Bryony and Roses by T. Kingfisher Read Free Book Online Page B

him like a shadow on the melting snow.  
    “Hey,” said Holly, flapping her fingers in front of Bryony’s face. “Hey! Have you heard a word I’ve said?”
    Bryony started guiltily. Iris had stopped crying in the corner, so probably more time had passed than she thought. “Sorry. Woolgathering.”
    Holly threw her hands in the air. “I’m making more tea,” she said. “Clearly you’re not going to listen to anyone tonight, but maybe tomorrow you’ll be ready to hear reason. And in the meantime, there’ll be tea.”
    Bryony’s own cup had gone stone cold. She handed it over.
    Listen. House. Power. Gardener.  
    Gardener? Really? How did that fit?  
    Gardening may be my great joy, but I don’t delude myself that it’s that important in the grand scheme of things…and why it would be important to the Beast, I can’t imagine…
    There was something more at work here. And if Bryony was going to be drawn into it, she was determined to get to the bottom of it.

CHAPTER EIGHT

    The snow melted almost at once. When Bryony had led Fumblefoot to the barn, his hooves cut holes in the snow and struck mud underneath. By morning, those holes were twice as large and smaller holes had appeared everywhere, cutting the white blanket into lace.  
    By noon, it was gone entirely.
    In the next few days, Bryony found herself thinking that the garden must know what was about to befall the gardener, because there had never been such a spring.  
    The fine haze of green leaves at the base of old stems became foot-high thickets practically overnight. The asparagus-like stems of false indigo came up like a forest of spears, and clover rioted down the pathways. Bryony felt as if she barely had time to sow a row of seeds before she had to turn around and begin thinning the seedlings, as if they threw their second and third sets of leaves in the moments when her back was turned.
    The generosity of the garden humbled her. She could not shake the feeling that it was trying to take care of her, overflowing in every direction so that she had enough of everything to take with her. She lifted and divided and potted from dawn to dusk, begrudging every moment spent inside eating, or outside tending to the chickens.  
    “It looks like you’re trying to take the whole thing with you,” said Holly, bringing out a cup of tea once more, four days after Bryony had come home.
    “Well,” said Bryony, chopping her spade through a ball of tightly wound roots, and prying the smaller half out of the ground. “Well. I suppose I am, a little.”
    “You’re going to miss the garden more than either of us,” said Holly, and that was a statement, not a question, which was good. Otherwise Bryony would have had to answer, and it would almost certainly have been a lie.
    “I’ll miss you very much,” she said instead, which was true.  
    “Ah, but we’re only people, after all,” said Holly, amused. There was no censure in her voice. Holly understood things. And then, more seriously, “Bryony, you don’t have to go. If you stay here—whatever happens—we’ll deal with it. I’ll tie you to me with ropes, and if this Beast and his house comes for you, he’ll have to take us both.”
    “And leave Iris all alone?” asked Bryony, transferring the roots, with their accompanying green spikes, to a waiting piece of burlap. “She’ll be dead in a week.” Iris had spent the last few days alternating between claiming that if Bryony stayed home and inside the cottage, she would be fine, and a deep conviction that the Beast was going to eat Bryony and then possibly the rest of the town. That she was able to hold both positions several times a day without seeing any contradiction was no longer a surprise to her sisters.  
    “She’ll go into town to Widow Grayson,” said Holly practically. “The Widow needs somebody to work the loom, now that her eyes are going, and she fancies Iris for that dim son of hers anyway.”  
    “All the more reason for