Roses in Amber: A Beauty and the Beast story by C.E. Murphy, C.E. Murphy (2)

I only saw the Beast at the evening meal for the next several days. All he did, each evening, was ask me if I would sleep with him, and once denied, disappeared again. I told myself it was less offensive to be left alone than to be visited by a captor who had no intention of letting me go. That was true, but it was also lonelier. I worked on my perfumes—the khemet one took a month to brew, so I found other recipes and mixed them until my room was overwhelmed with scent—and I went out to glare at the gardens, and I talked to servants whom I could neither see nor understand, assuming the hair-raising subliminal muttering was indeed them.

As such, the days were difficult to track. I had been there a week before I thought to begin a calendar, and even that only came to mind because my blood began to flow. It made a way to mark the days, though, so I used it as the beginning of my calendar, and noted the phase of the moon—new, the sky hanging empty—to help remember the details of time's passage. It helped keep track of the perfume brews, too, so those three things became my points of reference: the moon, the blood, and the perfume.

The khemet was almost done when I arose one morning to go on my daily tromp around the gardens, and found a steady, drenching rain falling. All the snow was gone, and the earth, between blades of dead, yellow grass, looked saturated unto mud.

I had no doubt galoshes and oilskins would appear if I asked for them, or even if I simply rooted around in the wardrobe for a while, but the prospect of going out into the rain was too depressing. At home, Opal and Flint, especially, would be pleased by its offering the first hint of spring, and at the softening of the ground. They wouldn't yet be planting seeds, but they might turn the earth over, helping it to thaw, while Pearl muttered curses about dirty feet and hard labor. Or perhaps they were only awaiting spring because it could offer—with the goods the Beast had sent with Father—the chance to return to the city, and begin a more luxurious life all over again.

My heart faltered at the thought. It was one thing to be captive in a castle at the heart of an enchanted forest that my family lived in, no matter the distance. Somehow it was something else entirely to not even share the forest's borders with them. Distressed and trying to shake it off, I wrapped myself in a warm cloak and went for a walk inside the palace, which was large enough to exercise horses in, never mind one young woman. I wasn't looking where I was going; escape from my own thoughts, not exploration, was my purpose.

So it took longer than it might have otherwise to realize that the parquet beneath my feet had turned to smooth road, and then that I had sometime recently stopped walking, and now rode astride a familiar charger. I patted the creature's neck, feeling callouses from a sword marring my palm, and looked ahead to see the great gates of my city rising before me. The road became cobblestones, and I rode home at the head of my army, the triumphant warrior queen returning. I had gone to war bearing my husband's standard; now I carried my own, a blazing sun, crowned and crossed behind by a sword and a needle, so that no one might mistake my symbol for a man's. Among the crowds were thousands of women waving needlework, an honor that delighted me; I raised my blade and named it the Needle, for them, and their roars of pride carried me all the way to the palace.

At its gates I could—or did, at least, whether I should or not—shed the persona of queen, and instead became the mother I had missed being for three full years. The same woman, clad in gold this time instead of green, but still with her beloved roses embroidered at the hem, came forth with her sweet, wicked smile. With her walked a little boy whose eyes were large and round with awe. I slipped from my horse and knelt, my arms open, and he did not run to me. Instead he clung to the gold woman's skirts, and a whisper of sympathy rippled behind me as my soldiers saw what happened.

I ought to have known: a good leader doesn't fight a losing battle in public, not if she can help it. But I hadn't thought it through; I had forgotten that a mother's longing over a three-year campaign would not be reflected in the heart of a child who had barely been off the breast when his mother left. Nell was my sweet boy's mother, for all that he knew or cared, and I would damage us all if I tried to change that in an instant. So I stood, still smiling, hoping that smile's cost didn't show, and embraced Nell as she came to me. The little boy in her skirts watched me, and when Nell made as if to encourage him to hug me, I shook my head just a little. One rejection in front of the troops was enough. More than enough.

Nell, who was wise, lifted him onto her hip, and stood beside me so he was between us both, and we turned to face my army, crying, "Your prince!"

The roar of approval made my son gasp, then hide his face in Nell's shoulder, and, finally, peek out and smile, to the chortling delight of the army. When the tales of that day came to me in later years, they were told the way I had hoped it would go: that the little prince had run to me, and we faced our troops together, with Nell, my strong right hand, at our side. It made a better story, but I knew it was only that, and so that night, as soon as I had a moment alone with her, I said to my Nell, "I owe you a debt that can never be repaid. He loves you," and Nell, smiling, said, "I love him too."

It wanted to be a festering wound, that my son went to Nell for comfort and laughter. I wouldn't let it: I could not hate she who had held the kingdom for me for so long, nor could I blame him for not knowing a mother who had left him behind. Nell, generous of heart, saw my struggle, and guided him toward me, little by little. "What does it cost you," I asked late one night, and she only shrugged, stroking my hair.

"I never wanted children, unless I could beget one on you. Your son is as close as I can have to that, but he's your son. I was never more than a caretaker to him." Her stroking fingers made their way down my belly and thighs, until I, Amber, came to myself shuddering with pleasure and leaning on a windowsill for support.

Night had fallen and the rain had stopped while I'd been tangled in Irindala's…dreams. I had no better word for what they were. My dreams, perhaps, and her memories, but whichever they were, they'd stolen the day away from me. Flushed, I went to wash before dinner, and to my surprise, then found the dining hall empty. I had no sense of the time at all, save that I was hungry, but the Beast had always waited for me before. I ate a little, then, remembering it, went to the observatory to see if the height of the moon might tell me if I'd lost more than the day, but also half the night as well.

I knew before I climbed the observatory's narrow stairs that the Beast was up there: the air's weight changed when he was nearby, and in daylight or at dinner I had become largely accustomed to it. It felt different at night, without the familiar trappings, and I noticed it more clearly. Nor did it fade as I entered the observatory. It was late indeed, the stars so far along in their nightly wheel that morning had to be closer than dusk. The Beast was a shadow on the floor. I barely had time to realize he was lying on his back, belly exposed to the sky like a giant dog, before he flipped himself over and rose to his feet with inhuman speed. "Amber?"

"Did I wake you?" Amusement colored my tone. I couldn't imagine him being caught in such an undignified position unless he hadn't heard or smelled me coming, and I doubted he would fail to do either of those things unless he had been asleep.

He sounded gruffly embarrassed. "Yes."

"Sorry." I sat on one of the cushioned benches, looking up at the stars. "Do you often sleep up here?"

"Often enough," he said guardedly. "I find the distance from the gardens comforting."

"The gardens," I echoed, faintly surprised. "It's the forest that seems threatening, to me."

"And yet it was the roses that imprisoned you here."

I glanced at him, an eyebrow arched. "The roses?"

"The edict that they must not be picked is not mine. I only enforce it."

"With great enthusiasm. Does this place—does it drag you into visions, too? Memories so real it's like you're living them yourself?"

The Beast bared his teeth suddenly, a brief and ferocious gesture. My gut tightened, but his gaze turned away; apparently the anger he'd shown wasn't for me. "No. Not for a long time."

"That's your answer to everything!"

"That is my experience." He sat on the bench opposite me, as well away from me as he could in the confines of the observatory. I thought he was trying not to trap me, which would have been comforting if he hadn't continued in a low growl. "This place, this palace…it rescues stories. It's trying to determine how you fit into its story. Where you belong. What role you play."

I drew my knees up, looking to the stars again. "What role do I play?"

The Beast shook his head. "I don't know. I'm an old part of its story, now. The captive in the castle. But there is rarely more than one captive in the old tales, Amber, so by rights, you must play some other role. It's trying on its memories, the stories that it knows, to see if any of them fit you."

"Why is it telling me Queen Irindala's story?"

A truly massive sound of surprise erupted from the Beast's chest. "Irindala was my mother."

I made an incredulous sound almost as large. "But you're a Beast! Irindala only had one child, the son who was los—oh. Oh." I stared across the darkness at him, dumbfounded. "I knew you weren't always a Beast. How stupid of me."

"Oh yes." The Beast shifted on the bench, folding himself until he lay like an enormous cat, his front feet folded neatly over one another, and looked toward me levelly. "How stupid of you to not immediately realize that the monster who took you captive was in fact the queen's son who disappeared over a century ago. Whatever could you have been thinking."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

He took a breath that expanded his apparent size by half, and exhaled it in something near a growl. "Would you have believed me?"

I spread my hands, trying to encompass everything: the palace that shouldn't be there, the Beast lying before me, the servants who were invisible but extraordinarily good at procuring whatever might be desired at a moment's notice, and said, "Probably."

The Beast chuffed, the deep sound I was coming to recognize as his laughter, and dipped his head in a nod. "Perhaps you would have. I think it didn't occur to me. People rarely find their way here, and I encounter few of those who do. Much of my time is spent…" He moved a paw as a cat might twitch its tail, or a human wave a hand, as if trying to say something words didn't easily convey.

"As a Beast?" I ventured. "Without thought, without…time?"

"It was sheer fortune that I wore trousers when I first saw you," he said, as if that supported my theory. I supposed it did, at that, but it made me smile anyway. "I hadn't bothered with any kind of…humanity…for—" His gaze lifted suddenly and I said it for him, amused: "A long time."

"Quite a long time indeed," he agreed. "If I'd been more in practice I might have been less…"

"Terrifying," I offered. "Loud. Monstrous. Rabid. Enrag—"

"That," the Beast said prissily, "is quite enough. But yes. All I knew was that someone had picked a rose, and I was furious. It took me most of the way to the garden to remember how to use words."

"You succeeded admirably, in the end. Loudly. Viciously. Frighteningly. But admirably."

He gave me a look that really did remind me wonderfully of Pearl. "Must you?"

"I'm beginning to think I must. How did you end up a Beast?"

"Ah," he said, softly. "That I can't tell you."

"You don't know?"

"I can't tell you. Like the picking of a rose, like the—" He stopped himself suddenly, then began again. "There are things that must and must not be done, here. Telling the entirety of my story is one of them."

"But why?"

"Amber. I am a Beast in an enchanted castle in a forest. What other answer do you expect?"

"Well, there must be some way to tell me."

He sighed. "The enchantment will tell you, if you wander the deeper parts of the palace unguarded. The main hall, the dining room and kitchen, our bedrooms, they're safe enough, but beyond them…" His tremendous shoulders rolled in a shrug. "You should know, though, Amber…the magic will want to make you a part of its story. To make you fit into the roles it already knows. And it will try to kill you, if it fails."

"Stars of earth and fire," I said as mildly as I could. "Has that happened often?"

The Beast rose, a dark and dangerous shadow against the starlight. "More than once."

He paced toward the stairs, clearly intending to leave me alone with the weight of that information. I waited until distance had nearly taken him, then said, "Beast. We missed dinner together, so you had better ask me now. Because you have to, don't you? It's one of those musts."

He turned his head back, though we could never make eye contact in the darkness. "Amber, will you sleep with me?"

"What would happen if I said yes?"

"I don't exactly know."

"So no one ever has."

His low laugh rolled across the room toward me. "No. No one ever has. The last person I was obliged to ask was perhaps the most beautiful person I have ever laid eyes upon. Perfect, a pure paragon. He…did not take the request well."

I murmured, "Oh dear," and then more clearly, but measuredly, wondering what the cost of either answer would be, said, "No, Beast, I won't sleep with you."

He bowed his head. "I thought not. Good night, Amber."

I said, "Good night, Beast," and he left me alone in the dark.

I stayed in my room most of the next day, working on perfumes and—I knew this perfectly well—avoiding any possibility of the enchantment drawing me down a hallway and trying to fit me into a predestined place. I emerged for dinner, which the Beast, very cautiously, took with me. I accused him of having been practicing eating like a civilized person, and he allowed that he may have been, and the evening passed in a strangely pleasant manner, even up unto the asking and answering of the ritual question. I didn't press him for any further details about the castle, the enchantment, or the paragon who had not cared to be propositioned by a Beast, and retired to bed early.

Dawn seemed to come even earlier, tenacious golden glow prying through my eyelids. I pulled a pillow over my head, determined to sleep a little longer, but heard someone repeating my name with increasing urgency. It wasn't the Beast, so I thought I had to be dreaming, as the servants had no audible voices and there was no one else to talk to. Finally, though, my oldest sister's voice sharpened unmistakably, and I bolted out of bed to her snapped, "Amber!"

Sunrise was coming from my vanity. Not reflected in it, but coming from it: the room's increasing brilliance shone from mirror's amber casing, and the mirror itself had taken on a silvery light of its own. I lurched to it, hardly awake enough to focus. My own tangle-haired reflection was barely visible in it, but Pearl, with her white hair cut short again so it was a cap of flyaway curls, looked out at me as though she sat five steps away, not across half an enchanted forest. "Oh, stars of heaven and earth, there you are. I've been hissing at you for half an hour."

"Pearl?" I sat heavily on my vanity stool, too thick-headed to comprehend what I saw. "Pearl, is that really you?"

"Of course it is. Keep your voice down. The family are all sleeping."

"What are you…how are you…?"

"I'm a witch, and I'm fine, thank you." Her familiar pedantry made me laugh, but I put my head down on the vanity table suddenly, overwhelmed with seeing her and not wanting to shed tears. Her voice softened unexpectedly. "We're all right, Amber. Are you?" I lifted a hand, trying to indicate a yes, and she went on, still more gently than I expected from my austere older sister. "That Beast paid well for you. The pearl he sent is a focus. I knew it had power the moment I touched it, but it's taken me this long to understand it well enough to contact you. I couldn't do it without the full moon. The ocean bends to the moon's pull, and the pearl is a prize of the sea. Its power waxes and wanes, but even in the dark of the moon it's a focus like nothing I've ever imagined."

By then I'd recovered myself enough to raise my head again, and even to smile at Pearl's enthusiasm. "Witchery suits you."

A pale gleam came into her eyes. "With a little more time, I think I can cast an enchantment to free you, Amber. Can you hold on there a little while longer?"

"Yes, but I don't think you can—" I cut myself off, remembering the Beast's inability to directly affect his fate, but his confidence that Pearl's magic would have an indirect effect. My sister, pale eyebrows elevated, waited for me to finish, and I spoke more slowly, trying to think out what the Beast had implied. "He knew you would discover its magic. He had faith in you."

"In me? How could he—" She stopped herself just as I had, muttering, "Obviously he knew us all, or he'd have never sent these particular jewels and stones. Maman has worn hers since the day it arrived, just over her heart. What does he expect me to do?"

"I don't know. The enchantment here is dreadfully powerful, Pearl. Whatever you do, don't rush it."

"Me." Pearl smiled faintly. "When have I ever rushed anything, Amber?"

"Never. Oh, Pearl, it's so good to see you. How are the boys? How is Glover? Has Opal noticed him yet? Is Father all right? I miss you all so much." A tightness constricted my chest, crushing further questions a way.

A suspicious glimmer shone in Pearl's eyes, but she wouldn't lift a finger to dash tears away. "The boys are strong and healthy. Jasper has grown four inches since you've seen him, Amber, and Flint's voice is changing. Jet has an opinion on everything and gets elbow deep in dirt whenever he has the chance. Opal was well on the way to noticing Glover before Father returned without you. She's been…well, you know how Maman often is? Faded? Opal has become more like that than I'm happy with, and even Daniel can't bring her out of it."

"Daniel?"

"Daniel Glo—oh. Glover. His forename is Daniel." Pearl, for the first time in her life that I could recall, looked vaguely ashamed. "I never knew, until I heard Opal use it. Now we all call him Daniel."

"It's a fine name. And Father?"

Pearl's voice lowered. "Worse than Opal. He can't forgive himself for leaving you there, although the way he tells the tale, I'm not certain he had much choice."

"He didn't. Pearl, can you waken him? So he can see that I'm all right?"

"I don't know if more than one of us can use the pearl. You told him!" she said, suddenly more acerbic and more herself. "You told him I was a witch."

"It came up," I said, hardly remembering how. "Has he taken it all right?"

"He hasn't fought me on it, if that's what you mean. He's taken nothing well since he came home, though. He feels guilty."

"Wake him up," I said firmly. "He needs to see I'm all right."

"Are you? The Beast sounded…" Pearl faltered, obviously uncertain what words would sufficiently describe my captor.

I nodded. "And he is. But he's more than that, and I don't even understand all of it yet myself. I'll be all right, Pearl, I swear it. But please, let Father see that I am. At least let us try."

She nodded and stood, climbing the stairs without releasing the pearl. I heard her whisper his name, and could see from how my field of vision moved that she shook him. He awakened with a concerned grunt, and I heard explanatory murmurs before she sat beside him on the edge of the bed, and his face, with hers in the periphery, swam into focus. He had aged visibly, more than just the old careful dye job having fully grown out. He looked thinner, paler, in a way the moonlight didn't account for. "Amber?"

"It's me, Father. I'm all right." Tears spilled over my smile. "I'm fine. Pearl says you've been worried. You don't have to worry, Papa. The Beast and I are getting on reasonably well, and I'm fine."

"How can you get along well with that monster?" His hoarse voice cracked, tears shimmering in his eyes.

"He's better tempered when someone hasn't just stolen his roses." I tried to loosen the tightness in my chest with a deep breath, and failed. "Is it still alive?"

"It's putting out roots," Father said bitterly. "Opal tends it, and Daniel says it should go in the ground soon. Your mother won't touch it, and neither will I."

"Perhaps it will thrive as long as I do," I said, then regretted it as Father's face pinched. "I intend to thrive a long time, Father. The Beast makes no demands of me. We usually dine together."

"How can that thing eat in a civilized manner?"

I breathed, "Awkwardly," and thought better of trying to offer further solace. "I'm so glad to see you, Father. I wish I could see all of you."

"Next time," Pearl promised. "At the next full moon. We'll have the whole family awake, now that we know it works."

"It will give me something to look forward to," I promised. "Tell everyone I love them, please?"

"We will." Their image blurred, and Pearl cast a sharp look toward the window. "There are clouds coming in. They may affect the spell. If it's cloudy the next full moon, Amber—"

"I'll wait for all three nights of it," I said. "And if we miss that one, there will always be another. I love you. I love you!" The last words were cried as murkiness swept my mirror, and I heard nothing in response. I buried my face in my hands, dragging great gasping breaths, and only dared lift my head again when I was sure I had conquered tears.

The reflection in my mirror showed a woman, not just the girl I had been when Father and I had left the hunting lodge together three months ago. I didn't know exactly what the changes were: some roundness lost from my cheeks, perhaps, and a hollowness in my throat that hadn't been there before. Mostly, though, I thought it was my eyes. In the moonlight, their hazel tint took on a greener shade, though by daylight, with the mirror's amber frame, I thought they looked uncomfortably yellow. Like a beast's eyes, though not like the Beast's, whose beady gaze was as brown as any boar's. I preferred the green, even if there seemed to be a new understanding of sorrow in my reflection. I rose and found a robe, drawing it around myself as I went to the room's balcony.

Two days' worth of rain had stopped sometime while I slept, and though clouds had come to obscure Pearl's moon, here the night was bright. The forest had a malevolent, creeping sense to it beneath the blue night, though I doubted our grounds had diminished any.

Our. A moment's defense of the Beast to my father, and suddenly the palace was ours, not his. But then, we were its only two denizens, and unless Pearl's magic worked some rare witchery indeed, I didn't expect to be going anywhere any time soon. So ours it would be, if only in my thoughts. I brushed water from a balcony seat and settled into it, drawing my feet up off the cold floor.

Pearl was not the person in my family I would have imagined as the savior of a captive in a castle. Jasper, of all of us, seemed most suited to the role: I could see him, even at seven years old, brandishing a blade and fighting his way through brambles to rescue a lost soul. But the lot had fallen to Pearl, whose arrogance was at least matched by her intelligence; if we had to depend on someone to rescue us, there were worse choices. Particularly since Pearl would take failure as a personal affront, and the last time she'd been thwarted, with Solindra Nare, it had wakened in her a witchery none of us had dreamed slumbered within. If she was stymied in her first attempt at freeing me, I half expected her to take on the guise of a faery queen, and wreak havoc on the forest and palace alike.

Comforted by the thought, I drifted, half asleep beneath the moon, until my legs relaxed enough that my feet fell down and hit the cold floor, and I yelped and ran for bed.

True sunrise wakened me a few hours later. I felt lighter than I had in weeks, buoyed by having spoken with Pearl and Father. I wasn't sure, if I reflected on it, that I believed rescue was at hand, though certainly Pearl would orchestrate it if she could. My exile simply seemed less onerous, with the prospect of talking to and even seeing my family every month. It wasn't the same as feeling their warm embraces, but neither was I so alone anymore.

Strangely enough, that fact made me feel more sociable, even if the only soul I had to socialize with was the Beast. I ate a breakfast of toast and jam, foregoing the bacon as an act of willpower that I immediately questioned. The servants appeared to question it as well, as a small plate of bacon waited for me on a windowsill outside my room when I left it. I said, "Well, if you insist," and took the plate with me as I went in search of the Beast.

He haunted none of the spots I might expect him to: the dining hall, its parlor, the library, even the garden, which still squelched with standing water and mud, were abandoned. I knew where his rooms were, but was reluctant to go to them, not because I thought I would be unwelcome. No, I was afraid if I went beyond the main hall, the palace would guide me away from my intended destination and pull me into one of its stories, and I was not quite prepared to face another intimate history lesson.

The Beast was Irindala's son, the prince of our realm. I knew his name. I shied away from that knowledge, hardly even letting myself remember it. I'd asked him his name once, and he had accepted Beast in its stead. It seemed a trespass to go beyond that, even if he had since confessed—in effect if not in actuality—to what his name was. To pull myself away from those thoughts, I let myself into the other round-faced hall, the ballroom whose basic form echoed the library's. I hardly expected to find the Beast there, but it was the only other place in the palace that I was willing to go that I hadn't yet looked in.

Sunlight poured in through the enormous windows and reflected off the golden parquet floors, brightening the room far more than the library with its carpets and shelves could ever manage. A crystal chandelier hung far above me, singing gently as the door's opening and closing pushed a faint breeze through the hall. I stood beneath it, smiling upward at the rainbows it cast, and tried to imagine this room full of music and flirtation and laughter.

I should not have: I knew it almost as soon as the fancy touched me. Memory snatched at me, memory that was not my own. The room filled with indistinct figures, beautifully dressed; music played as if from a distance, a ghostly remove that made its tune lighter and sweeter than any I'd ever heard. I was swept into the steps of a dance, moving with comfortable confidence as I smiled at my partners. I was hardly anyone, a courtier with a pretty dress and an excellent bosom, and no one could tell me any different. But I could charm, and I could flirt, and I wasn't surprised when, between dances, a slim and handsome young man crossed the floor toward me.

Other men might have to work their way through the crowd. For this youth, the crowd parted just a little, just enough, and did it without conscious effort or awareness: the prerogative of royalty. He stopped before me, offering a hand and unleashing a devastating smile that begot a breathless laugh from me as I took his hand. He drew me close, pulling me into the dance, and I could hardly do more than gaze up at him in half-stunned admiration. He favored his mother in beauty, though he had the broad nose I'd seen in paintings of the long-dead king, and he wore his tightly curling black hair cropped close to his scalp the way his father had. But he had Irindala's wide bright smile, played up against sepia skin darker than hers, and a jaw meant for sculpting. His hands were soft and, I saw, stained with ink: a scholar prince rather than a warrior. But then, he was young, and Irindala hadn't gone to war until she was in her twenties. He smiled again, and I smiled in return, lost in his dark eyes.

The music changed, gaining in tempo, until it became something I had never heard before. The prince's smile faded as his concentration increased: trying not to step on my skirt or my feet, trying not to crush me as he kept pace with the dance. Then even concentration faltered, becoming alarm, though it seemed only he shared that concern: my heart flew with excitement, my breath coming in laughs and joy filling me as we tangled more tightly together. He tried to break away and couldn't, though my grip hardly seemed strong enough to keep him. Faster and faster we whirled, until the part of me that didn't belong in that story spun loose and I began to fear, though the pretty girl I embodied still laughed and thrilled with delight. Nor could I loosen my hold on the prince: we spun together, increasingly out of control, our breath burning in our bodies and sickness rising from the relentless twirling, the impossible pace. My feet began to hurt and tears started to leak from my eyes, but the woman who had started the dance loved every moment of it.

I came to a sudden, shocking stop, and the memory ripped away in a whirlwind of fear.

"Amber." The Beast was there, his massive paw at my waist, holding me. Catching me. Stopping me. My heart lurched in surprise and gratitude and something else that left my stomach hollow. I put my hand on his chest to steady myself and found, to my surprise, that I was trembling. I put my forehead against his chest—well, his ribs; he stood much too tall for me to reach his chest, really—and he sank to his haunches, lowering himself until he merely loomed over me, rather than towered. He put his other hand against my hair, the barest touch of reassurance. For all of his size, I felt reassured, not trapped, and stood there, drawing tremulous breaths and noticing his musky scent, until my shaking stopped.

"What was that," I finally whispered, and felt his massive head shake above mine.

"Dancing," he said. "Dancing is rarely safe in faery tales. Are you all right?"

"No." I shook my head, fingers coiled in the heavy mane that fell down his chest. "No. That was…was it trying to kill me, Beast?"

"To subsume you, I think. It's still searching for a place you can belong. But if I hadn't come…" He shook his head again. "You were careening around the room. There's not much in it to hurt yourself on, but in time you would have managed anyway."

I stepped back a little, looking up at him. Up: even settled on his haunches he was taller than I, if not by much. "How did you know to find me?"

He lifted my amber necklace off my breast with the tip of one careful claw. "I told you it has a protective charm. I felt it struggling to keep you safe, and came to help."

I closed my hand over the necklace, and over his fingers as well. "You felt it?"

"There's very little that goes on in this palace that I'm unaware of, and the necklace is part of the palace. It's all bound together, me and it."

"And me?"

The Beast shifted his big head, not quite a shake. "Not so tightly."

"And what about the things you sent to my family? Are they irrevocably bound up in this too?"

"Everything inside the forest's boundaries is, to one degree or another. The enchantment's influence lessens, the farther from the palace it goes. But you need not worry." What passed for his smile pulled at his mouth. "The coin is real enough, and won't turn to lead in the city. Nor will the books turn to dust, or the jewels to ordinary stones. Are you all right now?"

I took a shuddering breath and straightened my shoulders. "I think so."

He leaned forward, onto all fours. "I'll leave you, then."

"Don't!" I put a hand over my mouth as if I could block the blurted word too late, but said, "Don't," again, more quietly. "I'd rather not be alone. I don't…I don't trust the palace. I don't want to get caught in another story right now."

The Beast ducked his vast head, an invitation, and, emboldened, I curled my fingers into the thick fur along his spine, and walked from the ballroom with him.

"Does the palace…listen?" It had taken me until evening to gather the courage to ask, after a quiet day spent in the Beast's company. We had read in the library—or I, at least, had read, while the Beast had stretched out in front of the fire and napped like the beast he was—and taken dinner together, in so far as the Beast was willing to sit with me while I dined; he still wouldn't eat in my presence. Neither reading nor eating had been entirely able to take away the memory of the dance, or the beauty of the prince I'd danced with.

I could see absolutely nothing of him in the Beast, save perhaps a shared coloring. The Beast was dark-furred as the prince had been dark-skinned, but since every beast I saw in him, from lion to bear to boar, could be or habitually was darkly furred, that seemed more coincidence than reflection of who he had once been. I wanted to ask what his memory of that dance was, but it hadn't been memory, not all of it. It had been a vision, one I lacked the knowledge to fully understand, and I was afraid that if I pressed it, the palace would retaliate.

The Beast looked up at my question, great brows furrowing. Feeling foolish, I tried to explain myself. "I know the servants listen, obviously, but you said there are things you can't tell me. Does the palace listen? Is that how it knows what's being said?"

"Ah. No. The enchantment—" He gestured at his throat. "Seizes me, if I say too much. The palace doesn't have ears, but the magic has limits. If I come up against them, I pay the price."

I closed my lips on burgeoning questions. A shadow crossed the Beast's face. "I'm sorry I can't explain."

"It's all right. I'd rather you could stop me from dancing myself to death than explain, if it comes down to it. But if the palace doesn't listen—is it safe to tell you something, Beast?"

"I hope it is always safe for you to tell me whatever you wish, Amber."

"It has to do with Pearl's witchery," I said cautiously.

The Beast's ugly face lit up, his gaze sharpening on me. "Has she learned to use the pearl?"

"She's starting to. She spoke to me, Beast. Through my mirror, last night. They're all well." My heart soared, remembering the conversation. "Upset at my absence, but mostly well. I found myself defending you to them."

"Really. That—I would not have expected that. Thank you. Which mirror?"

"The big one on my vanity. Why," I asked lightly, "does the other mirror do something too?"

He gave me a look that sent a flush of excitement through me, then twitched his head in a denial as I took breath to ask more. I bit my tongue, gazing at him and trying to remember what he'd told me about Pearl and her pearl. That it had power and she could use it, no more. He had been circumspect, and now I understood he may have been pushing the boundaries of what he was allowed to say about the enchantments here. I thought the same thing was happening now, and swallowed down my questions. I would have to explore for myself, although stars knew I lacked Pearl's native gift.

Then again, so had Pearl, before she'd been jilted. Perhaps I only needed the offense of being throughly rejected by a lover to waken magic in me.

The idea made me laugh aloud, surprising me and the Beast both. "I'm sorry," I said merrily. "I was imagining myself a witch. It didn't work very well. One in the family is enough. More than enough. I can almost hear our city neighbors clucking about it."

"And what would they say about the youngest daughter absconding to an enchanted castle?"

"That I had always been peculiar and that you could never trust my smile anyway."

The Beast tilted his head, examining the smile that came with the pronouncement. "It's an inviting smile," he said after a moment. "Difficult to look away from."

"There you go," I said. "Witchery, no doubt."

"No doubt," the Beast replied solemnly.

I smiled at him again, then stood, stretching. "I suppose I should go to bed." In truth, I wanted to examine my little mirror and see if I could discover any magical properties, but he had ended that conversation, so admitting as much seemed gauche.

"I suppose you should." He watched me as I went to the door, and then, inevitably, said, "Amber, will you sleep with me?"

I looked back at him, one hand on the door frame, and thought of his protective hand on my waist in the ballroom earlier, and of the tremendous paw cradling my hair while I trembled. And I thought, because I could do nothing else, of his enormous size, nearly three feet taller than I, and of the beast-like proportions and angles that made up his body. "Beast," I said softly, "how would that even work?"

He murmured, "Indeed," and I left the room.

The mirror, to my disappointment, absolutely did not work with moonlight. I brought it to the balcony, filling its pane with blue-white light, and felt nothing. I polished it, rubbed its back, said silly chants, and accomplished nothing. Nor did I know what I expected to accomplish, save that the Beast implied something could be done with it. I gave up and went to bed, and in the morning, watching sunlight glow through the amber frame, chided myself for a silly goose and tried again.

It answered to my wish and to sunlight as it hadn't done with the moon. Well, of course: a pearl had all the properties of the moon, pale and luminous, with shadows in its depths. Amber was the very color of the sun, rich and gold and made of life itself, born from the scars of trees fighting to live on.

It was not, though, as powerful as Pearl's magic. The mirror's surface shimmered gold and cleared to show me little Jet studiously smearing handsful of mud all over his face, while beside him an adult's shadow dug at the earth. I cried out, but neither of them heard me. The adult stood, then stooped to collect Jet, and for a moment I saw Opal's laughing face, but couldn't hear her words or the joy in her voice as she spoke to my littlest brother. They looked happy, though, and I closed my eyes against the image, feeling both relieved to see them and saddened that the contact wasn't as intimate as Pearl's magic made it. I had felt like I was with them, then; watching through my mirror made me feel that much more removed. I would rather be fully here, with the Beast, than pretending at a half-life of my family, whom I could only see and not hear or touch.

The image swam, then focused again, this time to show me the Beast. He, with the innocence of one who had no idea he was being watched, sat on his haunches and lifted his back leg to scratch at his mane. I yelped, embarrassed to have caught him in such an undignified pose, and pressed the mirror's surface against my chest so I wouldn't see any more. A moment later I peeked again, but I saw only my own amused face reflected back at me. "Very well," I said, both to my reflection and myself, "this mirror is not for me, unless I wish to go into the Queen's service as a spy, and learn to read lips."

The mirror blurred again. I put it down swiftly, its face against the vanity, rather than see what my commentary might awaken in its surface. I didn't want to become the Queen's spy, or risk any method of contacting her; explaining that I was the latest captive at her son's enchanted palace was beyond me, and I had an itching conviction that she would somehow be able to reach through the mirror's limitations and force those confessions from me.

"Which is madness," I breathed, but then again, I lived in an enchanted castle, and what seemed like madness on the surface might be perfectly reasonable when that surface was scratched.

"Perfumes," I said to myself, and resolutely stood to check my mixtures and their scents, testing them for strength and potency. Some of them wanted rose water, and what little I had had left after the city was all but gone. I gathered a cloak and, at the insistent murmuring of the invisible servants, a scone, and went out to the gardens.

The roses, which had never stopped blooming, had grown ferocious in the oncoming spring sunshine, and now covered the garden walls in relentless color. Loose petals drifted to the ground on every breath of wind, until a carpet of color greeted my feet. I began gathering the petals in my skirt as they fell, determined to use them in rose water: I would have my perfume yet, even if the garden didn't like me picking its roses.

Behind me, and without warning, the Beast said, "I believe you're safe enough picking them now that you're a guest here."

I shrieked and spasmed, narrowly keeping my grip—and thus my collected petals—in my skirt. "Could you please make some noise!"

"Evidently not. Are you all right?"

"Fine, save for a heart seizure!" I glowered at the Beast, who failed to look at all threatened. Piqued, I pulled a rose from one of the bushes, and aside from a piercing pain where I hadn't been careful enough of the thorns, suffered no ill effects. "Why didn't you tell me I could pick them?"

"I didn't know you wanted to."

"How maddeningly reasonable." I turned my palm up, examining a startling well of blood from the thorns. "I don't think the roses like me. Does this look strange to you?" The Beast hesitated, but I thrust my hand at him, displaying the blood rising from it. "It's got a golden sheen," I insisted. "It happens every time one of those thorns gets me."

He sat on his haunches like an enormous dog and lifted one paw to not quite cup my hand. I still felt his body heat, tremendous compared to my own, and resisted the impulse to settle my hand in his and feel if the pads of his palm were as rough as they looked. "Perhaps," he said after a careful look. "My eyesight isn't what it might be, but you may be right."

I'd quite forgotten about my injury by then, so intently was I studying him from so close. He was nearly as tall as I, sitting as he was, and I could see the short, velvet-like fur on his nose. It stretched into longer tufts at the bridge, thickening to a visible depth over the brow ridges before lengthening into the coarse mane that only parted around the twisting horns that swept back from his forehead. "Where are your ears?"

The Beast drew his head back, focusing on me with apparent effort. "My ears?"

"I assume you have them. But they're not…where they belong. Bears, boars, lions, goats, antelope…everything you remind me of has ears up here." I gestured vaguely along the outer lines of his forehead and skull, where animals tended to keep their ears. "Where are they?"

Moving slowly, and still watching me as though I had perhaps lost my mind, the Beast sat all the way back on his haunches and pawed through his mane until he'd exposed an ear far more human than animal, though it swept into a pointier tip than any human had ever sported. It struck me as delicate and unsuitable for his enormous rough form. "Well. You have lovely ears."

The Beast's laughter, from this close, shook the petals of my rose. "Do I?"

"Very. And if your eyesight is poor, I think they would support glasses very nicely. Have you ever asked the servants for any?"

His incredulous look said he had not. "My face is hardly shaped for them."

"If we trimmed this up," I said, not quite touching the longer fur at the bridge of his nose, "I think they might work fairly well. And this only needs trimming so the glasses don't push the fur into your eyes."

"Amber," the Beast said after a pause, "are you proposing to barber me?"

A flush ran through my whole body. I said, "I suppose you could ask the servants," stiffly.

The Beast ducked his head, making his bulk as small as it could be compared to mine, and leaned forward toward my hand, like a dog seeking forgiveness before he seemed to remember himself and pulled back again. His voice, though, was low and remarkably apologetic. "I would be honored if you were inclined to do so."

"Very well," I said, wondering what I'd gotten myself into, "let's go see if we can make you presentable."

A downright genteel barbering area awaited us in the sitting room beyond the foyer. A copper bath large enough for me to swim in and filled with steaming water sat in front of the fire, with bath sheets big enough for most beds hanging nearby to gather the fire's warmth as well. The Beast's usual chair, which was of preposterous size and allowed him to curl up in a variety of cat-like positions, had been replaced by a proper tilting barber's chair, which made me laugh. "Can you even sit in that?"

"I believe so," the Beast said dubiously. "Whether I want to or not is another question entirely. And then there is the bath."

I regarded the bath, which had to weigh two or three hundred pounds empty. "Do you suppose invisibility lends unexpected strength and efficiency to the serving class?" I expected, and got, no answer, but the comment avoided the topic of the Beast bathing in my presence. He was a Beast; it should not, in any meaningful way, matter. But he was also, it seemed, a prince, and he was certainly a thinking being either way, and also male. I was not unfamiliar with either male anatomy or—the phrase that leapt to mind made me wince—animal husbandry, but somehow the entire activity seemed fraught. "Perhaps there could be bubbles."

"Bubbles," the Beast echoed so swiftly that I thought I wasn't the only one finding the situation questionable, and shortly thereafter I politely turned my back while the Beast settled into a tub full of bubbles.

I turned around again when he gave an unusually human-like groan, and found him jaw-deep in the foam, with his mane floating around him like spiderwebs. "I'd forgotten what a hot bath felt like. I don't usually bathe," he said. "Beasts…don't."

"No, I suppose not." He didn't, as I'd half supposed he would, smell of wet dog. His usual muskiness was strengthened, but not unpleasantly so. I smiled suddenly. "You soak there for a few minutes. I'll be right back."

He gave an agreeable grunt and sank a little farther into the bubbles. I hurried off to my room, there to test the khemet perfume on my wrist and to think of its spicy warmth melding with the Beast's scent. Yes: I thought it would do nicely. Pleased with myself, I returned to the sitting room, where the Beast was now little more than a blunt face ringed by bubbles, and on impulse put my fingers in the water to touch his mane. His eyes opened, meeting mine, and I asked, "Will I wash it for you?"

I believed that for a moment he actually stopped breathing, though it was hard to tell with the bubbles. Then he nodded, and sat up with a minimum of spillage. I found lightly scented soap and worked it to a lather before sinking my hands into the warmth of his mane. A quick laugh caught me off-guard and shattered my self-consciousness. "And here I'd thought my sisters had a lot of hair."

The Beast breathed laughter, but said nothing. His skull was huge and heavy under my fingertips, like a mastiff's, and the sheer mass of fur meant it took a long time to massage soap through it. The water never got as dirty or as cold as I thought it should. Nor did the bubbles fade, which I found both considerate and vaguely annoying. I was certainly not peeking, but neither could I deny a certain prurient interest that slowly intensified as I washed and rinsed and combed his mane with my fingers. My mouth was dry and my cheeks hot as I went through the ritual again, working my way from his scalp through to the ends. Coarse strands clung to my fingers and floated in the water until I captured them into a snarl and set them aside. A jug of warm lemon water appeared at my elbow and rinsed his mane with it, working it through to remove the last of the soap. When I was finally done, I set the jug aside and lowered my mouth to beside his ear, where I murmured, "Are you purring, Beast?"

His breath caught, putting a hitch in the purr, and I straightened with a smile. "You were purring. I didn't know you could."

"I don't often have reason to." His voice, for a Beast's, was very soft, as if the edges had been taken away by the purr. He shifted, but before he decided to rise, I cried, "Oh, wait! I forgot!" and withdrew the khemet perfume from my bodice to tap a little onto his own wet wrist. He cast me a curious glance, and though I doubted he needed to to catch the scent, lifted his wrist to his nose to inhale.

"You make perfumes?"

"I'm surprised you don't smell my room from half the palace away. Do you—do you like it? It's an ancient recipe, one I found in the library, and I thought—I thought of it, and you, tonight. I thought…I thought of you."

The Beast, smiling as best he was able, took the vial and pressed the perfume's liquid over his palms before raking his huge hands through his mane, scenting it with my perfume. Then he lowered his hands into the water, washing away the excess scent as I, half trying not to be seen, ducked my head to catch the mixture of his scent and the khemet's. It worked even better than I'd imagined, deep and rich and delicious, and I was dizzy when he turned his dreadful smile toward me.

I looked away while he stood, then shrieked with laughter as he shook himself just as any animal would do, spraying water everywhere. I turned with an accusing smile to find as guilty a look as his face could produce writ large across his features, and a bath towel draped around him like a toga. "Well, go on." I turned away again, still smiling, and a few minutes later he cleared his throat, suggesting a reasonable level of decency had been achieved.

A modest amount, at least: he wore trousers and nothing more, as he'd done the first time I'd seen him. Then, though, he had been full of lashing anger, streamlined and dangerous, and now he was distinctly…fuzzy. His mane, though clean, was a tangle from having been shaken, and toweling had rendered the heavy fur on his shoulders and chest fluffy, without enough time having passed for it to lie down again. I went around the tub to run my hands over his shoulders, smoothing the fur, and he lifted his great paws to just barely capture my wrists as he gazed down at me.

My heart lurched so hard spots danced in front of my eyes and desire stung all the way through me. The Beast was not, perhaps, human, but he was very male, and very close, and wearing the scent I had made for him. Confused, I took a short breath and stepped back. He let me go with such grace that he might not have been holding me at all.

He seemed more like a man to me, somehow, than he had before, although I couldn't convince myself that his form had in any way changed. I whispered, "I should comb your mane before it dries," and he gave the most acquiescent of nods before going to the barber's chair.

My hands, cold with barely acknowledged anticipation, trembled for a long time as I worked a comb through the thick fur. More of it came away, creating shaggy tangles on the floor, and when I noticed a pair of scissors that hadn't been there earlier, I trimmed the ends until they were no longer split and raw. A leather tie came to hand just as I thought I might want one, and I combed his mane back to tie the upper bulk of it in a tail that revealed those unexpectedly elegant ears. All that was left were the eyebrows, which I couldn't reach without tilting the chair back so he would lie beneath me. I worked out how to—a handled gear did the trick—and cautiously tipped the Beast back toward me. He looked up at me a little cross-eyed, murmuring, "I confess I find the idea of scissors near my eyes slightly alarming."

"So do I. I'll be careful." I couldn't, though: my hands shook too much each time I came near his over-growing brows, and I finally tucked the scissors into my bodice and breathed deeply. "I can't. I can't do it upside-down. I'm not sure enough of myself."

"You could," the Beast began in a tone that suggested he was about to say something amusing. He stopped so quickly, though, and looked so distressed, that I was all too easily able to follow his thought, and why the humor in it had gone suddenly flat.

Without giving myself time to think, I said, "I could," and came around the chair to climb onto it, too. To climb onto the Beast, though once I set myself in motion it was less a climb than a lift: he caught me with one tremendous hand and scooped me into the chair with him as if I weighed as little as a pillow. Heat flushed through me, coloring my cheeks and speeding my heartbeat until I could hardly breathe, and even so, I couldn't help but be aware that our shared thought had been predicated on the Beast being a man.

He was not. Had I been lifted so easily into a man's lap, I would have been in his lap, even if the nominal goal was to trim his eyebrows. The Beast was too much larger than I for that, and to make things more difficult, he was lying back thanks to the barber's chair. In order to put our faces near to one another, I ended up more across the sharp angle of his ribs than his hips. I doubted my weight bothered him at all, but I felt uncomfortable and absurd.

He dropped his hand and released the chair's catch, sitting up to let the chair move beneath him, and then I was in his lap, with his warmth and bulk and the spicy depth of his scent surrounding me. He had a beast's ability to smell. I was quite certain of what my own scent told him, and wondered if my too-fast heartbeat gave me away as well. I felt wild, as if madness had overtaken me, and as if I had no wish to be brought back to sanity.

His mouth was not made for kissing. Nothing either of us could do would change that, but our foreheads touched and I closed my eyes, listening to the tandem harshness of our breath and searching for just a little more bravery. He whispered, "Amber," precursor to a familiar question.

Somehow it gave me the courage I sought. I whispered, "Beast," in return, swiftly curving in on myself to find his jaw, so I could kiss that, at least.

The scissors I'd put in my bodice jabbed my belly, and I flinched back from the Beast with a bellowed, "Ow! Stars and stones and by the dying mother sun, fuck, that hurt!"

The poor Beast elevated from the chair, setting me on my feet and backing away with the haste of a creature who thought he'd damaged me. I withdrew the bloodied scissors, still cursing, and pulled my bodice out so I could see how badly I'd hurt myself. Badly enough: blood oozed from a hole beneath my breastbone, and I pushed the bodice against it again, both to staunch the small wound and for the pain-easing relief of pressure. By then the Beast had retreated halfway across the room, and I snarled—unfairly, but pain brought out the worst in me— "It wasn't you. I put the sun-blasted scissors in my bodice so I could trim your eyebrows and then forgot they were there. I jabbed myself."

Halfway through the explanation its absurdity began to strike me, and although it still hurt like the moon's broken heart, I concluded with a reluctant laugh. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to yell at you. It wasn't your fault."

The Beast passed a hand over his eyes in the most human gesture I'd seen from him yet, then threw the motion away. "The servants had better take a look, then. Clean it, heal it if they can. I'll leave you to it."

"Beast," I said in a smaller voice, as he left the room, "will you—will you be at dinner?" It wasn't the question I meant to ask, but I lacked the boldness for the other, though only a minute earlier, the other's answer had been at hand.

He stopped at the door, looking at me. Studying me, as if he'd heard the question I hadn't asked, the one he asked every night, before shaking his great head once. "No, I don't think so. Not tonight. Good night, Amber."

I waited until he was gone, then let out a bereft little laugh, and let the servants tend to my injury.

They gave me a potion so potent I didn't care that they also gave me two stitches, or that each breath stung a little. I kept my eyes closed through all of it, conscious that I believed, rightly or wrongly, that it was easier for the invisible staff to do their jobs if I wasn't trying to watch them do it. Their humming and fussing seemed less muted than usual, as if the drink had rendered me closer to their state. I found the consequent higher pitch of their buzzing disturbing, even upsetting, and as soon as they seemed done with me, fled the parlor-cum-bathing-room.

In my altered state, I was not at all surprised that I could not find my rooms. I marched down the hallway, occasionally bumping off the walls and equally often picking myself up from the floor, and waited for the enchantment to take advantage of my muddled head. Even expecting it, I still didn't quite notice when the visions began, perhaps because they entwined nicely with my half-acknowledged fantasies of the Beast. They faded together, blood-heating images of my great Beast with my knees over his shoulders and his tongue between my thighs, and equally aching visions of my hands knotted in a dark-skinned woman's hair, urging her tongue to carry me to ecstasy. She crawled up my body, burying her fingers within me, a thing even fevered imagination admitted the Beast and his claws could not do, and lingered at my breasts until I cried with need and pleasure. She covered her mouth with mine as I broke for her, and she whispered, "How could I go on without you, my Nell?" as I shuddered and gasped and sank back into the sheets.

"You would find a new king," I murmured, when I could speak again. "A new man to pleasure you in bed, while I stood by and went mad with jealousy."

"Never."

"But you would." I rolled my queen onto her belly, stroking her thighs until they began to part. "You miss a man's touch. You still say his name at night, sometimes."

"Your touch is all I want right now." The queen's voice was ragged, and grew more so as I teased promises from her in the pursuit of satisfaction. Then, because I could, I refused to finish her until she had brought me to a head again, and her desperation to please made my release all the sweeter.

She went away often, did my queen, and I could never quite forgive her for it, no matter how important the treaty, no matter how necessary the war. I would dress her in her armor and leave her wanting, so she would remember to come back to me, and I recalled her sensual, shameful flush when her desire was so great that mounting her horse cascaded her into release. I teased her mercilessly when she returned from that campaign, urging her to admit to the thrill she'd felt with a beast between her legs. "No one," she promised me, "no one could ever love a beast as I love you."

While she campaigned and I sated myself with her love, the prince grew from a child to a youth, always standing at my side as his mother rode away. "Why does she always go?"

I put my arm around his shoulder, kissed his hair, and replied, "Because she doesn't love you like I do, my sweet." He turned a gaze on me that would have broken his mother's heart, but I was not his mother, and never had been.

Time passed: Irindala came and went, her son growing in leaps and fits from a youth to a young man. He had his mother's look about him: large dark eyes and curling black hair, and in time, I saw all that I desired about her reflected in him. He charmed and flirted, delighting the ladies of the court, and though I taught him to dance and seduce with his gaze, he never turned that sweet look on me. A worm of envy began to grow in my breast, that others should have what I did not. Irindala returned home and to my bed, and for a little while I was satisfied, until late one night, our limbs tangled together, light and dark, she murmured to me that she would bring her son with her on her next campaign, so he could begin to learn politics in the real world, and not just from books.

My heart cracked, not with fear, but with anger. "Are you sure he'll want to go?"

"It's his duty."

"And you'll leave me here, alone, with neither of you?"

"Who better to watch over my kingdom while we're gone?" She put herself above me and showered me with kisses, but even her hunger to satisfy me could not thaw my anger. I would not be abandoned by both for the sake of politics; the son could be sent to try his uncertain hand, or Irindala could go alone, but I would not lose them both. They belonged to me, Irindala because she loved me and the boy because I had raised him for her sake. I would have no other answer but that one of them would stay and be mine. But Irindala was accustomed to leaving, and I knew I could never keep her. The boy, then, would stay, no matter what enchantment I had to work to make it so.

I had done no magic since giving Irindala the boundary spell that she had worked with her husband's bones and her own blood. I had not needed to: she had been willingly seduced, and the power of being the queen's lover and confidante was stronger in human courts than almost any faery magic could ever be. We were creatures of magic, shaped in form by our desires, and the longer we went without using our power, the stronger it became, distilled in our blood. The boy did not see me with a lover's eyes, and so I made myself into a thing that he would: sweet and bosomy, with hair like his mother's, and a boldness that would run suddenly dry and require coaxing to be brought again to the fore. I let him seduce me, leaving him never knowing that it was I who seduced him.

I came to the court by day a precious creature lost in wonderment, even foregoing the roses I so often embroidered into my clothes, so that I might not be measured against my other self, Irindala's lover. By night I went to Irindala's bed, more passionate than ever from the pursuit of her son. The same touches that brought cries from her throat elicited shudders in the youth: teasing lips plucking nipples, curved nails scraping sensitive centers. No faery was ever more sated by love and desire than I, but rage clouded my joy whenever the queen mentioned her next journey, and her intention of taking her son with her. "The courtiers say he has a mistress, my queen. Perhaps he won't want to leave her."

She laughed beneath my warning, and gasped as I took her more ferociously. Only after, her lips against my breast, did she murmur, "I've heard the rumor, but I've not seen the girl, so perhaps she doesn't exist. He'll still come, Nell. It remains his duty."

I rose from the bed cold and angry, determined to win protestations of love and promises of forever from the boy I had raised to manhood. I shed the form that Irindala loved as I walked to his rooms, replacing it with the curves and large eyes that had captured his heart, and I was welcomed into his bed by eager hands. My anger could not quite hold as I admired the beauty of his face, and in holding my breasts to his tongue, I knew I could win from him the promises I desired.

And then came a thing I did not expect: Irindala at his door, Irindala who had followed me, Irindala who saw through my enchantment, and cried, "Nell!" in horror as I rode above the lad and let his fingers work between my legs.

The saying of my name shattered the magic holding me in my young lover's preferred form. His face contorted in abhorrence as I became the minder he had known all his life. He cast me off him with the strength of disgust, and seized a blanket as he came to his feet, covering himself from my gaze. "Aunt Nell, what—what have you done to me?"

I spat, "Nothing you weren't eager for," but he shook his head, dark eyes large and horrified.

"No. No, I wanted my little Helen, not—" A shudder ran through him. "What a fool I am. Nell. You might have called yourself Cornelia, too, or Ellen, and I never would have thought. Mother, Mother, I—I didn't know, I didn't want—!"

"You are never to blame," Queen Irindala said. For the first time I saw her as a queen, as a great and terrible warrior, and I knew that in a handful of heartbeats, her wrath would fall upon me.

"Traitor!" I shrieked at her son, knowing him to be the weaker of the two. "I raised you, I loved you, you desired me—"

"No more than I desired a beast!"

A wicked laugh shot from my throat. I pointed at both of them, Queen and Prince alike, and whispered, "Oh, but your mother knows love for a beast, do you not, Irindala? I curse you," I spat. "I curse the blood that runs in your veins, child, that it shall never let you die. I curse the body that you live in, that it should be as a beast's. I curse the walls that you call home, that they should forever be an unsolvable maze. I curse those who serve you that they should be as unseen as they are unappreciated. I curse the very land that you walk upon that it should be as if salted."

A maelstrom rose, the prince's cries at its heart. All the beasts of the forest and plains fought to become a part of him, his bones breaking and stretching, fur erupting from his skin as he screamed. Power flowed from me, ripping away the vestiges of humanity I had so long worn and revealing the immortal, ethereal beauty that was my own, for in no other form could I convey deathlessness upon a mortal creature. I shrieked in outraged pleasure, then, through the howl and the wind, through the shattering of stone and the falling of walls, heard Irindala whisper, "This land is mine," and I knew I had made a mistake.

I had given her the spell myself, told her how to waken it, how to bind the borders of the land against her enemies. She had bled for it, buried bones for it, spoken prayers over it, and made it her own. It was a spell to last forever, holding the borders of her country so long as the blood of the queen who laid it ran true in the veins of its royal family.

But as much as it bound the land to her, it bound Irindala to the land as well, and not even the faery queen herself could contain all the power of the earth within her mighty grasp.

"You can't!" I cried. "You cannot! The borders will weaken, your reign will end! You cannot, Irindala! It loses you all you have fought for!"

"It gains me my son." Soft, implacable words, and with them she tore from me the darkest aspects of my curse: that immortality should only last so long as the beastly form, and that the form itself could be undone by a lover's willing touch. That the maze of his home should become an endless palace, the servants offer what solace they could, and the land barren but for gardens of roses.

We fought, myself with the power borne within me, and Irindala with the power of the land. Forest grew around us, and a palace rose, and all the while the prince roared and sobbed and struggled with his transformation. I seized the roses, making them mine: should any traveler seeking shelter enter this sanctuary, they might leave safely unless they plucked a rose. Irindala poured strength into the forest, extending it as her beastly son's demesne; I took away his freedom to roam it, but could not prevent her making him its protector, and the protector of all the beasts within. I stole his rationality; she returned a thread, which grasped, might lead him back to thoughtfulness. On and on we went, until she cast the last and greatest counter to my spell: the land itself rejected me, casting me beyond the borders into my own land, and her voice lingering in my ears promised me that I should never return unless love itself carried me past the bone-bred barriers.

I howled protest, digging my hands into earth I had not set foot on in a hundred years or more, and wept as a rising spring showed me a face that was my own.

I opened my eyes with a head on me like a drum, and for some time lay where I was, with no idea and not much interest in where that might be. Only my head hurt. It seemed like my belly ought to, where I'd stabbed it, but when I flexed the muscles there, I felt no protest of pain, or even bandages. Looking hardly seemed worth it. Not when I could see, as if at the backs of my eyes, the vision I had been left with.

I'd known the eyes, the quirk of the lips, the unevenness that made it compelling. I had not known the highness of the cheekbones or the slight length of jaw; those things belonged to Pearl, not me. Neither had I known the ears, long and slender and pointed, not unlike the Beast's. But the face, yes. I had known that face, because it was my own.

I tried to sit up with the grim intention of finding the Beast, and discovered two things: one, sitting up was all but beyond me, and two, the Beast sat beside me as if he had not moved for hours. He was reading, in fact. He wore a carefully constructed set of spectacles, and was reading aloud, though I had hardly heard him in the midst of my own thoughts. I recalled the last words he'd said with a hazy memory: something of morning and evening mists, and now, as he made to close the book, I said, "I'm afraid you'll have to start again. I seem to have missed most of the story."

"Amber!" He cast the book aside and caught one of my hands in both of his enormous paws, engulfing half my arm in the effort. "Amber, thank the stars."

"I'm having a hard time moving. I feel like I've been sleeping for a week."

"Not a week." His voice lowered, vibrating through me. "Ten days days, Amber."

"Ten days." I understood him, but in the same way I had when he had first captured me and told me I had to stay: I understood the content of the words without them meaning much. Then, as his worried expression made it clear I must have, indeed, been asleep a very long time, I said, "I suppose I must be very hungry, then. And that I need very badly to pee."

Both of those things, having been considered, became violently true. I still all but lacked the strength to stand, but the Beast whisked me from the bed with the grace of practice, and deposited me over a chamber pot. I squatted there for some time, too relieved both literally and figuratively to be humiliated, and simply said, "Help," when my bladder had emptied and I couldn't yet push myself up. The Beast lifted me again, his head close to mine as he rumbled, "The bed or a chair?"

My eyes closed as I inhaled his scent. "You're still wearing my perfume."

"I hoped it would comfort you." He sounded pleased that I'd noticed, and I clung to his shoulders a few moments before sighing, "A chair, I think."

Only when he carried me into the sitting room did I realize we weren't in my rooms at all: there were no perfume potions anywhere, and the decorating was in different colors. My confusion showed, because the Beast said, "These are my rooms. I found you outside my door, the morning after my bath," as he tucked me into a chair.

If that polite description was how we were to refer to that evening, I would gladly accept it. "And I've slept all that time? I was…dreaming. Not dreaming."

"I told you the enchantment might try to kill you, if it couldn't make you fit into its story. I brought a few things from your rooms. Your rose water, and your amber mirror." The Beast fetched a platter that had appeared while he tucked me in. It was my usual breakfast, with a pile of bacon taller than my hand, and with my hand mirrorr and a vial of the rose water placed neatly on its side.

I touched the mirror's back, but didn't pick it up. "I doubt I want to look at myself." Nor did I wish to conjure up images of my family, not right now. Instead I offered the Beast some bacon. Somewhat to my surprise, he accepted. For a while we sat together and ate, before I finally pushed the plate away. "I'm not sure it was trying to kill me. Beast, my mother's name was Eleanor."

I had never seen him swallow before, not the way a human did when they were startled or afraid. A long, cautious silence passed, before he said, "My mother banished her."

"My father fought in the Border Wars."

The Beast came to his feet in a swift motion, knocking his chair backward. He caught it with one quick hand, settling it before stalking the outskirts of the room as if it had suddenly become a cage. Nervousness twisted my stomach, but not the fear I'd once had of him. When he reached the window, he asked, "Do you know what caused them?"

"The Border Wars? No. I mean—no. I know the queen…" I knew a great deal more about the queen now than I had the last time I'd been awake, and spent a moment determining what I had known. "Everyone knows she fought off invaders after the king died, and that the borders were safe for decades after that. But forty years ago they began to weaken again, and by thirty years ago they had to be re-established in the Border Wars. I know they say some of our enemies weren't human, that they were faeries, but I never used to believe that. There are hardly even any witches, how could there be faeries? But now I know that there were faeries. Beast…I have to leave. I have to go talk to my father. I need to know…what he knew about my mother."

"I need to show you something." It wasn't a refusal, though in truth, at this stage I didn't expect to be refused. Too much had happened, here and between us. I put my hand out, and he returned to not only take it, but once more scooped me gently into his arms. He brought me to his balcony, and I saw immediately what he wanted me to.

Roses had run amok, in the days that I slept. They were no longer fighting the forest at the estate's perimeter: instead they swept toward the palace like a pernicious weed. The long drive and the beautifully maintained ponds were blanketed in greenery; if that greenery hadn't been spotted with color I would have thought it to be greedy, grasping ivy. It covered the ground in the same way, layering tendrils that stuck to the earth and cement and stone. Ivy, especially new ivy, could be torn up relatively easily, but I knew from experience that the rose vines were protected by vicious thorns.

I caught motion from the corner of my eye, but it stopped when I looked directly. I glanced away again, watching side-eyed, and saw pieces of encroaching roses being scraped away from the palace walls in swaths, like someone was running the edge of a spade along the building and loosening them. No one was there, or at least, no one visible: the servants fought to keep the palace safe in whatever way that they could.

Their handiwork had not, though, been able to disguise the roses' trajectory. They were growing purposefully, coming from all directions, and from the shrinking circle where they had not yet reached, it was clear that their destination was where the Beast stood with me safe in his arms.

"They've been coming for me since you fainted," he said softly, but I shook my head.

"They're Nell's roses, Beast. They're not coming for you. They want me to finish her story."

"No." The Beast released me when I made to squirm away, but his deep voice reverberated despair as he did so. "Amber, no. You said yourself that the roses didn't like you."

"That was before they knew who I was. Before I knew who I was." I took a shaking step to the balcony's rail, leaning on it. I extended my hand, and we could both see the leading vines grow, adding six inches as they tried to reach me. I closed my fingers again and they faltered. "You see," I said quietly. "I'm sorry. She found a way to get to you. I'm the villain, Beast."

He growled, "Really," but I knew the growl wasn't for me. "Did you deliberately lose your family's fortune? Set fire to your home? Plan to force eight people to a remote hunting lodge? Conjure a snowstorm so you were driven to my palace? Then you are not the villain." He closed a massive paw on the balcony rail. "At worst, you're a pawn, like myself, Amber. A victim of someone else's game."

"But she was my mother."

"She was all but mine as well, and more." The Beast shuddered, and I forgot the threat approaching us to put my hand over his.

"I'm sorry, Beast. For what she did to you. That was wrong."

"I should have known."

A little smile crept across my face. "Now, you can't have it both ways, Beast. Either we're both innocent of being victim of her manipulations, or neither of us are, and you seem determined that I am."

He looked down at me a long moment, then turned his hand under mine, clasping it. "Very well. I have…a great deal of unlearning to do, if that's how it's to be. I've blamed myself for—"

"A very long time. Over a century, and yet Irindala still reigns beyond this forest. How?"

"Enchantment." A brief smile curled his mouth at my exasperated look. "Beyond that I don't know. I was not…thoughtful…in the aftermath of Eleanor's curse. The magic has told me time and again how I was brought here, but it can't finish the story. It can only try to make the pieces it has fit the story it knows so far, and it doesn't seem to know what happened after the curse struck."

"Which is why I must go to Father. He must know something. He knows my mother—and Maman, for that matter—both knew the queen, once upon a time. He must know something more."

The Beast looked askance at me. "Both his wives knew my mother? Your father moves in high circles, Amber."

"He used to. You can come with me, can't you?" I asked, suddenly eager. "You protect this forest and its beasts, don't you? So you must be able to leave the palace grounds."

"No longer. It is your world, a world apart from mine. I used to be able to." The Beast reached toward the roses, which surged toward him with thorns sharp and wicked at the fore. He pulled his hand back again and the vines settled. "It's been like this since they began their attack. I think they cannot kill me, but I believe they can bind me. Keep me here. And that they will kill me, if they can. Which is another reason I don't believe you're the villain, Amber. The roses have always fought the forest, never coming for me. Now they've turned their focus inward, and—can you walk?" he asked. "You should see this from the observatory."

"I think I can. Wait." I collected my mirror and the rose water, though the mirror seemed more likely to be useful. We might be able to see beyond the forest with it, or find a way through the roses with it. The rose water went into my bodice, but I had to find a reticule for the mirror, and tied the purse at my hip before we left the Beast's rooms. I meant to ask him why he had brought the mirror, but between my weariness and the obvious answer—that he knew its properties, and always had—I couldn't muster the effort. Even without wasting energy speaking, I tired halfway to the observatory. The Beast unhesitatingly carried me to its narrow stairway, which I had to ascend myself; his bulk was too great for him to climb the stairs carrying anything. He stayed just behind me, in case I fainted, but we reached the glass dome in safety, and I saw at once what he meant.

It wasn't only the roses racing toward the house. The lands had shrunk beneath the forest's encroachment as well. In places it was clear a war was being waged: swiftly-growing saplings were being throttled by roses, but their branches bent to scrape the vines from the ground. Here and there they'd reached a stalemate, horrible tangles of roses and trees no longer trying to reach the house, but instead growing higher and higher, each trying to dominate the other. "All this in ten days?"

"The snarls are from when I ventured out. It seemed to help: the roses stopped where I was, and the forest was able to catch up, to hold them in place. But staying still in their midst that long…" The Beast exhaled. "As I said, I think they can't kill me, but they could bind me. And I was afraid what would happen to you, if I let them take me. So I came back." He was silent a little while before saying, "I am not certain whether I am a coward or not."

"Beast! No! Of course not. If the roses did take you, she'd have won, wouldn't she? And if she won, the palace would go to ruin and I would die too. It's not cowardice to leave a battle you can't win, not if retreating saves lives. Even one life." I considered that. "I suspect I may feel especially strongly about the matter when it's my life."

That earned a chuckle from the Beast, which was all I wanted. "I have to go see Father," I said again. "If it was the full moon I could wait on Pearl conjuring a mirror-spell again—"

The Beast, cautiously, said, "Have you learned anything of your mirror?"

"I have. Oh!" I pressed my palm against the mirror's purse, then sank onto one of the low cushioned seats, putting my face in my hands. "Of course. That's why it worked for me, isn't it? We're all Eleanor's daughters. Of course Pearl's witchery didn't awaken out of nowhere. I knew—I knew, once you said the stones were bespelled, that the pearl was magic, that you hoped she would learn to use it and be able to break the enchantment here. If I go to Father I can bring her back, Beast. She can help you. She can fight the curse from within."

"She cannot." The Beast's voice was strange, and I looked up at him with fingers pressed against my mouth. "The breaking of the enchantment is quite specific, and I cannot imagine Pearl succumbing to its requirements in any usefully timely fashion."

"But she's a witch," I said helplessly. "I don't understand." And then I did, Irindala's amelioration of the curse coming back to me: the form could be undone by a lover's willing touch. I stood, swiftly, and the Beast, with a desperate ache in his voice, asked, "Amber, will you sleep with me?"

I opened my mouth to cry yes!, and rose vines smashed through the observatory windows to snatch me away.

Thorns sank into my skin as the roses held me, kept me from writhing away. Within a heartbeat I didn't dare struggle, as the runners reared back from the palace and fell toward the ground. Roses, even enchanted roses, weren't meant to hold a human's weight four or five stories above the earth, and all that kept me from plummeting were the numbers of runners rising to catch me. I felt them weaken and buckle beneath me, and others take up their slack. Those that pulled away left scores in my dress and across my limbs, though the pain wasn't as great as I would have imagined. It stung and tingled, but the roses I'd picked had caused me more discomfort.

I glimpsed the Beast leaping through the broken observatory windows and pouncing after the runners, his claws glittering sharp and his roar so loud and endless I briefly mistook it for the wind. He skidded to a halt at the roof's edge, slate tiles shattering and flying free beneath his weight, but I was already out of reach. Screaming, reaching for him, but out of reach. A runner wrapped around my face and lodged in my mouth, muffling my screams. I bit it, trying to catch a breath to scream again, and felt leaves tickling the back of my throat. I bit down again, tasting bitter sap, and a story exploded inside my mind.

I was Eleanor, and I never left the borders to Irindala's country, always testing them with my thwarted rage. They could not hold: Irindala had spent too much magic in altering my curse. I knew it, and yet they held. For years I paced, hatred sustaining me, and then it came to me that an active enemy lent strength to any magic. I gathered power into myself, transforming until my roots ran deep and my blooms rose to the sun: a hedge of roses that crept along the border, adding beauty as it searched for weakness. I grew tenaciously enough that in time the area I patrolled became known as the Rose Border, and it was at the Rose Border that the Border Wars both ended and began.

She ought not have lived that long, my old lover the queen. No mortal could, and no spell, no matter how flawlessly wrought, could forever survive the price of a single person maintaining it. Its burden had been meant to pass from queen to child, its strength invigorated by new blood. It took decades longer than I expected, but one day my wandering tendrils pressed into the border, and the border gave.

I plucked and picked, weakening it, though the banishment held: I couldn't cross the border myself. When I was sure of its weakening, I gathered myself together again, reshaping my form to the faery I had once been, and went into the Border Kingdom with news that the human border had finally begun to fail.

It could hardly be thought of as an invasion. Fae whose memories were long and whose pride stung at having been pushed back by a human army merely went to see for themselves, and, where they could, edged into Irindala's country. Elsewhere, where the border fell between Irindala's country and other human realms, there were invasions. Irindala's people had lived in undisturbed peace for seventy years or more, under the guidance of a queen believed to be a witch; invasion was inevitable. Having spread my knowledge, I returned to the border to sit and shiver with delight at each new piece of gossip about the slow fall of Irindala's country.

She fought for seven years, an ancient unaging queen struggling to retain her country, and in the seventh year, in a lull, retired from the field. That, finally, was when the faery king attacked, pushing hisy kingdom forward like an arrow meant to pierce the heart of Irindala's country. I thrilled to it, feeling my banishment weaken as the king advanced: I could not be kept from a conquered country whose land no longer belonged to its former queen. I thought her too old, too defeated by the long-ago loss of her son, to rally, and yet somehow, I was wrong.

Irindala returned to the battle as an implacable shield to her people. Everywhere she went, the border strengthened again, strengthened as it had not done in the previous seven years of war. Strengthened as though the aged queen re-cast the spell I had taught her nearly a century ago, though to do so was impossible. It required royal blood and royal bones, and unless she plucked the very bones from her own body, I could not see how she managed, for she had never again married, and had sworn for all this time to hold the land for the prince's return.

I entertained the glorious idea that she had sacrificed him, her beastly child, but I would have known that in my own bones, and knew it to be untrue. I had never tested the spell I'd given her, though, and thought that perhaps after all this time, her own blood renewed the magic after all. It did not much matter, perhaps; what mattered was that she pushed the Border Kingdom back, and back again, until the bloodiest battle of the war was fought at the Rose Border, and I, architect of it all, nearly died beneath a mortal's steel blade.

It was not that I was a female that stopped him; there were women a-plenty amongst Irindala's army, and the blood on his blade said he'd killed without hesitation before. Nor was it that I was not obviously a combatant: innumerable of the fair folk went into battle with no visible armor, relying on their magic to protect them more thoroughly than metal ever could. No: it was something else, a sudden focus in his gaze, and then a far-away look that ended with his sword lowering, and his deep voice saying, "Go."

I rose, and ran, and that night reshaped myself, for the first time in decades, to a mortal form. I kept those aspects of myself that I was most fond of: the slight asymmetry of my face, my height and my bosom, but I squared my jaw and cast off the white fairness of my hair for a honey gold, making of myself a creature that Irindala would not recognize if she met me face to face—

—though, remembering that she had known me in my sweet Helen form, I thought it best that I never encounter the queen again. Nor did I need to; all I needed was to find the man who had not slain me. And so I did, by putting myself to work in the roving hospital the queen's army had set up on the faery kingdom's side of the border. I listened and watched and waited, and soon enough he came in with an injury he said was no more than a scratch. He smiled at me as if I might be someone familiar as I tended the wound, and ten weeks later when Irindala closed the border for the second time in her long life, I returned to her country as Jacob's bride.

I finally knew, when Jacob carried me across the border into the country I had been banished from, how Irindala had survived a century and more. I put my feet into the soil, and felt how the earth, while fit for crops and building, had no magic in it. All life had magic, and we faeries, more than that, but Irindala's country had been drained of its power. The only place I felt any at all was along the re-established border, and that was new magic, fresh, recently cast. It had not yet spread into the land, and I thought it never would, not with Irindala drawing on the land to sustain her life. Here and there the earth was even spoiled, barren with too much having been taken from it. A thrill shivered through me. Irindala might well be her own undoing, and never know what horrors she had wrought. But that was only probable, and I intended her downfall to be inevitable.

I had no excuse to ask my new husband whether witches abounded here, but it took little enough time to confirm what I suspected. Witches were almost as unheard of as faeries, and even those who fought in the Border Wars only half believed in the fair folk at all. I dared not draw attention to myself as a witch, then, though I had been known as one while at Irindala's side. I did what I could, growing lush roses along the walls of the merchant's mansion Jacob earned his way to owning, and when he shook his head at them, I laughed and said, "Our own rose border, my love. Did the last one not bring us together?" We seduced one another amongst the roses, in the heart of my power, and I, forgetting caution in my hunger for a long-absent touch, became careless, and thus round with our passion.

Jacob's reverence at my swollen belly surpassed any love or awe Irindala had ever held me in, and I loved him for it. A daughter we called Pearl was born, and when it became clear to me that her hair would come in as white as my own naturally did, I worked the smallest enchantment on her, that it should be strikingly sable: worthy of attention, but not accusations of witchery. I set it to last so long as she wished to confine herself to the expected and the ordinary, which was as close to forever as any spell could be set, and was satisfied to see her grow up a cool and quick child who judged with a scathing glance.

Time and again I returned to lie in the roses with Jacob, and from those unions came the second daughter, Opal, who even at birth was so mild and ordinary that I lost interest in her immediately, and in due time, the third, Amber, whose golden gaze earned her the name and upon whom I cast a spell like Pearl's, softening the gold with green so she should not be thought a witch even in childhood. Unlike with Pearl, the spell seemed to reduce her fire and ambition, but she was the only one of the girls who loved the roses as much as I did, and so I was fond of her despite her dullness.

Irindala discovered me when Amber was two.

A queen was not meant to visit her demesne without fanfare; she was not supposed to slip from city to town and village, meeting the people as another, ordinary person. Afterward, I suspected that at some time or another nearly everyone in her kingdom had met their queen, and that almost none of them knew it.

I descended from our carriage outside an acquaintance's home, prepared to do the necessary duty of smiling and praising that seemed useful to Jacob's business. As the footman released my hand, I looked up from watching my footing and gazed directly into Irindala's eyes.

She had changed hardly at all, wearing her decades as a bare handful of years. Her beauty and resolution were undiminished, her carriage proud, and her dress of modern style, a detail I, who still loved the gowns of old, felt a flash of admiration for. I had for years worn a disguise, a face different from the one she had known, but, as she had done before, she saw through the enchantment in an instant, as evidenced by a hatred as potent as the day we had parted.

I had only one weapon at my disposal in that moment, and curtsied low, crying, "My queen!" in ringing tones that could only alert all who heard me of the illustrious presence we were in.

By the time I rose from my curtsy, Irindala was gone, and everyone in earshot looked at me with sympathy-tainted amusement: clearly they believed me to have lost my mind, and I received no small amount of mockery for it upon alighting in my acquaintance's sitting room. No one, it seemed, had seen the woman fitting my description, and I was obliged to concede, in public at least, that I had been taken by some fit of amusing madness.

I did not stay where she might find me. She had weakened my curse and lived a century since, and though I knew the cost it might wreak from her country should she gather her power to destroy me, she seemed not to, and I never doubted that she would hunt me like a dog and end me in the street, if she could.

I cast the greatest magic I had in years, and left Jacob and his daughters believing that their wife and mother had died giving birth to dull little Amber. Then I fled, not toward the border where she might expect me to run, but deeper into her kingdom, until at the edge of the enchanted forest, I flung myself into the earth and traveled farther, until I could rise as roses around the palace that held Irindala's beastly son.

I came to myself, once more Amber and no longer Nell, retching in the heart of a rose thicket. Sap clung to my throat, clogging my breath, while tears and snot ran from my face as I tried again and again to purge the sap from my body. The roses, which had never had a voice before, cooed daughter at me, and I gagged on the word. Petals shivered like laughter and leaves stroked my back, a motherly touch that made sobs break through the sap plugging my throat.

You are, though, the roses said. Lift your hands, child. See your blood.

I didn't want to. I couldn't stop myself. My hands rose, thorn pricks and scrapes all over them. The blood was gold and sticky as sap, with flecks of red swirling through like roses in amber. I had enough breath now, and screamed, "No!" with such force that I doubled myself, then fell to my knees coughing bloody sap.

He belongs to me, the roses purred. The bestial prince is yours, and you are mine, so he belongs to me.

I panted, "No," again, and pushed to my feet, knowing I pushed my hands against thorns and hardly feeling the pain. Nor would I look at the wounds, at the wrongness of my blood, and I feared what the mirror at my hip would show me of my eyes. I turned in the thicket, waiting for Eleanor to appear in a mortal form. Instead the roses gathered together, creating a shape of petals and stems that had some approximation of a human face. She could see me: of that I had no doubt. But why she chose to remain roses lingered in my mind as a mystery for a few heartbeats, before I laughed roughly. "You're stuck, aren't you? You came into the queen's forest and even all your power can't bring you back to your faery form, not at the heart of the enchantment. You're stuck."

Runners lashed out and struck my face, scoring wounds and narrowly missing my eyes. Stuck, but not helpless. Watch your tongue, daughter.

"I'm not your daughter." But I was, of course. I was, and that had to give me some kind of weapon to use against her, if only I could think of it. My blood was half hers. More than half, perhaps, I thought, looking at sap rising from my stinging scrapes.

The rose runners had known me, when I'd reached toward them in the palace. They'd reached back. Maybe they knew me still. I turned from Eleanor, not trying to escape her notice, but for the moment's respite from her strangely formed body. It began to shape itself again in front of me, but I whispered, "I want out," and extended both my bloody hands.

Pearl would have been better at it. Pearl had spent months already in the pursuit of witchcraft. All I could do was think I had sap in my veins, as there was sap in the living roses, and ask them to let me pass, as sisters might.

They didn't. Eleanor swirled into being in front of me again, laughter in her rose-petal eyes. Anger rose in me, different from before. That, though voiced as denial, had been born of fear. This was calmer, born of defiance, and felt stronger for it. "What is amber but the resin of healing wounds?"

A flicker of something curled Eleanor's leafy lip, and my own mouth curled with cold anger. This time I reached out not with the hope of moving the roses, but holding them still. The rustling branches protested, then slowed, then held. I couldn't freeze them as solidly as true amber, but I had seen innumerable lumps of half-frozen resin trickling down trees, hard enough to poke and dent without easily regaining their shape, and that was enough. I didn't try to make a passage with magic, only ran into the brambles, trusting that I would survive the scratches and regrow the hair caught and pulled free. I pressed and pushed branches out of my way, careless with my skin, and knew there would be a price paid for every puncture. Where I could, I dropped low, crawling through the thicket, and it was on my hands and knees that I made my escape.

It was not a clearing that I reached, but rather a different kind of tangle: I had reached a border where the forest and the roses fought each other. Here, though, the undergrowth lifted for me, tree roots carving a tunnel of themselves and the forest floor that I could scramble through. The passage collapsed behind me, and for voiceless blooms, the roses screamed quite well, their rage reverberating in my very blood. I cast my thoughts forward, thinking of my magic-born sisters, and of Father, and of what he knew. I followed those thoughts as if they were a lifeline, scrambling ever onward, denying the part of me that was drawn back toward the roses.

Somewhere beyond the distance I knew the palace walls to be, the forest let me surface, and the ground beneath my feet remained curiously clear of roots and lumpy hillocks. I ran, and then I walked, and then I ran some more, not so much choosing a direction as simply running away. I had stood above the estate in the observatory, and knew that the hunting lodge was not, by ordinary travel, within a day's journey of the palace. I had little hope of finding my way home, but I remembered the Beast had told me Father would be home before nightfall, and I thought maybe the forest might have enough magic left to guide me.

I had been running—and walking and gasping and limping—for an hour or two when I burst onto a small, wealthy farmstead. A handsome barn stood at one corner of a very large garden; at the corner diagonal rose a whitewashed house whence happily raised voices could be heard. The far side of the house was covered in roses, huge rich flowers that had no business blooming this early in the season, but bloom they did. Land had been cleared beyond another corner, with the foundations of a new building already built, and between that building and the barn lay pens with pigs and goats. The earth hazed with the green of new growth, and it all seemed prosperous and safe.

It wasn't until Beauty plodded out of the barn with Flint in tow that I realized the prettily whitewashed house was the hunting lodge, and the farm, our own. I let go a cry of relief and thanks to the forest, and plunged down toward the oldest of my little brothers, who gaped at me as if I was a ghost appearing from the woods. Then he cried, "Amber! Amber!" and before I'd reached him, almost the whole of the family had spilled from the house to meet me. Even Pearl, whom I had not believed could, spilled tears as the family captured me in hugs, all of them shouting questions.

Opal finally shushed them by saying, beneath the uproar, "But look at the state of you, Amber," in dismay. I did, and wondered that they'd been willing to approach me at all. My dress, which had only been a sleeping gown to begin with, was in tatters, and thorn scrapes criss-crossed my skin until I appeared hardly more than a walking welt. I touched my hair, hardly able to imagine its condition, and Jasper, with a forthrightness bordering on uninhibited delight, said, "It's awful!"

I laughed in surprise and hugged him. "Thank you. I'm sure that made me feel better than an 'it's not so bad'."

"It is so bad," he continued with that same good cheer. "You've got half a rosebush in your hair, Amber." He reached to pluck a thorn from the tangles. I caught his hand with a swiftness that startled both of us, and shook my head. "Don't. Don't touch them. I don't trust them."

"Amber," Pearl said, her voice heavy, "what's happened? Did the Beast do this to you?"

"What? No! Stars, no. No, it's—" I looked at Father, whose eyes were still bright with tears, and whose mouth was a grim anticipatory line in a beard he had not worn the last time I'd seen him. "It wasn't the Beast," I said again, firmly. "Father, I have to know. What did you know of your first wife?"

Father's grimness swept away in a flood of astonishment soon replaced by aged resignation. "Less than I should have. Come, children. We'd better go inside."

Only when we stepped inside did I realize who had been missing from the crowd outdoors. "Maman?" I asked, suddenly frightened. "Where is Maman?"

"Resting upstairs," Opal said quietly. "She took to her bed over a week ago, and has hardly been aware of us since. Amber, what has happened to you?"

A tremor of relief raised hairs on my arms. Maman had always been fragile, all of her strength drained by the boys and the letters she wrote, but the prospect of her loss while I had been away was too much to bear. I wanted to see her, but my story needed to be told, and would only agitate her. Opal could come up with some softer variant on it, something palatable for Maman's infirm state, and we would share that with her, instead of the whole dreadful truth.

We sat together, all of us, even little Jet, whose three years certainly should have protected him from the worst of my tale. Helpless to explain the impossible in anything but blunt terms, I told them what I had learned of the queen, the curse, and Eleanor's role in it. Pearl went and got a mirror when I spoke of the spell that had altered her hair, staring into it as if trying to understand that the brilliant white coif she now wore was what she had always been meant to have. Then she handed me the mirror, and my story fell into speechlessness as I gazed at it.

The green was gone from my eyes, leaving them their unknown but natural, shocking, gold, and they were the least of it. My skin was a lattice of scratches, which I'd known, but seeing the scores across my cheeks and forehead was vastly more dismaying than acknowledging the ones on my arms and legs. Jasper had been kind: my hair was beyond awful, an amber-colored snarl of twigs and thorns that made me look like I was half a tree. I handed Opal the mirror, and she tilted it so I could see what I was doing as I began to work the thorns out.

Jet's curious little fingers reached for the first of the thorns as I placed them aside. I snapped, "Don't touch those," and his hand flinched back. He gave me a look of tragic betrayal that would have won laughter from me, had I not been so afraid of the thorns. My gaze skittered to the window where the bit of stained glass, the leaded rose, hung, and beyond them to the roses that covered the entirety of that wall. Opal, following my gaze, shook her head. "They're the strangest roses I've ever seen, Amber. They've been growing and blooming since before they were put in the ground, but save for the branch they grew from, they have no thorns. They're not like the ones that attacked you, even if they came from the same garden."

I nodded uncertainly. Glover rose from beside Opal and got a small-necked glass jar for me to drop them in. Grateful, I smiled at him, then told the rest of my story.

Father's face grew bleaker and bleaker as I listed Eleanor's transgressions. When I finished, he shook his head, his words weary. "I knew she hadn't died."

We sisters, especially, gawked at him, and he passed a hand over his mouth, pulling at the short beard. "Not at first, for what little that may be worth. I mourned as if I'd lost a wife in childbirth, but as you grew, Amber, and played more beneath the rosebushes…" He shook his head. "Visions came to me. More than visions; memories. I knew I had seen you there with her, and that it was more than wishful dreaming. That little piece of knowledge shook other pieces loose, memories that couldn't have happened if she had died when you were born, until one day I saw a woman who so closely resembled Eleanor's description of the queen that I remembered she had claimed to have seen her. I remembered she'd said as much on the day she left us, and I think remembering it may have shattered the rest of the enchantment. I've known since then that she didn't die, and that she bore some manner of magical power."

"Why didn't you tell us?" Opal asked in astonishment. Pearl shook her head as if she anticipated Father's answer, and when it came, nodded agreement.

"What was the purpose? A mother who had died was at least not one who had abandoned you deliberately. And if she carried witchery in her blood, I thought it better to let you forget her as much as you could. I grew insular," Father admitted. "I drew you close to me and turned the world and friendships away. I wanted to protect you, but the end that was our ruin. Had I been more open, we might have had friends to turn to when our home burned, and our lives might have gone on safely in the city."

"You got out enough to meet Maman," Flint said with a quick smile. "Good thing for us, too."

Father very nearly blushed, a thing I hadn't known he could do. "Your mother sought me out. She'd known Eleanor a long time ago, in the queen's court, and heard she'd died, with children left behind. She wanted to make sure the children were well. We became friends, and fell in love. I was grateful, at the time, that anyone else cared. Now I think I may be grateful that someone, at least, counted Eleanor among their friends. It makes me feel a little less the fool."

"We became friends and fell in love," Maman agreed softly, from the stairs. "The rest…may not be precisely true."

The family turned as one to see Maman standing tall and straight on the stairway, one hand wrapped tightly around the bannister as if it lent her the strength to remain upright. She looked, to my eyes, desperately fragile: the warmth had fled from her skin, leaving it yellow beneath its mahogany hue, and she had lost weight, leaving her magnificent bone structure sharper than I'd ever seen it. She looked older, and familiar, but not in the way that a mother did to a child who hadn't seen her in a long time.

Father and I both shot to our feet, Father to offer Maman assistance on the stairs, and myself to simply stand and sway and stare. Maman gave me a rueful smile as she accepted Father's help, and the family made way for her to sit in one of the couches beside Father. I stayed on my feet, gaping at her, and it was Father who had to ask, "What part isn't true, Felicity?" in a cautious voice.

Maman looked at me, waiting to see what I knew, and after a moment I managed a whisper: "Maman is Queen Irindala."

A commotion rose, my two sisters and two of my brothers suddenly full of demands and questions. Jet, who had no questions, felt he should add to the noise, and began to wail. Glover leapt to his feet and bowed so deeply his hair swept the floor. Then he picked Jet up, trying to comfort him. Amidst all the clamor, Father ducked his head, amused guilt pulling at the corner of his lip.

"You knew," I said to him, astonished. "You knew."

Maman's eyebrows went up at that accusation. "Jacob?" Her voice silenced everyone else's, and we watched them, rapt as children at the theatre.

Father lifted his gaze to hers, and my heart shattered with agony for him: his love for Maman was so clear, so obvious, and his regrets for what he had put her through written as largely on his face. "I suspected," he said. "From the beginning, I suspected."

A shadow of loss crossed Maman's features. "Is that why you married me? To wed a queen?"

"Maman!" Pearl burst, not, I thought, because she questioned Father's devotion, but because she had verified, with that query, that what I had said was true.

Maman arched her fingers in her lap, showing Pearl the pads, and with that minute gesture, silenced my older sister more thoroughly than she'd ever been in her life. Father, as though Pearl's outburst hadn't happened, whispered, "Of course not. I married you because I loved you. If you wanted to keep your old self secret, what right had I to unearth it? But you did look very much as Eleanor had described you, and when you said you'd once known her…" He smiled, softer and more gently than I'd ever seen. "I am sorry, Iri. Sorry for having dragged you into this life, when you had only asked for that one."

A smile twitched Maman's lips. "'Iri'?"

"Shh," Father said, primly. "It's my secret nickname for you."

Pearl threw her hands in the air as Maman, eyes sparkling with laughter, leaned in to kiss Father. Jasper, whose thoughts had flown far ahead of mine, said, "That's why you write letters all the time. You never stopped ruling the kingdom, did you? Maman, which of us is to be king after you?"

Flint, horrified, said, "Not me!" while Jet asked, "King? King?" brightly. We laughed, and Maman steepled her hands in front of her mouth before saying, "That's a concern for another time, Jasper. For now I think I must fill in the empty spaces of Amber's tale, so she can decide what to do next."

"Why didn't I recognize you?" I asked in bewilderment. "I saw you over and over in the enchantment's visions, but I saw Irindala, not Maman."

"You said it only knew the story it had experienced up until then," Maman said. "I think it only knew me as Irindala. That it had no reason to see me as someone else."

"But I did." I closed my eyes, recalling Eleanor's impression of the queen's face to mind. "You were younger, maybe…rounder? Softer? Your hair and your clothes were different, but…well, it's obvious now…"

"But you had no reason to think it, then. I was a younger woman, a long way away, in an enchanted story. It's often easier to see the lost youth in someone older, than the old woman in someone young."

I laughed as an incongruous thought struck me. "Well. I suppose Annalise will be satisfied with her references, if she asks for them. It's not often a lady's maid gets a recommendation from the queen!"

"Maman," Flint objected over my commentary, "you're not old!"

Maman gave me a wry smile, and, equally wryly, said, "I'm very old, my boy," to Flint. "Far older than any mortal should be. I didn't know," she admitted to me. "Until now, when you told me. I didn't know what Nell knew, that I've been leeching magic from the kingdom's very land. I'm afraid I can't maintain this artificial youth much longer without irreversibly damaging the country I fought so hard to hold." She sagged a little even as she admitted it, and I remembered she'd been bed-ridden for over a week.

As had I. I finally sat, a slow sink into cushions. "You'd better tell us everything, Maman."

"I did come to check on Nell's children," Maman said to Father, then shook her head. "No, but I must start earlier than that, when the spell to bind our borders began to fail. I knew it was my own doing. My own fault. The magic was never meant to be held by a single monarch for so long, but to be passed down from child to child, renewed by birth and love. But I had sworn to never marry again, to never carry another child until my son's curse was broken and he could kneel before me to take the crown." She smiled briefly. "I was arrogant and angry, which are bad traits in a queen. But the border began to break down, and I knew I had to do something.

"For the first years of the Border Wars I fed the land with my own blood, as I had done when I buried Euard's bones so many years earlier. It helped, but not enough. It took almost seven years of fighting before I was willing to concede that I must bear another child and give this country a future beyond me."

"Maman!" Flint's eyes rounded and he looked about as if he'd been caught with his finger in the sugar. "Me?"

A bittersweet smile creased Maman's features. "No, sweet. This was fifteen years or more before you were born. I couldn't bring myself to marry again, not for convenience, but there were child-makers among the men in the fields. I had a handful of affairs, and when I was certain I had caught, I retired from battle to bear the child."

"But there is no heir." Pearl spoke with a sorrowful intelligence, and for a moment Maman seemed to lean into that understanding before gathering herself to go on.

"There is no heir. The child was born too early, and never breathed outside the womb."

Opal whispered, "Oh, Maman."

Maman's smile turned bleak with thanks, then bleaker still with what she had to say. "I'll never be sure what I did was the right thing. The baby would have been my heir, had she lived, but she did not, and I had cast the spell with Euard's bones once already."

It was I who said, "Oh, Maman," this time, with a knot of heartbreak and pity tightening in my stomach.

She nodded, reciting the next part carefully and without emotion, as if to allow emotion would be her undoing entirely. "I returned to the field, burying her bones and saying the spell all around the kingdom, as I had done before. And for the second time, it worked. The borders rose again, and we were safe. Safe," she repeated, with a weary laugh. "Safe, save for Nell having crossed back into the kingdom while the borders were down, and for her having born children to a man of my people."

"I didn't know," said Father, helplessly. She took his hand and squeezed it, all the acceptance and apology necessary.

"I know. Nor do I condemn you, Jacob. You might have slain her, you know." Maman closed her eyes, as if recalling the part of the story that I had told, how Father had stood over Eleanor's faery form and stayed his sword.

Father's chin lifted and his eyes darkened with memory. "I felt—I felt a compulsion not to kill that faery woman. A demand that rose from the bottom of me, as if it came up through the—"

"Through the earth," Maman said. "And spoke to you. I can't think I did it deliberately, Jacob, but even now I don't know what will happen to my oldest son if Nell dies. My fear of that unknown kept her alive that day, and what came after is therefore of my making as well. She found you, and began again. I know better than that Nell's love was intoxicating, so I can never blame you for loving her." Maman took a breath, as if steadying herself. "I only discovered her by happenstance. She was right, Amber. I'd spent decades traveling and meeting my people, without them ever knowing who I was. I wanted to see, and be seen, as a citizen, not a monarch; how else, I thought, to know the needs and wants of the people? So I was in the city, and we saw one another by chance."

"How did you disappear?" Jasper asked, fascinated.

Maman chuckled. "I'd had decades of practice by then. A cart went by while she was curtsying. I flung myself in the back amongst the rutabegas, and by the time she rose I had been carried safely around a corner. And I'm small, and had my hood up. It's easy enough not to notice me."

Father murmured, "I would disagree," and earned another sweet smile from her as she continued.

"I set someone to learn who she was, and it took little enough time, but Nell was no fool. She had fled already, and I let myself hope she had returned to the Border Kingdom. But I needed to know what I could about her children, too, and that," she said apologetically to Father, "is why I came to check on them. I was afraid I would find her greed and possessiveness embodied in them, that I would find young witches easy with using their magic to get what they wanted. Instead I found you three girls," she said, with a smile as fond for us as she'd had for Father. "You seemed to have no magic amongst you at all, but I could see the best of Nell in your mannerisms and glances and smiles. You, the four of you, showed me something of what a family could be; something I had known little off, with my campaigns and my politics and my lost child. I loved that life," she said simply and without remorse, "but I had lived it for a century, and wanted to try this other thing too. I was lucky that Jacob came to love me, as I had come to love all of you, and luckier still to have had three fine strong sons so very late in my life."

Jet, who had had more than enough of storytelling, shouted, "Maman!" and flung himself at her, snuggling ferociously before settling contentedly into her arms. Maman, murmuring over his head, said, "When the house burned and you proposed we retreat to this lodge, I was lost, Jacob. Terrified. I knew what the forest held, and I became instantly convinced that Nell had not retreated to the Border Kingdom at all. I felt in my bones that she'd come here, and I couldn't help but feel that she was drawing me back to her, determined to bring her curse to fruition at last. The forest has treated us well, but it would; it's mine. And then you found the palace, Amber, or it found you, and you chose to stay." Maman bent her head over Jet's a moment. "I dared hope that Nell had lost her strength at last, and that the curse might finally be broken, not completed.

"But then eleven nights ago I felt a terrible triumph from the wood. You've told us now what happened, Amber, but I didn't know then. All I knew was that the palace was coming under attack, and in the end, I have not lived this long to let my firstborn son go without a fight. I am sorry," she said to the rest of the family. "I know that you worry for my health, and that it's worse when I take to bed as I've done. But in many ways, this forest is me, and I have been fighting Nell in it these past ten days."

A long silence met Maman's final confession, until I broke it with the truth of what I'd seen: "If you hadn't, Maman, I think the Beast and I would be dead already." I described for them again the encroaching roses, and the fierce tangles of forest where the Beast had gone to stand his ground and the woods had helped him.

"'The Beast'," she murmured. "His name was Timmet, once."

A strange little pang, unexpectedly possessive, ran through me. "That was a long time ago."

She smiled at me before the smile turned to a soft laugh. "Yes, it was. And I was Irindala once, but not so long ago."

"Iri," Father said again, with the satisfaction of a man who had been waiting to say it aloud for years. Maman's laughter grew and she kissed him as Jet, squished between them, let out a sleepy protest. For a moment we were together and contented, before I said, "I have to go back."

"Amber!" Opal protested, and Maman's gaze grew serious.

"It might cost you dearly, Amber."

"Maman, already, wherever I go, he is with me in spirit. Nothing can cost me as dearly as losing my Beast will."

"He's your stepbrother," Pearl said, suddenly mischievous. I gawked at her, then blushed furiously, enraged but unable to argue the fact. Maman came to my rescue, saying, "He is no blood relation to you, Amber. Pearl, be kind."

Pearl, who did not default to kindness, said, "Hnh!" and settled back, still smirking. "I'll go with you."

I shaped the word, soundless with surprise: what?

"At least I'm a witch, Amber. I have the pearl. And she's as much my mother as yours. More. I remember her, and you don't. There must be something I'll be able to do, but mostly I'm not letting my little sister go into battle against a faery all on her own."

"Neither," Opal said softly, "am I." She rose, smiling at our collective astonishment, and fetched the opal the Beast had sent. "I wondered, Pearl," she said as she did so. "I wondered why—if—the Beast would send you alone a gift with magical properties only you could unlock."

"They're all enchanted," I said. "Protection charms."

Opal nodded, crossing the room to the rose window, where a few small herb plants grew, and broke a leaf off a bay bush. "But a protection charm isn't the same as magic within, and he sent no instructions for Pearl. I thought perhaps I might unlock some power, if I experimented. I read the book of stones, the one the Beast replaced our lost copy of." She smiled at Father, whose eyebrows drew down in recognition, if not understanding. "Opals are reputed to have a cunning gift, if wrapped in a bay leaf and held in the hand." She held up the leaf, wrapped it around the stone, and, palming the two items together, disappeared.

Glover jolted to his feet with an anguished, "Opal!" while the rest of us shrieked in various levels of surprise. Poor little Jet began crying again, and Opal reappeared with the leaf and stone held separately again. She displayed them a second time, put them back together into her palm, and disappeared. Her laughing voice said, "I'm still here. But surely an invisible sister might be of use in your battle, Amber," before returning to our view.

Father said, "No," weakly, as if he knew he'd lost the argument before it even began. Glover said it more strongly, but with greater despair; and Pearl said, "At least Lucinda isn't here to try to talk me out of it."

"Lucinda," I echoed, far more able to grasp that than Opal's sudden resolve and magical talent. "Lucy? From the village? The one you were always sneaking off to read the cards for? When did that happen?" I considered what I'd just said, and smiled. "I suppose while you were sneaking off to read the cards."

Pearl actually smiled, and I realized once again how beautiful my oldest sister was. "Reading the cards is as nice a phrase as any."

I laughed, then extended my hands toward both my sisters. "I don't know what you can do, but I won't turn away your help. Eleanor is disembodied, but I'm not sure that doesn't make her stronger. And the longer I'm gone the more danger my Beast is in. I must go. Maman, can you send us back, through the forest?"

"I'll go with you." Maman spoke with resolve, then startled as every adult voice said, "No," firmly. "It is my battle," she said, suddenly fierce, as she had never been in all the time I'd known her. For the first time I truly saw a queen in my fragile mother, and yet I denied her with a shake of my head.

"I don't think it is, anymore. Eleanor sees me as her avatar, and the Beast has always been the piece over whom this battle is fought. This is a war for the next generation, Maman, and you have three sons to raise to princedom. Our country has no leader but you, and none of the boys are old enough to take the throne without your guidance."

"I don't want the throne!" Flint wailed. "I want to breed the finest line of horses this land has ever seen, with Beauty as its strong stock backbone!"

"That's all right," Jasper said. "We have an older brother who might want it anyway."

"Timmet has been long apart from the world," Maman said. "I don't know what he might want, when the curse is broken." She held my gaze a few hard seconds, studying me before nodding. "You may be right. My duty may be to my younger children, not to the oldest. But if I don't go with you, Amber, I cannot guide all of you through the forest."

"The moon rose this afternoon," Pearl said thoughtfully. "I think the pearl might make me a moonlight path. So that's one of us you don't have to send."

"A moonlight path," I said, half incredulously.

Pearl gave me a flat look. "Asks the woman who has just come from an enchanted castle housing a beastly prince?"

I breathed, "Fair point," and looked at the roses beyond the rose window. My hands began to itch. More than itch: a sting grew worse as I rubbed at my hands, and spilled into the scratches and scrapes all over my body. I reached out, and the roses visible at the window bent toward me, as if eager to feel my touch. I took a deep breath and stood. "Send Opal, Maman. I think I can get there myself."

We did not go girded for war. Had we been in the castle, we might have: the servants would have whisked armor around us, finding pieces that fit just right and required no effort to lift or move in. But despite being placed near the heart of an enchanted forest, the hunting lodge was only that, a lodge meant for ordinary people doing ordinary things: it had no armor, no swords, no shields. Just three sisters determined to do right by one another, and a worried family to leave behind. We gathered outdoors, beside the roses, for our leave-taking. I had the mirror at my hip, and removed it to hesitantly offer it to Maman and Father. "I don't know if it works here—show me the Beast, please, mirror?"

The reflective surface swirled, but rather than my Beast, I saw only roses and thorns plundering the palace gardens. They slithered like snakes, and although the mirror carried no sound, I felt like I could hear them moving, hissing against one another as they grew and explored. Maman reached out and pressed the mirror down, shutting its pictures away. "I'll need to fight with the forest, from here. If I have that to watch, I'll be too caught up in fearing for your lives. All of yours. Take it with you, Amber. Maybe it will guide you."

Opal tucked bay leaves all about her person, into her bodice, into her sleeves, even made a wreath of them for her hair. Glover, who had done so much for us, who had gotten us through our first year in the lodge and helped us thrive in our second, stood by helplessly, despair written across his features. Opal, once satisfied with her leaves, extended one hand toward him, and with the other touched the small glimmering opal necklace at her throat. "This is how I know I'll be safe," she said easily. "The Beast's opal is a thing of his palace, and for all I know, it might shatter under the pressure of enchantment there. But I carry yours with me, and its only enchantment is love. It will keep me safe." She pressed a kiss against his lips, leaving him stunned as she said, "I'm ready," to Maman, and walked confidently into the forest.

Pearl had been murmuring to her pearl for some time, a quiet discussion with it and the sliver of a daytime moon; tomorrow the moon would be new, and this venture, too late. She said no goodbyes, merely left moonlight shining under her feet.

To my surprise, the boys fell on me with hugs and tears. "You've already been gone for ages," Flint whispered. "I don't want you to go away again."

"I know, but I have to." I kissed his hair. "I'll come back, I promise."

He nodded, but looking at his face, at Jasper's—even at Maman and Father and Glover—it was clear that the only one who believed I would return was Jet, whose three years were not enough to inure him to falsehoods told to ease the heart. I hugged them all, hard, before facing the roses. Maman asked, "What will you do?" and I discovered I had to act, rather than lose my nerve by answering.

I knew they would respond to me, that they seemed to want to touch me as much as I had always wanted to touch their velvety petals as a child. It felt vulnerable, reaching for the roses—even thornless roses—with my scored arms and the blood-flecked amber that had dried on them. These roses were my roses, I told myself as fiercely as I could. These roses, I had paid for with my freedom, with my blood, and, I was prepared to accept, possibly with my life. They were made of my mother's faery magic, born of her rage, bent to my will, shaped by my love. I knew what could be done with roses by a true faery, and I knew what could be done with the land by a mortal woman, and I knew that somewhere between those things, an answer would be met.

They grasped me, the runners and the petals and the leaves. Not as Eleanor's roses had done, not violently, not snatching me away from the person I had come to love, but eagerly, a lover's touch in and of themselves. They ran up my arms, engulfing me, and grew up my throat and cheeks and hair. Too late, I thought that Jet, especially, shouldn't be there to see this, but I could do nothing about it now, as the rose plants writhed and wrapped themselves around my legs, fitted themselves to my groin with breathless intimacy, and wound around my torso to make a bodice of their branches. I caught a last breath, quick and shallow, and then the roses drew me in.

I lost all sense of self: I was not an I, but a them, rooted in the earth and reaching for the rain and sunshine. My roots traveled underground, finding new places to send shoots upward. I reveled in the magnificence of it, of the life that pounded through the earth, and I felt, in the distance, a darkness. A place of no life, or stunted life, and I remembered myself, and my mission.

The roses had no desire to curl in on themselves, to dive deep into the earth and race toward that dark place, but I whispered to them the truth: that there were other roses there, and that they were dying.

I didn't know how long I traveled through the soil. Far less time, certainly, than it should have taken a wandering rose to cut its way through miles of forest in search of an enchanted garden. I burst from the ground like a sapling unfurled all at once, shaking dirt from my hair and shoulders and gasping for air that I hadn't realized I missed.

Night had fallen while I was underground, the moon high in the sky. But then, the moon had risen in daylight anyway, and its placement was of no particular help to me in judging the time. Nor did it matter: late was all that mattered, and I had a fear in me that I wastoo late.

I stood before the palace gates. Their copper roses were all tarnished now, much worse than they should have been even after months of neglect, and I doubted they'd been neglected at all until the past ten days. Real roses throttled the copper ones, with pieces of metal already crumbling beneath the pressure. I stepped forward, and unlike the first time I'd encountered them, the gates did not swing open, silently welcoming. I pushed, then put my weight into it, and earned a reluctant, creaking handful of inches just enough for me to squeeze through.

Runners sprang to seize my legs. I spread one hand, hissing at them, and they backed away in angry confusion: I was clearly not meant to be able to command them, yet they were obliged to heed my wishes. It was more difficult than with my roses, and every step I took had grasping thorns tearing at my ankles.

The driveway itself was hip deep in rosebushes. They climbed the vast oak trees, working to strangle them; the oaks bent and scraped with no assistance from the wind, clearly trying to rid themselves of their attackers. I wanted to go to one, to help it fight the climbing roses, but I couldn't sacrifice everything for the sake of one tree. I whispered my sorrow, and received a sense of benediction in return: they—or Maman, conducting what she could of her own battle through the forest—forgave me for the choices I had to make.

I waded into the roses, afraid to give myself up to the plants again. There were too many of them: even breathing in their thick scent made me feel as though I was losing my sense of myself. But I went so slowly on foot, and I dared not ask Maman for help, not inside the palace grounds. In the forest itself, perhaps, but here, Eleanor now reigned, and I couldn't risk Irindala's kingdom for a battle I had claimed as my own. Teeth gritted against the scrape of thorns, I extended my hands. They were swollen with sap and scratches, my blood more gold than red, and they were the only way I could think extend my power: reaching out physically, so that I might reach out with magic as well.

To my shock, the roses parted before me.

I ran forward, relief blinding me to the possibility of a trap until suddenly the roses closed around me again, and Eleanor's floral shape emerged from the thicket. She was taller now than she'd been, and her breath fetid with decay: the weight of the roses themselves were causing them to smear together and rot. Daughter, she cooed again. You have returned to make the bestial prince yours, and thus mine.

"I've come to break your curse." The words, spoken aloud, seemed like the impotent threat of a child. All around me the roses rustled with laughter, clearly no more threatened than they would be by a child.

How, Eleanor wondered. How will you, thornless Amber, break a curse that has held for a century? Even if you could lie with him—and how would that work, she asked, throwing my own words back at me—even if you could, how can you think that I would not simply destroy all of this in retaliation?

"Maybe you will," I admitted. "But maybe you won't be able to. I intend to find out."

Or die trying! Thorn-laden branches lashed at me, scoring mark after mark and drawing blood that ran slow and thick with sap from my skin. You don't understand, Eleanor hissed. The roses that waken your power are mine. The blood that they draw is mine. You tried to freeze me in amber once, little girl. Feel the power of a faery queen!

"Are you?" I could hardly ask the question, my breath stolen from me with each bramble slash. The next time they came at me I flung my hands up, crying for them to stop, and they at least fell away for a moment. More followed, though, and I lacked the strength to stand under the onslaught. But curiosity drove me forward a step, as I tried to see whether her flowery form granted itself a crown. "Are you a faery queen?"

I might have been! Roses were suited to rage, with their flushed colors and heavy petals. A storm of blossoms swirled around Eleanor's unshaping form, as if anger made her lose her grip on herself. Had Irindala not turned against me, I might have ruled her land at her side!

I could not help a brief, sharp laugh. "I know little of faeries, Eleanor, but I think a faery queen, and a queen who is a faery, are not the same thing at all."

I paid for my humor: so many runners slashed toward me at once that I could never block them all. Still, it had been worth it, and I began to feel not just the lashing, but the power of the sap running within me. She had wakened me, I thought; she did not know she empowered me. I forced myself a step forward, a grin stretching my features as she struck at me again and again. I pushed away what I could, but I let as many blows land, the sap rising in me.

And then, very suddenly, I couldn't move at all, and I realized she'd known what she was doing all along, after all. She couldn't stop the blood in my veins; she needed it to be sap, so that my wounds might freeze into resin and harden into amber, as I had done to her before. Letting me struggle forward, gathering the sap in my blood, had given her enough to seize me. And she had had an entire garden of roses to draw from, and the full power of a faery, where I had only my own body and the half-magical blood she had granted me with at birth. Shecould escape my trap, but hers, for me, was deadly. I saw all of that in her inhuman smile, and cursed the stars for my foolishness.

But my blood was was only half of hers. I pulled that thought back, clinging to it. Unless she saturated me even further with the sap, perhaps I could hold on to my mortal aspect long enough to cast off the stiffness that had overtaken my limbs. All at once I stopped struggling, no longer straining to move myself when we both knew I couldn't. I would have collapsed, weeping, had I that much control over my limbs, but the defeat of my posture was enough: her runners withdrew to dance in the air like serpents deciding if they should strike. I gave them no reason to, my breath nothing more than broken sobs.

You see the folly of fighting a faery queen, Eleanor murmured. You are my daughter, my only child with any love for the roses. Let me take you, little Amber. Let me fill you with my spirit, and you will know power unlike any you have ever dreamed of. You will have your Beast, and so shall I.

A shudder ran through me; I hoped it looked like resignation, and not revulsion. My blood, my body, my soul, were mine to command, not my birth mother's, and if sap ran in my veins, then sap, too, was mine to command. It was not to be crystallized inside me, but rather to flow freely, warming my skin as easily as it might bring life to a rosebush. I twitched my toes, simply to see if I could.

I could, and yet that did me no good at all, not unless I could find some way to avoid her fresh attacks; we would be here for months and years with me fighting forward a single step at a time, while my poor abandoned Beast lay far ahead of me.

I had not yet laid in any kind of plan when Pearl came stalking across the brambles on a path of moonlight, a teardrop shield of glowing pearl on one arm and a moon-bright sword in her hand.

Moonlight walked with her like a carpet, spreading across the tops of the brambles to create a shining path that cut past Eleanor and rolled on toward the palace. Her hair swept upward as if drawn to the thin moon, and I swore that her ears, too, had taken on a faery slant not unlike the Beast's. She planted herself in front of me and shouted, "Go!" as thorns lashed toward us both.

She met the attack with her moonlight blade, severing thorns and runners alike. They fell to the ground writhing, and did not take root again. Where they landed blows against her, moonlight sparkled, taking the brunt of the hit: in one moment, when a dozen lashing branches struck her at once, I saw the shape of the enchanted armor she wore, bright and pearlescent under the moon. I backed away, breathless at what my sister had become, then scrambled onto the plane of moonlight across the roses, and ran, determined to take the space Pearl had given me.

Not only her power came to the fore: roses tried to catch me as I ran, but weaved away again as I whispered curses at them. Not curses, not like the one Eleanor had cast, but ordinary, mortal curses: by the earth and sun and stars, stay away from me; get off, you donkey's arse; may you wither in the sun's embracing light. The curses, breathless as they were, helped to keep me moving forward; repudiating Eleanor's work felt as powerful as the magic awakened in my veins. In that endless run, all I wanted was to be different from her, a creature of my own, worthy for being myself alone.

I hardly knew the palace grounds when I finally broke free of the avenue of roses. A barricade of forest had risen, tall and tangled as all the spots where the Beast had gone forth to try his hand against the roses. The branches parted for me and I stumbled inside them, breathless and gasping.

Wreckage met my eye. The beautifully kept pools looked like aged ruins, torn apart by Eleanor's swiftly-grown roses, and now littered with their carcasses. A ring of empty earth, appearing nearly scorched in the moonlight, lay between the new trees behind me and the palace. I stood where I was a moment, hardly believing the damage that had been wrought, then started forward again, trying to understand what I saw at the palace. Dry, dead rosebushes crackled beneath my feet as I walked, and I slowly began to understand that the palace as I knew it was no more.

It had become a writhing, squirming mass of living roses, and at its center, I could feel the faltering heartbeat of my Beast.

I broke into a run again, not knowing how I would fight my way to the castle at the heart of the enchanted kingdom, but determined that I would. I raced heedlessly up the brambles, searching for a way in, and was instead met by a fist of branches that caught me in the jaw and knocked me the long way back to earth again.

My breath left me with the impact, my whole body stunned and numb. Above me, outlined by the crescent moon, I saw thorns spiraling together into a lance, but I could not force myself to move. Behind the lance, Eleanor reshaped herself into a monstrously vast form, all roses and rage. Did you think a little girl playing with moonlight could stop me? she roared in my mind. Did you think a creature as endless as roses could bedistracted by a little sword and shield? You have chosen your lot, daughter, and you will pay for it with your—

"Am I ordinary, Eleanor?" asked the sweetest voice I had ever known. The rose-being swung around, losing petals as it searched, but Opal was—of course—nowhere to be seen. "Such a disappointing child," she said in the most gentle mockery of a chiding tone that I had ever heard. "Perhaps that answers why I'm so biddable. Perhaps I was trying to earn the love of a mother who had no use for me."

For an instant she appeared, perfectly lovely in the moonlight. Then she cast away the aged bay leaf and wrapped her opal in a new one, in barely the time it took for her to wink at me. Her voice came again from yards away, sending Eleanor in another swirl. "Or perhaps I'm simply kind by nature, and was granted early release from a mother who might have driven it out of me. Best of all," and though her voice remained sweet as roses, acid dripped through it as well, "best of all is that in time I gained a new mother, one who did love me, and whose name I have recently learned is Irindala."

Eleanor's roar of fury was so great it carried true sound, the explosion of branches and the collapse of whole trees. The palace shook beneath that roar, falling in on itself. I swallowed a scream, knowing Opal was distracting Eleanor from me and not wanting to lose the advantage. My heart hurt, though, with terror for Opal and fear for Pearl, whose fate I could not know. My breath came back at last, and I forced myself to sit, moving as quietly as I could.

"Irindala was a good mother," Opal caroled from the safety—not that I dared think of it as such—of her invisibility. "She loved us even though we weren't her daughters by birth, and our father has never been happier than with her. Do you know, he realized you hadn't died? But he never went looking for you. Why would he? You had abandoned us, and he had earned Irindala's love. He did well, don't you think? Trading a wicked faery wife for the true love of a queen?"

Her voice danced from spot to spot, much more quickly than mere invisibility could account for. I wondered what other properties the opals had as Eleanor slammed lances of rose spirals into the earth, trying to pierce Opal's wandering voice. Opal only laughed, and I thought perhaps my kindest sister had a villainous streak after all.

Gathering courage from her mocking bravery, I plunged my hands into the palace's foliage, and became Amber in roses.

These roses did not take me kindly, as the ones at the lodge had done. Even then I had been in danger of losing myself; Eleanor's roses wanted to tear me from myself. The thick cloying scent of them, tinged with rot, made my mind float outside my body, growing ever-more detached. I could feel myself gagging on the smell and had little desire to return to that sickened body. It would be easier to let go, dissolving across Eleanor's roses.

A spark of triumph shot from them, either at my own thoughts or—worse by far—at some battle won beyond the endless thicket I had entered. I snapped back into my body, dizzy again at the sickening scent of roses, and clung to the notion of sap in my veins. I offered a desperate conviction that I belonged with the roses, that I was not an enemy for them to spurn or destroy, and they did not listen. They rejected my presence, forbidding me to become part of them. I felt as though I retained my human shape, which I had not felt at all when I traveled beneath the earth with my roses. I fought for each forward step, runners and thorns digging into my shins and forehead and squeezing tightly, until I thought I couldn't possibly be moving ahead at all.

But Pearl was out there, battling roses with a sword made of moonlight, and Opal was closer still, taunting a faery monster with no protection of her own save invisibility. And the Beast lay somewhere ahead of me. If I failed, all three of them would die, and so failure could not be considered.

Things that had sap in their veins also had bark as their skin. Sometimes paper-thin bark, delicate and fragile-seeming, but even birch paper had to be peeled away in layer after layer to reach and damage the wood beneath. And I was Amber, after all: amber, which came most often from within rough-barked pine trees. If amber itself ran in my veins, surely I could convince my body that its skin was as tough as pine bark, all but impervious to the thorns. The scoring on my skin roughed it up already: I imagined those little wounds layering on top of one another like bark did, thickening like scarred wood, and bit by bit the thorns lost their bite. I kept my eyes closed, pressing forward, and finally felt brambles breaking under my feet as I regained the ability to move.

All I needed was a direction to move in, and I had no sense of that at all. The palace was enormous even when visions and memories didn't expand it beyond reality, and now it was being dismantled by the weight and fury of roses. I had entered the roses nearest, I thought, the round room that had been the library—for a moment my heart broke, thinking of all that had been reclaimed in that library, and was now lost again—and I had felt the Beast at the heart of the palace. That, to me, would always be the sitting room and adjoining hall, where Father and I had first been ushered and where the Beast and I had taken meals together. I struggled onward, but I struggled in darkness: I had no idea if I was going the right way or not, and every suspicion that the roses would force me in the wrong direction. I dragged in breath through my teeth, trying not to taste the overwhelming smell of roses, and somewhere at the back of my throat, a hint of cinnamon caught.

I froze there amongst the unforgiving roses, opening my mouth like a cat trying to find more scent. Cinnamon and myrrh, and the latter made me suddenly laugh. The roses pulled back a little at the sound, then attacked again, but in the moment they retreated, I turned toward that scent and pushed forward.

Cinnamon and sweet wine and myrrh: I had my Beast's scent, the one I had made for him, and best of all, what was myrrh but a resin? Not as hard or ancient as amber, but made from the seeping skin of trees, and thus within my demesne. Half a dozen resins were used in perfumes; I had known it without thinking it through, and now thought that Eleanor had been mistaken about us all. Even as children we three girls had played toward aspects of our unawakened magic, strengthening bonds that we would later need.

I moved faster, with the Beast's scent in my throat. The brambles grew more frenzied but less effective as I gained confidence, lashing at me, trying to tangle my feet, but also bowing to my will as I thrust them away. They scraped at my skin, but no longer pierced it: I was too much one of them, a creature of imagined bark and wood and sap. Nothing so clear as a path ever opened up, but as with the forest when I'd escaped earlier, just enough space cleared in front of me, and if it stitched together again behind me, that was a problem for another time.

I stepped free into what might once have been the dining hall, but which was now the eye of a bloom-laden maelstrom, rising clear to the now-moonless sky, so that all that looked down upon us were stars. I saw what Eleanor had done, how she mastered such enormous power, and I cried out in horror for my Beast.

Eleanor's roses themselves took their life from him: roots dug deep into his withered body and pinned him to the earth. The storm's eye was hardly larger than he was, just enough to let him breathe and continue to live. I did not have to be well-versed in magic to understand the wicked cleverness of what she'd done: I knew enough of Irindala, and the curse, to recognize it clearly.

Irindala was bound to the land by blood and bone and magic, and the Beast, her son, was as tied to it as she was. Through him, Eleanor could draw on the very strength of Irindala's country, and though Maman had drained it nearly dry of magic, it still had life in it. To take the country's very life would nearly satisfy Eleanor, I thought. Nearly, but not quite.

But the curse lay on top of that, and curses broke laws of mortality. Eleanor had cursed the Beast to lonely immortality, and Irindala had only been able to lessen its impact. He could be made a mortal man again by a lover's willing touch…but until then even Eleanor couldn't killthe Beast.

She could use him, though. Any mortal creature could never have survived what the Beast now endured: the fact that he was silent, half unconscious beneath the writhing, hungry roots spoke to the pain he must have been in. But the Beast would not, could not, die, and so long as he lived, Eleanor could use his bond with the land to grow her power and wreak havoc on Irinidala's country.

Here, at the heart of her power, at the heart of his, Eleanor stepped out of the roses and I saw her true form with my own for the first time.

I had seen her repeatedly in Irindala's memories, and even through her own eyes, reflected in water, and yet she did not look like I believed her to. I had thought her tall: she was not, especially. But then, Maman was quite small indeed, and by comparison, Eleanor might be thought tall. She was rounder, too, more curvaceous than I expected; more like Opal in bosom and hip than I'd imagined.

Save for her figure, though, she was hardly like Opal at all. Opal was pretty, whereas Pearl and I were beautiful and interesting, respectively, and Eleanor was both of those things. Her features were like mine, a little asymmetrical, but the shape of her jaw and cheekbones lent her an arrogant elegance that Pearl had inherited and turned to beauty. None of us, though, shared her eyes, which were huge and angled and not at all human. Her hair was ivory, with a yellow undertone that Pearl's didn't share, and slender pointed ears poked through the straight locks. In the starlight her skin was so golden it could be mistaken for green, like the green of new growth in roses.

Her mouth curved in a deadly smile when she saw me, and the laugh that broke from her throat sounded like the scrape of thorns. "Oh, you are my daughter," she said in pleasure. "My foolish little Amber, throwing it all away for a Beast."

"Even if I didn't love him," I said as steadily as I could, and in a voice that didn't sound quite right, "you would need to be stopped."

"And you believe you can."

"I believe it's worth trying."

The attack came without warning, innumerable sharpened branches racing as one to pierce me. I let them, gasping as too many broke through my skin: my thoughts of bark-like protection were not, it seemed, enough to ward off killing attempts. Eleanor laughed, surprised at the ease of taking me to my knees, but I had no interest in taking her on directly. Not while she was tied to the power of the land, at least. On my knees, I was able to worm one hand through the rose roots and curl my fingers against the Beast's shin. I felt his weakening life force, and the strength of the roses, and I whispered, "No," to them.

They had bowed to my will before, parting just enough to let me pass through them. A shock trembled them now, and under my resolute command, they began to withdraw from the Beast's body. Eleanor shrieked in outrage, more and more spears raining down on me. Some struck home; more did not, as the roots pulled away from the Beast and the roses struggled to decide which of us was their master. I extended my other hand, head lowered, and thought of my thornless roses, racing now along a pathway between the hunting lodge and the palace's front gates. I called them to me, and they began to grow ever-faster. They peeled Eleanor's roses off the copper-worked gates and ran forward, moving more and more quickly as I pulled the other roots from their hold in the Beast's flesh.

He awakened screaming, a sound so terrible I wanted nothing more than to stop and comfort him. I didn't dare, knowing that if I did I would never have the chance to start again. I told myself the pain was good: it meant he was alive, and it meant Eleanor's roses were losing their grip on him.

Eleanor seized my hair, ripping my head back and slashing at my throat with nails made of thorns. They connected: I had no way to stop them. But my throat didn't slit open; it felt more like rough chunks of flesh were torn away, without any terrible pain accompanying the blows. As surprised as she was, I smiled at her. I couldn't fight her without taking my hands away from the Beast and my call to my roses; all I could do was smile, and so I did, confused and bright and helpless. Her eyes went mad with rage. She seized my jaw and the back of my head as a tunnel opened in her roses, my power bringing what it could to the fight.

It brought nothing visible, but before she could twist my head around, something struck her, knocking her away from me. My head was yanked forward as she staggered away, but my neck wasn't broken, and Opal appeared in front of me.

My sweetest sister wore a maniacal grin matched by the fierce smile on Pearl's face as she came striding down the tunnel I'd carved through the roses. They had both taken a beating: Opal limped and bled, and Pearl was scored all over by rose thorn lines. But they were neither of them defeated, and my heart soared to have them with me. As if joy fed my magic, the roots loosened from the Beast ever-faster. His screams lost strength, not as though he was losing strength, but as if the pain was no longer as unbearable. I cried out in relief and my sisters turned their smiles on me, then both paled and stepped back before exchanging looks and returning, resolutely, to the battle.

Eleanor made a sword of thorns and struck not at Pearl, whose moonlight armor had faded with moonset, but at Opal, whose magic was the least of all of ours. Pearl, with a sword shaped like the crescent moon itself suddenly in hand, leapt to her defense, thorn meeting pearl-drop shield. I knew from the clatter that the shield was unlikely to last long.

The final threads came loose from the Beast. Eleanor's power weakened suddenly, obviously: she staggered with the loss of it, and Opal leapt on her with driving elbows and knees, more ferocious than I had ever imagined she could be. It created the briefest lull for Pearl, who shot me a wide-eyed look that jerked to the Beast and back, as if to say get on with it!

I did not want to leave my sisters to fight a mad faery, but neither would the curse break if I left the Beast to help my sisters. I let the power of the roses go, surprised that the tunnel remained open, and crawled up my Beast's body to catch his huge face in my hands. "Beast. Oh, Beast, my love, my Beast. Wake up, my love. Listen to me. Listen, beloved. Wake up, and tell me: will you sleep with me?"

Eleanor screamed. From the corner of my eye I saw Pearl's crescent sword sweep down, and light exploded all around us as the Beast transformed in my arms.

I had seen so many beasts in my Beast: the ram, the boar, the bear, the cat. His arching, writhing form transformed into each of them, fighting me with tooth and claw and tusk and horn. I hung on, sobbing, as he became too big, too cruel, too fierce to hold. Injuries opened on my arms, my torso, my legs: everywhere and in every way that a beast might strike in rage or fear, I was scored. I held on, afraid that if I released him I would lose him forever. Then he began to shrink, but in shrinking radiated heat, until it was as though I clung to an iron bar. A burning woody scent filled my nostrils. I screamed, but I did not let go, and suddenly the pain and the power were gone. The Beast made an ungainly whumph of sound as he collapsed on top of me.

He ought to have crushed me. That he did not took some consideration; the thought that we had succeeded, that the curse had ended and his transformation had been undone, took some time to reach. My heart clenched in sudden terror: I had become quite accustomed to my Beast, had fallen in love with him. I had seen the prince in a vision, but I had never thought of what he might be like, or if I would care for him. I pressed my eyes shut against the oncoming sunrise—the sky above the tunnel of crumbling roses was gold and pink and streaked with blue—and tried to tell myself that Timmet was the Beast, whether in an ungainly monstrous form or in his own.

A voice, his voice, but much thinner and lighter, no longer coming from a chest as broad as my arm, said, "Amber?" with much the same confusion I myself felt.

I set my teeth so I might gather my nerve, and opened my eyes to see—

—to see a Beast, albeit not the same Beast I had known, propped above me. His shoulders were no more than a man's in breadth, though like before a dark mane cascaded over them, and down his chest, like a lion's. More of a mane than before, in fact, as it had less inhuman features to struggle with, and could frame them more magnificently. His face was slim, all planes and angles softened by the loose long fur of his mane, through which the ears I had liked so much still swept upward. Like Eleanor, his eyes were huge and slanted, though his were the amber shade of a beast's, and his lips, parted in astonishment, showed teeth sharper and more deadly than any human had ever owned.

I scrambled backward, out from under him, until my back hit the brambles. It was a greater distance than I had expected: we were in a proper clearing now, and also all alone. "Beast?"

He sat on his heels—he was no taller than an ordinary man now, and shaped beautifully through the waist and hip, where more fur clung, offering an appealing amount of modesty to an astonishing creature. His forearms were furred as well, and his hands no longer massive paws, but slim fingers ending in unmistakable claws. He had not, I thought, looked at himself yet: his bewildered gaze was fixed on me, as though I had done something more impossible than break a faery's curse. "Amber?"

"It's me, Beast, I'm—oh, you can see me clearly for the first time, can't you? It's me," I repeated. "But you're—" I made a gesture, trying to encompass what had happened, trying to indicate that it had somehow gone wrong, and, catching sight of my own hand, froze.

My fingers were branches. Slender and knobbly with knuckles, still able to bend, but unmistakably branches of golden-hued wood. So were my arms, my legs; I scrambled to my feet, looking down at myself, and discovered my clothes had been torn away entirely as I'd struggled through the brambles the night before. It hardly seemed to matter: the whole of me had taken on an aspect of a living tree. Not bark-like: my torso shone more like polished heartwood, and I was dressed at hip and breast in wreathes of roses. I was warm to the touch, and the hair that fell around my face cascaded like petals, velvety against my cheeks. My toes gripped the earth like I could put down roots. My heart still beat like a woman's, fast with shock, but I was not, I realized, afraid. Startled, but not afraid, and, in digging my toes against the earth, I almost felt right, as if I had long since known where a path of roses might lead me, and had only been waiting for this moment.

Not this moment, though: I hadn't transformed when the Beast did. Memories flooded back: Eleanor's sharp laugh and her claim that Iwas her daughter, after all. The way my throat had not slit like a mortal's would, under Eleanor's attack, and Pearl and Opal's exchange of glances upon seeing me. I had been other for some little while already, although I'd been too occupied to know it. I lifted my hands to my cheeks, trying to feel if my face was at least shaped as it had been, but I wasn't' sure: I had never tried to memorize myself with my fingers before. I turned a helpless gaze at my Beast, who was no more what he had been than I was, and found him presenting a wolfish smile.

"Beauty," he said, and despite everything, I made a disparaging face.

"Beauty is our horse."

"You are a beauty." He came toward me, extending his hands, and then he saw what he had become, and stopped as short as I had, turning his palms up and down, watching the ruff of fur at his wrists fall and drape, and the light catching his deadly nails. As I had done, he spread his hands a little and looked down at himself, taking in the mane that stretched in a V down his chest, and the heavier fur at his hips. Fur grew more heavily on his calves, too, falling around his ankles very like Beauty's feathered feet, though the long clawed toes beneath it were nothing like her hooves. He looked up at me, his golden eyes wide, and I whispered, "You should see your face. It's beautiful."

He touched long fingers to his cheeks as I had done to myself, but he, who had worn a Beast's massive head for decades on end, found more changed with that touch than I had. In particular he tested the shape of his mouth, no longer overbitten from below and or weighted with tusks. He took three long strides, suddenly standing before me with a question in his eyes.

I answered it by throwing my arms around his neck and kissing him, again and again, until we were together a loving tangle of beast and botany on the earth, and the sun had risen high into the sky above us.

"So," the Beast said then, in an amused murmur against my skin, "this has not gone quite as we imagined. We may have some explaining to do."

I turned my face against his mane, inhaling his scent. Still musky, and the khemet perfume had vanished with his transformation. I would have to make more, if the ingredients could be found. I wasn't at all sure they could be: the palace had been lost to roses, and I had no idea if it would rise again. I sat up, examining the clearing as if it might hold answers.

It had grown while we were tangled in one another's arms. The sky was larger than it had been, brambles withering to dust, and some distance away, lay Eleanor's body. It had gone all to amber with roses captured inside, like some great sculptor's work. A sculptor, though, would likely have left his creation her head, and Eleanor's was missing. A thin layer of sparkling white quartz crystals glittered where her neck had been severed, as if Pearl's moonlight sword had left traces of itself behind. The moon was a barren, bright place: surely nothing slain with its light could return to life.

The head itself was gone, and a path through the collapsing brambles led away from our little clearing. Although the ground had writhed with roses when I'd noticed it last, it was now soft earth, rich and loamy and, along the pathway, marked with two sets of footprints. Quartz droplets shone against the ground, too, as if blood had fallen and crystallized. I shivered, glad my sisters had escaped and in awe of what they had done. I wondered what one did with the head of a wicked faery to quell any residual power it might have, and concluded that between them, Pearl and Maman would find an answer. I stood, and rickety branches fell in waves. Rose-scented dust lifted into the air and tinted the sky pink. I could see foundations amidst the eroding roses: something, at least, was left of the palace. Not much, but something. "I wonder what's happened to the servants."

"Gone now, with the palace. With the enchantment." The Beast—Timmet—I could not decide what to call him, even in my mind—rose and came to stand beside me.

"Were they not real?" I looked at him. "I mean, were they not transformed as you were?"

"I never thought so. I didn't know any of them from their behaviors or opinions, as I'd known my own servants. I think everything here was made of Nell's magic. Everything except me, and I was shaped by it. Everything except you."

"I was born of it," I said a little dryly. More than a little, perhaps: my voice had altered somewhat to my own ears, both deeper and more rustling, as if the creak of an old tree spoke along with the whispers of wind in its leaves. It lent a depth to my asperity that hadn't been there before. I thought Pearl would like it.

The Beast, whether he liked it or not, at least chuckled. "There is that. So nothing here is…real."

"Or everything is, and ever was. I think I can..." I extended a hand, calling life from the exhausted and dying roses around us. One single runner came to me, climbing into the air to offer me an amber-tinted thornless bloom. I offered it to the Beast. He took it gingerly, but his golden gaze remained on me.

"What has happened to you, Amber? This was never part of the curse."

"This is the price of wakening faery blood to save a prince." I flexed my toes in the soft earth, feeling it accept me in a way it had never done when I wore human skin. "I didn't know this would happen, but I wouldn't undo it. I don't feel much different. A little stronger, maybe. I'll have to figure out how to brush my hair, and whether sitting in a bath will ruin my finish."

The Beast laughed with surprised. I grinned back at him, then turned my attention to the failing brambles. "I feel as though I can call green things to me. Not just the roses, but everything, I think. The earth is…hungry. Needy. Not just here, but throughout Irindala's country. I think I can feed it. I think I have to. If you and I are born, in our own ways, of enchantment, then…" A breath escaped me and I opened my hands to encompass the ruins we stood in. "Then maybe this is only enchantment in need of caring, just as all of Irindala's country needs care. I hate to lose it, after all of this. I feel as though I have a duty to it. Your mother warned me there would be a price for breaking a curse so old and heavily weighed on the land. Perhaps this is it."

"My mother?" The Beast turned to me with a graceful movement, lithe and very unlike the Beast he had been, but also familiar in its power. "You've seen my mother?"

"I—oh." I reached for his hand. "Your mother is my Maman, my stepmother. I didn't know until yesterday." I glanced uncertainly at the sky, with its rose-colored sun, then back at the Beast. "If it was yesterday. When I left you, whenever that was."

I had learned to read the Beast's expressions well, and Timmet's were far easier to read, for all their still-inhuman cast. He blinked slowly, clearly nonplussed. I curled my arms around him and breathed his scent again before chuckling. "We will have a great deal of explaining to do, not just to our family, but each other. Beast—Timmet—"

He exhaled, a curiously small sound. "I haven't heard that name in a very long time. I wonder if it fits me anymore."

"It does," I said with brash confidence, and then, more softly, "but so does 'Beast', and so might something else entirely, if you prefer it. I don't understand what went wrong, my love. I thought you would be brought back to yourself. I'm afraid—I'm afraid I did this to you somehow. Because I loved the Beast. And because I'm—" I looked down at myself, then back at my Beast.

"Mmmn." He shook his head. "What is 'myself'? I was human for eighteen years and a beast for over a century. Anyone might change in that time, even so much that they no longer knew the mortal form they once wore." He extended a clawed hand, so much more human than it had once been, yet still so animalistic. "I think you could not have done this to me, no matter how changed you are. Not alone, at least. If I were not content to be some of one and some of the other, I think no matter how much you loved the Beast, I would have become what I once was. But the Beast is my most familiar form, and I feel connected to it still." A smile, much more clearly a smile than that which his more beastly face had expressed, curved his lips. "Connected, but much less lumberous."

"I believe I'm the one who is now lumber-ous," I said with a brush of branch-like fingers, and earned a withering look worthy of Pearl, had it not also been laced with amusement. Smiling in return, I said, "Pearl and Opal will tell Maman and Father that we're all right, but we should probably go to them. Maman has waited so long to see you again. And we should figure out where a living tree and a beautiful beast belong in this world."

"Together," the Beast said softly. "We will never, ever be apart."

"Together," I agreed, and then because I could not help it, I added, "except perhaps when we require the necessary. Or I wish to have a gossip with my sisters, or you a wrassle with your brothers, who will be most taken with your extraordinary form. Or—"

"Enough!" Timmet roared, and if he lacked the volume he once had, it was easier to hear the humor in his voice. We laughed together until the tears came, and I thought us the better for it.

I took his hand in mine, and together we went to see what the world would make of us.