Bryony and Roses
Authors: T. Kingfisher
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, places, plants, poets, events, or actual historical personages, living, dead, or trapped in a hellish afterlife is purely coincidental.
Copyright 2015
Ursula Vernon
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States by Red Wombat Tea Company
Artwork by Ursula Vernon
Praise for “Toad Words”
“…a book of re-told fairy tales, all in the quirky, matter-of-fact-in-the-face-of-total-nonsense style that I’ve always loved. They’re often dark, sometimes sad, but always endearing, even when they’re disturbing.”
—Pixelatedgeek.com
Praise for “The Seventh Bride”
“A brilliant re-telling of the "Bluebeard" fairy tale,
The Seventh Bride
captures the horror of the original story, but Kingfisher creates a wonderful character in Rhea.”
—Alexis Lantgen,
The Wise Serpent
For my mom,
from whom I probably
inherited the gardening
thing
When I was in my early 20s, I picked up a book called
Rose Daughter
by Robin McKinley. It was a retelling of Beauty and the Beast and it was wonderful.
In addition to being an amazing author, McKinley did two things very right. One of them I can’t reveal without ruining the ending. The second involves the rose.
Some elements are fairy-tale canon, of course, and figure in almost every retelling—the sisters, the merchant who loses his wealth and hopes to regain it, the house of invisible servants that grant every desire, the Beast who asks Beauty to marry him every night, and of course, the stolen rose.
(In the very lengthy French version, which is…something else…all these elements are jumbled together with trained monkey servants and parrots and devices that allow one to spy on anyone else in the world. The Beauty and the Beast story take up only the first third, which is mostly concerned with fairy politics. But even then, there’s still a rose.)
Rose Daughter
returned the rose to center stage and made Beauty a rose-loving gardener.
At the time I read it, I was myself a frustrated gardener. I had discovered that gardening was in my blood but had no garden. I was trying to save myself with hanging baskets and houseplants, wedged into a tiny apartment with very little sunlight, and it was not going well.
Rose Daughter
was a window into a world that I desperately wanted. I loved it. I read it until my first copy fell apart.
Years passed. I moved out of the apartment and into a series of larger rentals and finally a house and a garden in North Carolina.
North Carolina is not a great climate for roses. They get mildew and black spot and very strange diseases. I planted roses and watched them die.
I went to native roses—fierce, rugged, unstoppable plants, with canes like barbed wire. They grew. Too well. I went from dead roses to hacking back runners that were popping up in flower beds twenty feet away. They were beautiful for only about ten minutes at a time and they did not smell like much of anything and they wanted to eat the world.
After a year or two, it began to occur to me that I didn’t actually like roses very much.
After three or four years, I sat down and began to write a book. It was also retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and in a very different way, it was also about roses…and about rutabagas, and basil, and mint, and plants that I knew from my own life as a gardener.
All of which is a long way of saying that this book would probably not have existed without McKinley’s
Rose Daughter
, and I am very grateful to her for writing it. It was a book I needed very much at the time, and if I had not needed it so badly, I don’t know that I would have found myself needing to write this one.
I know it’s probably a bad idea for an author to tell you, in an introduction, that you should go read that other book, but if you love the fairy tale—or gardens—I cannot recommend it highly enough. Regardless of how you feel about roses.
T. Kingfisher
Pittsboro, NC
May, 2015
She was going to die because of the rutabagas.
Bryony pushed her cloak back from her face and looked up. The space between Fumblefoot’s ears had become her entire world for the past half-hour, and she was a little surprised at how large the forest was when she finally lifted her eyes.
Unfortunately, it was all covered in a thick blanket of snow.
Her pony continued plodding forward, the snow wet and sloughing around his hooves. Even with her teeth chattering, Bryony could appreciate the beauty of the snow—fat flakes falling in a steady, business-like manner, black tree trunks fading into soft grey, the way snow piled up on top of the evergreen branches and bore them down to the ground.
It was a pity that all that beauty was going to kill them.
The pony staggered a bit. Bryony patted his shoulder as he got his feet back underneath him. It might be a sign of exhaustion, but then again, Fumblefoot came by his name honestly, and he could just be clumsy.
Please just be clumsy, old fellow.
She wished that she could get off and lead him, but once she did that, it was only a matter of time.
She hadn’t felt her feet in nearly an hour. Even if Fumblefoot somehow staggered onto the road to the village, she suspected that she’d be down a couple of toes by the time they made it home.
Farewell, little pinkie toes. I can’t say I ever really appreciated you, but I suspect that I will miss you very much once you’re gone.
Rutabagas. Of all the stupid things to die for.
The problem with rutabagas was that they liked a long growing season if they could get it, and the earlier you planted them the better. Bryony had no great love of rutabagas—they were basically somewhat insipid turnips, fit only for stews and roasts—but she’d also never had any great success growing them, and that was a direct affront to her gardening skills.
When her friend Elspeth in Skypepper Village had sent word that she had some particularly hardy rutabagas last year, and would be happy to share the seeds, Bryony had saddled up Fumblefoot and made the five-hour journey to Skypepper. It was a little early in the spring, sure, but you really couldn’t get the seeds in the ground too quickly, and there were all sorts of ways to coax the seedlings along if it looked like it was going to frost.
Bryony’s lips twisted sourly. She tucked her gloved hands under her armpits, leaving the reins looped over the saddle horn. (Fumblefoot would have landed flat on his face if he tried to bolt at the best of times. He would no more have tried to run in the snow than he would have tried to fly.)
Frost. Heh.
Freakish late season blizzard, on the other hand…
Most of her plants would probably do fine, even if her sister hadn’t gotten out and covered them. Sadly, Bryony and Fumblefoot wouldn’t fare nearly so well as the plants.
Fumblefoot stumbled again. The wind was beginning to pick up. Bryony watched the snowfall between the pony’s ears, and saw it begin to fall slantwise. When she lifted her chin off her chest to look around, the forest seemed smaller, closed in, as if they moved through a series of snowy rooms.
Beets, now, those were useful. Beets you could do something with. Tomatoes, definitely. It went without saying that a good tomato was worth dying over—if not your
personal
death, then certainly the neighbor’s, who would insist on growing a tomato the size of a baby’s head and then waving a hand and saying “Oh, well, nothing to it, really, I just put ‘em in the ground and give ‘em a drop of water now and again.”
Obviously if such a neighbor was interred in the compost heap, no jury of gardeners would ever convict you.
Corn, too. Sweet corn was a glorious thing, particularly in summer, and while Bryony would not personally have been inclined to die for it, there were stories that whole civilizations were in the habit of sacrificing people to ensure the corn harvest. And wheat was so tied in with blood that even now if you went too far up into the hills at the wrong time of year, you’d best check the scarecrows
very carefully
to make sure that one of them wasn’t a former travelling salesman.
Bryony sighed. Nobody in the history of the world had ever sacrificed anybody to the rutabagas. The issue simply did not arise.
She wiggled her fingers inside her gloves, yanking them free of the fabric and folding them up against her palm to try to warm them. She mostly succeeded in making her palms colder.
Her sisters were going to miss her. Bryony felt a pang thinking of them. Holly was probably going to the window every few minutes and pushing the curtains aside to look for her. Iris was likely sitting beside the fireplace, working on her embroidery and making endless cups of tea.
At least it probably won’t hurt,
she thought glumly.
I hear you feel really warm right before you freeze to death.
It was hard to get upset. She was too cold. Her eyelashes had ice on them, and if she cried it would freeze on her cheeks. It was easier simply to tuck her hands in her armpits and let her chin sink to her chest and let Fumblefoot lead them through the woods. He was probably no better at finding the road than she was—Fumblefoot was a very inferior pony, or else Bryony and her sisters would never have been able to afford him—but the world was nothing but snow now, and anything resembling landmarks had vanished under white.
She tried to summon some anguish over her impending demise, but her mind rapidly wandered to the rutabaga seeds and then to the garden, and from there death could not compete.
I’ll miss the garden this spring. Damnit. I hope Holly will remember that she needs to spread manure on it—Iris won’t, Iris hates the very thought of manure. And someone has to weed the bee balm back, or it’ll eat the whole flowerbed, and this was the year I was really hoping that the sage would take off…
Her thoughts continued in this vein for quite some time, punctuated occasionally by rubbing her nose (which was very cold, and in the way of cold noses, dripping) until she realized that Fumblefoot had stopped walking and lifted her head.
They’d found an impossible road.