“There, hush now,” I heard her soothing Alvie.
“It came for me again,” Alvie whimpered, and I could imagine how Ms. Potsdam brushed away the hair from his forehead, caressed his cheek, leaned over to wrap her arms around him.
“Now, you know there’s no creature,” she gently reassured him. “Never has been and never will be.”
“But—”
“Shhhh,” she cut him off. “And just you wait and see too, now that Kiara’s come, it’s only a matter of time now. Mark my words, dear, very soon, very soon he’ll be all human again. All of us will. And a man isn’t nearly as terrifying as a monster, now is he, dear?”
My stomach sank. I’d never thought of how my rage could have so saturated the castle that it wouldn’t allow even Alvie to sleep through the night. I knew what it did to me all too well, even to the servants, but I had never thought that someone who had never been the object of my anger would still fear it. But why not? Didn’t a frost that ruined one man’s garden destroy his neighbor’s as well? Didn’t a blizzard that fell on one house blanket the next one, too?
What a brave boy to be nothing but cheerful during the day.
It wasn’t until later, when I was finally climbing into bed that the thought struck me, doubling me over so I had to catch my breath. All of us.
What had I done to those around me? How much had my struggle with my own humanity taken from theirs? When all this was over, could they really return to being the people they once were?
Could they ever dream again without startling awake from a nightmare of me?
Neither of us ever said a word about what occurred between us that night, not the next day nor any of the ones to follow. I’d stayed awake half the night thinking about the kiss Kiara had impulsively placed on my forehead, thinking about the way she hadn’t shied away or been disgusted with the very notion of it. Perhaps she really had found some visible fragments of my humanity to focus on after all.
The other half was spent berating myself for becoming the nightmare of an otherwise happy child.
The instant I left my rooms the next morning, I sensed something was different. There was a hum in the air, a melody. Music. Someone was playing an instrument somewhere in the castle. Even faint, I remember it so clearly because of how rich it sounded having been absent from my life for so many years.
Remembering, I went straight to the music room, where I found Kiara, fingers dancing across the strings of a harp, her face glowing in a way I hadn’t seen before. Right then and there, I believed she really was an angel sent from Heaven to offer me some respite in my final days as a human. I had never heard her play, despite her professed love for it, unless she’d only ever played during the times I was away from the castle. Unwilling to interrupt, I watched from the doorway for several minutes before she noticed me. Even then, she only knew I was there because I started humming along with her, giving my voice leave to do something I hadn’t allowed it to do in a long, long while.
I had once loved music, loved to listen, even to sing and hear the differences in the way my voice echoed in various rooms. The curse had so polluted music for me it had become a nuisance and song an eerie screech, the wailing refrains of the anguished creatures of the Dark Forest.
Kiara laughed when I tentatively sang along, her expression one of surprise that my rarely used voice could competently carry the tune. She raised her own voice in harmony, and we sang together for an hour or more.
“It seems it’s been a long time for both of us,” she said, once the last notes had faded away. Then she fixed her gaze on me and said seriously, “Thank you, Azahr. For this. Thank you so much for all of it.”
I accepted her gratitude shyly, embarrassed, for it was I who owed her the thanks.
Like light, like laughter, like happiness, Kiara had brought the joy of music back to the castle, enough to touch the strings of my soul and prompt therein a melody of transformation. Enough to remind me what it would actually feel like to be human again.
I was sitting at my desk sorting through some sparse correspondence from Sir Garamond about the front, when an unexpected knock at the door interrupted me. My anger was already frosting over my veins from the reminder that I was not requested at the front or asked to further help in any way, but had been left to uselessly sift through reports recounting battles already over.
“Enter,” I gruffly allowed.
Ms. Potsdam poked her head in.
“Whichever you think is best,” I tried to preempt her so I could seethe in silence, mistaking her appearance for a question about breakfast.
She shook her head. “It’s about something else, Your Highness.”
“Well?” I prompted.
“Well,” she repeated, “it may not be my place to say this, Highness, but seeing as she is staying with us and there’s no one else who’s looking out for her, I was thinking that should—”
“What happened to Kiara?” I immediately cut in.
The frost was turning to ice, freezing the blood and pumping it to every limb and organ in my body.
“I don’t know,” Ms. Potsdam said simply.
I blinked at her. “What?”
“Well,” she tried again, “it’s none of my business and I shouldn’t have seen a thing, but the other night I’d forgotten to bring Miss Kiara a hot towel before her bath. When I remembered, she was already in the tub, and I usually leave it right there…and she was washing, and I’ve never seen them before, Highness, but I must have startled her and she turned to me, and then I couldn’t see so well anymore…”
She gulped a breath, this rambling so unlike her usually competent self told me volumes about how bad the situation must be.
“Will you speak or must I find out myself?” I asked into the pause.
“Scars, Your Highness,” she blurted, “like busted harp strings up and down her legs. Hastily, inexpertly healed.”
My anger was so palpable, time itself froze. Oh, how the beast wanted to ransack a village, what it could do to a people who would allow such a thing to occur. I barely managed to contain it long enough to ask, “Recently healed?”
“That’s just it, I don’t know!” Ms. Potsdam wrung her hands, near to tears, “I didn’t see enough, but they weren’t red. I just don’t know.”
I swallowed, pushing the beast back in its crouch.
“Thank you, Ms. Potsdam,” I said in a valiantly measured voice. “I’m glad you came to me.”
Recognizing the dismissal, she curtsied hurriedly and fled from the room, leaving me to wonder after her. What had she thought seeking me out instead of confronting Kiara? Was she only acting as a good servant to her master or was there something else at play? Was she relying on my reaction if her worries proved correct?
With mighty effort, I went to seek out Kiara instead of immediately giving in to my rage. At the very least, she might buy the villagers a few more moments of life, at worst, she might actually give me some names.
I found her in the small castle library, humming to herself as she exchanged the books she’d borrowed for others.
“They’re not going anywhere,” I commented, affecting a calm demeanor. “You don’t have to take them all at once.”
She spun at the sound of my voice, and her bright expression gave no hint to the terrible secret she kept.
“Good morning, Azahr,” she said cheerily.
I nodded toward the various small piles of books and the single page of sheet music she’d taken for the lyre she usually brought along.
“These aren’t all for me,” she explained. “They’re for the villagers.”
“They’re for the—” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. Didn’t she understand what she was doing? Didn’t she understand how precious these books and music were? How much time they had taken to accrue, how much went into each and every piece? The music was meant for her, not for some village folk who couldn’t value their worth.
“Not to give away,” she said quickly, perh
aps sensing the cold rage seeping from me. “I’m teaching the children how to read and sing.”
That stopped me short. “Surely they have a schoolhouse.”
Kiara nodded. “A schoolhouse, yes,” she said, emphasizing the singular word, “but they need two or three. Children of poorer families rarely get to attend, almost never for more than a few seasons, and some parents discourage their children because they themselves never learned much.”
“And you’re teaching them?” I eyed her from beneath my furrowed brow.
“Whoever is willing, yes!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t it marvelous? All these books and songs and finally people to share it with!”
“Kiara, what are you doing?” I demanded. “Most of these villagers are farmers and loggers and trappers. They have no need for stories and worlds they’ll never see. Most of them will never travel farther than the forest surrounding these lands. Yet you bring further danger to yourself—”
“I’m simply giving shape to their dreams,” she protested, her face flush with passion. “Rather, I’m giving them a dream! Books are nice to look at, but that’s not what they’re for. And music is meant to be heard! Think of all the minds that could—”
She stopped abruptly as the rest of my words caught up with her.
“Oh,” she said quietly.
She glanced up at me, noticing the severity of my expression.
“Oh,” she said again.
“What did they do to you?” I asked menacingly.
“They?” she echoed, delaying the inevitable. She leaned against a table, steeling herself.
After a heavy pause, she looked back up at me, breath even, composed.
“I was raised in a village owned by a local lord,” she began in a measured voice. “His holdings weren’t very large, but they held some farmlands, a cluster of villages, and his estate boasted a most wonderful rose garden that drew admiration from all over the kingdom.
“My father was his chief steward, a close personal friend and his trusted voice in matters of business and estate. My sisters and I near grew up in his manor. We even took lessons with the children’s tutors, which is how I learned to play the harp. Once, I unknowingly walked up to the stall of a particularly wild horse, and after someone finally realized where I’d gone, they rushed in to find it nibbling sugar cubes from my palm. Everyone agreed that I had a knack for calming more troublesome animals, so they set me to taming some of them.”
My anger hadn’t fully abated, but I was listening attentively, ice blue eyes focused on her warm brown ones. She may have been composed in her telling, but there was no hiding the hurt she was experiencing reliving her past. Forget ransacking villages, the beast was redirecting its rage toward whomever was at the center of her pain.
“The lord’s youngest son wasn’t more than two years my senior,” Kiara went on, “closest in age to me, so we were constant playmates. He was born over seven years after his older brother, so there wasn’t a thing he wanted that wasn’t granted. Until I said no.
“The lord had bought his son a new hunting dog, and it was a beautiful but brutish animal. The son didn’t want to give it up, and no one else wanted to go near it, so it was decided I should try my hand at bringing it around. I worked with it day and night, fighting for every bit of its trust, and every time I turned around, the son was there, too. Watching, not just the dog’s progress, but me as well.”
She didn’t stifle her shiver, and I couldn’t say then if it was only the memory or my obviously growing rage that prompted it.
“I was only fifteen,” she said through gritted teeth. “I knew so little about such things, about the way a friend could want more, about the ways he might insist if you didn’t. That last day, he cornered me on my way to training the dog. It was lunchtime and I was hurrying, I couldn’t be late to feeding or I’d risk angering a rather fickle and very vicious animal.
“He didn’t care, though. I forced him away from me so hard, he stumbled back. Then I ran. And it was seconds before I realized the heavy breathing wasn’t only mine.
“I awoke three days later, my legs so heavily bandaged, I couldn’t walk for weeks. The lord sought out a Healer at great expense, and while he made sure I could walk again, it was too late for his limited magic to undo all the damage. The son blamed the entire incident on the dog, and no one had cause to think otherwise, though I knew its cage had been locked. It was killed, and Father packed our bags and moved us far away as he could. He became a merchant, but without his former contacts, he’s been struggling to make ends meet ever since. And he won’t accept help from anyone, not even his sons-in-law, who are comfortable enough to have some funds to spare. I hadn’t touched a harp again until I came here.”
Kiara pulled back from memory and focused on me, the intensity of her gaze meeting me head on, undaunted, unafraid.
“So when I said I knew evil,” she told me straight, “that I had looked it in the eye, it was looking back from the face of someone once dear and trusted.”
“But—You,” I stuttered, waving my hand, trying to encapsulate all of her. “You don’t—”
“No, I don’t,” she stepped in. “I struggled a lot at first, but after months of ghosts and specters, I finally realized that it wasn’t my fault. And every day I locked myself away was another day he took from my life. So I made a decision that I wouldn’t let him have any more of me than he’d already stolen.”
She stepped closer and placed a warm hand on my freezing arm. Just there, just beneath her touch, my blood pulsed upward, seeking to feel just a little of the fire of her defiance to live, and live well.
“I have known pain and I have known darkness, and no matter what I’ve become, some sense of it still lingers,” she added. “However, I do not blame anyone else for it, because then I forfeit control over it. Only I can make it stronger in feeding it, only I can weaken it in denying it. What is this beast, Azahr, but what you make of it? What is its power outside of what you give it?”
I stared at her, barely comprehending that such a dark tale could come from someone so bright, so full of life and joy. But though her words may have been good enough for anyone else, they weren’t enough for me, not anymore. The faery’s curse made certain the beast would be powerful no matter how much I fed it, and its strength certainly wasn’t reliant on what credence I gave it. The beast was there, alert and alive, volatile and vicious, a monstrous entity which invaded every part of me.
Kiara’s story proved she knew well enough of evil and darkness, and her choice to live in spite of it was admirable. But even so, she didn’t know the beast.
I started to shake my head, but she stopped me with a question.
“Remember the song you gave me when I first came here?”
“I remember.”
“The sound of a man who feels himself two halves of one whole, captive of a war between evil and good,” she mused. “It’s true that most people usually find some sort of balance, some way for good to overpower whatever evil they harbor. But it’s also true that some hide the whole of their evil in the half of their good so no one is the wiser.”
“You could be talking about me,” I dared say.
Kiara shook her head. “No,” she insisted. “This thing in you that you call a beast, as long as you see it as something else, something apart from yourself, you can be rid of it entirely.”
“Nonsense,” I dismissed her words.
Kiara gripped my arm. “Nonsense is you locking yourself away from the world! How can you fight when you’re surrounded by so much darkness? When you can’t see the world that makes it worth it?”
“It’s better this way,” I insisted. “Safer.”
Kiara shook her head. “Come with me,” she urged. “Come with me to the villages.”
My thoughts on the wisdom of that were written all over my face.
Kiara loosed an exasperated huff. “Please, Azahr,” she pleaded, “let me show you. Let me show you the good your books and music do. Let me
show you how to give this anger some purpose.”
I hesitated, and Kiara doubled down, looking me directly in the eye as she appealed to the fraying fragments of my humanity.
Finally, I nodded, and her joy then was salve enough to keep my mind from endlessly berating my foolish decision.
From that day on, I drove Kiara into the villages for her afternoon visits. I even helped her pick out pieces I thought the children would enjoy and carried them to the carriage for her. At first, I didn’t dare enter her little schoolhouse, I hardly ever said a word until we were safely back at the castle. Most of the time, I sat hunkered on the driver’s seat, sinking into my blandly colored cloak so no one would think to look at me twice.
One day, it occurred to me how ridiculous a picture I made, a crown prince of a powerful kingdom and heir to a military legend sitting alone on a carriage seat because he couldn’t bring himself to enter a schoolhouse full of harmless children. I rose decisively, marched up to the door, then quietly slipped inside and pressed myself against the wall.
After a few days of this, I was in my usual corner when I abruptly tuned into the boy sitting closest to me. He was practicing his reading, though the book he used was meant for noble children much older than he. Still he soldiered on, sounding out each syllable with exaggerated care.
“The g-gener-general sig-sigan-siganal-led—”
“Signaled,” I suddenly heard myself say.
The boy turned to glance at me, registering my pronunciation, his expression otherwise unchanged.
“Signaled,” he repeated, looking back in his book. A pause. “And this?” he asked, pointing.
I leaned in. “Colonel. That’s a hard one, though.”
“Colonel,” the boy repeated.
He kept on reading, somehow confident I would keep watch over his shoulder, which I did. And I was back the next day. And the next.
“See, Azahr,” Kiara smiled in gentle triumph, “where is your beast now?”
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