Bryony and Roses by T. Kingfisher Page B

was just about as bad as she expected. They were gauzy enough that she could still make out shapes in the room, as if through a dense pink fog.  
    House extinguished the candles. She burrowed down into the pillows.  
    As she fell down the dark well of sleep, a last thought came to her.
    What if I’m not the first?

    “Bryony….Bryony…Bryony…”
    The sound woke her. The horrible voice was back, saying her name, and furthermore it was right next to her ear.
    Her heart shuddered and leapt. She stared into the pink depths of the bed-curtains, her eyes wide.
    If I look over, what am I going to see? Is there going to be something there?  
    She had a stark vision of hands reaching up from underneath the bed, attached to a terrible creature whispering her name.
    “Bryony…Bryony…”
    “No!” shrieked Bryony, sitting up in bed. “ Stop!”  
    She flung her arm sideways, sweeping aside the curtains, and there, on the nightstand, stood a clock.
    Golden nightingales perched atop it. As she watched, they opened their beaks and sang “Bryony…Bryony…”  
    She sagged back on the pillow, feeling damp with relief.
    “It’s a cuckoo clock. A stupid…horrible… personalized cuckoo clock.”  
    She rubbed her hands over her face, feeling like ten kinds of idiot.
    The birds said her name a few more times, then closed their beaks. Bryony sighed.
    It was odd, though. She was awake much earlier than she had been the night before. Had she slept through the clock, or was it going off at different times?
    “House,” she said wearily, “please don’t…err…please make them stop doing that, all right?”
    When she opened her eyes, the clock was still there. The mechanical nightingales looked vaguely reproachful.  
    Hopefully they would stop singing now. Bryony went to eat breakfast, and then to turn sod.  

    “The house would probably do that if you asked,” said the Beast, coming up behind her in the garden.
    “No,” said Bryony, sliding one edge of the shovel under a square of sod and ripping it out with a heave. She flipped the sod into the wheelbarrow. Earthworms fled, wiggling, into the dirt.  
    “Certainly it would,” said the Beast.
    “I’m sure it would,” said Bryony, setting her shovel down. “I don’t want it to.” She walked to a tray of lemonade being held aloft by a stone dryad statue. (She found most garden statuary insipid, but the lemonade was too good to complain.)  
    “Why not?”  
    Bryony drained a glass of lemonade and set it back down. “Because this is my garden. If I let House build it for me—and then what, weed it and mulch it and prune it as well?—it won’t be mine. It’ll be a thing that the house made for my amusement.”  
    “Hmm,” said the Beast. “I understand that, I think.”  
    “Besides,” said Bryony, wiping sweat from her forehead, “it’s not like I don’t have plenty of time.”
    “There is that,” agreed the Beast. He sounded so humble that it irritated Bryony, who preferred him when he was feeling snappish and sardonic.
    “If seeing me out here working bothers you, feel free to grab a shovel and help me strip some of this sod,” she said.  
    He stared at her.
    “It’s easy,” she said. “Here. Here’s the shovel. I’ve already cut it into squares. Shove the blade under just under the grass roots and flip it out. Like peeling a really big orange. With a really big butter knife.”
    “Your gift for metaphor leaves much to be desired,” said the Beast, but he took the shovel. It looked like a toy in his hands. One paw engulfed the end of it. He followed her directions and awkwardly tore up a strip of the lawn.
    “We’re going to need to get you a bigger shovel,” she said. “You’ll hurt your back.”
    “I doubt that,” said the Beast, moving on to the next square.
    “Hunched over like that? Yes, you will.”
    “I am functionally immortal, you know.”
    “Good for you. Do you want to be functionally immortal with a bad