Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

Masako anxiously glanced up at her glorious beauty.

The Lady’s skin was pale and smooth, but dark worn shadows cupped her eyes, and her eyelids were wrinkled with age and experience. She looked like she could be sixteen or a hundred years old.

Friend Rat. She smiled. Her breath was sweet, but her eyes were dark with pain. Guardian. Protector. I am most honored by your kind visit.

Me? Masako squeaked disbelievingly.

Yes, you. The Lady lowered her hand, and Masako crawled upon her palm. She bowed her head, humbled by the Lady’s demeanor. The pale Lady raised her hand, and Masako resisted the urge to dig her claws into her skin.

The Rats have always been my most trusted guards: loyal, wise, brave. But for a thousand years I have been bound by a curse, dying so slowly, every day. MyGuardians were scattered and lost. Lost from me, and lost in themselves. My Guards were flung to the outer realms, far beyond the Forest of Dreams. As the centuries passed, I learned to pull my spirit from my body. The Lady stroked her free hand lovingly against the coarse bark of the great pine. She took that hand and then rested the palm upon her chest. In this form, I traveled to distant realms to search for my trusted Guards who have lost all memory of their origin.

A golden tear of sap slowly formed in the corner of her pale eye. I had thought that if they ate a seed from my tree they would remember and return to me. Return they did, but only to ravage my branches for more seeds, ripping off my needles in their need to consume them. They ate and ate until they died. And yet I am not yet free. Of the hundreds of Rats I have found and brought back to me, none remain except this one. She gestured gracefully toward the middle-aged male rat.

He had been raising a pine nut to his incisors, but he dropped it with a sudden flurry, transparently trying to hide the evidence beneath his hind paw.

The Lady of the Pine smiled sadly. And my most loyal one; even he is rather flawed.

Masako blinked her small black eyes. She sniffed and sniffed, her whiskers sweeping. How many pine nuts were left? How could there be any left if the tree was so barren?

Masako-san , the Lady said gently.

Masako stopped sniffing the air and rose up on her hind legs. Can you free me from my thousand-year-old curse? Masako nervously scrubbed her whiskers with both paws. I’ll try, she squeaked. I can try.

The Lady of the Pine closed her eyes. Her eyelids were ridged like tree bark. Suddenly she looked so very ancient, Masako could not help but bow with reverence.

The Lady of the Pine began to lower Masako, but she stopped at her midriff. See, the Lady whispered. I am bound, here, and it is killing my spirit, stopping the flow of my life sap.

Masako gasped. There. A cord. It was tightly bound around her middle. But it was much too narrow and it cut into her dress, her flesh, down to the bone. Golden sap oozed from the circumference of pain. She was slowly being cut in half.

A great spasm shook the Lady, and Masako clung desperately to her fingers with her claws.

The Lady regained control and gracefully dabbed the sleeve of her dress to the corner of her lips. A golden stain marked the silver cloth. I fear my time is near, she said calmly.

What must I do? Masako held the Lady’s thumb with both tiny paws. She could try. She could try to get through to the rope with her teeth.

The Lady sadly shook her head. If it was such a task, little Guardian . she whispered. She raised her free hand toward the great barren tree and pointed upward. High above them, perhaps twenty feet or more, Masako could make out something lighter colored than the bark encircling the massive trunk.

There, the Lady said gently. That is the binding that is upon me. That is the binding that must be broken.

Masako closed her eyes. Her tiny heart tripped like a windup toy. She didn’t have to help her. The pine tree and her spirit were nothing to her. She could just turn around and follow the loud scent trail back to the store and crawl back out to her own world. She had no obligation to come to the Lady’s aid. Masako sighed. Opened her eyes.

She leapt.

The thick hide of the tree was ridged and provided easy paw-holds for a scampering rat. But the vertical climb was intense, and Masako was soon panting and wheezing with exhaustion. She was not made for endurance, only for brief spurts of speed. She was extremely grateful not to be able to see details farther than a few feet away. She had a horrible fear of heights.

Masako climbed and climbed. Her paws were growing raw with pain. She could scarcely breathe. She had no idea how much farther she had left to go, and she was growing so weary. But she continued her upward clamber long after she had burned through her initial altruism. Now she was frightened that the only thing keeping her from falling was her upward momentum.

A humming vibration broke through her flutter of heart, the blood ringing inside her ears. Something glowed, pale, white, like a winter grub.

The rope! She had reached the rope that choked the great tree!

Masako set a quivering paw upon the binding, but as soon as her tiny nails pricked the surface, the great rope moved, turning half an inch clockwise away from the point of contact.

From deep inside its roots the tree groaned.

Far, far below a woman’s voice gasped.

Oh! Masako gnawed her teeth together, her fur standing on end, her whiskers horizontal with horror.

The rope was alive. And it tightened when it was touched.

How? How on earth was she to take it off if she couldn’t touch it?

Incisors clattering, Masako began to crawl horizontally around the tree trunk, directly beneath the squeezing white rope. It was much more difficult going around than it had been climbing upward. Stretched out to the tips of her hind paws, she reached for a distant protrusion of bark. Just as her tiny claws made contact, the brittle piece flaked beneath her weight. Gravity yanked at her round middle, and she screamed as she began to plummet. Her tail, with a life of its own, swung desperately toward the tree and embedded its length inside the ruts of bark just as her opposite paw found purchase. She dug her tiny claws into the bark and sobbed with relief.

When she finally opened her eyes, the great white rope was right before her.

The rope. It was much thicker, here, than it had been where she had started.

It was not the same width all the way around.

What did that mean?

Masako climbed more carefully, planting her tail in the grooves of the tree before moving forward. One inch at a time, she slowly made her way around the trunk, her ears and tail growing red from the blood and exertion. She would climb around the ring of rope. To see if there was a flaw, a weakness that she might discover. To somehow break the binding.

She had rounded over three-quarters of the massive trunk. The rope had gradually widened, until, at one point, it was easily three times her width, but after that it had begun to slowly taper once more.

She had never once seen a spot where it was weakened or frayed. She dared not touch it again, to check, in case it choked the Lady further. She wouldn’t even let her sensitive whiskers whisper over the surface.

The rope that had been narrowing so subtly suddenly bulged. Thick, rounded. The fur along her spine tingled with abject disgust. She would have retched if rats were capable of retching. But she only convulsed with revulsion, red tears of stress forming in the corners of her eyes.

Even as her very essence screamed at her to flee, she continued onward. Looking for the weakest point of the binding rope.