Chapter Text
It was a keen autumn afternoon, and Briar Rose was ajoy with the newness of the season.
Her aunts loathed autumn. Too dark, they said, and too cold; too easy to catch your death. Rose thought that even the cold seasons had their beauties. Today the wind fluted through gaps in branches, and leaves came down in sheets, though the trees were so full from summer that their silhouettes were hardly diminished. They canopied the world with honey and hazel, and their gaps let in more of the sun, which was gentle, now, instead of hard and hot, and cabbages had begun to grow plump in the garden. The weather was fickle, but that simply meant it was full of surprises; Rose coveted a good surprise, for her life was very plain.
Sunset was only a few hours out, now, and usually Rose would have been called back to the cottage—except that today, unusually, her aunts were away.
They hadn't explained why. All Rose could tell that morning was that they seemed worried, and that they were in a rush. Flora and Merryweather didn't even bicker. Flora took both Rose's cheeks between her palms and kissed her squarely on the forehead. Then, before bumbling out the door, she said, "Now, Rose, I'm aware that this is quite—quite sudden, and really truly everything is fine, and we'll return by the end of week…"
Fauna followed, kissing Rose's left cheek, and Merryweather her right. They squeezed her hands with a desperate tightness that Rose was unaccustomed to. "There's bread enough for your dinner, dear," Fauna said, "and wood for a fire, and we've already drawn up the water for your bath, oh—"
"And we love you, Rose!" Merryweather added, puffing out her cheeks. "We'll be back before you blink! Don't you worry about us!"
"Wait! Please, Auntie Flora, where are you all going? Is it—"
The door slammed before she could finish. Rose rushed to the window, thinking she might see them off, but by then they'd already disappeared, impossibly, into the forest.
There it was, in any case: her coveted surprise. For the first time in her thirteen-and-a-half years, Rose was alone.
For the first half of the day she couldn't conceive of what to do with it. She went about her usual chores: the mill's flume needed de-leafing, and the vegetables had to be tended and sung to, and there were acorns to be inspected for their suitability for flour. She wasn't afraid—she was coming into herself as quite the little woman, and she was certain she could handle a week of solitary homesteading. This was the perfect opportunity to prove her capability, and then, when her aunts returned, she might be granted even more freedoms. Perhaps—perhaps!—they might even let her venture into the village, and allow her to make her first friend.
Bit by bit, though, her mature resolve burst into a foreign giddiness. The cottage was absent of the sisterly tension that perpetually thickened the air. Upstairs there were neither puttering footsteps nor voices coming through the wood beams; the only sounds were tree and animal. Experimentally, as she was scrubbing the kitchen, she dipped her hand in a sack of flour and rubbed the white all over her face.
She waited. No one came around to reprimand her.
Alone! (But for the birds and the squirrels, she amended, who followed her diligently while she whistled and worked.) Rose was an obedient girl—she'd argue, anyway—but even she couldn't resist the basic temptations before her: she could eat cake for dinner, she could slide down the banister instead of taking the stairs, she could be as loud and thoughtless as she liked!
She covered her arms and legs and dress with flour and announced loudly, delightfully, to no one: "I am the ghost of Briar Rose!" She clutched her chest and fell to the floor, like she figured it must be done in plays, and delivered her lines in her best impression of a spiritly moan. "My dear old aunts have forgotten me, and now I've been left here to rot… I am cursed to haunt this cottage, forever and ever and ever and ever…" She raced up and down the hall like a rabbit, getting powder over everything; she yipped like a fox; she bayed like a wolf; she indulged in all the little insanities a thirteen-year-old girl ought to when presented with the rarity of freedom. She clanged pots in the kitchen; she cupped her hands around her mouth and screamed. The birds scattered, screeching warnings to their families, and Rose laughed, wild with glee.
Then her smile faded. The glade was quiet.
She tiptoed to the window and peeked outside. Still, but for the wind eddying a pile of leaves. Silent, but for the blood in her ears. Alone—she picked at her fingernails. Her throat was a little raw, now; her skin itched from the flour, stuck with sweat.
When the warmth of afternoon crept over the glade, Rose donned her boots and basket and took to the forest, where the animals were, and where all the beauty of autumn was.
The forest was always more encouraging for the imagination than home. Today she was pretending to be an adventuress in search of a cure for her sickly companions. The scenario had come to her several nights ago, in a dream: she lived in an old house made of cobblestone in a dirty alley in the capital city—the details were fuzzy, as her imagination had only illustrations and descriptions from stories to work with—with three old widows, played, of course, by Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather. In the dream her widows were pale and coughing black blood and grew weaker by the day. Rose mourned dutifully for them, until a beautiful stranger showed up at her doorstep and told her there was a mushroom that grew in the most dangerous part of the forest which could cure any ailment.
The dream had taken a strange turn, after that: all of a sudden, she was the size of a doll and, for reasons she could not recall, she had to race a king of mice through a maze of giant toys to win his prized ball of yarn. Thankfully, Rose was a judicious editor. She cut details and embellished others. Now in her fantasy she was a girl from the provinces with an elegant Latin name like Angélique. She came to the city in search of work, as her parents had died tragically in a churchfire, but none of the cityfolk would take her, for she was too wild. As she sat crying beside the river, ready to sell her hair for food, the widows found her. They stayed her knife and kissed her hands and from then on adopted her as their own daughter. This was why "Angélique" was willing to go to such perilous lengths for them. It was a moving tale of True Love, also known as the most powerful force in the universe. Her aunts had impressed that fact upon her many times.
She imagined searching high and low for her storybook mushroom, growing exhausted, growing hopeless, running into danger at every turn. She bounded up and down felled logs and swung from branches with a carelessness that would make Fauna very uneasy. She looked across the river, toward the shadow of the mountain, where the forest darkened and the underbrush grew tangled, damp, and deep green.
Rose's aunts had many rules, but above all were the golden three: never share your name with a stranger, never eat of a stranger's food, and never cross the river into the dark woods beyond.
The most dangerous part of the forest, undoubtedly.
Rose, to her credit, was not completely reckless. She had brought with her an old knife (it would be very silly for a girl of the forest to wander outdoors without one!); a small jar of soaked oats, in case she got hungry; and a smaller bag of flint and pyrite, and some other materials for a torch. She knew her way around the forest by heart, and could navigate by stars, river, moss, and mountain. Her aunts were famous exaggerators, and so it was difficult to assess which of their warnings were legitimate and which could be safely disregarded. Rose realized this a couple of years ago, when she pricked her finger on a sewing needle and Fauna started crying. They hadn't let her go up to bed all night, for fear of some—nebulous infection taking her in her sleep, Rose assumed, though she never succeeded at prying out the details of their worry.
She muddied her boots in the swollen bank and found a place to hop across. Gray clouds rolled over her as she landed. The smell of almost-rain hung in the air and a shock of cold kissed her cheeks.
Her spine tingled. It was the closest she had ever come to this forbidden place. The stretch before her was overgrown, with wild clouds of bracken growing up to the waists of the trees; and overpoweringly green, except for one variety of wildflower, which popped out defiant and red, and had long, artistic petals, like spiders' limbs. Mist crowded between the trees' branches and clung to the bracken fronds and glittered like drops of ice. The birds were only half-calling; she could hear their chirps behind her, but in front of her was complete silence. Then there was a vague, implacable offness to it all—the smell of the air, the twist of the tree trunks, the movement of the leaves. Even the water's burble echoed differently, on this side.
Rose glanced behind her. The sun glinted off the surface of the river, which flowed from the mountain and forked into creeks a little further down. One of those creeks wound under the mill of the cottage. She could turn back around and follow it home. And what a fun adventure she'd already had, wandering so far! The mature part of her knew it would be wise to turn back…
A raven called from the dark: throaty, trilled, halting.
The gleam on his feathers was unnatural, like a wisp of white fire, the brightest point of light in the whole distance of wood. He stared out with shiny, black eyes, and tilted his head, as though to ask her a question. They stood like that for a long while: Rose's thick boots dug into the mud and the strange lushness of the forest floor, the beginnings of rain beading on the waxed layer of her cloak, and the bird as still as a statue.
"Is this your home, little creature?" she asked.
The raven puffed his chest and cawed again. Then he spread his wings, hopped from his branch, and flew deeper into the dark.
It would be wise to turn back, Rose thought again. Flora would be livid, if she knew how far Rose had gone already. She should prove to them that she can be trusted. She should prove to them that she can be careful…
But they would never trust her, Rose knew. She looked straight ahead, where there lay everything she was forbidden from touching, knowing that if she didn't take this chance, she would never have the opportunity to see it again.
The raven's wingbeats were still nearby, circling. She closed her eyes, took one step into the darkness, and followed.