"This is the price of wakening faery blood to save a prince." I flexed my toes in the soft earth, feeling it accept me in a way it had never done when I wore human skin. "I didn't know this would happen, but I wouldn't undo it. I don't feel much different. A little stronger, maybe. I'll have to figure out how to brush my hair, and whether sitting in a bath will ruin my finish."
The Beast laughed with surprised. I grinned back at him, then turned my attention to the failing brambles. "I feel as though I can call green things to me. Not just the roses, but everything, I think. The earth is…hungry. Needy. Not just here, but throughout Irindala's country. I think I can feed it. I think I have to. If you and I are born, in our own ways, of enchantment, then…" A breath escaped me and I opened my hands to encompass the ruins we stood in. "Then maybe this is only enchantment in need of caring, just as all of Irindala's country needs care. I hate to lose it, after all of this. I feel as though I have a duty to it. Your mother warned me there would be a price for breaking a curse so old and heavily weighed on the land. Perhaps this is it."
"My mother?" The Beast turned to me with a graceful movement, lithe and very unlike the Beast he had been, but also familiar in its power. "You've seen my mother?"
"I—oh." I reached for his hand. "Your mother is my Maman, my stepmother. I didn't know until yesterday." I glanced uncertainly at the sky, with its rose-colored sun, then back at the Beast. "If it was yesterday. When I left you, whenever that was."
I had learned to read the Beast's expressions well, and Timmet's were far easier to read, for all their still-inhuman cast. He blinked slowly, clearly nonplussed. I curled my arms around him and breathed his scent again before chuckling. "We will have a great deal of explaining to do, not just to our family, but each other. Beast—Timmet—"
He exhaled, a curiously small sound. "I haven't heard that name in a very long time. I wonder if it fits me anymore."
"It does," I said with brash confidence, and then, more softly, "but so does 'Beast', and so might something else entirely, if you prefer it. I don't understand what went wrong, my love. I thought you would be brought back to yourself. I'm afraid—I'm afraid I did this to you somehow. Because I loved the Beast. And because I'm—" I looked down at myself, then back at my Beast.
"Mmmn." He shook his head. "What is 'myself'? I was human for eighteen years and a beast for over a century. Anyone might change in that time, even so much that they no longer knew the mortal form they once wore." He extended a clawed hand, so much more human than it had once been, yet still so animalistic. "I think you could not have done this to me, no matter how changed you are. Not alone, at least. If I were not content to be some of one and some of the other, I think no matter how much you loved the Beast, I would have become what I once was. But the Beast is my most familiar form, and I feel connected to it still." A smile, much more clearly a smile than that which his more beastly face had expressed, curved his lips. "Connected, but much less lumberous."
"I believe I'm the one who is now lumberous," I said with a brush of branch-like fingers, and earned a withering look worthy of Pearl, had it not also been laced with amusement. Smiling in return, I said, "Pearl and Opal will tell Maman and Father that we're all right, but we should probably go to them. Maman has waited so long to see you again. And we should figure out where a living tree and a beautiful beast belong in this world."
"Together," the Beast said softly. "We will never, ever be apart."
"Together," I agreed, and then because I could not help it, I added, "except perhaps when we require the necessary. Or I wish to have a gossip with my sisters, or you a wrassle with your brothers, who will be most taken with your extraordinary form. Or—"
"Enough!" Timmet roared, and if he lacked the volume he once had, it was easier to hear the humor in his voice. We laughed together until the tears came, and I thought us the better for it.
I took his hand in mine, and together we went to see what the world would make of us.