He sat on his heels—he was no taller than an ordinary man now, and shaped beautifully through the waist and hip, where more fur clung, offering an appealing amount of modesty to an astonishing creature. His forearms were furred as well, and his hands no longer massive paws, but slim fingers ending in unmistakable claws. He had not, I thought, looked at himself yet: his bewildered gaze was fixed on me, as though I had done something more impossible than break a faery's curse. "Amber?"
"It's me, Beast, I'm—oh, you can see me clearly for the first time, can't you? It's me," I repeated. "But you're—" I made a gesture, trying to encompass what had happened, trying to indicate that it had somehow gone wrong, and, catching sight of my own hand, froze.
My fingers were branches. Slender and knobbly with knuckles, still able to bend, but unmistakably branches of golden-hued wood. So were my arms, my legs; I scrambled to my feet, looking down at myself, and discovered my clothes had been torn away entirely as I'd struggled through the brambles the night before. It hardly seemed to matter: the whole of me had taken on an aspect of a living tree. Not bark-like: my torso shone more like polished heartwood, and I was dressed at hip and breast in wreathes of roses. I was warm to the touch, and the hair that fell around my face cascaded like petals, velvety against my cheeks. My toes gripped the earth like I could put down roots. My heart still beat like a woman's, fast with shock, but I was not, I realized, afraid. Startled, but not afraid, and, in digging my toes against the earth, I almost felt right, as if I had long since known where a path of roses might lead me, and had only been waiting for this moment.
Not this moment, though: I hadn't transformed when the Beast did. Memories flooded back: Eleanor's sharp laugh and her claim that Iwas her daughter, after all. The way my throat had not slit like a mortal's would, under Eleanor's attack, and Pearl and Opal's exchange of glances upon seeing me. I had been other for some little while already, although I'd been too occupied to know it. I lifted my hands to my cheeks, trying to feel if my face was at least shaped as it had been, but I wasn't' sure: I had never tried to memorize myself with my fingers before. I turned a helpless gaze at my Beast, who was no more what he had been than I was, and found him presenting a wolfish smile.
"Beauty," he said, and despite everything, I made a disparaging face.
"Beauty is our horse."
"You are a beauty." He came toward me, extending his hands, and then he saw what he had become, and stopped as short as I had, turning his palms up and down, watching the ruff of fur at his wrists fall and drape, and the light catching his deadly nails. As I had done, he spread his hands a little and looked down at himself, taking in the mane that stretched in a V down his chest, and the heavier fur at his hips. Fur grew more heavily on his calves, too, falling around his ankles very like Beauty's feathered feet, though the long clawed toes beneath it were nothing like her hooves. He looked up at me, his golden eyes wide, and I whispered, "You should see your face. It's beautiful."
He touched long fingers to his cheeks as I had done to myself, but he, who had worn a Beast's massive head for decades on end, found more changed with that touch than I had. In particular he tested the shape of his mouth, no longer overbitten from below and or weighted with tusks. He took three long strides, suddenly standing before me with a question in his eyes.
I answered it by throwing my arms around his neck and kissing him, again and again, until we were together a loving tangle of beast and botany on the earth, and the sun had risen high into the sky above us.
"So," the Beast said then, in an amused murmur against my skin, "this has not gone quite as we imagined. We may have some explaining to do."
I turned my face against his mane, inhaling his scent. Still musky, and the khemet perfume had vanished with his transformation. I would have to make more, if the ingredients could be found. I wasn't at all sure they could be: the palace had been lost to roses, and I had no idea if it would rise again. I sat up, examining the clearing as if it might hold answers.
It had grown while we were tangled in one another's arms. The sky was larger than it had been, brambles withering to dust, and some distance away, lay Eleanor's body. It had gone all to amber with roses captured inside, like some great sculptor's work. A sculptor, though, would likely have left his creation her head, and Eleanor's was missing. A thin layer of sparkling white quartz crystals glittered where her neck had been severed, as if Pearl's moonlight sword had left traces of itself behind. The moon was a barren, bright place: surely nothing slain with its light could return to life.
The head itself was gone, and a path through the collapsing brambles led away from our little clearing. Although the ground had writhed with roses when I'd noticed it last, it was now soft earth, rich and loamy and, along the pathway, marked with two sets of footprints. Quartz droplets shone against the ground, too, as if blood had fallen and crystallized. I shivered, glad my sisters had escaped and in awe of what they had done. I wondered what one did with the head of a wicked faery to quell any residual power it might have, and concluded that between them, Pearl and Maman would find an answer. I stood, and rickety branches fell in waves. Rose-scented dust lifted into the air and tinted the sky pink. I could see foundations amidst the eroding roses: something, at least, was left of the palace. Not much, but something. "I wonder what's happened to the servants."
"Gone now, with the palace. With the enchantment." The Beast—Timmet—I could not decide what to call him, even in my mind—rose and came to stand beside me.
"Were they not real?" I looked at him. "I mean, were they not transformed as you were?"
"I never thought so. I didn't know any of them from their behaviors or opinions, as I'd known my own servants. I think everything here was made of Nell's magic. Everything except me, and I was shaped by it. Everything except you."
"I was born of it," I said a little dryly. More than a little, perhaps: my voice had altered somewhat to my own ears, both deeper and more rustling, as if the creak of an old tree spoke along with the whispers of wind in its leaves. It lent a depth to my asperity that hadn't been there before. I thought Pearl would like it.
The Beast, whether he liked it or not, at least chuckled. "There is that. So nothing here is…real."
"Or everything is, and ever was. I think I can..." I extended a hand, calling life from the exhausted and dying roses around us. One single runner came to me, climbing into the air to offer me an amber-tinted thornless bloom. I offered it to the Beast. He took it gingerly, but his golden gaze remained on me.
"What has happened to you, Amber? This was never part of the curse."