A Red-Rose Chain

“I do so appreciate knowing that I can still make you blush,” he said.

Any answer I might have given died as the trail ended, widening out into a clearing straight out of a Disney movie. It was small, perfectly round, and even more perfectly designed. Pine trees created the edges, but they were barely visible under the rioting roses that climbed them, treating them as a natural trellis and pathway to the sky. High overhead—easily fifteen or twenty feet—those roses reached out and twined themselves together in a series of gravity-defying lover’s knots, creating a latticework of living branches. It shouldn’t have been possible . . . but Ceres was Blodynbryd, just like her sister, and I had seen Luna do quite a few impossible things with her roses.

The flowers themselves came in every color of the rainbow and a few colors the rainbow hadn’t received the memo on yet. Some were modern, cultivated roses, blooming in that familiar shape that has sold a million Valentine’s Day bouquets. Others had older, wilder silhouettes, opening in ragged cups or in tiny starbursts. But they were all roses. The air in the clearing was thick with their perfume, and they turned toward Ceres as she walked.

At the center of the clearing was a tiny cottage that might as well have been made of gingerbread for as much as it resembled something that should have housed a fairy-tale witch. The door was held shut by twisted rose boughs, all in a state of full bloom. Ceres stopped in front of the door, raising her hand and waving it across the span of the doorway. The roses promptly furled themselves, becoming tight buds. Then, and only then, the boughs unknotted and pulled away, revealing the actual door one inch at a time.

When the last of the roses retracted, Ceres pushed the door open and looked over her shoulder, smiling at the rest of us. “Enter freely, and be not afraid, for there is nothing that will harm you here.” Then she stepped inside.

“I think that was meant to be reassuring,” I said distantly. “I am not reassured. Tybalt, how about you? Are you reassured?”

“Unlike you, I come from an era where that was a common welcome into someone’s home,” he said. “I am reassured.”

“Ceres usually has lavender cookies,” said Walther. “I am totally reassured.” With that, he went in, leaving us with no choice but to either follow or wait outside for his return.

I have charged headlong into portals, sealed lands of Faerie, and experienced more dangers than any one woman can reasonably be expected to both encounter and survive. I sighed, and stepped into the quaint little forest cottage.

“Huh,” I said a moment later. “It’s bigger on the inside.”

“Many things are,” Ceres agreed. She was on the opposite side of the large parlor, arranging a tea service on a sideboard that appeared to have been designed for exactly that purpose. Despite the size of the room—it was easily bigger than my first apartment, but then again, what wasn’t?—it was modestly appointed, with most of the furniture carved from rosewood, left unpainted to allow the wood’s natural beauty to shine through. I called it a parlor, because I didn’t have a better word for a space that seemed to be receiving room, living room, dining room, and foyer all at the same time.

It was an elegant, economically designed space, and I wouldn’t have found it strange in almost any demesne, if not for one small thing: there was no floor, just hard-pressed dirt that filled the room with its characteristic earthy scent. It mingled with the roses, creating a perfume that was at once common and impossible for any lab in the world to replicate.