Chapter Two: The Garden of Ruby Roses - Fifteen Nights with the Beast for the Ruby Rose

Grover cried when she left.

The sound did not follow her through the corridor, nor down the staircase, nor into the hall. It remained in the room behind her, broken and low, a father’s grief too worn for loudness. But Isla heard it all the same. She heard it in the trembling of her own hands as she fastened her cloak. She heard it in the quick, painful beat of her heart. She heard it in the silence of the house, which seemed to shrink back from her as though it already knew she was walking towards something from which she would not return unchanged.

She did not look back.

If she had, she might have stayed.

The morning was cold and colourless beyond the door. A thin rain drifted over Briar Hollow, silvering the hedges and turning the lane to soft dark mud. The village looked strangely distant, even while she still stood within it. Smoke rose from chimneys in faint grey ribbons. The church spire was half veiled by mist. Somewhere a cart creaked over wet wheels, and somewhere else a dog barked once and fell silent again.

Ordinary life continued.

It felt monstrous that it should.

Isla drew her cloak more tightly about her and began to walk.

She left the village quickly. She did not wish to pass too many familiar faces, nor answer too many questions. The road beyond Briar Hollow bent between fields gone wan and bare with autumn, then narrowed into an old track bordered by thorn hedges and leaning ash trees. The farther she went, the less the world resembled the one she knew. The cottages disappeared. The distant sounds of the village faded. Even the wind seemed to change its voice.

By the time she reached Blackwood Ridge, the rain had all but stopped.

Mist clung low beneath the trees. Wet leaves darkened the ground. The path there was uneven and half-swallowed by roots, as though the woods had spent years trying to erase it. Branches crossed high above like the ribs of some vast cathedral built for no human worship. Ivy climbed the trunks. Brambles reached from the undergrowth to tug at her skirts.

She ought to have turned back.

No one of sound mind, she thought, would willingly continue into such a place.

But whenever she imagined retreat, she saw Grover in bed with fever shining in his eyes and blood hidden in the linen of his handkerchief. Fear became smaller then. Never absent. Never truly manageable. But smaller.

So she walked on.

At first the woods were merely old. Then they became strange.

The air grew warmer where it ought to have grown colder. The silence deepened until even the sound of her own footsteps seemed unwelcome. Once, passing beneath a great oak split by lightning long ago, she noticed white fungi clustered at its roots in shapes like tiny graveyard lanterns. Once she thought she heard whispering to her left, but when she stopped there was nothing there but leaves moving faintly against one another. Once she looked back and could no longer see the path she had come by, only the dark swallowing line of trees.

Then, without warning, the woodland ended.

She emerged into a clearing so wide it looked unnatural, as though the earth itself had been forced back. At its centre stood the manor.

It was larger than she had imagined.

No village story had prepared her for its size, nor for the bleak elegance of it. It rose in pale stone darkened by age, with towers at its corners and tall, narrow windows that seemed to hold the light rather than reflect it. The rooflines were sharp against the clouded sky. Balconies jutted from the upper storeys like watchful ledges. One wing was overgrown with black ivy. Another seemed almost untouched by time, severe and noble and dreadful in its stillness.

It did not look abandoned.

It looked waiting.

Before it lay a great enclosed garden behind high walls and a gate of wrought iron twisted with old thorned vines. Through the bars she could see pale gravel walks, dark green hedges, the suggestion of statuary, and beyond all else—like scattered rubies in dim light—the roses.

Isla stopped without meaning to.

They were extraordinary.

The blooms were not merely red. They were the deep red of garnet, of wine held to candlelight, of blood remembered rather than freshly spilled. They glowed against the gloom with such vivid richness that they seemed almost impossible. Hundreds of them flowered in thick dark clusters, spilling over arches, climbing trellises, crowding the edges of paths and the feet of weathered stone urns.

She had never seen beauty so lush in a place that felt so wrong.

For a long moment she simply stood there, looking through the gate, caught between wonder and dread.

Then she noticed that the gate stood slightly open.

Not wide. Just enough.

As though someone had expected her.

A chill slid slowly down her spine.

She ought to have taken that as warning enough. She knew it even as she placed one gloved hand upon the iron and pushed.

The gate opened soundlessly.

Inside, the garden felt like another season altogether.

The air was softer there—warmer, scented, almost heavy. The smell of the roses was richer than any rose ought to be, layered with damp soil, old stone, pear blossom, and something darker beneath, something almost intoxicating. Gravel paths curved between thick rose beds bordered by clipped box and yew. Marble figures stood half hidden among the climbing vines: saints or queens or mourning women, their faces softened by weather and shadow. A fountain whispered at the centre of one circular walk, its dark basin reflecting a sky too dim to belong to midday.

And everywhere there were birds.

At first Isla thought them carved into the branches.

They were pale creatures, sleek-bodied and elegant, with white feathers that caught silver in the strange light. They perched along the walls, on the branches of old fruit trees, beside the fountain, among the iron arches. Their black eyes followed her in uncanny stillness. Not one of them sang. Not one moved.

The silence of them unnerved her more than noise might have done.

She stepped deeper into the garden.

The paths wound further than they had first appeared from outside. What she had taken for a single enclosed space unfolded into a series of linked terraces and hidden turns. One walk opened into an orchard where the grass grew thick and dark beneath rows of pear trees bowed with impossible late fruit. Another led through an archway smothered in ruby-red climbing roses into a narrower passage lined with stone basins in which black water lay utterly still. Another ended at a terrace from which the manor loomed near enough to seem watchful, its windows tall as church doors and just as unreadable.

The place was beautiful.

Not kindly beautiful. Not innocent. But so richly, unnervingly beautiful that it made her pulse race for reasons that were not wholly fear. She had the sudden sensation that she was walking through a dream built by grief and excess and old, undying desire.

Then she remembered why she had come.

She began to search for the finest bloom.

That, too, became strangely difficult. Every rose looked rare enough to rescue a life. Some were only just opening, still tight and dark at the heart. Others spread wide with impossible fullness, their petals velvety and luminous. At last she found one near the edge of the central terrace, hanging slightly over the path as though offering itself.

Its stem was thick with thorns. Its petals were almost impossibly dark at the centre, brightening only towards the outer folds. Rain clung to it in tiny silver beads.

Her fingers shook as she reached out.

The nearest bird screamed.

The sound hit her like broken glass.

It was not birdsong. It was not even truly animal. It was a shrill, tearing cry with a note in it so close to human alarm that every nerve in her body leapt at once. Another bird answered from the orchard. Then a third from the wall. Then twenty more.

The whole garden erupted.

White wings beat frantically through the air. The birds flung themselves from branch to parapet, from parapet to rose arch, their cries crashing over one another in a horrible chorus of warning. The fountain seemed to shiver with it. The roses trembled. The very air changed.

Isla snatched back her hand.

Too late.

At one of the upper windows of the manor, a figure moved.

Her gaze flew to it.

Someone—something—had stepped into view behind the glass.

He stood framed by the window like darkness given shape. Even at that distance his height was startling. He seemed vast and still and regal in a way no ordinary man could ever have been, a dark silhouette against the pale murk beyond. Broad shoulders. A long fall of black hair. A shape at once noble and deeply, instinctively terrifying.

He saw her.

She knew it at once. Not because she could make out his face from that distance, but because the whole garden seemed to know it too. The birds screamed all the more wildly, wheeling in pale frantic circles.

Then the figure was gone.

Panic took her.

She ran.

The garden, which moments before had seemed enchantingly intricate, became at once a maze designed for her ruin. Paths curved unexpectedly. Hedges loomed too high. Arches led into narrower passages instead of the open gate. Gravel slid beneath her shoes. Rose thorns caught at her skirts and scratched her hands through the gloves. The cries of the birds drove her onward in blind terror.

At last she saw the gate ahead.

Relief nearly made her weep.

She reached it, seized the iron latch, and dragged it with all her strength.

It did not move.

For one numb second she simply stared at it, unable to understand what her hands were telling her. Then she pulled harder, pushed, rattled the bars until the iron rang against the walls.

Locked.

The gate was locked.

“No—” The word escaped her in a whisper first, then again, louder and broken. “No, no—”

She threw herself against the bars. Nothing yielded. The iron held fast as if it had never once been open. Behind her, the screaming of the birds ceased all at once.

The silence that followed was worse.

No wings. No fountain. No wind in the trees. Only the sound of her own ragged breathing and, a heartbeat later, something else.

Footsteps.

Slow. Measured. Heavy.

They came along the gravel with the deliberate certainty of something that had no need to hurry. Each step seemed too weighted, too assured. Her hands tightened painfully around the iron bars.

Then she turned.

He stood at the far end of the rose walk.

And for one terrible instant the world seemed to narrow around him.

He was not grotesque. That was the horror of it. Had he been misshapen, snarling, slavering, some crude beast of fang and muscle, her mind might have accepted him at once as a thing to flee. But he was something far worse: magnificent and monstrous together.

He was towering, broad through the shoulders and chest in a way that made every human man she had ever known seem slight. He wore black, though not the rough black of a huntsman or brigand. His garments were rich, severe, almost princely in their cut—a dark fitted coat beneath a heavier sweeping cloak that moved behind him with shadowed weight. His hair was long and black, falling in wild waves to his shoulders and beyond, like a dark mane stirred by storm. From within that blackness rose ears not wholly human—high-set, pointed, half-hidden in the thick sweep of his hair. His face was cast in deep shadow and sharp planes: a strong brow, a powerful jaw, cheekbones cut almost too fine for the brute force of the rest of him. Dark fur shadowed parts of his face and throat, not in patches of deformity but in a way that made him seem like some old woodland king dragged half across the boundary of animal and man. His eyes, when they fixed on her, burned with a deep amber fire.

He looked like night given rank and flesh.

Terrible. Noble. Unmistakably other.

His gloved hand flexed once at his side. The other was bare enough to show that his fingers were too long, too powerful, tipped not quite with claws and not quite with nails. He did not snarl. He did not bare his teeth. He simply stood there in the rain-grey light among the ruby roses and looked at her.

It was far worse.

“Who,” he said, and his voice was deep as storm over stone, “has entered my garden?”

The sound of him seemed to alter the air.

Isla opened her mouth. Nothing came.

He took one slow step forward.

The gravel shifted beneath his boots. Her spine pressed against the locked gate. The ruby roses crowded red and bright at the edges of her sight.

He took another step.

She saw then that his face was not hideous in any simple sense. There was beauty buried in it, but beauty sharpened into threat. A lordly beauty. A cursed beauty. The kind that made instinct recoil before the mind had time to reason. The fall of his hair, the proud line of his throat, the command in the set of his shoulders, the inhuman gleam in his eyes—everything in him spoke of power.

And of danger.

“I asked you a question.”

His voice did not rise. It was quieter, if anything. More controlled. More frightening.

The world tilted.

The last thing Isla saw before darkness took her was the beast advancing through the arch of roses, all black shadow and amber eyes, like the lord of every nightmare that had ever learned to dress itself beautifully.

Then she fell.

When she woke, it was to warmth and gold and the rich smell of food.

For one confused instant she thought she had woken from the nightmare into some grand hall of memory or delirium. Candlelight burned above her in tall branching candelabra. Firelight moved across polished silver. The scent of roast meat, baked bread, fruit, spiced wine, and something sweet and buttery drifted through the air.

Then pain returned to her wrists.

Her eyes flew open fully.

She was tied to a chair.

Ropes had been wound tightly round her wrists and the carved arms, round her waist and across the high back so that she sat held upright whether she wished it or not. Panic surged at once, raw and immediate.

She was in a dining hall vast enough to shame any manor she had ever seen. The ceiling rose high in shadowed arches. Long curtains framed black windows through which not even a hint of daylight remained. A great hearth blazed at one end, its fire casting deep orange light over the walls and floor. Tapestries hung between carved panels darkened by age. Candles burned in such number that their light seemed almost unreal, yet vast reaches of the room remained shadowed all the same.

Before her stretched a table covered in food.

Not a simple supper. A feast.

Silver platters groaned beneath carved meats glazed dark with juice. Bowls held black grapes, figs split at the flesh, pears, apples, shining cherries, and pomegranate seeds like scattered gems. Steam rose from covered dishes. Fresh loaves lay half broken beside knives and silver salt cellars. There were cheeses, sauces, pastries, wine decanters, crystal glasses, dishes of honey, and plates so beautifully laid it would have been exquisite had it not been terrifying.

At the centre of it all sat the beast.

He was eating.

His movements were calm. Measured. Controlled. There was nothing wild in the way he cut meat or lifted his goblet. If anything, he moved with the severe, effortless grace of a man long trained in elegance and then forced into another body without losing the memory of it. The black of his clothes drank the light around him. The fire burnished the heavy fall of his hair. His profile, turned partly away, looked carved from shadow and old nobility.

Then he looked at her.

“You are awake,” he said.

Panic flared so strongly that she jerked instinctively against the ropes. The chair legs scraped across the floor by an inch and no more.

“Please,” she gasped. “Please don’t hurt me.”

He set down his knife.

“If I had wished to hurt you,” he said, “you would not be here at my table.”

The table.

The absurd civility of those words, spoken by such a creature in such a hall, made the terror stranger rather than less.

He rose.

The full height of him in the candlelight took what little breath she had left. He seemed even larger indoors. Not clumsy, not brutish, but vast in a way the room itself appeared to respect. His cloak fell heavily behind him in black folds. The muscles of his shoulders shifted beneath his coat as he moved. His face remained mostly in shadow until he came nearer and the candlelight touched it in fragments: the severe line of his brow, the dark sweep of fur near his cheek and throat, the unmistakable strength of his mouth, the amber burn of his eyes.

He stopped three paces from her.

“Why,” he asked, “did you enter my garden?”

She swallowed hard. “My father.”

“Your father sent you?”

“No.”

“Then why speak his name first?”

“Because I came for him.”

Something in his expression altered—only slightly, but enough to tell her she had said the one thing that made him listen.

“Explain.”

She tried to steady her breathing. It did not wholly work.

“My father is dying,” she said. “He has been ill for weeks. No physician can help him. No medicine has worked. Last night a wise woman came to our house and said that only one thing might still save him—that if I could bring him the essence of a ruby-red rose from your garden for fifteen days, he might live.”

The beast did not move.

The candles crackled faintly. Somewhere a log shifted in the hearth.

She pressed on. “I did not come to mock you. I did not come for greed. I came because I could not stay and watch him die without trying.”

He turned away from her and returned, with unhurried steps, to the head of the table. He did not sit at once. Instead he stood with one hand resting lightly on the back of his chair, as though considering something not new to him.

“Who told you this?” he asked.

“Mistress Hawthorne.”

At that, he gave a low sound too bitter to be called laughter.

“Of course she did.”

“You know her?”

“I know enough.”

He sat. The candles cast long shadows beneath his eyes. “And she told you nothing else?”

“Only that the roses might save him.”

“She said nothing of this house?”

“No.”

“Nothing of me?”

Isla hesitated. “Only that a beast lived here.”

His gaze sharpened.

“And when you saw me, was she wrong?”

The question was so direct that she could not answer it politely.

“No,” she whispered.

For one stretched moment the hall held its breath.

Then, unexpectedly, he inclined his head very slightly, as though accepting honesty as a form of tribute. “Good. I dislike false comfort.”

That startled her enough that her fear fractured for an instant beneath sheer uncertainty.

He resumed his meal—or seemed to. He cut a piece of meat, lifted it, set it down again untouched. It was as if appetite no longer belonged to him and habit alone performed the motions.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Isla.”

“And your father’s?”

“Grover.”

His eyes lifted again. “You came alone, Isla Grover.”

“Yes.”

“Through Blackwood Ridge.”

“Yes.”

“No escort. No brother. No servant. No lover.”

“No.”

His gaze lingered on her a moment too long. “No one valued you enough to stop you?”

Heat stung her eyes. “My father tried.”

“And the others?”

“My sisters were more afraid of fear than of losing him.”

The beast leaned back slightly in his chair. Candlelight moved over the hard lines of his face. “How many?”

“Three.”

“And none came in your place.”

“No.”

“Why?”

Because they are selfish. Because they love comfort more than duty. Because I am the one he trusts.

“I did,” she said simply.

Something unreadable passed through his gaze.

He rose again and came back towards her. This time he circled slowly, like some dark thought taking shape. She could feel his presence rather than track it, the way one feels a storm drawing near before the first thunder sounds.

“You risked your life,” he said behind her shoulder, “for a dying man and a story about roses.”

“It is not a story.”

“No?”

“No.”

“You saw my garden.”

“Yes.”

“You saw me.”

Her mouth went dry. “Yes.”

“And still you speak of stories as though the world has any need to invent horrors.”

His voice was near enough now that it brushed the back of her neck like cold velvet. She shut her eyes for one shaking second, then opened them again.

“Please,” she said. “Whatever else you are, whatever curse lies here, whatever bargain you think the world owes you—please do not punish my father for it.”

There was a pause.

When he moved back into her sight, he was no longer circling. He stood before her again, grave and terrible and strangely still.

“Punish him?” he repeated softly. “Do you imagine I sought him out?”

“Did you not?”

“No.”

His answer came too quickly to doubt.

Then who had cursed Grover? Why did the roses cure what ordinary remedies could not? Why did Mistress Hawthorne speak of this place as though it had always been waiting for her?

The questions crowded her mind, but fear kept her from asking them aloud.

At length the beast said, “Your father may have the roses.”

Relief swept through her so violently she nearly sobbed with it.

“Thank you—”

“But not freely.”

The hope dropped at once into dread.

She stared.

He went back to the head of the table and laid both hands on the polished surface. The gesture had the force of a sentence being written in stone.

“These are my conditions,” he said. “You will listen.”

She could do nothing else.

“For fifteen days,” he said, “one ruby rose from my garden will be given for your father’s cure.”

“Yes.”

“For fifteen nights,” he continued, “you will come here before sunset.”

The room seemed to grow colder despite the fire.

“You will remain in this house from evening until dawn. At first light, you will leave with the day’s rose. You will take it to your father. You may remain with him through the day. But before sunset falls, you will return.”

Her mouth parted in disbelief. “Return?”

“Yes.”

“Here?”

He looked at her without blinking. “This is where we are.”

Terror sharpened. “You mean to keep me here every night.”

“I mean to require what I require.”

“No.” The word escaped before she could master it. “No, that is impossible.”

“On the contrary,” he said, and there was the faintest edge of cruel amusement in his tone now, “it is perfectly possible.”

“You cannot ask such a thing.”

“I can.”

“Why?”

At that, something dangerous entered his eyes.

“Because I choose to.”

“That is not a reason.”

“It is the only one you will have.”

She shook her head. “No. No, if you want payment, there must be another way. Money perhaps, or service, or—”

“Service?” he repeated, and now there was unmistakable irony in it. “How swiftly you offer yourself once a man’s death is near.”

Colour rose painfully to her face. “That is not what I meant.”

“I know exactly what you meant.”

He came a step closer, and his voice lowered. “You wish to imagine yourself noble in sacrifice. Do not. Bargains made from fear are rarely noble.”

Her breathing quickened. “Then what do you want of me?”

For the first time, he did not answer at once.

He looked at her as though weighing something hidden far deeper than the question itself.

“At table,” he said at last, “you will dine with me.”

She blinked. “What?”

“You heard.”

“That is all?”

“No.” He turned away, then back again. “You will attend this house while you are in it. You will obey my rules. You will speak with courtesy. You will go nowhere forbidden to you. You will not pry into what is hidden. You will not attempt to flee before dawn. And you will return each evening without fail.”

It was such an odd mixture of civility and menace that she could not at first tell whether to be more frightened or less.

“You want conversation,” she said slowly, hardly believing it.

“I want what I asked for.”

“You are asking for a prisoner.”

He considered that. “A guest under obligation.”

“A captive.”

“Only if you prefer uglier words.”

She gave a breathless, incredulous laugh that was nearer panic than amusement. “You bind me to a chair and speak of guests?”

His gaze dropped briefly to the ropes. “You fainted in my garden. I did not know whether waking unbound in a strange hall with a beast standing over you would improve your opinion of me.”

Against all reason, that answer startled a choked laugh out of her.

The sound hung between them both.

He looked at her sharply.

She could not stop. It came only once, but it was enough to leave her horrified at herself. Here she sat tied to a chair in a cursed manor, bargaining with a monstrous stranger while her father hovered near death, and she had laughed.

The beast’s expression changed.

Not softened. But altered.

“There,” he said quietly. “A living sound at last. I was beginning to think terror had taken all of you.”

The remark unsettled her so thoroughly that she forgot the ropes altogether for a moment.

Then sense returned.

“If I refuse,” she said, “my father gets no roses.”

“No.”

“And if I agree, I come each night and leave each dawn.”

“Yes.”

“And if I fail once?”

“Then you fail him.”

She closed her eyes.

Behind her lids she saw Grover again. His wet lashes. The tears he had not hidden. The plea in his face when she left. Come back to me.

How could she refuse? How could she not?

When she opened her eyes, the beast was still watching her.

“Why me?” she whispered.

This time the answer came so quietly she almost missed it.

“Because you came.”

It was not enough. Yet something in the way he said it made her feel that, for him, it was.

Silence stretched.

The candles hissed softly. Rain slid down the windows. Far off in the manor, a door closed with a hollow echo.

At last Isla said, “If I agree, may I go to him now?”

“Yes.”

“With the first rose?”

“Yes.”

“And you will not deny me the next, if I return before sunset?”

“I will not.”

Tears filled her eyes at last, hot and unwanted. She did not wipe them away.

“I agree,” she said.

The beast did not move.

“Say it properly.”

Her hands hurt where the ropes bit into them. Her heart beat too fast. The hall seemed to lean in around her.

“I give you my word,” she said, forcing the words clearly through trembling breath, “that I will return before sunset each day for fifteen nights, if you give me the ruby roses my father requires.”

A long pause followed.

Then he came behind her chair.

Every muscle in her body tensed.

“Be still,” he said.

His hands—large, strong, dark against the rope—moved with surprising care as he loosened the bindings round her wrists. Pain flared as blood rushed back into her fingers. Then the rope at her waist fell away, and she was free.

She remained seated for a moment, almost unable to believe it.

“You may stand,” he said.

She rose slowly, unsteady but upright.

The beast crossed to the table, selected a single rose from a crystal vase set among the candles, and held it out.

It was stunning.

The petals glowed ruby red against the black of his sleeve, luminous as if lit from within. The scent rose rich and dark between them.

“For today,” he said.

Isla took it in both hands.

Their fingers did not touch. She was absurdly grateful for that.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

He inclined his head once. “Gratitude sits oddly in this room.”

She looked up at him. “Then perhaps the room needs it.”

For a second the amber in his eyes sharpened. She thought she had offended him.

Instead he said, “You grow brave with a rose in your hand.”

“No,” she answered honestly. “Only desperate.”

Something like approval crossed his face.

“Good,” he said. “Desperate people are seldom dull.”

She did not know what to make of that at all.

“Go,” he said at last. “The west passage will open for you. Bring the rose to your father before the day weakens it. Return before sunset.”

“I will.”

He said nothing more.

She turned, clutching the rose close, and crossed the hall on unsteady legs. At the archway she hesitated and looked back.

He had resumed his place at the head of the table, all in black, vast and shadowed among candlelight and silver. The feast remained before him untouched now. He sat like a dark prince in exile, terrifying and alone, as though the whole house had been built merely to contain the weight of his curse.

For one bewildering instant, her fear tangled with something else.

Not pity.

Something more dangerous.

The sense that whatever horror he was, it had been shaped by loneliness until loneliness itself had become part of his power.

Then his eyes found hers again.

“Before sunset,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Do not be late.”

She fled.

This time the garden was silent. The pale birds watched from the walls with glittering black eyes but did not scream. The gate opened when she reached it, as though obeying some silent command. The ruby rose trembled in her hands as she stepped back into the world beyond the walls.

She did not dare look behind her.

By the time Briar Hollow came into sight again through the thinning mist, the sky had begun already to lean towards afternoon.

She carried hope home in the form of a flower.

And all the while, beneath relief, beneath exhaustion, beneath the desperate rush of wanting only to place the rose in Grover’s hands, one truth moved beside her like a shadow that would not leave:

before sunset, she had promised, she would return to the beast.