Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt Page B

covered with roses.
    The queen saw the remains of men in the thorns: skeletons in armor and skeletons unarmored. Some of the skeletons were high on the sides of the castle, and the queen wondered if they had climbed up, seeking an entry, and died there, or if they had died on the ground and been carried upward as the roses grew.
    She came to no conclusions. Eitherway was possible.
    And then her world was warm and comfortable, and shebecame certain that closing her eyes for only a handful of moments would not be harmful. Who would mind?
    “Help me,” croaked the queen.
    The dwarf with the brown beard pulled a thorn from the rosebush nearest to him, jabbed it hard into the queen’s thumb, and pulled it out again. A drop of deep blood dripped onto the flagstonesof the gateway.
    “Ow!” said the queen. And then, “Thank you!”
    They stared at the thick barrier of thorns, the dwarfs and the queen. She reached out and picked a rose from the thorn-creeper nearest her and bound it into her hair.
    “We could tunnel our way in,” said the dwarfs. “Go under the moat and into the foundations and up. Only take us a couple of days.”
    The queen pondered. Her thumb hurt,and she was pleased her thumb hurt. She said, “This began here eighty or so years ago. It began slowly. It spread only recently. It is spreading faster and faster. We do not know if the sleepers can ever wake. We do not know anything, save that we may not actually have another two days.”
    She eyed the dense tangle of thorns, living and dead, decades of dried, dead plants, their thorns as sharpin death as ever they were when alive. She walked along the wall until she reached a skeleton, and she pulled the rotted cloth from its shoulders, and felt it as she did so. It was dry, yes. It would make good kindling.
    “Who has the tinder box?” she asked.
    The old thorns burned so hot and so fast. In fifteen minutes orange flames snaked upward: they seemed, for a moment, to engulf the building,and then they were gone, leaving just blackened stone. The remaining thorns, those strong enough to havewithstood the heat, were easily cut through by the queen’s sword, and were hauled away and tossed into the moat.
    The four travelers went into the castle.
    The old woman peered out of the slitted window at the flames below her. Smoke drifted in through the window, but neither the flames northe roses reached the highest tower. She knew that the castle was being attacked, and she would have hidden in the tower room had there been anywhere to hide, had the sleeper not been on the bed.
    She swore, and began, laboriously, to walk down the steps, one at a time. She intended to make it down as far as the castle’s battlements, where she could make it to the far side of the building, tothe cellars. She could hide there. She knew the building better than anybody. She was slow, but she was cunning, and she could wait. Oh, she could wait.
    She heard their calls rising up the stairwell. “This way!” “Up here!” “It feels worse this way. Come on! Quickly!” She turned around, then did her best to hurry upward, but her legs moved no faster than they had when she was climbing earlierthat day. They caught her just as she reached the top of the steps, three men, no higher than her hips, closely followed by a young woman in travel-stained clothes, with the blackest hair the old woman had ever seen.
    The young woman said, “Seize her,” in a tone of casual command.
    The little men took her stick. “She’s stronger than she looks,” said one of them, his head still ringing from theblow she had got in with the stick before he had taken it. They walked her back into the round tower room.
    “The fire?” said the old woman, who had not talked to anyonewho could answer her for six decades. “Was anyone killed in the fire? Did you see the king or the queen?”
    The young woman shrugged. “I don’t think so. The sleepers we passed were all inside, and the walls are thick. Who are