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.