Daylight was holding on by a thread, casting long shadows across the castle grounds as I stared out from one of the high windows at the grotesque garden below. The roses glowed an unnatural red against the darkening landscape, their vibrancy seeming to intensify as the light diminished.
My father was out there, suspended in their thorny embrace, feeding them with his essence. I couldn’t leave him another night without answers. Whatever secrets those blood-drinking blossoms held, I needed to understand them. I wanted to understand what connected them to the power of Beast who had claimed me, and to this cursed place I now called shelter.
Beast hadn’t returned after our encounter in the kitchen, leaving me raw and wondering. Three times claimed, three bites marking my skin in a pattern I didn’t yet comprehend. Did the pattern mean something? My body still ached with the memory of his possession, but my mind refused to be distracted from the more pressing mystery that waited in the garden.
“I’m coming, Papa,” I whispered through the glass that remained on this window, my breath forming a small cloud that quickly disappeared.
I needed light. The thought of venturing into the rose garden after dark sent shivers through me that had nothing to do with the castle’s perpetual chill. In the sitting room, I found what I needed near the fire Beast kept feeding. An iron sconce that could serve as a torch handle. I wrapped strips torn from an old tablecloth around one end, securing them tightly before holding them to the hearth’s dying embers. The fabric caught quickly, flaring into bright flame that illuminated my determined face in the broken mirror across the room.
The woman who stared back at me looked both familiar and foreign. My face was the same with my mother’s amber eyes, full lips, the features that had caused so much unwanted attention in the village, but something in my expression had changed. The naive girl who had trusted in the goodness of her neighbors was gone. In her place stood someone harder, warier, with shadows in her eyes that hadn’t been there before Gaspard, before the drowning cage, before Beast.
I pulled the borrowed blanket tighter around my shoulders and made my way through the castle’s winding corridors, torch held high. The servant’s slippers whispered against stone floors as I descended the main staircase and approached the massive front doors. They opened with surprising ease, as if the castle itself understood my intentions and offered no resistance.
The garden looked different in the flickering torchlight. By day, it had been merely grotesque. Dead plants surrounding an island of unnatural vitality. But as twilight deepened into late evening, the roses seemed to pulse with inner light, their red so deep it bordered on black at the edges. The scent they released was heavier now, sweeter, with that underlying copper note that reminded me of blood.
I approached cautiously, remembering the slash across my palm from my previous encounter with the vines. They moved more actively now, writhing and twisting around one another in a dance that seemed almost deliberate. As if they were watching me. Waiting.
“I know you can move,” I said aloud, my voice steady despite the fear curling in my stomach. “I know you’re aware somehow. I want to understand what you are. What you’re doing to my father.”
The vines nearest to me stilled momentarily, as if listening. Then, with renewed vigor, they twisted around my father’s suspended form, thorns digging deeper. Papa didn’t flinch, his face remaining peaceful in that unnatural slumber. Was he truly alive? Or was this merely his body, preserved by whatever magic sustained the roses?
I moved closer, torch extended to illuminate the strange scene. The way the vines penetrated his flesh reminded me of roots drawing sustenance from soil. They weren’t merely holding him. They were feeding from him in some fundamental way.
My eyes drifted beyond the rose garden to the castle behind it, and further still, to what lay beyond. I’d glimpsed it only briefly during my exploration, but no angle from the front let my eyes see it. The hidden valley behind the castle, untouched by the decay that blighted the surrounding forest. An oasis of vibrant greens in a wasteland of corruption, as if protected by some invisible barrier.
Understanding dawned, pieces connecting in my mind with the clarity of one of Papa’s mechanical inventions clicking into place.
“The sacrifices,” I whispered. “They’re not just feeding you, are they? You’re using that energy for something else.” I stepped closer, the torch throwing my shadow across my father’speaceful face. “You’re protecting that valley. Creating a barrier against whatever curse destroyed the rest of the forest.”
It made terrible sense. Every Harvest Moon, a sacrifice to feed the roses for another year. Their blood and life essence channeled into maintaining the sanctuary beyond. A price paid in human suffering to preserve something precious.
“Oh, Papa,” I said softly, reaching out to touch his cold cheek. The roses allowed me passage. “You’re saving them, even now. Even like this.” Tears welled in my eyes, but I blinked them back. “I understand the necessity, but there has to be another way. A way that doesn’t demand death.”
A movement caught my eye. It was a single vine detaching itself from the mass, rising like a serpent awakened from slumber. It swayed before me almost to hypnotize me into a trance, its tip pointing toward my hand where the thorn had cut me days before. The wound had scabbed over, an angry red line across my palm, but it hadn’t bothered me enough to fret over it.
I hesitated, remembering the sharp pain, the feeling of my blood being drawn into the plant’s hungry tissues. But curiosity—my greatest strength and deepest flaw, as Papa often said—drove me forward. I extended my flattened hand, palm up, an offering in question.
The vine moved with deliberate slowness, wrapping around my wrist like a living bracelet. Its texture surprised me. Not rough as I’d expected, but smooth and cool, almost silken despite the thorns that dotted its length. The thorns curled outwardly around my hand to not puncture my skin again. It tightened gently, bringing the tip to rest directly over my healing cut.
Warmth flooded through me, starting at the point of contact and radiating outward. It wasn’t the scorching heat of fever or the comforting warmth of a hearth. This was something elseentirely. A liquid gold flowing through my veins, seeking out every wounded place.
The cut on my palm sealed itself before my eyes, new skin forming over the angry red line until no trace remained. Even the cuts on my feet, hidden beneath borrowed slippers, knitted themselves together, leaving only smooth skin where broken flesh had been. It didn’t take away the tender ache between my legs, but it was enough for now to feel mildly better.
I gasped, recognizing the sensation instantly. It was the same sensation of power I already knew. The same energy that had flashed through me when Gaspard attempted to force himself on me one final time, had broken my iron cage. It had kept me from drowning in the river when the village tried to execute me.
“It was you,” I breathed, staring at the vine still wrapped around my wrist. “You gave me this power.”
The vine tip moved, swaying left to right in what could only be denial. Then, with deliberate purpose, it extended further, touching the center of my chest directly over my heart.
“Not you? Then...” I struggled to understand. “It comes from within me? But how? Why?”
The vine offered no answers, merely unwinding itself from my wrist and retreating to rejoin the mass surrounding my father. I stood there in the deepening darkness, torch guttering in the evening breeze, more questions crowding my mind than when I’d first ventured out.
If the power wasn’t given by the roses, but came from within me, what did that make me? And why had it manifested now, after eighteen years of dormancy? What connection did I have to this place, to Beast, to the curse that held them all in its grip?
As darkness claimed the garden completely, I turned back toward the castle with whispered ‘goodnight’ to Papa, mind racing with possibilities, each more fantastical than the last. Onething was certain. I was no ordinary village girl, and my fate was bound to this place in ways I was only beginning to comprehend.
seventeen
