Bryony and Roses (6 page)

It was Iris who Bryony was worried about. She sighed.
 

Holly matched her step for step as they went back to the barn, where Fumblefoot lived with Blackie the goat.
 

“Something’s up,” Holly said, before they’d gotten halfway there. “You’re not yourself. What happened?”

“I’ve been home two minutes,” said Bryony, annoyed. “Couldn’t I just be tired?”

“No. You’re walking wrong. Like you’re expecting somebody to jump out at you.”
 

Holly had a cheerful pink face and big, twinkling blue eyes, and Bryony occasionally had to remind herself that her sister also had a mind like a handful of razors.

“I’d rather only tell it once,” said Bryony tiredly. “You’re not going to believe me anyway, either of you, and it’ll be easier this way.”

“I’ll believe you,” said Holly. “You’re my sister. I don’t think you’ve ever lied to me about anything important.”

“I lied to you about who got punch on your favorite dress when you were twelve.”

Holly waved this off as unimportant. “Yes, well, I dropped your doll down the well, so it all evened out.”

“Mmm.” Bryony unsaddled Fumblefoot and gave him a desultory rub down. They had come out of the woods less than a mile from Lostfarthing, despite the complete impossibility of doing so.
 

Holly hefted the saddlebags over her shoulder as they walked towards the house. Chickens clucked and wobbled out of their path. “Well, whatever it is, I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said.

“It’s something,” said Bryony.

“In that case,” said Holly, switching shoulders, “just let me know who you want dropped down a well, and I’ll see what I can do.”
 

Telling her sisters did not go as well as Bryony had hoped.

She told the whole story through, sitting on a stool in front of the fire, with her fingers wrapped around a mug of peppermint tea.
 

At the end of it, Holly said “Huh!” explosively, and then there was a brief silence, and Iris burst into tears.

Holly rolled her eyes and dropped a shawl over Iris’s shoulders. (It didn’t stop the crying, but it did rather muffle it, and it usually calmed Iris a bit, like covering a birdcage.) Holly drew closer to Bryony. “Now,” she said, “if you say this is what happened, I will believe you. But I have one question first.”

“Ask,” said Bryony wearily, staring into her tea.

“Did you meet someone and fall madly in love and now you’re running away with him to a better life and this was seriously the best story you could think of? Because if it is—”

“Oh God, if only!” said Bryony, and started laughing painfully, which only made Iris cry harder.
 

“All right, then,” said Holly. Her eyes strayed to the little chest on the mantelpiece. “I will admit, the coins make compelling evidence…although he values you far too cheaply, if that’s all he thinks you’re worth…”

Bryony hadn’t mentioned that the Beast had offered her gold. She made a noncommittal sound and took a sip of tea.

“So now that that’s settled,” said Holly, sitting back on her heels, “you obviously can’t go back.”

Bryony hadn’t really expected them to cheerfully agree that she should march back into the hands of the Beast, but she was hoping to get Holly on her side, at least.
 

“But—”

“A strange man-monster lures you into the woods and informs you that he means to hold you prisoner? Are you mad? I shouldn’t have to tell you this.” Holly’s eyes narrowed. “Did you hit your head? Is there something you’re not telling us?”

“No, no—”

“Did he feed you poisoned food and if you don’t come back in seven days, you don’t get the antidote?”

“I—wait,
what?”
 

“Are you enchanted?” Holly leaned forward and peered at her pupils.
 

“How would we tell?” asked Bryony, exasperated. “And the Beast did save my life—”

“Yes, yes, he’s a great humanitarian.” Holly waved this off, then paused. Her finger drifted to her lower lip. “Unless he
is
a humanitarian…and he’s looking for a next meal…”

“I don’t think he’s a cannibal,” said Bryony, wondering how they had gotten so far afield, “and anyway, if he wanted to eat me, he would have. He didn’t have to let me come back and say good bye.”

“But what if he means to kill you?” cried Iris, taking her hands away from her face long enough to hurl the words out, then immediately covering her face again.
 

“I don’t think he does,” said Bryony slowly. “I’m nearly sure of it. There’s something else going on there. Something…something I can’t figure out…”

“So what?” asked Holly fiercely. “Why do you have to be the one to figure it out? His house can grab people, he says—well, let him grab someone else!”

Bryony shook her head slowly. “I can’t explain it. But I think the Beast is in trouble.”

Holly snorted, and Iris looked out between her fingers long enough to give her sister a disbelieving look.

She couldn’t explain it. If she tried, it would sound flimsy, and her sisters would drag it out and dissect it and make her see how ridiculous it was, and Bryony didn’t want to hear it.
 

Because something strange
was
going on, even beyond the enchanted house and a Beast defensive of his roses.

When she had led Fumblefoot through the wrought iron gate, and prepared to ride away, the Beast had come out to meet her. Fumblefoot didn’t like him and tried to dance nervously, but because it was Fumblefoot, he had to settle for a few sidesteps and a disgruntled whuffle.

“Give me your hand, Miss Bryony,” said the Beast.
 

Bryony tried to read something in his eyes—the eyes, that was the trick, look at the eyes and not at the great tusked muzzle beneath them—but there was nothing.

He could have twisted my head off like a pigeon’s at any point. It seems unlikely he’d put me on a horse and then yank my hand off.

She stuck her hand out, feeling foolish.

The Beast reached through the bars of the gate and took her hand in his own very large one. For a moment it looked as if he was the prisoner, not she.
 

He held her hand very lightly, with his thumb lying in a bar across her fingers, and said “Miss Bryony, please listen to me.”

Bryony, who had been staring at the dark clawed hand wrapped around her own, looked up sharply, because on the word
listen
he had given her fingers a quick hard squeeze, like one who seeks to convey a secret message.
 

“You must come back in a week’s time,” he said, gazing intently into her face. “The house will come for you, otherwise. It has great power.” He squeezed her fingers twice more, on
house
and
power.
“But I have no wish for you to be unhappy. Bring with you anything you need in your new life—mementos, hobbies, beloved objects. And as you are a gardener, please bring anything that you require—seeds for planting, tending, staking, pruning…whatever it is that gardeners do.”
 

He dropped her hand dismissively as he said this last, but Bryony was more puzzled than ever, because he had given her fingers a final hard squeeze on the word
gardener,
and his golden eyes never left her own.
 

“Um,” said Bryony. “Yes. I will?”

The Beast had nodded and turned away, stalking back towards the house. The folds of his robe spread out around him like a shadow on the melting snow.
 

“Hey,” said Holly, flapping her fingers in front of Bryony’s face. “Hey! Have you heard a word I’ve said?”

Bryony started guiltily. Iris had stopped crying in the corner, so probably more time had passed than she thought. “Sorry. Woolgathering.”

Holly threw her hands in the air. “I’m making more tea,” she said. “Clearly you’re not going to listen to anyone tonight, but maybe tomorrow you’ll be ready to hear reason. And in the meantime, there’ll be tea.”

Bryony’s own cup had gone stone cold. She handed it over.

Listen. House. Power. Gardener.
 

Gardener?
Really? How did that fit?
 

Gardening may be my great joy, but I don’t delude myself that it’s that important in the grand scheme of things…and why it would be important to the Beast, I can’t imagine…

There was something more at work here. And if Bryony was going to be drawn into it, she was determined to get to the bottom of it.

The snow melted almost at once. When Bryony had led Fumblefoot to the barn, his hooves cut holes in the snow and struck mud underneath. By morning, those holes were twice as large and smaller holes had appeared everywhere, cutting the white blanket into lace.
 

By noon, it was gone entirely.

In the next few days, Bryony found herself thinking that the garden must know what was about to befall the gardener, because there had never been such a spring.
 

The fine haze of green leaves at the base of old stems became foot-high thickets practically overnight. The asparagus-like stems of false indigo came up like a forest of spears, and clover rioted down the pathways. Bryony felt as if she barely had time to sow a row of seeds before she had to turn around and begin thinning the seedlings, as if they threw their second and third sets of leaves in the moments when her back was turned.

The generosity of the garden humbled her. She could not shake the feeling that it was trying to take care of her, overflowing in every direction so that she had enough of everything to take with her. She lifted and divided and potted from dawn to dusk, begrudging every moment spent inside eating, or outside tending to the chickens.
 

“It looks like you’re trying to take the whole thing with you,” said Holly, bringing out a cup of tea once more, four days after Bryony had come home.

“Well,” said Bryony, chopping her spade through a ball of tightly wound roots, and prying the smaller half out of the ground. “Well. I suppose I am, a little.”

“You’re going to miss the garden more than either of us,” said Holly, and that was a statement, not a question, which was good. Otherwise Bryony would have had to answer, and it would almost certainly have been a lie.

“I’ll miss you very much,” she said instead, which was true.
 

“Ah, but we’re only people, after all,” said Holly, amused. There was no censure in her voice. Holly understood things. And then, more seriously, “Bryony, you don’t have to go. If you stay here—whatever happens—we’ll deal with it. I’ll tie you to me with ropes, and if this Beast and his house comes for you, he’ll have to take us both.”

“And leave Iris all alone?” asked Bryony, transferring the roots, with their accompanying green spikes, to a waiting piece of burlap. “She’ll be dead in a week.” Iris had spent the last few days alternating between claiming that if Bryony stayed home and inside the cottage, she would be fine, and a deep conviction that the Beast was going to eat Bryony and then possibly the rest of the town. That she was able to hold both positions several times a day without seeing any contradiction was no longer a surprise to her sisters.
 

“She’ll go into town to Widow Grayson,” said Holly practically. “The Widow needs somebody to work the loom, now that her eyes are going, and she fancies Iris for that dim son of hers anyway.”
 

“All the more reason for you to stay here,” said Bryony. “Iris’s fate would be far worse than mine. I just have to deal with an enchanted manor house and a somewhat sarcastic monster, not marry the Grayson boy.”

Holly snorted. Bryony tied the burlap square around the roots of the plant, wet it down, and added it to a straggling row of similar burlap sacks.
 

“Why are you so determined to go?” asked Holly. “Truly?”

Bryony wiped her dirt-streaked hands on her trousers and sat down next to Holly. Her sister had brought out another cup of tea, and she gulped it gratefully, even when it burned her tongue.

“Do you remember the city?” she asked finally, when it became obvious that Holly was not going to be put off.

“Mmmm,” said Holly, who remembered it the way that a soldier remembers a great and terrible defeat.
 

“When we’d lost…when Father had lost…well. You know.” Bryony laced her fingers around her knee and leaned back. The sun was warm, and she could hear the rustle of leaves as the pea plants investigated the side of the house. “When everything was sold, and all we had left was a cottage so far away that nobody wanted it… I stopped feeling miserable. It was like I’d come out the other side. I remember this kind of crazy exhilaration as we left the city.”

“Because we were finally leaving?” asked Holly, the teacup forgotten halfway to her mouth.
 

“A little. But more…” Bryony spread her arms. “If that could happen to us, if we could be rich and then suddenly have nothing—if life could change that much, overnight—then
anything
could happen. Birds could turn into fish. The sun could rise at midnight. I could learn to fly. The world was obviously wilder and stranger than anyone knew. And there was nothing left to lose. Nobody could take anything from us, because we didn’t have anything left to take. I felt invincible.”

“Hmmm,” said Holly. She remembered the teacup and drained it. “I think I understand. When we left the city, on that rattletrap wagon, I remember thinking, ‘Thank God, it doesn’t matter anymore that I’m not pretty, at least nobody’s going to pretend that I’m beautiful just because I’m rich.’” She wrinkled her nose. “When I realized that, I started laughing, because it was such a relief, and Iris thought I was crying and started up herself, and I couldn’t explain without sounding completely mad.”
 

“Oh, well,
Iris,
” said Bryony. She remembered when their creditors had come to cart the furniture away, including the marble-topped vanity in her bedroom, and she had thought,
No one will try to smother me in paint again, trying to interest some poor nobleman in a short and rather plain merchant’s daughter.
It had been a different feeling, but close enough that she thought Holly probably understood.