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.