Free Bryony and Roses by T. Kingfisher Page B

it up and found the handle smooth and contoured. The blade was already sharpened, which was a great relief—sitting with a file trying to put a bit of edge onto a shovel was one of the least pleasant parts of gardening. She set it against the grass experimentally and stepped on it, and felt it sink smoothly into the ground.  
    “Before you begin digging your escape tunnel,” said the Beast, “would you like a tour of the grounds?”  
    She raised an eyebrow. He was smiling, she thought, although it was mostly around the eyes.  
    “Certainly,” she said, setting down the shovel. “There may be an even better place to escape from.”
    “This way, then,” he said.  
    She took a few steps toward him, and found herself reluctant to get any closer. Certainly the last few feet would make no difference in how dangerous he was. He could take two strides and twist her head off, probably before she knew he’d moved.  
    It was simply that he was so very large, and there was an aura around him like the air before a thunderstorm. Bryony felt that her lungs were working harder to breathe the air around him, and was grateful when he began walking and she could fall back a pace without being obvious.  
    “How are your rooms?” asked the Beast.  
    “Oh,” said Bryony. Dreadful, she thought. “Very…err…pink. And grand. But mostly pink.”
    “You don’t like pink?”  
    “I shouldn’t think anyone likes pink as much as that room does,” said Bryony. “I’ve seen color-themed rooms before. There was a friend of my father’s who had a suite done entirely in cloth-of-gold, but it wasn’t quite so…so…” She waved her hands, unable to come up with a description that did not involve uteruses, and that was not a conversation she wished to start with the Beast.
    “Your father had very wealthy friends, then,” said the Beast. “For a gardener of Lostfarthing.”
    Bryony froze. The Beast stopped walking and turned his head toward her.  
    “You are looking at me,” he said, “with eyes like an animal in a trap. It does not suit you, so we will assume that cloth-of-gold is found in every front parlor in Lostfarthing and there is nothing extraordinary about it. If the pink troubles you, you need only ask the house to change it. I expect that it would be willing to compromise.”  
    “Compromise,” said Bryony, finding her voice with difficulty. “Mauve? Or lavender, perhaps?” She shrugged. “I shall try to drag some other colors in, and perhaps it will mute the pink somewhat. I don’t want to hurt its feelings.”
    As soon as she said it, she thought that this was a foolish thing to say. Did an enchanted house even have feelings? But the Beast nodded gravely.
    “It is wise not to hurt the house’s feelings.”  
    For a moment the silence around them seemed to sharpen. When she looked up at the house, she half-expected to see it bent toward them, listening.  
    The moment passed. They came around the back of the house. More lawn, more hedges. Off in the distance, marking the lines of an old carriageway, were rows of chestnut trees.  
    They had nearly reached the carriageway when Bryony, who could see to the far wall by now, said “No vegetable garden.”
    “No,” said Beast.  
    “What do you eat?”  
    The Beast shrugged. “The house creates the food, as it created your shovel.”  
    Bryony shivered, remembering the bacon and the grapes. “And that…works? You don’t starve? It’s real?”
    The Beast nodded. “The things it creates are real enough. If you take your shovel outside the gate, it will still be a shovel. The coins that I gave you for your sisters are not fairy gold, and will not melt away.”
    “Magic,” said Bryony, who hadn’t even thought to worry about the coins.  
    “Yes.” The Beast spread his hands. “But if you grow a plant to eat—a tomato, or a lettuce or even a rutabaga—”
    “Ha.”
    “—it is made of sun and earth and water. The house is much the same