Bryony and Roses Read online

  No. There were few things as immutable in life as the need to prune the shrubs. Either there were people out here after all, or she’d stumbled onto…something else.

  “M-might as well s-say it,” she told Fumblefoot. “M-m-magic.” Fumblefoot snorted.

  Keeping a boxwood hedge trimmed was a pretty wasteful use of magic, in Bryony’s opinion, but then so much magic seemed to be frivolous. If wizards could invent a charm to keep the deer out of the garden, now, or to age compost overnight—now that would be something useful. But no, if you were a wizard, you were far too important to fool about with that sort of thing, and would be charging money for expensive frivolities, like making sure your carriage horses had matching coats, or that your silk dress rippled with embroidery that changed color to match your surroundings.

  Actually, compared to that, a permanently trimmed hedge seemed almost practical.

  I don’t have any proof. Maybe there’s people here. Probably there’s people here. After all, what’s more likely—that there’s a hidden manor house between home and Skypepper, or that somebody left magical self-trimming boxwoods lying around?

  The snowy roadway ended in a circular carriageway, with an enormous fountain in the middle. The fountain’s lines were obscured with snow, and a thin film of ice coated the edges. The boxwood hedges swept out in a great curve, following the lines of the carriageway, and stopped before they reached the house.

  She was very aware of the silence as they trudged around the fountain. It was so quiet. Her breathing, though muffled by the weight of her scarf, seemed very loud. The crunch of her footsteps seemed to break through the silence like ice.

  It’s just the snow. Snow does strange things to sound, that’s all.

  The door loomed before them. Bryony had been stealing glances at it for some time and it kept getting taller and wider until when she finally arrived, it was nearly twelve feet high and wide enough for a hay wagon.

  It didn’t look ruined or abandoned or even very old. The doorhandles gleamed, and a great iron shield in the middle, cut into the shape of a stylized rose, had not rusted. Only a thin rime of white clung to the edges.

  Two bushes flanked the doorway, in great marble planters. The ugly stems with their wicked thorns were immediately obvious as dormant rosebushes. They had been pruned back heavily by someone who knew what they were doing.

  A row of short marble steps led up to the doorway. Bryony dropped Fumblefoot’s reins, hoping that the butler or the majordomo (if there was someone there) could tell her where the stables were, and went up the stairs carefully, getting both feet on one before attempting the next. It would be just her luck to find the only hidden manor house in a thousand miles of woods, and then slip on the last step up to the door and brain herself on a marble planter.

  She reached up to the door knocker and the moment her fingers touched it, the door swung silently open.

  The hinges did not creak. There were no ominous noises. The door just swung open a little way and stopped, standing wide enough for a woman and a pony to walk through.

  “Um. H-h-hello?” Bryony poked her head inside, hoping to catch someone in the act of pulling the door open.

  There was no one there.

  She couldn’t even blame a well-weighted door this time, because the knocker was on the right and it was the left-hand door that had swung open.

  The double doors opened onto an entryway as large as her own cottage, with a thick red carpet on the floor. Four doors led off in various directions, and a set of crystal sconces held beeswax candles, burning as brightly as if they had been lit a half-minute before.

  As she watched, the door directly across from her swung slowly open.

  At this moment, had she not been in imminent danger of freezing to death, Bryony would have turned around, climbed onto Fumblefoot’s back, and ridden as far away as she possibly could. This was magic, no doubt about it, and the very best possibility was that somewhere there was a sorcerer who was going to get very annoyed when he found that a soggy peasant and her disgraceful horse had invaded his spotless domain.

  The rather worse explanations involved wild magic or fairies or any number of things that meant this house was a great big trap and if she stepped inside, the door was going to slam shut and the house was going to devour her.

  On the other hand, it was warm inside the house. Just being out of the wind left her feeling a hundred times warmer. She pushed her cloak hood back from her face.

  I’ll go back outside. We’ll crouch down behind the wall, maybe, out of the wind—surely that’ll be enough—I mean, I don’t need all my toes, and it’s better to lose a few than get eaten by a house—

  It was so very warm. She hadn’t been dressed for a blizzard, but even her light cloak and gloves were starting to feel hot.

  “Hello?” she called again.

  No one came. If there was a butler, he was invisible, and wasn’t that a pleasant thought?

  Bryony stood on the threshold in indecision, until something shoved her hard in the back.

  She let out a yell and stumbled forward, sure that the door would slam and the lights would go out and then she’d start hearing something—a sound, a monster, something terrible—and she reached out to catch herself because her feet had gone cold and clumsy. She landed on her knees on the carpet with her head bowed as if waiting for the headsman’s axe.

  It had been Fumblefoot.

  He whuffled at her worriedly when she fell down. Fumblefoot did not understand humans very well, except that some of them gave you grain and called you a good little idiot and some of them attached very heavy things to you and hit you to make you run. He knew he preferred the former to the latter, but his experience did not encompass humans that yelped and fell down when you poked them.

  He shifted nervously from foot to foot. He was cold. There was warmth. What was going on?

  “Idiot,” muttered Bryony. She got slowly to her feet. The ice on her eyelashes was melting and streamed down her face like tears.

  Horses were notoriously sensitive to magic—horses bespelled to have matching coats were wild and jittery for weeks afterwards—but with a real numbskull like Fumblefoot, you couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t even scared of barking dogs, because he didn’t think they had anything to do with him. Magic might go right over his empty little head.

  He didn’t seem nervous. Hopefully that was a good sign.

  “Well, I suppose if it’s certain death or a magic house…”

  It was possible that there was random benevolent magic scattered through the world. You heard about it occasionally. Groves where lost sheep turned up, springs that healed, trees that sheltered the hunted from the hunter.

  It was just that you heard so much more about the nasty things that ate you in the dark.

  She gathered up Fumblefoot’s reins and led him into the house.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Stay right there,” Bryony told the pony. “If this is some sorcerer’s house, we’re not going to get hoofprints all over his nice floor. He’s going to be mad enough as it is.”

  She pulled her scarf down. Her face was wet underneath, from her own breath steaming against the fabric. When she pulled her gloves off, her fingers were white, but she knew they would turn red and begin burning like fire any second now.

  She turned back to Fumblefoot, thinking to pull his packs off and start rubbing him down, and saw that the double doors had swung shut.

  Running was currently beyond her, but she stomped to the door, leaving bits of compacted white snow behind her, and pushed against it. Her heart was in her throat, because if it refused to open, she was going to have to panic, and she truly did not think she had the energy left.

  It swung open easily, affording her a glimpse of the snowy world outside.

  Bryony let out a long breath. Very well, then. They would be allowed to leave—or there was at least an illusion they would be allowed to leave—

  Stop. This is too complicated. I cannot k
eep waiting for something to jump on me from the shadows when I am ready to fall down already. I will just trust that the house will let us go again, because there is nothing I can do about it if it won’t.

  She turned back, to find that Fumblefoot was investigating the open door.

  “No! Stop, idiot!” She hurried to him and laid a hand on his shoulder, trying to push him away from the door. “You’ll get snow all over the floor—the sorcerer’ll kill us—if there is a sorcerer—oh, stop, stop!”

  Melting snow was sliding off the bags and his tail and the saddle blankets and plopping on the thick red carpet. A trail of soggy hoofprints led from the door, and as she watched, he lifted his tail and—

  “Oh dear God, no, stop!”

  Fumblefoot gave her a reproachful look. Stop what?

  I have broken into an enchanted manor house and my pony has crapped on the floor. Oh God. Bryony fought the urge to giggle hysterically. She would have to find something shovel-like—maybe she had something in the saddlebags—and then she could scoop the mess up and dump it outside. Her gloves would never be the same, but arguably neither would the carpet.

  Fumblefoot took advantage of her distraction to go through the open door. Bryony gave the pile of pony droppings a guilty glance—they probably weren’t going anywhere, after all—and hurried to catch him before he made even more of a mess.

  The door led to a long hallway, built to a scale so impressive that even a pony in the middle of it did not make it seem significantly smaller. It was lined with doors and enormous oil paintings, decorative marble tables and wrought-iron candlesticks.

  Everything was silent inside the house. It was as quiet as the snow-covered landscape outside. The carpet muffled her footsteps, and even the pony’s thudding, squelching progress was muted. If she hadn’t been able to hear him breathing like a bellows, she would have thought that her ears had frozen in the cold.

  She reached under Fumblefoot’s chin and snagged his reins. He let out a colossal sigh and tried to lean on her, and while she was avoiding being squashed against a marble-top table, a third door swung silently open in front of them.

  The pony made for it so determinedly that he practically dragged Bryony along with him. Reins really only went so far with Fumblefoot: his previous owner had been a very bad man and left the pony with a mouth like iron, so he was fully capable of ignoring somebody hauling on the bit when he chose.

  “The floors….!” said Bryony hopelessly. Her fingers were burning so badly that she couldn’t keep a grip on the reins anyway, and let go to keep from being swept into the doorframe. She cradled her hands against her chest, and so it was hunched and nearly weeping in frustration that she entered the enchanted parlor.

  There was a brick fireplace on the wall, and in the fireplace, a fire was burning. As soon as she saw it, she heard it as well, snapping over the logs and crackling through bits of kindling.

  It was too much. The sight of the fire wrung the last energy from Bryony. Exhaustion poured into her bones like molten lead, weighing her down until she thought her knees would buckle.

  Fumblefoot had found something to eat. “Because it is completely and totally normal for people to have buckets of hot mash in their parlors,” said Bryony, to his ears. One flicked at her as if she were a fly.

  She dragged the saddle off his back and managed to pull him out of the mash long enough to pull the bridle off his head. She had just enough strength to heave the saddle to one side. Her saddlebags went clink, because Elspeth had sent jars of liniment and preserves home with her, but nothing broke.

  There was an elegantly laid table a few feet from the fire. Silver candlesticks burned amid piled fruit and covered dishes. Light rippled from the tablecloth in the way that light ripples from very expensive damask and doesn’t ripple from anything else.

  There was a single chair and a single place setting. Bryony didn’t dare sit down. She pulled the elegantly folded napkin from under the gleaming silverware, turned back to Fumblefoot, and began rubbing his legs down with it.

  Fumblefoot ignored her, slobbering happily into his food. Bits of grain and horse drool stained the carpet.

  “It’s their fault now,” muttered Bryony, working her way down his hind leg with the napkin. “They gave him the mash.” She had no idea who they might be—if it was a sorcerer, it was a very accommodating one. She supposed it could still be fairies, in which case Fumblefoot, having eaten fairy food, was probably trapped forever inside the fairy mound or ring of stones or…ring of boxwood…thing…poor fairies, they probably expected better…

  She fell asleep next to the fire, with the battered napkin still in her hand.

  Bryony woke up because her feet were finally warm enough to become excruciatingly painful.

  She bit her lower lip and was just thinking that she needed to take her boots off and take a look at the toes in question when she realized that she had tucked the toes of her right foot up under her left knee, which would be very difficult if she were still wearing boots.

  She opened her eyes. There was a blanket over her, and her boots were sitting next to the fire. Her cloak was hanging on a coatrack by the door.

  Her first instinct was to sit bolt upright and look around for whoever had draped the blanket over her and pulled her boots off.

  There wasn’t anyone there. Fumblefoot stood in the corner, drowsing, on a pile of straw. (Clearly piles of straw were accessories in all the best parlors.) He lifted his head a little when he saw her move, then dropped his nose again with a contented hurrff!

  “Right…” said Bryony. “Right…right. Okay. I can’t have slept long. My feet are still cold.” She gritted her teeth and pulled the blanket back.

  She was still wearing socks. They were wet and squishy and regrettable. She yanked the socks off and laid them carefully across the hearth, then took a deep breath and looked down at her feet.

  Her feet were bright red and burning so fiercely it made her eyes prickle—but none of the toes were purple or black or any odd color, and she could wiggle all of them.

  The pain of moving them made her want to howl, but she wasn’t going to lose anything to frostbite. A weight that had settled in the pit of her stomach seemed to lift. It wasn’t that she cared that much about the toes, but the act of actually having them chopped off or fall off or whatever happened when you got frostbitten toes was so gruesome she’d been trying not to think about it.

  She got up. She’d been lying on the floor in front of the fire, under a quilt covered in patchwork roses. There was a sofa on the far side of the room with thick pillows that looked much more comfortable than the floor.

  Her bare feet made no noise in the deep pile carpet. As she walked toward the sofa, trailing the quilt behind her, the table full of food caught her eye again.

  Her stomach growled.

  “I’ll be trapped forever in fairyland,” she told her stomach. Her stomach did not seem to care.

  Bryony wrapped the quilt around her shoulders, feeling like an invalid. The silver bowls glittered. The smell of fresh bread nearly drowned out the smell of horse and drying socks.

  Well, if they wanted to trap me, it’s not like they didn’t have plenty of chances already….

  It was a small, round loaf on a little wooden board. It was still warm from the oven, and how was that even possible?

  Does it matter?

  Her stomach insisted that it didn’t.

  She sank into the chair and tore off a hunk of bread. Her hand shook as she buttered it. The butter knife was heavy and the handle was intricately worked with a pattern of vines that ended in a swirling open rose.

  “I am beginning to see a theme here,” said Bryony dryly, and then didn’t say anything more as she stuffed the bread into her mouth.

  It was sourdough. It was incredible. She found that tears were leaking down her cheeks for no reason, and this was infuriating, because she hardly ever cried. She wiped the side of her hand across her eyes and looked around for more bre
ad.

  There were other things on the table. Bryony didn’t quite have the energy to investigate the covered dishes. There were too many and they were too shiny and reminded her too much of meals in the capital. Besides, there might be something horrible under those covers—vipers or severed heads or something.

  Anything is possible.

  She cut a wedge of cheese and sandwiched it between more hunks of bread. It was soft and nutty and a great deal better than the cheese that her sister Holly so painstakingly coaxed out of goat milk.

  A bunch of grapes lay beside the cheese. Bryony eyed them with suspicion. It was spring. Grapes would not be ripe for months yet.

  When she and her sisters had lived in the capital—when her father had still been alive—there had been hothouse grapes all winter, as plentiful as apples and as little regarded. You could pick three grapes off a bunch and toss the rest away without even thinking about it. She had not seen grapes in midwinter for five years. The nuns in Longfarthing had an orangery, but the oranges were reserved for the sick, and if they grew grapes, no one outside the convent had ever heard of it.

  She poked a grape. The skin was firm and green, with a faint reddish bloom. It did not shriek or run away or turn into a frog or do anything to advertise its magical origin, but surely it must be magic. Everything was magic. There hadn’t been a pile of straw in the corner when they entered the parlor, and boots did not take themselves off, not with that many laces.

  In the end, she left the grapes alone. The bread and the cheese could have had a mundane origin, but there was no way the grapes were anything but magical. And if fairies could doom you to a lifetime in fairyland by eating mere bread and cheese, then the odds were so stacked against mortals that there was no hope for anyone.

  By the time she was halfway through her third cheese sandwich, Bryony was yawning as often as she was chewing. She pulled the rose quilt around her shoulders and stumbled to the sofa.

  The cushions were deeper and softer than her mattress back home. She made it halfway through the thought I wonder if the snow is still… and fell straight down into sleep.