PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF ROBIN McKINLEY

Rose Daughter

“Every sentence and every occurrence seems infused by magic. I will keep this book. I will reread it, time and again; it has earned its place as one of my odd coterie of bedside companions.” —Fantasy & Science Fiction

“McKinley is at home in a world where magic is a mainstay and, with her passion for roses, she’s grafted a fully dimensional espalier that is a tangled, thorny web of love, loyalty, and storytelling sorcery. Fullest appreciation of Rose Daughter may be at an adult level.” —School Library Journal

“Readers will be enchanted, in the best sense of the word.” —Booklist

Deerskin

“A fierce and beautiful story of rage and compassion, betrayal and loyalty, damage and love … A fairy tale for adults, one you’ll never forget.” —Alice Hoffman, New York Times–bestselling author of At Risk and Seventh Heaven

“I did so much enjoy Robin McKinley’s Deerskin.… I respect her writing and reread her constantly, finding new perceptions each time.” —Anne McCaffrey, bestselling author of Damia’s Children

“An enormously powerful novel … Dreamlike, urgent, inexplicable … Robin McKinley has created a world where nightmare and hope exist side by side.”—Patricia A. McKillip, author of The Sorceress and the Cygnet

“A wonderful story, wonderfully told.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Award-winning author McKinley turns her storytelling acumen and stylistic grace toward an adult audience.… A classic journey-tale and a parable for modern times.” —Library Journal

“Superlative.” —Booklist

Sunshine

“Pretty much perfect.” —Neil Gaiman

“Sunshine is quite possibly the best vampire book published in my lifetime.” —Melissa Marr, author of the Wicked Lovely series

“The charm of this long venture into magic maturation derives from McKinley’s keen ear and sensitive atmospherics, deft characterizations and clever juxtapositions of reality and the supernatural.… McKinley knows very well—and makes her readers believe—that ‘the insides of our own minds are the scariest things there are.’” —Publishers Weekly

“A luminous, entrancing novel with an enthralling pair of characters at its heart.” —Booklist

“Step into Robin McKinley’s thrilling, beautifully described world.” —Jayne Ann Krentz, bestselling author

“A smart, funny tale of suspense and romance.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Sunshine takes everything we have always known about the menacing eroticism of pale men with sharp teeth, and throws it up into the air.” —Time Out

“McKinley [balances] the dark drama with light touches of humor. Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will feel at home, but McKinley’s novel has its own originality and depth.” —Orlando Sentinel

“A good book with some nice little twists on the magic theme.” —The Kansas City Star

“Well-written and exciting.” —Rocky Mountain News

Rose Daughter

Robin McKinley

To Neil and Tom,
whose absurd idea it was

and in memory of
a little lilac-covered cottage
where I used to live

CHAPTER

1

Her earliest memory was of waking from the dream. It was also her only clear memory of her mother. Her mother was beautiful, dashing, the toast of the town. Her youngest daughter remembered the blur of activity, friends and hangers-on, soothsayers and staff, the bad-tempered pet dragon on a leash—bad-tempered on account of the ocarunda leaves in his food, which prevented him from producing any more fire than might occasionally singe his wary handler, out which also upset his digestion—the constant glamour and motion which was her mother and her mother’s world. She remembered peeping out at her mother from around various thresholds before various nurses and governesses (hired by her dull merchant father) snatched her away.

She remembered too, although she was too young to put it into words, the excitability, no, the restlessness of her mother’s manner, a restlessness of a too-acute alertness in search of something that cannot be found. But such were the brightness and ardour of her mother’s personality that those around her also were swept up into her search, not knowing it was a search, happy merely to be a part of such liveliness and gaiety.

The only thing that ever lingered was the sweet smell of her mother’s perfume.

Her only memory of her mother’s face was from the night she woke from the dream for the first time, crying in terror. In the dream she had been walking—she could barely walk yet in her waking life—toddling down a long dark corridor, only vaguely lit by a few candles set too far into their sconces, too high up in the walls. The shadows stretched everywhere round her, and that was terrible enough; and the silence was almost as dreadful as the darkness. But what was even worse was that she knew a wicked monster waited for her at the end of the corridor. It was the wickedest monster that had ever lived, and it was waiting just for her, and she was all alone.

She was still young enough to be sleeping in a crib with high barred sides; she remembered fastening her tiny fists round the wooden bars, whose square edges cut into her soft palms. She remembered the dream—she remembered crying—and she remembered her mother coming, and bending over her, and picking her up, whispering gently in her ear, holding her against her breast, softly stroking her back. Sitting down quietly on the nurse’s stool and rocking her slowly till she fell asleep again.

She woke in her crib in the morning, just as usual. She asked her nurse where her mamma was; her nurse stared and did not believe her when she tried to tell her, in the few words she was old enough to use, that her mamma had come to her in the night when she had cried. “I’d’ve heard you if you yelled, miss,” said the nurse stiffly. “And I slept quiet last night.”

But she knew it was her mother, had to have been her mother. She remembered the sweet smell of her perfume, and no one but her mother ever wore that scent.

Her perfume smelt of flowers, but of no flowers the little girl ever found, neither in the dozens of overflowing vases set in nearly every room of their tall, magnificent town house nearly every day of the year, nor anywhere in the long scrolling curves of the flower-beds in the gardens behind the house, nor in the straight, meticulous rows within the glasshouses and orangeries behind the garden.

She once confided to a new nurse her wish to find the flower that had produced her mother’s scent. She was inspired to do so when the nurse introduced herself by saying, “Hello, little one. Your daddy has told me your name, but do you know mine? It’s Pansy, just like the flower. I bet you have lots of pansies in your garden.”

“Yes, we do,” replied the little girl politely. “And they’re my favourite—almost. My favourite is a flower I do not know. It is the flower that my mother’s scent comes from. I keep hoping I will find it. Perhaps you will help me.”

Pansy had laughed at her, but it was a friendly laugh. “What a funny little thing you are,” she said. “Fancy at your age wanting to know about perfume. You’ll be a heartbreaker in a few years, I guess.”

The little girl had looked at her new nurse solemnly but had not troubled to explain further. She could tell Pansy meant to be kind. It was true that she had first become interested in gardens as something other than merely places her nurses sometimes took her, in the peremptory way of grown-ups, when she had made the connexion between perfume smells and flower smells. But she had very soon discovered that she simply liked gardens.

Her mother’s world—her mother’s house—was very exciting, but it was also rather scary. She liked plants. They were quiet, and they stayed in the same place, but they weren’t boring, like a lot of the things she was supposed to be interested in were boring, such as dolls, which just lay there unless you picked them up and did things with them (and then the chief thing you were supposed to do with them, apparently, was to change their clothes, and could there be anything more awfully, deadly boring than changing anyone’s clothes any more often than one was utterly obliged to?). Plants got on with making stems and leaves and flowers and fruit, whatever you did, and a lot of them were nice to the touch: the slight attractive furriness of rabbit’s-ears and Cupid’s-darts, the slick waxy surfaces of camellia leaves and ivy—and lots of them had beautiful flowers, which changed both shape and colour as they opened, and some of them smelt interesting, even if none of them smelt like her mother’s perfume. And then there were things like apples and grapes, which were the best things in the world when you could break them off from the stem yourself and eat them right there.

From the nurses’ point of view, the youngest girl was the least trouble of the three. She neither went out seeking mischief, the more perilous the better, the way the eldest did, nor answered impertinently (and with a vocabulary alarmingly beyond her age), the way the second did. Her one consistent misbehaviour, tiresome enough indeed as it was, and which no amount of punishment seemed able to break her of, was that of escaping into the garden the moment the nurse’s eye was diverted, where she would later be found, digging little holes and planting things—discarded toys (especially dolls), half-eaten biscuits, dead leaves, and dry twigs—singing to herself, and covering her white pinafores and stockings with dirt. None of the nurses ever noticed that the twigs, were they left where she planted them, against all probability, grew. One old gardener noticed, and because he was old and considered rather silly, he had the time to spend making the little girl’s acquaintance.

Nurses never lasted long. Despite the care taken and the warnings given to keep the nurses in the nurseries, eventually some accident of meeting occurred with the merchant’s wife, and the latest nurse, immediately found to be too slow or too dowdy or too easily bewildered to suit, was fired. When Pansy came to say good-bye, she said, “I have to go away. Don’t cry, lovey, it’s just the way it is. But I wanted to tell you: It’s roses your mum’s perfume smells of. Roses. No, you don’t have ’em here. It’s generally only sorcerers who can get ’em to grow much. The village I was born in, we had a specially clever greenwitch, and she had one, just one, but it was heaven when it bloomed. That’s how I know. But it takes barrels of petals to make perfume enough to fill a bottle the size of your littlest fingertip—that’s why the sorcerers are interested, see, I never knew a sorcerer wasn’t chiefly out to make money—your pa’s paying a queen’s ransom for it, I can tell you that.”

When the youngest daughter was five years old, her mother died. She had bet one of her hunting friends she could leap a half-broken colt over a farm cart. She had lost the bet and broken her neck. The colt broke both forelegs and had to be shot.

The whole city mourned, her husband and two elder daughters most of all. The youngest one embarrassed her family at the funeral by repeating, over and over, “Where is my mamma? Where is my mamma?”

“She is too young to understand,” said the grieving friends and acquaintances, and patted her head, and embraced the husband and the elder girls.

A well-meaning greenwitch offered the father a charm for his youngest daughter. “She’ll work herself into a fever, poor little thing,” the woman said, holding the little bag on its thin ribbon out to him. “You just hang it round her neck—I’d do it myself, but it’ll work better coming from your hands—and she’ll know her mamma’s gone, but it won’t hurt till she’s a little more ready for it. It’ll last three, four months if you don’t let it get wet.”

But the merchant knocked the small bundle out of the woman’s hand with a cry of rage, and might have struck the greenwitch herself—despite the bad luck invariably attendant on any violence offered any magic practitioner—if those standing nearest had not held him back. The startled greenwitch was hustled away, someone explaining to her in an undertone that the merchant was a little beside himself, that grief had made him so unreasonable that he blamed his wife’s soothsayers for not having warned her against her last, fatal recklessness, and had for the moment turned against all magic. Even her pet dragon had been given away.

The greenwitch allowed herself to be hustled. She was a kindly woman, but not at all grand—greenwitches rarely were—and had known the family at all only because she had twice or three times found the youngest daughter in a flowerbed in one of the city’s municipal parks and returned her to her distracted nurse. She gave one little backward glance to that youngest daughter, who was still running from one mourner to the next and saying, “Where is my mamma? Where is my mamma?”

“I don’t like to think of the little thing’s dreams,” murmured the greenwitch, but her escort had brought her to the cemetery gate and turned her loose, with some propelling force, and the greenwitch shook her head sadly but went her own way.

The night of her mother’s funeral her youngest daughter had the dream for the second time. She was older in the dream just as she was in life; older and taller, she spoke in complete sentences and could run without falling down. None of this was of any use to her in the dream. The candles were still too high overhead to cast anything but shadows; she was still all alone, and the unseen monster waited, just for her.

After that she had the dream often.

At first, when she cried out for her mamma, the nurses were sympathetic, but as the months mounted up to a year since the funeral, and no more than a week ever passed before another midnight waking, another sobbing cry of “Mamma! Mamma!” the nurses grew short-tempered. The little girl learnt not to cry out, but she still had the dream.

And she eluded her protectresses more often than ever and crept out into the garden, where the old gardener (keeping a wary eye out for the descent of a shrieking harpy from the nursery) taught her how better to plant things, and which things to plant, and what to do to make them happy after they were planted.

She grew old enough to try to flee, and so discover that this did her no good in the dream; it was the same dark, silent, sinister corridor, without windows or doors, the same unknown, expectant monster, whichever way she turned. And then she discovered she had never really tried to run away at all, that she was determined to follow the corridor to its end, to face the monster. And that was the most terrifying thing of all.

She wondered, as they all three grew up, if it was the dream itself that made her so different from her sisters. They were all beautiful; all three took after their mother. But the eldest one was as brave as she had been, and her name was Lionheart; the second one was as clever as she had been, and her name was Jeweltongue. The youngest was called Beauty.

Beauty adopted the nerve-shattered horses, the dumbly confused and despairing dogs that Lionheart left in her wake. She found homes for them with quiet, timid, dull people—as well as homes for barn-loft kittens, canaries which wouldn’t sing, parrots which wouldn’t talk, and sphinxes which curled up into miserable little balls in the backs of their cages and refused to be goaded into fighting.

She brought cups of tea with her own hands to wounded swains bleeding from cries of “Coward!” and “Lackwit!” and offered her own handkerchiefs to maidservants and costumiers found weeping in corners after run-ins with Jeweltongue. She found tactful things to say to urgent young playwrights who wished to be invited to Jeweltongue’s salons, and got rid of philanthropists who wished Jeweltongue to apply her notorious acuteness—and perhaps some of the family’s money—to schemes towards the improvement of the general human lot.

She also kept an eye on the household accounts, to make sure that the calfbound set of modern philosophy Jeweltongue had ordered contained all the twenty volumes she was charged for, that all twenty sets of horseshoes the farrier included in his bill had indeed been nailed to the feet of Lionheart’s carriage teams and hunters, and that the twenty brace of pheasant delivered for a dinner-party were all served to their guests.

On some days, when it seemed to her that everyone she met was either angry or unhappy, she would go out into the garden and hide. She had learned to avoid the army of gardeners, run by an ambitious head gardener who was as forceful and dominating as any general—or rather, she had never outgrown her child’s instinct to drop quietly out of sight when a grown-up moving a little too purposefully was nearby. As soon as she stepped out onto the lawn, she felt tranquillity drift down over her like a veil; and almost as though it were a veil, or as if she had suddenly become a plant herself (a tidy, well-shaped, well-placed plant of a desirable colour and habit, for anything else would have drawn attention at once), she was rarely noticed by the gardeners, hurrying this way and that with military precision, even when they passed quite close to her.

The old gardener who had been kind to her when she was small had been pensioned off and lived in a cottage at some distance from their great house, on the outskirts of the city, where the farmlands began and where he had his own small garden for the first time in his long life. A few times a year she found half a day to go visit him—once with a convalescent puppy who had been stepped on by a carriage horse—but she missed having him in the garden.

Once she arranged the flowers for one of her sisters’ balls. This was ordinarily the housekeeper’s job. Her sisters felt that flower arranging was a pastime for servants or stupid people; Beauty felt that flowers belonged in the garden where they grew. But on the morning of this party the housekeeper had fallen downstairs and sprained her ankle, and was in too much pain to do anything but lie in a darkened room and run the legs off the maid assigned to attend her.

Beauty looked at the poor flowers standing in their buckets of cold water, and at the array of noble vases laid out for them, and began to arrange them, only half aware of what she was about, while her sisters were rushing around the house shouting (in Lionheart’s case) or muttering savagely (in Jeweltongue’s) while they attended to what should have been the housekeeper’s other urgent duties on the day of an important party. Most of Beauty’s mind was occupied with what the night’s events would bring; she would much rather scrub a floor—not that she ever had scrubbed a floor, but she assumed it would be hard, dull, unpleasant work—than attend a ball, which was hard, dull, unpleasant work that didn’t even have a clean floor to show for it afterwards.

Neither Lionheart nor Jeweltongue at best paid much attention to flowers, beyond the fact that one did of course have to have them, as one had place settings for seventy-five and a butler to cherish the wine; but when they came downstairs to have a final look at the front hall and the dining-room, even they were astonished by what Beauty had done.

“My saints!” said Lionheart. “If the conversation flags, we can look at the flowers!”

“The conversation will not flag,” said Jeweltongue composedly, “but that is not to say that Beauty has not done miracles,” and she patted her sister’s shoulder absently, as one might pat a dog.

“I didn’t know flowers could look like this!” roared Lionheart, and threw up her arms as if challenging an enemy to strike at her, and laughed. “If Miss Fuss-and-Bother could see this, perhaps it would quiet her nerves!” Miss Fuss-and-Bother was the name Lionheart had given to the governess least patient with the frequent necessity of fishing Beauty out of her latest muddy haven in the garden and bringing her indoors and dumping her in the bath. Lionheart had often been obliged to join her there after other, more dangerous adventures of her own.

But that ball was particularly successful, and her sisters teased Beauty that it was on account of her flowers and asked if she was keeping a greenwitch in her cupboard, who could work such charms. Beauty, distressed, tried to prevent any of this from reaching their father’s ears, for he would not have taken even a joke about a greenwitch in their house in good part. The housekeeper, who did hear some of it as she hobbled around the house on a stick, was not pleased and contrived to snub “Miss Beauty” for a fortnight after. (She might also have denuded the garden of flowers in her efforts to have a grander show than Beauty’s for the next party, but the head gardener was more than a match for her.) Beauty stayed out of her way till she had moved her ill will to another target; there was too much temper and spitefulness in the house already, and she thought she might forget her promise to herself never to add to it, and tell the housekeeper what a dreadful old woman she thought her.

Besides, she would probably then have to hire another housekeeper afterwards, and she could think of few things she less wanted to do.

The sisters’ parties, over the course of several seasons, became famous as the finest in the city, as fine as their mother’s had been. Perhaps not quite so grand as the mayor’s, but perhaps more enjoyable; the mayor’s daughters were, after all, rather plain.

Only the ill-natured—especially those whose own parties were slighted in favor of the sisters’—ever suggested that it was the work of any hired magician. Their father’s attitude towards magic was well known. His sudden revulsion of feeling upon his wife’s death had indeed been much talked of; but much more surprising was its result.

It was true that he was the wealthiest merchant in the city, but that was all he was; and if he had long had what seemed, were it not absurd to think so, an almost magical ability to seize what chance he wished when he wished to seize it, well, seers and soothsayers were always going on about how there was no such thing as luck, but that everyone possessed some seeds of magic within themselves, whether or not they ever found them or nursed them into growth. But no mere merchant, even the wealthiest merchant in the biggest city in the country, and whatever the origins of his business luck, should have been able to dislodge any magical practitioner who did not wish to be dislodged; but so it was in this case. Not only were all the magicians, astrologers, and soothsayers who had been members of his wife’s entourage thrown out of his house—which ban was acceptably within his purview—but he saw them driven out of the city.

The sisters were forbidden to have anything to do with magic; the two elder girls still bought small street charms occasionally, and Beauty was good friends with the elderly salamander belonging to the retired sorcerer who lived near them; but none of them would ever hire any practitioner to do a personal spell.

It was no surprise to anyone who paid attention to such matters when Lionheart contracted an engagement with the Duke of Dauntless, who owned six thousand of the finest hunting acres in the entire country, and much else besides. Jeweltongue affianced herself to the Baron of Grandiloquence, who was even wealthier than the Duke, and had a bigger town house. They planned a double wedding; Beauty and the three sisters of the Duke and the four sisters of the Baron should be bridesmaids. It would be the finest wedding of the season, if not the century. Everyone would be there, admiring, envious, and beautifully dressed.

In all the bustle of preparations, no one, not even Beauty, noticed that the old merchant seemed unusually preoccupied.

He had hoped he could put off his business’s ruin till after the wedding. He loved his daughters, but he felt his life had ended with his wife’s death; he had been increasingly unable to concentrate on his business affairs in the years since. His greatest pain as he watched the impending storm approach was the thought that he had not been able to provide a husband for Beauty. It was true that she was not very noticeable in the company of her sisters, but she should have been able to find a suitable husband among all the young men who flocked to their house to court Lionheart and Jeweltongue.

He thought of hiring a good magician or a sorcerer to throw a few days’ hold over the worst of the wreck, but his antipathy to all things magical since his wife’s death meant not only had he lost all his contacts in the magical professions, but a sudden search now for a powerful practitioner was sure to raise gossip—and suspicion. He was not at all certain he would have been able to find one who would accept such a commission from him anyway. It had occurred to him, as the worst of the dull oppression of grief had lifted from his mind, to be surprised no magical practitioner had tried to win revenge for his turning half a dozen of them out of the city; perhaps they had known it was not necessary. The unnatural strength that had enabled him to perform that feat had taken most of his remaining vitality—and business acumen—with it.

The bills for the wedding itself he paid for in his last days as the wealthiest merchant in the city. He would not be able to fulfil the contracts for his daughters’ dowries, but his two elder daughters were in themselves reward enough for any man. And her sisters would do something for Beauty.

It was ten days before the wedding when the news broke. People were stunned. It was all anyone talked about for three days—and then the next news came: The Duke of Dauntless and the Baron of Grandiloquence had broken off the wedding.

The messengers from their fiancés brought the sisters’ fate to them on small squares of thick cream-laid paper, folded and sealed with the heavy heirloom seals of their fiancés’ houses. Lionheart and Jeweltongue each replied with one cold line written in her own firm hand; neither kept her messenger waiting.

By the end of that day Lionheart and Jeweltongue and Beauty and their father were alone in their great house; not a servant remained to them, and many had stolen valuable fittings and furniture as well, guessing correctly that their ruined masters would not be able to order them returned, nor punish them for theft.

As the twilight lengthened in their silent sitting-room, Jeweltongue at last stood up from her chair and began to light the lamps; Lionheart stirred in her corner and went downstairs to the kitchens. Beauty remained where she was, chafing her father’s cold hands and fearing what the expression on his face might mean. Later she ate what Lionheart put in front of her, without noticing what it was, and fed their father with a spoon, as if he were a child. Jeweltongue settled down with the housekeeper’s book and began to study it, making the occasional note.

For the first few days they did only small, immediate things. Lionheart took over the kitchens and cooking; Jeweltongue took over the housekeeping. Beauty began going through the boxes of papers that had been delivered from what had been her father’s office and dumped in a corner of one of the drawing-rooms.

Lionheart could be heard two floors away from the kitchens, cursing and flinging things about, wielding knives and mallets like swords and lances. Jeweltongue rarely spoke aloud, but she swept floors and beat the laundry as pitilessly as she had ever told off an underhousemaid for not blacking a grate sufficiently or a footman waiting at table for having a spot on his shirtfront.

Beauty read their father’s correspondence, trying to discover the real state of their affairs and some gleam of guidance as to what they must do next. She wrote out necessary replies, while her father mumbled and moaned and rocked in his chair, and she held his trembling hand around the pen that he might write his signature when she had finished.

Even the garden could not soothe Beauty during that time. She went out into it occasionally, as she might have reached for a shawl if she were cold; but she would find herself standing nowhere she could remember going, staring blindly at whatever was before her, her thoughts spinning and spinning and spinning until she was dizzy with them. There were now no gardeners to hide from, but any relief she might have found in that was overbalanced by seeing how quickly the garden began to look shabby and neglected. She didn’t much mind the indoors beginning to look shabby and neglected; furniture doesn’t notice being dusty, corners don’t notice cobwebs, cushions don’t notice being unplumped. She told herself that plants didn’t mind going undeadheaded and unpruned—and the weeds, of course, were much happier than they’d ever been before. But the plants in the garden were her friends; the house was just a building full of objects.

She had little appetite and barely noticed as Lionheart’s lumpen messes began to evolve into recognizable dishes. She had never taken a great deal of interest in her own appearance and had minded the least of the three of them when they put their fine clothes away, for they had agreed among themselves that all their good things should go towards assuaging their father’s creditors. She did not notice that Jeweltongue had an immediate gift for invisible darns, for making a bodice out of an old counterpane, a skirt of older curtains, and collar and cuffs of worn linen napkins with the stained bits cut out, and finishing with a pretty dress it was no penance to wear.

Nor could she sleep at night. She felt she would welcome her old nightmare almost as solace, so dreadful had their waking life become; but the dream stayed away. Since her mother’s death it had never left her alone for so long. She found herself missing it; in its absence it became one more security that had been torn away from her, a faithful companion who had deserted her. And it was not until now, with their lives a wreck around them, that she realised she had forgotten what her mother’s face looked like. She could remember remembering, she could remember the long months after her mother’s death, waking from the dream crying, “Mamma!” and knowing what face she hoped to see when she opened her eyes, knowing her disappointment when it was only the nurse’s. When had she forgotten her mother’s face? Some unmarked moment in the last several years, as childhood memories dimmed under the weight of adult responsibilities, or only now, one more casualty of their ruin? She did not know and could not guess.

What unsettled her most of all was that her last fading wisp of memory contained nothing of her mother’s beauty, but only kindness, kindness and peace, a sense of safe haven. And yet the first thing anyone who had known her mother mentioned about her was her beauty, and while she was praised for her vitality, her wit, and her courage, far from any haven, her companionship was a dare, a challenge, an exhilarating danger.

In among her father’s papers Beauty discovered a lawyers’ copy of a will, dated in May of the year she had turned two, leaving the three sisters the possession of the little house owned by the woman named. Beauty puzzled over this for some time, as she knew all her father’s relatives (none of whom wanted to know him or his daughters anymore), and knew as well that her mother had had none; nor did she know of any connexion whatsoever to anyone or anything so far away from the city of the sisters’ birth. But there was no easy accounting for it, and Beauty had no time for useless mysteries.

There was a lawyers’ letter with the will, dated seven years later, saying that the old woman had disappeared soon after making the will, and in accordance with the law, the woman had now been declared dead, and the house was theirs. It was called Rose Cottage. It lay many weeks’ journey from the city, and it stood alone in rough country, at a little distance from the nearest town.

Even their father’s creditors were not interested in it.

She wrote to the lawyers, asking if there was any further transaction necessary if they wished to take up residence, and received a prompt but curt note in reply saying that the business was no longer anything to do with them but that they supposed the house was still standing.

Rose Cottage, she thought. What a romantic name. I wonder what the woman who had it was like. I suppose it’s like a lot of other house names—a timid family naming theirs Dragon Villa or city folk longing for the country calling theirs Broadmeadow. Perhaps—she almost didn’t dare finish the thought—perhaps for us, just now, perhaps the name is a good omen.

Hesitantly she told her sisters about it. Lionheart said: “I wish to go so far away from this hateful city that no one round me even knows its name.”

Jeweltongue said: “I would not stay here a day longer than I must, if they asked me to be mayor and my only alternative was to live in a hole in the ground.”

It was teatime. Late-afternoon light slanted in through the long panes of their sitting-room. They no longer used any of the bigger rooms; their present sitting-room was a small antechamber that had formerly been used to keep not-very-welcome guests waiting long enough to let them know they were not very welcome. In here Jeweltongue saw that the surfaces were dust-free, the glass panes sparkling, and the cushions all plumped. But the view into the garden showed a lawn growing shaggy, and twigs and flower stems broken by rain or wind lay across the paths. It had been three weeks since the Duke and Baron sent their last messages.

Beauty sat staring out the window for a minute in the silence following her sisters’ words. It was still strange to her how silent the house was; it had never been silent before. Even very late at night, very early in the morning, the bustle had only been subdued, not absent. Now silence lay, cold and thick and paralysing as a heavy fall of snow. Beauty shivered, and tucked her hands under her elbows. “I’ll tell Father, then, when he wakes. At least something is settled.…” Her voice tailed off. She rose stiffly to her feet. “I have several more letters I should write tonight.” She turned to leave.

“Beauty—” Lionheart’s voice. Beauty stopped by Jeweltongue’s chair, which was nearest the door, and turned back. “Thank you,” said her eldest sister.

Jeweltongue reached suddenly up, and grasped Beauty’s hand, and laid the back of it against her cheek for a moment. “I don’t know what we would be doing without you,” she said, not looking up. “I still can’t bear the thought of … meeting any of the people we used to know. Every morning I think, Today will be better—”

“And it isn’t,” said Lionheart.

Beauty went back to the desk in another little room she had set up as an office. Quickly she began going through various heaps of papers, setting a few aside. She had already rebuffed suggestions of aid from businessmen she knew only wished to gloat and gossip; uneasily she discarded overtures from sorcerers declaring that their affairs could yet be put right, all assistance to be extended on credit, terms to be drawn up later upon the return of their just prosperity. Now she drew a sheet of her father’s writing-paper towards her, picked up a pen, and began to write an acceptance, for herself and her sisters, of the best, which was to say the least humiliating, offer of the several auction houses that had approached them, to dispose of their private belongings, especially the valuable things that had come to them from their mother, which their father had given his wife in better days. Beauty had told no one that she was not sure even this final desperate recourse would save their father from a debtors’ prison.

And in the next few days she made time wherever she could to visit various of the people who had adopted her animals. She learnt what she could, in haste and distress of mind, of butter- and cheese-making from a woman who had been a dairymaid before she married a town man, while her cat, once a barn-loft kitten, played tag to rules of her own devising among their feet and the legs of furniture. She learnt bottling and beer-making from an old woman who had been a farm wife, while her ex-racing hound made a glossy, beer-coloured hump under the kitchen table. She took the legal papers she was not sure she understood to a man whose elegant, lame black mare had foaled all four of his undertaker son’s best funeral carriage team. Another man, whose five cowardly hounds bayed tremendously at any knock at the front door from a vantage point under his bed, taught her how to harness a horse, how to check that its tack fitted, and the rudiments of how to drive it; and a friend of his saddled up his very fine retired hunter, the whites of whose eyes never showed anymore, and went to the big autumn horse fair to buy her a pair of pulling horses and a suitable waggon.

She came home from these small adventures with her head ringing with instructions and spent the evenings writing up notes, listening to the silence, trying not to be frightened, and wondering wearily what she was forgetting.

I can teach you to remember, the elderly salamander said to her.

“Oh—oh no,” said Beauty. “Oh no, that won’t do at all. But thank you.”

Your other friends are giving you gifts, said the salamander, gifts of things you need, things you ask them for, but sometimes things they know to offer you. Why may not I also?

“It is very kind of you,” said Beauty, “but I have no claim on you.”

You have the claim of friendship, said the salamander. My master, since he retired, is interested only in counting his money. I shall miss you, for you have been my friend. Let me give you something. It will be a small something, if you prefer, something smaller than memory.

“I would rather forget how to smoke meat and brew beer and saw and nail if I might also begin to forget the last few weeks,” said Beauty simply.

The salamander was silent, but she saw by the flicker in its cloudy eyes that it was thinking.

Pick me up, it said at last, so that I may look into your eyes.

Beauty picked it up gently, in a hand that shook only a very little.

This is more difficult than I expected. We salamanders rarely give gifts, and when we do, they are rarely small. It made a faint, dry, rattling sound Beauty recognised as salamander laughter. This will have to do.

Abruptly it opened its eyes very wide, and Beauty was staring into two pits of fire, and when she sucked in her breath in shock, the air tasted hot and acrid with burning. Listen to me, my friend. I give you a small serenity. I would give you a large one, but I am uncertain of human Capacity, and I furthermore believe you would not wish it. This is a serenity you can hold in the palms of your two hands—even smaller than I am. And she heard the rustling laugh again, even through the thunder of the fire. I think you may find it useful. It hooded its eyes. You may put me down.

Beauty set it back down on the pillar where it spent its days watching the townsfolk and pretending to be a garden ornament. It turned suddenly, like the lizard it almost was, and touched her hand with its tongue. I did not mean to frighten you, it said, and its voice was tinny and distant, like the last reverberation of an echo. Cup your hands and look into them now.

Beauty did so and at once felt heat, as if she held a small glowing sun in her hands. She looked down and again saw fire, red and hot and bottomless. “It—it doesn’t look very serene,” she quavered.

Trust me, said the salamander, and curled up and became the statue of a salamander.

CHAPTER

2

In six weeks from the day the news was first heard that the wealthiest merchant in the city had resigned his post in disgrace, his daughters had packed up what few goods remained to them—including himself—and begun the long journey to their exile near a village with the outlandish name of Longchance.

Everyone knew the old man’s health had broken with the ruin of his fortunes and that the girls were left to rescue themselves by what devices they could themselves contrive. While no one in the city was moved to offer them any financial assistance, there was a kind of cool ruthless pride in them that they had risen to the challenge. Beauty’s negotiating skills had won, or been allowed to win, by the thinnest margin, the ultimate round, and their father was to be spared the final misery and disgrace of prison—not because she had anything very much to offer in exchange for the old man’s meagre life but in recognition that her determination was absolute. And there was not, after all, any material gain to be had from letting the old man die in gaol. The price for this benevolence was a promise that the old merchant would do business in the city no more. It was a guarantee Beauty was happy to make for him.

They escaped only just before Lionheart’s roaring ceased to compel delivery of their groceries.

None of the sisters had ever before ventured out of the city more than a few days’ journey, and then only for some amusement at some great country seat. The old merchant had occasionally chosen to conduct his business in another city in person, but then he travelled by sea, always booking the most luxurious private cabin for the journey. Now they were on the road for weary week after weary week, with only such comforts as an ancient unsprung farm waggon and a pokey tent could offer. They had barely been able to pay for their place in a traders’ convoy heading in the direction they wished to go; they would be travelling often through near wilderness, and banditry was common. But the traders did not welcome them, and they were made quickly aware that their leader’s agreeing to take them on was not popular with the others and that they would receive no help if they found it difficult to keep up.

They did keep up. The merchant was ill and weak and wandered in his wits, but the three sisters did everything, as they had done everything since the Duke and the Baron had written a few words on two sheets of heavy, cream-laid paper and sealed them with their seals. Lionheart was tender to their two slow shaggy horses in a way Beauty had never seen her be tender with her high-couraged thoroughbreds, and Jeweltongue was gentle with their father in a way Beauty had never seen Jeweltongue be gentle with any human being less capable than she.

There was one bit of trouble early on, when one of the traders attempted to pay rough court to Jeweltongue; she had just bitten his hand when Lionheart hit him over the head with a horse-collar. The commotion brought some of the others. There was a brief, tense, ugly silence, when it might have gone either way, and then the traders decided they admired these soft city girls for defending themselves so resolutely. They dragged their colleague’s unconscious body back to his own fireside, and their captain promised there would be no more such incidents. There were not.

Winter came early that year; the traders’ convoy had to take shelter in a village barely halfway to their goal. It might yet have gone hard for the three sisters but for Lionheart’s ability to turn three wizened turnips into a feast for sixteen, Jeweltongue’s ability to patch holes in shirts more hole than shirt out of a few discreet excisions from the hems, and Beauty’s ability to say three kind words, as if at random, just before cold- and want-shortened tempers flared into fighting. By the time of the thaw, the traders were no longer sorry for their leader’s bargain with the ruined merchant and his three beautiful daughters, and the fellow still bearing a knot on the back of his head from a blow from a horse-collar had mended a frost-cracked wheel for the sisters and refused any compensation, saying that companions of the road took no payment from one another.

The three sisters and their father went the last few miles alone. The lawyers’ letter had described Rose Cottage as being at the end of the last track off the main way through the woods before Longchance’s farmlands began. The traders knew the way to Longchance well, and while none of them knew anything of Rose Cottage, they knew which track the last one was—or what was left of it, for it had not been used in many years. It was just wide enough to take two small horses abreast, and just clear enough for an old farm cart laboriously to lumber down.

A surprising number of the traders came round individually to say good-bye to their travelling companions, and several mumbled something about maybe looking in t’see how they was doing, on the way home again. Then the traders went on the wider way. The three sisters and the old merchant went the narrow one.

The house too was recognisable from the description in the lawyers’ letter. Small; thatched, now badly overdue for replacement; one storey, with a loft over half of it, the roof so peaked that the upstairs room would be only partly usable; stone chimney on either of the narrow sides of the house, the one on the loft side much the bigger; two small tumbledown sheds and some bits of broken fence; and a chestnut tree growing a little distance from the front door. The remains of an overgrown garden spilled out behind the house, but even Beauty was too bone-weary to explore it.

But the house was surprisingly tall for its small size, and this gave it a curious authority and a reassuring air of steadfastness. They all sat and stared while the horses, perceiving the end of the road and a lack of attention in the hands on their reins, dropped their heads and began to nose through the debris of winter for anything to eat.

It was earliest spring. The sky was blue, the birds sang, the chestnut tree was putting out its first sticky leafbuds, but the low coarse growth underfoot was matted weeds interspersed with bare muddy patches, the brown buds crouched on drearily empty branches, and the house had obviously been derelict for a long time. The clearing it sat in was reverting to woodland, with opportunistic saplings springing up everywhere; there was a bird’s-nest built into a corner of the front door and an ominous crown of ragged twigs on one of the chimneys. The two sheds hadn’t a sound wall between them; there was nowhere to keep the waggon or stable the horses. It was a cheerless homecoming.

Lionheart was the first to jump off the waggon, stride forward, and throw the unlatched door of the house open, spattering herself with shreds of broken bird’s-nest and fighting off the maleficent embraces of the long thorny stems of an overgrown bush just beside the door. Jeweltongue and Beauty followed her slowly; their father sat dully in the cart. Beauty’s heart sank when Lionheart opened the door so easily; she had feared the worst when the lawyers had sent her no key, but if the house had been open to weather and all depredations both animal and human.…

“No leaks,” said Lionheart, looking towards the ceiling. She climbed the ladder and stuck her head through the trapdoor. “Nor any I can see up here,” she said, her voice muffled.

“No rubbish in the corners,” said Jeweltongue. She walked round the one big downstairs room, touching the walls. “It’s not running with damp. It doesn’t even smell of damp. Or of mice.”

Beauty was standing in the middle of the floor, slowly turning in her place, half watching Jeweltongue touching the walls, half looking round herself, thinking, It does not smell of mice, nor of damp, but it does smell of something—I don’t know—but it’s a friendly smell—not like a years-closed-up house. Well, there may be horrors tomorrow—birds’-nests in the chimneys, snakes in the cellar—but … And her heart lifted for the second time since the Duke and Baron had written those final lines, and she remembered that the first time had been when she discovered the papers saying that they still possessed a little house called Rose Cottage. Rose Cottage. She had wanted the name to be a good omen.

Lionheart came downstairs again, and the three sisters looked at one another. “It’s perhaps just a bit small,” said Lionheart.

“But it’s ours,” said Jeweltongue, and walked over to Beauty and tucked her hand under her sister’s arm.

“Those little leaded windows don’t let in much light,” said Lionheart.

“The ceiling is high enough to make the house seem bright and airy,” said Jeweltongue.

“None of our furniture will sit straight on this floor,” said Lionheart.

“None of the wisps and remnants we now call our furniture is going to sit straight anywhere,” said Jeweltongue, “and we can invent a new parlour-game for winter evenings, rolling pennies across the slopes.”

Lionheart laughed. “There’s a baking oven,” she said, looking at the bigger chimney. “And think of the fun I’ll have learning where its hot spots are. The first loaves will have slopes on them like the floor.” She looked round again. “And we’ll never be lonesome because we’ll always be under one another’s feet. Not like—not like the last weeks in the old house.”

Beauty felt Jeweltongue shudder. “No. Never like that. Never again.”