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“Imagine if I’d nicked the silverware!”
    “Would you like to nick the silverware? We have a great deal of it.”
    “But not of roses, apparently!”  
    “I am sorry,” said the Beast. “I have need of you.”
    “But I cannot stay with you,” she said. “My sisters—the garden—they’ll starve! And my plants—”
    She loved her sisters very much and would have died for them gladly, but the thought of losing her garden, the long rows of vegetables and the wild edging of herbs and flowers, the great purple sprays of lavender and the soft fuzz of lamb’s ear—that was a loss so great she did not have words to wrap around it.
    “They’ll starve,” she said again, because she knew that only a gardener would understand her other grief, and there was nothing about the Beast to give her hope. “I am the one who grows all the vegetables—”
    “Can they not learn?” rumbled the Beast.
    “Oh no. Well, Holly could. Iris is useless for anything but embroidery, she is afraid of worms…Oh, I only hope they can learn quickly enough! We have worked so hard, we came from so little—” She raked her hands through her hair. “We have earned a little breathing room, but a bad harvest or a missing gardener—”  
    She stopped, aware that she was talking too much, keenly aware of how pointless it all was. The Beast, in his vast manor, could not possibly know or care what it was like to be so poor that a well-stocked root cellar was the only hedge against starvation.   She knotted her fingers together and stared down at them.  
    She would not beg.  
    In the bright shadows of the fire, the Beast shifted restlessly and said, in a low earthen rumble, “Perhaps I can make it easier.”  
    “You can let me go!”
    He shook his great head. “I will give you a week to return to your sisters. Then you must come back to me, or I will come to fetch you.”
    Bryony’s heart, which had risen a little, sank down to her toes.   “Come and fetch me,” she repeated tonelessly.
    “The house will,” said the Beast.   “I cannot leave the grounds. The house, however…” He spread his clawed hands. “Even I do not know all that the house is capable of.”  
    Strangely, she did not doubt him. She wondered vaguely how it would happen. Would she step outside the cottage and find her feet on the road leading to the iron gate? Would Fumblefoot lead her here when her hands faltered on the reins?  
    Would the house tear itself up from its foundations and go striding across the landscape on legs of masonry and mortar?  
    She put her face in her hands.  
    “I suppose that I can hardly stay inside the cottage for the rest of my life,” she said dully. “And if the house comes for me, my sisters—”
    She stopped. The notion of the house reaching out for her and catching Iris or Holly instead was too much to bear. Holly would try to fight and be killed, and Iris would cower in a corner and weep.  
    Iris had only barely recovered from the death of their father. Something like the Beast she might never recover from again.  
    “It is a large house,” said the Beast. “You will have all that you desire. Books, fine clothes…”
      “Swear that you will not hurt my sisters,” she said fiercely, turning on him, not caring about the state of her clothes any longer, or that she was like a mouse making demands of a wolf. “Swear that if I stay with you, you’ll leave my sisters out of this.”
    “I want nothing of them,” said the Beast. “If you come back within a week, they shall never see me.”
    Bryony’s breath hissed between her teeth.  
    “Then I shall stay,” she said, and the realization that her garden was lost to her was a cut so deep that she wrapped her arms around her belly and her breath caught with it. Only the knowledge that the Beast was watching her, and that she did not want to show any weakness before her captor kept her from gasping.
    Perhaps I will not have to stay. Perhaps when he has had