a question: "Amber, will you sleep with me?"

"Excuse me?" I looked back, too astonished to be insulted, and thinking, impossibly, that somehow the Beast had overheard Rafe's conversation with his friends, over a year ago. "Is that what you've kept me here for?"

"I most sincerely doubt it," the Beast replied, sounding, indeed, most sincere. "Answer freely; it will cost you nothing."

I snapped, "Then don't be ridiculous," and stalked out.

I slept better than I would have expected, under the circumstances, and awoke the next morning so warm and comfortable that for a few breaths it was as if the fire had never happened and we had never left the city. Then memory returned, crushing those happy thoughts, and I rolled over to bury my face in the pillows and cry. When that was over, I forced myself out of bed to find eggs and toast and more of that glorious bacon awaiting me, which made it harder to be miserable. Once fed, I dressed in the most sensible clothes available to me, put on my amber necklace, and went exploring.

The library lay where I'd expected ballrooms to be, but in the opposite rounded facade my expectations were fulfilled: a magnificent ballroom, with balconies and seating areas unlike the library's, all open to the high ceiling rather than shaping the room like an egg. I wondered when the last time a ball had been held there, then went away from that room in hopes of finding answers to that, and other, questions.

The halls were broad with floors of well-polished parquet, and lit with candles that roused themselves when I came close, then went dormant again behind me. I opened innumerable doors, finding nothing more extraordinary than bedrooms and sitting rooms. I spent half a day doing that, walking far enough inside the palace that by lunchtime I was wobbling with exhaustion. The Beast didn't join me for lunch, and to my embarrassment, I fell asleep in front of the dining room fire only to be awakened by his arrival near dinnertime. "I've been working hard every day for over a year," I mumbled in apology. "I don't know why a walk around a house, even a big one, put me to sleep."

"Did your older sister sleep a lot after you arrived at the lodge?"

"Pearl has always slept a lot." I frowned at the Beast, trying to order my thoughts. "But now that you mention it, yes, she did. A great deal. So did Maman. I thought they were just grieving for the life we'd lost."

"That's no doubt part of it, but it often happens when magic awakens, and your sister had only just become a witch, hadn't she?"

"How do you know that?" I wasn't quite awake enough to be scared or angry by his knowledge, only befuddled by it.

"You live in my forest, and now in my palace. I know a great deal about what goes on here."

"Do the little birds and mice come to tell you?" I mumbled, scrubbing my hands over my face. "All right, if you don't want to tell me, don't. Have you eaten? Because I think I'm going to have dinner and go back to bed."

"I will keep you company."

"All right." From the way he'd said it, I thought if I flapped a hand at him and told him to shoo, that he would, which made me more willing to have him stay. Dinner was no less extravagant than it had been the night before, and I found myself breathing, "Are you sure you're not fattening me up?" without expectation of being heard.

"Quite sure. Judging from how much of the house you explored today, I think you're in no danger even if I was trying to." The Beast's mouth was not well suited to a smile, but I thought I saw a glimpse of one at its corner as I looked up guiltily. "I have excellent hearing," he offered, as if it was an apology.

"And probably a keen sense of smell," I muttered, but that time I expected to be heard.

His face twitched with amusement again. "Yes."

"What are you?"

I hadn't meant to ask that. The Beast's entire form went fierce with surprise and I quailed, more shocked by the asking than the response. It took a few seconds for either of us to be able to speak, and when he did, he replied, "A Beast," without any of the humor from before.

I set my teeth together. "Yes, but you weren't always, were you. A Beast who had never been a man wouldn't care about clothes, or what he looked like when he ate, or ancient libraries restored in his own. Or spy on a family in a hunting lodge nearby, and you did spy. You knew all of our names. You gave them that wagonload of goods. The cloth, the books, the stones. Why?"

"Most of the stones carry protective charms. The rest was as much to disguise their importance as anything else."

A chill sluiced down my spine and over my arms. "Why do they need protection? And what do you mean, most of the stones?" I curled my fingers around the amber necklace I wore, wondering if it offered protection, and from whom. Or what, if it came to that.

The Beast, watching me, said, "It's woven with a protective charm as well. I wasn't sure if you'd wear it."

"It makes me feel closer to my family. Why are the stones all charmed?"

"Magic can be troublesome." The Beast shrugged a huge shoulder. "The pearl is more than just charmed, and could be of great help to your sister's witchery, if she chooses to use it."

"I could feel it had power. It made my hands tingle. Why wouldn't she use it?"

"Because she's received it in exchange for her sister."

"A bridewealth, paid to the whole family?"

The Beast held himself still for a breath, then released it in an exhalation that seemed even larger than he was. "I would not have said that. Since you've broached the topic, though, Amber, will you sleep with me?"

"For the Queen's sake, no! Are you going to ask me that every day? What use will the pearl be to Pearl? What can she use it for?"

"If she learns, you'll know." The Beast raised a paw. "Amber, there is very little I can tell you about…anything. I can tell you that I'm caught in a war between two very powerful and very angry people, and that I can do nothing directly to challenge my fate."

A dozen more questions leapt to my lips and stopped there, another chill draining through me. "'Directly'."

He nodded once, and I got up and left the table to chase the edges of understanding undisturbed.

The Beast was a pawn in a war. The idea of his great and terrible self being unable to guide his own fate carried twists of black humor: I, who was so much less than he—and arguably much more, being at least human—could hardly dream of managing my own future if the Beast couldn't direct his.

Could not directly affect his. But my sister was a witch, and he had given her a gift of magic. I had no doubt that was an indirect action that could affect him, if Pearl were to pursue it. I thought she would. The pearl had power, and I doubted the new-found witchery in her veins would let it lie. I didn't know what would happen then, but I had confidence in something happening.

I might be here only as an incentive, an excuse, to get that pearl to my sister. But perhaps there was more than that; perhaps my being here simply disrupted the status quo, changed the places of the pieces on the board, if nothing else. An extra piece had to change the game in some way. I found the idea oddly comforting. If there was some purpose to my captivity, then that captivity—not exactly onerous as it was—was easier to accept.

I had taken the stairs to my room. I was certain I had taken the stairs to my room, but my room was only a few steps down the corridor, and I had been walking for some time already. The palace had grown colder, as if the walls thinned and the wind came up to blow through them. I looked behind me, but the hall was gone: instead I looked at a courtyard, cobblestoned and walled with polished stone. Dirty, melting snow lay in cracks between the cobbles, but the air warmed, carrying the scent of spring rot in it.

A woman walked out of the walls, carrying a bundled infant in her arms. She was hooded in a green cloak embroidered at the hem with roses, and shook the hood back as she approached me, revealing a strongly-jawed round face and pale eyes with a ring of black around the irises. They made her expression intense, as did the hint of a sneer around her lips, as if anything I did was known to her and already harshly judged.

Then she smiled, and affection filled me, as well as loss. I embraced her and kissed the child, then swiftly turned away to mount a tall horse who wore the accoutrements of war. So did I, for that matter: chain mail that fit well, the weight of the cowl unfamiliar on my shoulders. More familiar was the sword at my hip and the leather, metal-knuckled gloves I gripped the reins with. I clicked at the horse, and we rode out of the courtyard to stand before an army of thousands, whose voices all rose as one as I came to them. A corridor opened through their center and I charged down it, letting their cheers propel me forward into war.

I fought like the mother sun who had been separated from her lover, the sister moon. I fought with the strength of grief and the resolution of sorrow. Every night I worked the spell I had been given by my lady, she who now watched over my infant son. Every night I kissed one of my husband's bones and buried it in the earth, dedicating his body to the huntress moon, and every morning I let three drops of my own blood fall where the bone had been, asking the brutal sun goddess to be our strength. Where my blood and his bones lay, a border rose, defining my kingdom so that none could ever again dare to claim it as their own. When there were no more bones to bury, I gave three drops of my blood to the huntress moon and six to her sister the sun, and built our border that way.

For three years I fought and bled and rode, until my enemy could run no more, and finally stood to face me. He had mocked my husband and then me, believing our goddess-worshiping country to be weak, and for his arrogance, died beneath my blade.

We rode home in triumph, my army and I, and I, Amber, found myself at the door of my room, as if I had never gone anywhere else. I flinched, whipping to search for the army, my horse, the scars on my fingers where I had bled and bled and bled again for my country, and none of it was there. I hurried into my room and poured wine that I hunched before the fire with, trying to clear my head of the visions. I fell asleep there, huddled around a glass of wine, and was grateful that the visions didn't pursue me into dreams.

Morning came early, and I awakened stiff and uncomfortable from sleeping on a rug. I groaned as I rolled over, and thought I heard a worried buzz from the invisible servants. "I wonder if you could have put me in bed," I said to their fussing.

The inaudible hum intensified. I creaked laughter and sat up. "I take it you couldn't, or thought you shouldn't. Well, if there's a next time, although I hope there isn't, you may. If you can."

Hairs stood up on my nape as they hummed at one another, or perhaps at me. Maybe they really couldn't lift a sleeping person from the floor. Maybe the only person in the palace who could was the Beast. My stomach turned over with nerves, and I concluded that invisible servants carrying me around were one thing but a Beast was something else entirely. "All right," I whispered. "Leave me on the floor, then. I'll try to get to bed next time, instead."

The inaudible hum faded, letting me relax. The clinking of china and glassware told me that a meal had appeared somewhere in the room, so I climbed to my feet and went to indulge, again, in crisp bacon. We hadn't had bacon at all since leaving the city, and it had never been this good. Enchanted bacon was a more prosaic use of magic than I had ever imagined, but one I entirely approved of.

I left my bedroom more apprehensively than I had the previous morning, as if the castle might aggressively besiege me with visions again. If, in fact, they had been visions at all: I had certainly known the story I'd been part of. It was the Queen's War, the one that had defined our country and staved off invasion so very long ago. I had been Queen Irindala in it, with the weight of a sword comfortable in my hand. No story I'd ever heard had told of the burying of the king's bones, though, or the blood sacrifice to build our kingdom's borders. But then, enchantment belonged to faeries or witches, and was considered suspect within our realm. Even if the queen was known to have witchy associates—and she was, else she would never have lived such an improbable span—she would not have been likely to confess to casting a spell, even to protect our borders.

My feet had taken me not to the breakfast room, but outside the palace. I looked up at it now, myself a small and solitary thing standing in the snow before its great edifice, and wondered at how long it had been there. It seemed that it must have stood since the Queen's youth, at least; it was as if the palace carried living memories of that time. And it had that library full of ancient, rescued books. Maybe the palace—or some version of it, at least—had been here always, collecting memories and stories that would otherwise be lost. Perhaps I could find my way into a corridor that would tell me of Boudicca, or one that would know the tale of the physician Al Shifa.

Maybe, a small and quiet part of me thought, maybe I could find a room that would let me know my long-dead mother, although Father still carried her memories with him, so perhaps they weren't lost enough for the palace's enchantments.

I was outside anyway, so I went past the frozen pools toward the gardens where so much trouble had begun. There were other fresh footprints in the snow: the Beast had come this way since the end of the storm. I put my foot into one of his prints and puffed a steamy breath of awe into the cold air. He'd been walking on all fours, which changed the shape of what pressed into the snow, but my foot still fit tidily into one of his paw prints. If he'd been walking upright I'd have been able to put both feet, heel to toe, into the print, and probably had room to spare.

The rose garden looked more gnarled than I remembered it from only a few days ago, but I hadn't been paying the closest attention, by the end of it all. I wandered its paths, rubbing my palm in memory of the prickles I'd taken, and did not pick any roses. After a while I went back to the library, where tea and scones with strawberry jam awaited me, and I wondered aloud if perhaps a book or two on perfumery might be found.

By the time I'd settled by the fire with my scones, a tidy stack of books and scrolls had arrived on the nearest table. I chose a scroll and unrolled it, then screwed my eyes shut as the text on it danced and swam. A second look rendered it perfectly readable, and I made a note to myself that I should probably always open a book and glance away briefly before trying to read it. Then I laughed. "How easily we adapt to enchantment, hm?"

The under-the-skin hum buzzed at that, and I smiled, this time apologetically. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make light of your situation." The scroll held a recipe for a perfume called khemet, made with cinnamon and myrrh and sweet wine, though the properties of the wine weren't described beyond its sweetness. I said, half to myself and half to the palace, "I don't suppose any of this particular sweet wine is lingering in the cellars," and put the scroll aside to examine others.

Nearly all of them contained recipes I didn't know, but many of those required ingredients I was confident of finding in the kitchen or on the grounds, come the thaw. I found myself talking to the library about them, explaining what I knew about how the scents combined, or the differences in practicality for a wax-based perfume versus a liquid one. I whiled away the afternoon in that pursuit, narrowing the scents I wanted to create—first, at least—down from dozens to three. I sighed contentedly and stacked the unneeded books together, thanking the servants as the books returned to their shelves one by one, and gathered the three I wanted to bring back to my room.

The khemet recipe scroll, which I thought I'd put away, wobbled at the edge of the table. Beside it stood a bottle no taller than my hand, so old that embedded dust had pitted the glass. My head snapped up and I looked around the room in astonishment, as if I could lay eyes on the servant who had delivered the little bottle. There was no one there, of course, so I picked the bottle up, gently tilting it to watch the wine inside shift. "Stars of earth and heaven. Thank you. How did you…thank you!"

My treasures clutched carefully in my arms, I left the library with a sense of satisfied servants in my wake.

I was late to dinner, and came down smelling of a peculiar enough array of herbs and spices that the Beast's nose twitched, though he didn't say anything. Dinner didn't taste quite right, either, with strong scents still clinging to my hands, even though I'd washed them with soap and then with lemon water. Eventually, as if testing uncertain waters, the Beast said, "You've found a way to entertain yourself?" and unleashed two or three hours of enthusiastic lecture on the topic of perfume-making. To his credit, he retained the appearance of interest, and it was only when my own stomach rumbled with a consideration of dessert that I realized the Beast had probably not eaten at all.

When the demand was put to him, he only shrugged. "I can eat later. It's been a long time since I've had anyone to converse with. Or," he amended, with what might have been the hint of a smile, "to converse at me."

"You should still eat," I said firmly, aware I sounded like Opal fussing over the boys when they were ill. "I'll look away, or pretend not to watch, but if I'm going to be here forever it's ridiculous for you to not have dinner with me."

The Beast gave me a measured look. "You are adapting very well."

"I believe I may be in some sort of denial." That was true enough: I couldn't really imagine remaining at the Beast's palace forever. Thinking about it, though, made it seem too real, so I added, more lightly, "Also, there are books. I've missed reading, the past year. Apple pie, perhaps?"

To my relief, the Beast responded with precisely the right amount of solemn pedantry: "I have never read an apple pie."

I smiled. "To eat. As an experimental meal shared. No one expects pie to be eaten tidily; it's too delicious."

The Beast, playing the role of pedant perfectly, said, "Ah," with only the gravest hint of humor, as if my explanation had been entirely necessary. I giggled beneath his continued, "I haven't had apple pie in…a very long time. My tastes run more toward the carnivorous. And I haven't had dinner."

"I might submit, Master Beast, that you are quite old enough to decide that once in a while, dessert might come before dinner." He cast a glance at me, and I, following with uncomfortably great precision where his thoughts ran, threw my palm off to stave off his words. "No. I am not dessert, and I won't sleep with you."

That time there was no doubt that the curl of his lip indicated humor, as a low rumble of laughter rolled from his chest. "Then I suppose I'll have to try some apple pie."

Unexpectedly delighted, I clapped my hands together and said, "May we please have some apple pie?" to the room, which developed a sense of bustling off to do a job. "Can you feel it when they talk to each other? That buzz that settles under the skin?"

The Beast quirked an eyebrow and shook his head. "You do?"

"Obviously, or I wouldn't have asked. I wonder if you've gotten used to it, or if you're too magical yourself to notice."

"Perhaps," the Beast suggested dryly, "they don't talk to each other around me."

"Do you talk to them?"

His startled look was sufficient answer to the question. I said, "Well then," as if the problem was obvious, and by then an exceptionally large apple pie, easily two feet across, had arrived as the centerpiece on the table. A plate of ordinary proportions sat at my place, and a considerably bigger one had been placed where the Beast usually sat. "I don't think I can eat even one slice of that. Perhaps I could take a…dollop, and the rest can be yours to do with as you see fit."

"Thrust my face into, and slobber, perhaps," the Beast said, still dryly.

I looked up at him, genuinely curious. "Is that the best you can do?"

"It's not unlike what I usually do," he admitted. "I haven't tried eating like a civilized being for a long time."

"Since the last time you had apple pie, perhaps. Well, would you like to give it a try?"

"…not with an audience."

That seemed eminently fair. I nodded. "Maybe I'll just have a bit of pie, then, and leave you to your own devices."

The Beast turned his head away from me a little, as though I'd landed a blow I hadn't even meant to throw. "Why," he said again, "would you be kind to me?"

"I don't know," I also said again, and got myself some pie. It was delicious, full of cinnamon and cloves, and there was a custard to pour over the top. I ate my piece, thinking about his question, and finally said, "I suppose behaving nicely is as much for my own benefit as yours. Probably more. I could be angry and afraid," and even saying those words lit their fire inside of me, so I took a breath, trying to ease their burn. "But there's clearly very little I could do to harm you, which means feeding my anger is more likely to make me miserable than you. So I suppose I'm trying to let it go by being nice. It helps that aside from our first meeting, and the fact that you coerced me into staying…" I had to breathe again, trying to shake off the memory of fear and the still-vivid fury that those admissions acknowledged before I continued. "Aside from that, you've been…quite pleasant yourself."

"Aside from that," the Beast echoed. "As if those things could be pushed aside."

"Did you come here of your own volition?"

The Beast cast me a startled glance. "No."

"Would you leave if you could?"

"I would."

"Then you and I aren't so different, except I see my captor every day and I think you don't. I don't even know which is worse. As long as I see you every day, there might be a chance I could talk you into letting me go. If whomever put you here is long gone, you don't even have that chance. So if I'm kind, maybe it's because I hope it'll awaken a sympathetic kindness in you, and you'll release me."

"Rather than be angry, and hope your rudeness will drive me to send you away?"

"You're a Beast," I said with a degree of scathing that would do Pearl proud. "If I fight, your nature will make mastering me your prize, and no master ever wants to release his prize. Prizes are things, and things don't have feelings that matter. If I have any hope of getting out of here, it's in making you see me as a person. An equal. Someone worthy of respect. Maybe you won't. Maybe you can't. But making myself into a monster to earn that respect means you win anyway, so I'll be kind where I can be."

The Beast watched me through all of that speech, and when it ended, said, "It's possible I've never respected anyone as much as I do you, in this moment. You're very wise, for one so young."

"But you're still not going to let me go."

"No."

"Fine. Enjoy your pie, Beast." I stalked from the dining hall, and managed not to cry until I was safely in my own rooms.