Rose, Wilted: Book 1

Chapter 2 - Beauty

The next dawn found me tired and sluggish. My bed was calling me back, tempting as a lotus blossom, because though I had finally managed to get a bit of sleep, it wasn't near enough.

My dreams had been fitful and full of demon shadows, mobs, and a glimpse of a brown furred monster. Then my sisters were railing me and the mob was crying for blood, closing in around me and shoving a mirror in my face. My reflection was that of a hideously deformed creature with cruel jaws and shaggy fur. And when I tried to scream it came out as a roar. Then it shifted to halls of mirrors in a twisting, inescapable labyrinth, echoing with Ilsa's voice telling me how hideous I was. Her voice was joined by Blair's then Father's and then the chanting mob. I tried to run, but the voices only increased in volume until I sank into the floor and fell back into my bed.

I shuddered. A deep, disturbed feeling rested in my chest, left over from the real and dreamtime events of the night before. I knew dwelling on it wouldn't do me any good, but I just couldn't shake it off in two minutes.

In an effort to distract myself, I stood up, rubbing my forehead with one hand and fumbling for my clothes with the other. When I found them at last I undid my nightgown and slipped into my shift, then pulled my blouse over my head. Draped over a chair at the foot of my bed was a dress with a dark green bodice and a faded light green skirt and sleeves, which I slipped over my head. We couldn't afford a mirror anymore, and I would have opted to go without one anyways even without last night's dream, but I still had the fairly accurate idea that my plain brown hair was tangled mess. I grabbed a hairbrush from off the same chair my dress had been on and began attacking my hair with it until it fell straight against my back.

Besides that rickety chair and my bed, my room was essentially four wooden walls and a floor with some roof supports and thatch above it. That and a trunk at the foot of my bed that held almost all my earthly possessions. I opened up that trunk now and pulled out a small chest. I gently lifted the lid. Inside was a small pair of white pearl earrings and a strand of the same. And there was a ring of silver, shining innocently in one corner. I slipped it onto the ring finger of my left hand. I snapped the lid shut again and placed it back in the trunk on top of a carefully folded white dress. What I pulled next from the trunk merited a more grim expression. It was supposed to be a dagger, but it was more of a long kitchen knife, and it was in a sheath strapped to a belt. No one in the village went anywhere without a weapon anymore, not even a woman. I tied the belt around my waist, carefully concealing the weapon in the folds of my skirt.

I thought perhaps I might go into town today. There wasn't much left in the cupboards, and, as I reflected as I walked out of my room and down the stairs, we couldn't live on what the henhouse alone produced. I strode across the floor and grabbed a basket that sat near the door, grabbing a cloak on my way out as well.

I made my way past the blackberry bushes along the side of the house and back the hen house. I ducked inside and gathered up the four eggs I found there, placed them in the basket and backed out of the coop, latching the door behind me. I hurried back inside to cook them up for breakfast.

Once indoors I crossed over into the kitchen to the ashy, metal stove. I opened the soot blackened grate and stoked up a fire from yesterday's embers, carefully setting the kindling and the larger pieces of wood around them. It was much like the Phoenix of legend that mother used to speak of. Reborn from the ashes of an old life into something new and spectacular. But there wasn't much new and spectacular in this town, and this was truly only a kitchen fire. I closed the grate, squeaky in its hinges, and swiped the back of my hand across my cheek. Then I commenced whipping up the eggs. It really wasn't worth the trouble of frying them when scrambled eggs seemed to cook so much faster, so I made a heap of the latter with the four eggs I'd found in the henhouse this morning.