Briar Rose - Part 4 of 4
Night has fallen. In the Great Hall, there is music and dancing.
Chapter 16
Night has fallen. In the Great Hall, there is music and dancing. I watch as the Duke dances with several young ladies. They seem to occupy his attention only briefly. His eyes glaze over and I know that he thinks about the sleeping woman. A silence falls over the room and I turn my head to see Isabella.
“The Necromancer!” those around me hiss.
“She must be moving into her chamber.”
The Duke bows before his young dancing partner and steps away, moving to join the witch at the door. I follow. Her dark eyes gaze past his shoulder and meet mine.
“Then you have finally decided to join us madam?” says he. “Shall you dance?”
“No,” Isabella says. “I am content to watch.”
“Very well.” He claps his hands for the musicians to take up their instruments once more.
Isabella moves around the edges of the Great Hall. A path opens up for her. Courtiers step back and some cross themselves. From the sparkle in her eyes, I know they amuse her. Finally she finds a seat. “Sit on my knee,” she mutters under her breath, and I do though she cannot feel my form pressing down on her. “They see my lips moving and think I am casting a spell,” she says of those who glance anxiously at her.
“You like their fear.”
“They stay away and I am left in peace. But let us forget them. Tonight you shall awaken.”
“Tonight?”
She gives a little nod.
Servants are passing through the guests with great jugs of wine which they pour into glasses. One glances at Isabella with a smile before moving on.
“Return to your chamber. I will join you soon.”
I want to throw my arms around her but I cannot. But soon, soon I will touch her with my own flesh and blood hands. I begin to tell her this but she is frowning. I turn and follow her gaze. The Duke stares at Isabella and then at me, but his eyes are unfocused. A woman stands beside him. A visitor. She watches me then leans towards the Duke, whispering urgently.
“Go,” Isabella directs me. “Wait in your chamber.”
I pass through the wall into the garden. Moonlight bleaches the statues, they stand luminous like ghosts. As I find my way to my chamber, I think on the Duke staring at Isabella and the empty space before her, and wonder what he means to do. Will Isabella’s plans come to nothing?
I pace my chamber. There are the distant sounds of festivities. Finally, I hear footsteps outside. The door crashes open and Isabella is pushed inside. She falls to the floor. The Duke and the woman step in, and the door is slammed shut.
“That is the one I saw in the Great Hall,” the woman says, stepping up to my casket. “And here she is standing beside it.”
“Where?” The Duke squints.
“It is no use, Your Grace, few people see spirits.”
“Ask her what she was doing with the witch.”
I look down on Isabella who is struggling to sit up. With one hand she pushes back her long hair. Her nose is bloody and I know he has struck her. But a witch can defend herself, surely? “Isabella?” I say to her.
She shakes her head.
“I believe she can hear you herself,” the second witch tells the Duke.
“Then,” he says with a calmness I have never heard before and yet I know signifies danger, “I demand to know what business she has with the Lady Isabella, or the Lady Isabella will suffer for her silence.”
“Isabella was the only one who could see me,” I tell the witch. She is older than Isabella. “For a hundred years I had no one to converse with. She has been my company.” The woman repeats my words for the benefit of the Duke.
“And the Lady Isabella,” he says. “What has she told you?”
“She has told me of the world outside. She has been my friend.”
When the Duke hears my words from the woman’s lips, he frowns.
“Who are you?” I demand of the woman before me.
“I am descended from one of women who put you here. Like your friend there. Our families have advanced in the world since you fell into sleep.”
I look at Isabella.
“What?” laughs the witch. “She has not told you that your fate was the handiwork of one of her line? Do you still believe she is your friend? She is no friend to you. My great grandmother saved you from death by casting the spell of sleep over the spell of death. And again her House would do evil to you. What plans has she been hatching?”
“Are you truly descended from that first witch?” I ask the woman I have loved.
She nods.
“Why did you not tell me?”
“Because you would hate me.”
The Duke seizes Isabella’s arm and pulls her to her feet. “Where is your magic now, you slut? I believed you were powerful, but you take a slap well enough. And I see no magic to keep your nose from bleeding. What shall I do with you?”
“You are very brave to be treating one such as I in this manner,” she says. “It was not so long ago that you treaded more carefully.”
“Ah, well, necromancers come and necromancers go. I have another witch to serve me now. I’ll not be needing you. So, tell me, have you been making plans behind my back, for I believe there is more to this than friendly conversations with my ghostly bride? Well?”
She spits in his face. He lashes out and she flies against the wall. Then he strides over to the casket where he takes out his key and opens the lid. He reaches inside and lifts me out, my hair trailing down. “Behold my intended,’ he says to no one in particular. ‘I should have had her long ago. But all I could do was look on her. Was that your doing, witch? I know of the powders you give to the ladies. Powders to enhance a man’s lusts, and powders to dampen it.”
Isabella looks up at me from the floor. “Do you hate me?”
I kneel beside her. She does not turn her bloodied face away. I look into her eyes. “No. I only love you. And maybe I am a fool for it, but it is true.”
Behind me my words are repeated to the Duke.
“I should have done this the first day I saw you.” There is a tearing sound. I know what he intends to do and huddle closer to Isabella.
She raises her arms and begins to chant.
“Make some of your magic to deal with that slut,” the Duke orders. “And call the guards.”
The woman goes to the door and calls them. Nobody comes.
“Then cast a spell of your own, shut her up.”
Isabella’s chanting is growing stronger.
I turn and see the Duke climbing on top of my sleeping form which is laid out on a couch.
“Shut her up! I cannot perform while she is chanting like that.”
The woman begins her own chanting. The Duke breaks away from my form and strides to the door, throwing it open and bellowing for the guards. When no footsteps come, he departs to fetch them. I glance at Isabella before getting up to follow. In the corridor outside, guards lie sleeping. And when I pass with him into the Great Hall, I see servants robbing the pockets of the sleeping guests. They blanch at the sight of the Duke, and vanish through open doorways. The Duke turns as the chanting from my chamber grows louder. He sways on his feet. His eyes glaze over. I watch as he falls to the floor, atop a pile of other bodies.
“Isabella!” I cry, running up to my chamber. “The Duke is dead or asleep, I know not which.” There is a great crashing as I enter the room. The other witch lies among the broken glass of my casket. Her blood drops like rubies, like the drops of blood from the Duke’s sword when first he came here. There is a long and deadly shard of glass piercing her stomach.
“That is a fatal wound,” Isabella tells her. “I do not have the magic to cure it and even if I did, I would not have you in the world to plot against me. I can offer you a spell of sleep over death. Or you can die. Tell me now.”
“I’ll not be imprisoned under your spells.” Blood pours from the witch’s mouth.
“Very well.” Isabella turns her back on the woman and lifts my sleeping form from the couch. ‘We don’t have much time.’
“Awaken me now, if you can do it. If you have not lied to me about everything.”
“Go into your body.”
I pass inside myself. My arms ache from where the Duke held me, but there is no other pain. I feel her arms around me. I am laid down. I see nothing.
“This is not a good moment,” she murmurs. “I didn’t want it to be like this.” She lifts me against her and presses her mouth against mine, softly, her tongue slipping between my lips.
I feel her breath pass into me, her warmth. Her hair screens me like a silken curtain. My limbs are trembling, and then my tongue touches hers. I wish I could look on her and then my eyes flutter open. Her face is blurred. I blink and blink again. My fingers jerk. I try to speak. “Issssabelle.”
“Your limbs are not strong. I must carry you.” Held against her, I see the blurred outlines of the chamber and the figure lying on the floor. We pass quickly through the palace. Outside there is the snorting of horses. “Help me!” Isabella snaps, and a figure steps forward with a flaming torch and holds me while she climbs on her horse. I am lifted on to the saddle before her. “Now save yourselves. Quickly.”
In the moonlight, torches flicker, and I see people, servants, mounting horses and then we are off at a canter for the palace gates. The other horses gallop before us. Something is happening, I know, even though I cannot see clearly yet. The briar hedge seems to tremble. There are snapping sounds. The last horse passes us and Isabella kicks her stallion into a gallop. The briars are closing in.
“Isabella!” I close my eyes, turning my head against her shoulder. I tense my body against the deadly thorns. But they do not come.
“You can open your eyes. We are safe.”
And I do open them, and blink. I raise a trembling hand and rub away a hundred years of sleep. The horse is standing, nodding its head up and down and snorting.
“Look, my love,” Isabella murmurs. She lifts her arm and points before us. “A palace full of fine lords and ladies all fast asleep.”
In the moonlight, I see the tower above the hedge. “Am I really your love?”
“I am not the woman who put you there. Don’t think that I am.”
“Kiss me again.” I don’t know if it’s the old spell or her lips that make me weak.
When she pulls away she says, “Who will wake them, do you think?”"
“Those in the palace? I thought you merely drugged them.”
“Yes, but that was to ensure they would not disturb your waking. The spell holds them in sleep. Until that time when someone comes to wake the Duke.”
I think about the man who would have married me and put me on display for the rich and noble to gawk at. “If it’s love that is to waken him, I fear he will be asleep a long time.”
Chapter 17
The tale of the briar roses passes through the land. People recount it to the witch and her companion, not knowing that it is a tale we know better than they.
The roses of the briar hedge grow fat on blood, they say. Big, fat, succulent blossoms, ripe as forbidden fruit, they bid the passing traveller to reach out and pluck. But behind the petals, behind the blooms, thorns as sharp as knives on stems blacker than night. They have twisted and entwined their way through a century.
Sometimes men go there because they have heard a story, other times they see the towers and want to reach the palace of dreams. But they all come to the same end, those men. They are hung out to die on the thorns of the briar hedge. And the roses flower on, never out of season, never out of bloom.
The End
Artwork by Aleksandra at Fusion Dreams.
I adored this story!