Waking beauty, p.50
Waking Beauty, page 50
Arpien’s request was not without cost, for more than one man who turned back fell to the trampling cloven hooves. But if those men’s bravery didn’t fry the Devarish hogs away to flaky nubs, like overdone bacon, at least it counterbalanced any growth allowed by the men who retreated.
Yet no sooner had the Rosarian troops sent up a rallying cry than their cheers turned to shouts of confusion. The earth under them trembled and gave way. Pools of metallic flickering lights spilled out of the earth and drained away again. Massive clods of dirt churned up around them. The pools of light mounded as no natural water ever could. The surface strained as though some bulky creature flexed powerful muscles to break through it.
One fairy emerged from each pool. Troops scurried out of the way. Arpien couldn’t imagine any fairy here at the invitation of Voracity was favorably disposed to Rosaria, or to him. The pools draped the shoulders of each form, until Arpien realized they were not pools, but robes like the one Voracity wore. A fairy with cobalt hair flung his robe out behind him and leapt into the air. Finally Arpien realized he’d misnamed it again—the dazzling, imperfectly perceivable lights were wings.
Three of the evil fairies dove at him, arms outstretched. They grabbed a mantiz in each powerful hand, spiraled dozens of feet into the air, and dropped them. The mantizes plummeted to the earth. Saw-tooth limbs flailed in the air. The flailing continued after impact. A sign of life or the last twitches of death?
Arpien raised the vademecum sword and rushed to the mantizes’ defense, a reaction he would neither have predicted nor judged wise. He drew up short as one of the evil fairies slammed down into the earth in front of him. He felt the impact as two more fairies closed in from the right and left. There was no good stance to take, but as Voracity was the threat that Arpien wanted least at his back, he whirled to face her.
“Mind the sword,” Voracity ordered the others. “But the prince is only paper.”
Arpien chopped at the fairy nearest him and found only air. He tripped headlong, rolled and recovered. The fairies’ smug expressions told him he had not tripped over his own feet. They were toying with the paper prince.
A blade sliced into his back. Pain robbed his breath, then vanished as quickly. He whirled in the direction of the new attack, and found only a flash of dizzying winglights and another piercing attack from behind. His knees buckled at the agony, but he used the vademecum sword as a crutch to keep from falling. Blows from his barely seen enemies fell before he could pinpoint the location of each attacker.
It was his nightmare, brought into the waking world. Voracity stood back and watched the others have their amusement with a vaguely impatient expression on her stunning face. Her wings thrummed in orange squiggly lines.
Suddenly the pattern of Voracity’s winglights shifted to violent ice blue. “What’s she doing there?”
Voracity extended her wings behind her and somehow, stepped backward through them. As her body dissolved she barked an order. “Confiscate the sword. Kill the wielder.” Her impossible wings glittered in the air a few seconds after the rest of her vanished, then they themselves swallowed each other up.
Without Voracity, the briars paused in their disassembly of Boxleyn Palace. The reprieve made little difference to the Rosarian army outside the gate. It made little difference to Arpien, as the giant winged figure before him raised a final killing blow.
66
Brierly
Garden. Brierly never would have described it as such. It was a maze of the thickest briars she had ever seen. Far more intimidating than even those outside Castle Estepel. Thorns as long as rapiers. Vines as thick around as a man’s thigh. Worse, these vines were dead. The sweet rotten stench of them lay heavy in her lungs. But they were also alive. They grew, they moved, they reacted. They were more like predatory animals than plants. Thorns aligned like eyeless heads to watch them pass.
She saw creatures slinking within the vines—a foot, an eye, a tail. Here and there a vine whipped around one of the creatures, a snake sinking teeth of thorns into its prey and swallowing it whole. Brierly never got a clear sighting of the creatures, but they didn’t look human. Their screams were just human enough to scrape the courage from her bones.
But the Prince stood here beside her, so she didn’t escape into another dream. “Do you recognize this place?”
“Are we going to her fortress?”
He nodded, and tugged her forward by the hand.
The vines slithered around them, but left a path open. They must have passed through a mile of briars before Brierly saw through the tangle to the stone fortress. The fortress gave the impression of impending weight, an inevitable fall. Even as she watched, Brierly saw a chunk of the building crumble off. Before it hit the ground three vines shot out and caught it. Thorny fingers wedged and tied the block back in place. The stones shifted to receive it, but the stone distorted the face of the wall instead of strengthening it. It swelled like an abscess ready to burst.
“Is Voracity’s fortress really a prison?” Brierly said. “Do you make her live here?”
“It is a prison of sorts. But she chooses to stay here.”
“Why would anyone choose to live in a place like this?”
The Prince regarded her soberly.
“This is the garden we’re going to—prune?”
“One of them.”
Brierly thought of the servant, Senesca. The old woman still bore the scars from weeding the briars outside Castle Estepel as a child, and those briars were nowhere as virulent as these. Brierly sucked in a breath. She’d promised to serve the Prince. She seized a vine and pulled.
The vine pulled back. Brierly fell nose-first in the dirt as the vine dragged her into the thicket. The Prince laid his hand on the vine. A jolt ran down its length and into Brierly’s hands. It felt soothing to her, but it must have irritated the vine, because it released her. Brierly scooted back.
“I see I’m going to have to teach you my way of gardening,” the Prince said.
Brierly rubbed her hands. “I’m listening.”
“How do you defeat thorns?”
That sounded much more like a question than an answer.
In one accord all the vines stretched for the sky. In hunger or in welcome, Brierly couldn’t tell. They blocked out the sun. Only it wasn’t really a sun, it was a pale silvery orb. Not the moon either. A source of false light.
The briars bowed down around a tall graceful figure.
Voracity.
“You do not understand the rules,” Voracity said to Brierly. “You are mine completely now. You cannot stand against me.”
If that were true, why had Voracity rushed back to her fortress?
“Maybe someone else can,” Brierly said.
Only then did Voracity see the Prince a few feet behind Brierly. Voracity dropped back a step and covered her head. When the Prince did not attack, she slowly lowered her hands.
“You came to fight,” the fairy said. “Fine. Fight. No matter who wins, I will make you pay dearly.”
“My Steward is going to fight for me.”
Brierly choked. Why chance the fate of Rosaria to the prowess of someone who had one hundred years of defeat to her name?
Voracity scoffed. “Your Stewards are weak. Why do you place your faith in them?”
“You’ve got it backwards, as usual.”
Uh, you’re the Prince. Crush her.
The Prince laid a hand on her shoulder. “I’m right here with you. How do you think she’ll win?”
Brierly didn’t have time to answer. She was too busy dodging the three-foot-long thorn that came hurtling at her chest.
She avoided it by turning into a mouse.
A mouse wasn’t a small enough target. Voracity flung thorn after thorn around her. Brierly scurried right and left as their razor tips bit into the ground. In seconds Brierly was caught in a cage of thorns.
“How do you defeat thorns?” asked the Prince.
Wasn’t he supposed to be telling her that?
She turned into a shadow and slipped between the thorn bars of her cage. But this was a mistake, as the shadows of the vines could twine around the shadow of her soul. She popped into her own flesh again.
“What is your name?” the Prince said.
Never underestimate the power of a name. “Steward,” Brierly said. Was he reminding her of her vow?
Briars shot out of Voracity’s hands. Brierly sprouted wings and launched into the air. The vines chased her. She flew in circles. The pursuing vines tied themselves in knots.
She could still see the Prince below. She flapped closer to him, certain that if she lost sight of him she’d be dead. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted up at her. “Your other name.”
She frowned. The moment of distraction cost her her right wing. One of the thorns pierced the feathers. She wanted to scream but it was quicker to vanquish the wings. She plummeted toward the hungry thicket.
Spinning wheels. She reversed gravity.
Not her best idea, as now she was soaring away from the Prince. She switched gravity back the right way and grabbed ahold of a dingy storm cloud. “My name is Brierly!”
“No,” he said.
A flock of thorns pierced the cloud and she let go. She twined her limbs around a bolt of lightning—ouch—and slid to the ground. “No?”
“Your true name.”
It was all too familiar. Voracity was attacking her, and instead of interceding, he quizzed her with useless conundrums.
“Do you trust me or not?”
Brierly flushed. Aye, she did trust him. Then let her listen. He wanted her true name.
She gasped. Not her nickname. What she was christened.
She raised her hands and aimed for the briars.
“My name is Briar Rose.”
Petals flew out of her fingertips like a swarm of avenging butterflies. Single petals seeded themselves in the hard vines and bloomed. The roses grew so large that they choked out the thorns. The thorns shed from the vines like scales. The earth swallowed them down in little pits of steam.
Voracity redoubled her attack. Briars collided with petals in the air. The petals stripped the thorns from the vines like devouring locusts. Naked limp vines drooped and fell over.
Voracity turned and fled to her fortress. Her power was thorns, and thorns had no power anymore.
The thorns were not the only thing the petals destroyed. Brierly aimed higher and the petals embedded themselves into the walls of the fortress. Roots spread through stone and mortar. The fortress cracked and crumbled. Voracity braced the disintegrating building with a web of supporting briars. Brierly targeted these, too. The briars bloomed and thorns rained from the fortress. It sounded like hail hitting the ground.
As Brierly/Briar Rose flung petals, she saw the Prince beside her. Only, in the corner of her vision, sometimes he looked like the Thorn King. When the Prince stood beside her, the petals she threw were pure white. When the Thorn King stood beside her, the petals were blood red.
When her briars failed, Voracity plucked the roses from her fortress with her own hands. She screamed as her hands closed around each blossom. The rose petals pierced Voracity’s flesh as the thorns had pierced Brierly’s. Voracity tore a white blossom from the wall, smeared with her own blood. It floated to the ground and took root. The bloodstains sizzled away, and the petals gleamed as white as before.
“Long ago she made her choice. Now the petals are poison to her,” the Prince said. “You see what you must do.”
Brierly sprayed the petals directly at Voracity. The petals swirled around Voracity in a great red and white funnel.
The Prince put a hand on her shoulder. “Stop.”
He took exactly one step back. Brierly went with him.
The weakened fortress shuddered and swayed overhead. Any moment before this, Brierly would have dodged out of the way. With the Prince beside her, she stood rooted as the fortress crashed down around them. A stone block as big as she was smashed in front of her. It rolled and bumped gently against her toes.
The fortress was gone. In its place stood a magnificent rose garden. Wild but not unplanned. And not a single thorn anywhere. Fragrance rolled over her like incense. She sucked it into her lungs. The breath of life itself. How was it possible to feel so spent and energized at once?
She walked in the garden with the Prince. The rose vines rearranged themselves into tunnels and arches to let them pass. The very rubble left from the ruined fortress shrank into pebbles. Within the fortress’s blackened heart they found Voracity. The fairy shrank and faded like her place of power.
The malignant glare Voracity cast at Brierly was enough to turn her stomach. But it was only a passing glance compared to the hatred Voracity fixed on the Prince. At last Brierly understood that the christening Curse, the killings at the Spring Ball, the one hundred years of torture, none of it had been out of hatred for Brierly. By herself Brierly was no true threat to Voracity. In the same way Voracity was no true threat to the Prince. But rather than surrender, Voracity had struck against the things he loved.
Voracity raised a bloody hand and pointed at Brierly. “She’s dead anyway. Bled to death in the waking world.” Voracity kept her eyes on the Prince, as though she searched for any sign of pain to savor. “She’s the last Steward, and you’ve lost her. And with her the entire realm.”
“Have I?”
The earth rose up and swallowed Voracity down, like the wave from Arpien’s childhood nightmare.
Watching it made Brierly lightheaded. She sank down at the Prince’s feet.
“Well done, Steward,” he said.
“But you didn’t need my help. Why ask me?”
“Because in doing what I asked, you’ve given me what I value most of all.”
“Are Arpien and Nissa all right?”
“What is my name?”
She was beginning to understand the Prince’s way of answering in questions. Somehow he was both here beside her and there on the battlefield with them.
She smiled, but she was too tired to respond in words. Her weakness couldn’t be from this battle. She’d drawn on the Prince’s strength, not her own. Maybe Voracity was right. But only half right, as she was about a lot of things. Brierly thought she might have died in the waking world, though she certainly didn’t feel lost. In fact, the only thing about death that bothered her now was being parted from Nissa, dear friend, and Arpien …
Meeting the Perfect Prince did not diminish her feelings for her imperfect one. If such a creature as she were loveable, how easy it was to love Arpien. In very different ways, both her princes laid claim to her heart through their kindness, goodness, and their pursuit both gentle and relentless. She wished now that she’d had the courage to say more to Arpien. If there was anything she’d learned from the Thorn King, it was that love did not mean self-protection.
So tired. She could feel time dripping through her fingers, brief yet infinite. “Could you … tell Arpien …”
“I know, daughter. Rest.”
She sank into a dreamless dark.
67
Arpien
Arpien thrust the vademecum sword into the fairy’s abdomen—as high as he could reach. The fairy arched backward and opened his mouth to the sky. A fairy scream was unlike any sound Arpien had ever heard. It was the sound of a thousand whetstones grinding the metal of a thousand blades. It was the sound of luxurious silk torn between wolf claws. It was the bellow of a dozen shrill organ pipes. The pitches writhed like snakes cast into a fire. Conflicting resonances shot through the vademecum sword and into Arpien’s arms. Arpien’s ears dripped with warm blood. He clung to the vademecum sword with both hands. His knuckles whitened, and he called to the Prince for help with all his might.
The Prince did not come. But something else did.
The evil fairy exploded.
Without blood (did fairies have blood?) the fairy shattered apart, like glass when a singer hits a certain pitch. Glimmering shards of fairy zinged past Arpien. But no, these were not pieces of a dead fairy. Pieces of living fairies burst out of the white-hot vademecum sword and expanded into a fleet of whole fairies. Two score fairies took to the skies.
It looked like the Prince had finally given his loyal fairies permission to appear in full form.
They seemed to be relishing it.
Arpien peered up at the soundless storm overhead, soundless because all he could hear was the piercing ringing in his ears, left from the evil fairy’s scream. Their conflict lit the sky in a dozen clashes of lightning that was not lightning, of arrows that were not arrows, of wind that stirred the elements but not the air. Stray fairy weapons slammed into the earth below and created craters ten feet across.
Arpien would never again think of fairies as wispy and delicate sylphs who lounged around on spotted mushroom caps.
He started as Bo touched his arm. Bo was standing now. He favored his left leg heavily, but he was up. Arpien could only hear ringing, but he read his brother’s lips and his intent well enough. All around them troops stopped to stare at the celestial battle. It would be an ideal moment to order them to stop fighting, when the heat of battlelust turned to the cold rush of awe.
“Lay down your swords!” He could feel his voice more than he could hear it, a series of vibrations in his own skull. “The battle has been won by forces you and I can never match.”
Perhaps persuaded by the sword that had magically imported legendary warriors twice in the past hour, all soldiers within earshot paused to consider him.
Bo declared something inscrutable beside him. The gaze of the soldiers shifted to the banner of the Prince that hung over the walls of Boxleyn. Arpien shifted his own gaze there as well, just in time to see the east tower burst open with thousands of red and white moths.
