Things that had sap in their veins also had bark as their skin. Sometimes paper-thin bark, delicate and fragile-seeming, but even birch paper had to be peeled away in layer after layer to reach and damage the wood beneath. And I was Amber, after all: amber, which came most often from within rough-barked pine trees. If amber itself ran in my veins, surely I could convince my body that its skin was as tough as pine bark, all but impervious to the thorns. The scoring on my skin roughed it up already: I imagined those little wounds layering on top of one another like bark did, thickening like scarred wood, and bit by bit the thorns lost their bite. I kept my eyes closed, pressing forward, and finally felt brambles breaking under my feet as I regained the ability to move.
All I needed was a direction to move in, and I had no sense of that at all. The palace was enormous even when visions and memories didn't expand it beyond reality, and now it was being dismantled by the weight and fury of roses. I had entered the roses nearest, I thought, the round room that had been the library—for a moment my heart broke, thinking of all that had been reclaimed in that library, and was now lost again—and I had felt the Beast at the heart of the palace. That, to me, would always be the sitting room and adjoining hall, where Father and I had first been ushered and where the Beast and I had taken meals together. I struggled onward, but I struggled in darkness: I had no idea if I was going the right way or not, and every suspicion that the roses would force me in the wrong direction. I dragged in breath through my teeth, trying not to taste the overwhelming smell of roses, and somewhere at the back of my throat, a hint of cinnamon caught.
I froze there amongst the unforgiving roses, opening my mouth like a cat trying to find more scent. Cinnamon and myrrh, and the latter made me suddenly laugh. The roses pulled back a little at the sound, then attacked again, but in the moment they retreated, I turned toward that scent and pushed forward.
Cinnamon and sweet wine and myrrh: I had my Beast's scent, the one I had made for him, and best of all, what was myrrh but a resin? Not as hard or ancient as amber, but made from the seeping skin of trees, and thus within my demesne. Half a dozen resins were used in perfumes; I had known it without thinking it through, and now thought that Eleanor had been mistaken about us all. Even as children we three girls had played toward aspects of our unawakened magic, strengthening bonds that we would later need.
I moved faster, with the Beast's scent in my throat. The brambles grew more frenzied but less effective as I gained confidence, lashing at me, trying to tangle my feet, but also bowing to my will as I thrust them away. They scraped at my skin, but no longer pierced it: I was too much one of them, a creature of imagined bark and wood and sap. Nothing so clear as a path ever opened up, but as with the forest when I'd escaped earlier, just enough space cleared in front of me, and if it stitched together again behind me, that was a problem for another time.
I stepped free into what might once have been the dining hall, but which was now the eye of a bloom-laden maelstrom, rising clear to the now-moonless sky, so that all that looked down upon us were stars. I saw what Eleanor had done, how she mastered such enormous power, and I cried out in horror for my Beast.
Eleanor's roses themselves took their life from him: roots dug deep into his withered body and pinned him to the earth. The storm's eye was hardly larger than he was, just enough to let him breathe and continue to live. I did not have to be well-versed in magic to understand the wicked cleverness of what she'd done: I knew enough of Irindala, and the curse, to recognize it clearly.
Irindala was bound to the land by blood and bone and magic, and the Beast, her son, was as tied to it as she was. Through him, Eleanor could draw on the very strength of Irindala's country, and though Maman had drained it nearly dry of magic, it still had life in it. To take the country's very life would nearly satisfy Eleanor, I thought. Nearly, but not quite.
But the curse lay on top of that, and curses broke laws of mortality. Eleanor had cursed the Beast to lonely immortality, and Irindala had only been able to lessen its impact. He could be made a mortal man again by a lover's willing touch…but until then even Eleanor couldn't killthe Beast.
She could use him, though. Any mortal creature could never have survived what the Beast now endured: the fact that he was silent, half unconscious beneath the writhing, hungry roots spoke to the pain he must have been in. But the Beast would not, could not, die, and so long as he lived, Eleanor could use his bond with the land to grow her power and wreak havoc on Irinidala's country.
Here, at the heart of her power, at the heart of his, Eleanor stepped out of the roses and I saw her true form with my own for the first time.
I had seen her repeatedly in Irindala's memories, and even through her own eyes, reflected in water, and yet she did not look like I believed her to. I had thought her tall: she was not, especially. But then, Maman was quite small indeed, and by comparison, Eleanor might be thought tall. She was rounder, too, more curvaceous than I expected; more like Opal in bosom and hip than I'd imagined.
Save for her figure, though, she was hardly like Opal at all. Opal was pretty, whereas Pearl and I were beautiful and interesting, respectively, and Eleanor was both of those things. Her features were like mine, a little asymmetrical, but the shape of her jaw and cheekbones lent her an arrogant elegance that Pearl had inherited and turned to beauty. None of us, though, shared her eyes, which were huge and angled and not at all human. Her hair was ivory, with a yellow undertone that Pearl's didn't share, and slender pointed ears poked through the straight locks. In the starlight her skin was so golden it could be mistaken for green, like the green of new growth in roses.
Her mouth curved in a deadly smile when she saw me, and the laugh that broke from her throat sounded like the scrape of thorns. "Oh, you are my daughter," she said in pleasure. "My foolish little Amber, throwing it all away for a Beast."
"Even if I didn't love him," I said as steadily as I could, and in a voice that didn't sound quite right, "you would need to be stopped."
"And you believe you can."
"I believe it's worth trying."