by E J Kitchens
“You can do that?” she asked in surprise.
Lady Violetta cocked an eyebrow. “Of course—oh.” She flicked her hand in Lyndon’s direction, and he vanished with a startled cry. The quill made a check mark on the cream-colored parchment. “Part One: Message to King Patrick. Check. Part Two …”
Belinda was going to make a grand entrance. At least that’s what Lady Violetta had assured her. The stone of the tower keep was cold under Belinda’s fingers, damp and slimy with growth of some foul sort. How was she going to get through that rock? Marigold nudged her shoulder, and Belinda rubbed her muzzle in return, whispering “Stay,” into her twitching ear.
A silencing spell had helped get them, along with the largest horse in the stable, into the village and hidden beside the tower in a little-used alleyway. A dark, hooded cloak and a uniform matching the Duke of Marblue’s guards kept them from being questioned by any who saw them. It was one of three outfits Lady Violetta had included in Belinda’s arsenal. She’d not divulged the other two, which would magically appear when called on. Belinda would have to trust that the enchantress’s surprisingly practical choice of the first continued to the rest.
And then there was the rose …
Belinda folded back the flap of her satchel and blinked against the rosy glow radiating from it. From an open box, she pulled a heavy golden vase the height of her hand. A sad smile twisted her lips as she held the vase up to admire it. It wasn’t a delicate thing she feared breaking. It had a look of strength and solidness about its masculine design. Polished gold, the emblem of the kingdom engraved into it, set with sapphires, rubies, emeralds, and diamonds. It was beautiful and strong. Like its owner.
An idea teased her mind and her eyes when she stared too long at it: it was wrought of a crown.
A rose, thorned and glowing, rested against the vase’s lip. The glow wasn’t the soft pink of a sunrise or the dusty rose of a sunset. It was the same deep crimson hue as the blood red petals clinging to the rose hip, limp and sparse. It was an aging rose for an aging curse. Why, Beast? Is danger a game for you? She brushed a finger gently over a drooping petal. It was soft as fur on one touch, silken as a young rose on the next.
The rose is the sign and focus of Beast’s curse, Lady Violetta had said. It cannot be kept apart from him. Don’t worry. You can’t cause a petal to drop; nor can he deliberately pluck them off. Curses have rules.
Belinda clenched her jaw. Curse curses and their rules. At least the ones Lucrezia took advantage of. But uncurse stubborn beasts who won’t give them up, she added in prayer. She opened her left palm and balanced the vase out before her. Calling up an image of Beast, with teasing merriment in his eyes as they raced together, Belinda held the rose in front of her. “Take me, please,” she said, and walked into the impenetrable tower wall.
A crimson glow exploded around her. Vine-like strands of gold flared and twisted through the blaze, shooting out and retreating, brushing against the wall and the alley floor, reaching under her hood to tickle through her hair, darting forward to some unknown target and then flying back to her chest to settle against her heart and tug her along. She jerked back at the contact, then eased forward, the tension of her shoulders giving way to the warmth of the golden flare thrumming against her heart with a pulse of its own.
The wall vanished, as did the alley behind her. The golden thread drew her along, twining through the tower’s secret ways, paths found only by magic and sly, creeping creatures. Through the crimson haze of light and flashes of gold, she could just make out the lines of stones stacked and joined together, the dark blotches of spiders on gossamer webs, the gray, scurrying forms of mice and lizards.
Stone and web and creatures all gave way to let her pass. No web caught her hair nor rough rock her fingers.
Then her feet felt the push back of solid stone beneath, a silent refusal to give way for her. Cool, musty air assaulted her face. Lowering the rose, she looked about her and instantly stiffened.
She was a small figure in a cavernous room, perched high on a rail-less stair whose apparent purpose was access to the cage, wrought of iron bands and sized to fit a man, hanging above her. Empty racks lined the walls where weapons and instruments of cruelty once hung. A few broken remnants of larger machines sat about the room. A trapdoor in the floor, nearer the wall than the center of the room, marked the exit of the criminals and traitors who’d entered. Tightening her grip on the vase as if it could shield her from the ghosts of the past conjuring violent images in her mind, she forced her eyes away. Higher up, to her left, at the solitary break in the stone wall, was a barred window, perhaps as wide as Belinda’s shoulders. Certainly not Beast’s.
“To him,” she whispered. Her heart jumped to her throat. The stone beneath her feet gave way. The blood red glow enveloped her again, and she fell as much as walked, following the golden tendrils to the black heart of the tower.
Stone once again refused to let her pass. Black and red blended. The yellow and orange of a flame danced with them; then the red glow fled back to her, darkness following. But darkness couldn’t conquer the yellow and orange.
Across the room—a dungeon cell—light from a small window high in a heavy wooden door reinforced with iron bands cast shadows on the wall to play with those from the twin torches flickering yellow and orange on the walls flanking the door. Shadows and light both outlined a familiar form chained, standing, to the wall. His head hung forward as if in sleep. Dark flakes of dried blood stained his cuffs. Dirt and grass smudged his velvet jacket.
The rose’s glow dwindled to a blush of the air around it, and the golden threads retreated to the vase, except the one that kept its coiling path to Beast’s chest, connecting him with the rose and her. The golden thread burst loose from Beast with a fiery jolt that Belinda felt in her own chest. It vanished into the vase with a golden spark, and Beast’s head snapped up.
“Beast!” With the silencing spell still in effect, she could only be heard if she wished it. And she wished it now. She pulled back her hood.
He straightened as if forgetting his chains, that hideous, toothy grin breaking across his face. “Belinda! What—” He clamped his mouth shut, his gaze jerking to the door opposite him. His look of horror was almost comical. He was chained to a wall, yet concerned for her.
“Don’t look so alarmed. I’m no ghost,” she tried to tease as she picked her way over rotting straw strewn across worn stone. But her attempt fell flat. She didn’t have the heart for it with him chained like a criminal. Well, she was here to change that. Making her spine as stiff as a book’s, she forced a confident tone. “I have a silencing spell. I’m only heard by those I wish to talk with, and so long as I want, they’re only heard by me.”
She left the corner’s shadows, the rose still held out in front of her. The joy faded from Beast’s face as his gaze fell on the rose and rested there, his expression shifting from shock to unreadable.
Liar. Traitor. Spy for the enchantress. Illiterate villager trickster.
The accusations swarming her mind pierced her like a rose’s thorns. Guilt knotting off her words, Belinda slipped the rose back into her satchel and covered it. As she did, a single petal loosened and floated to rest on her boots. It shifted to a warning tuft of chestnut fur, then vanished.
Belinda sucked in her breath and looked with horror to Beast, but he didn’t seem surprised. He knows exactly when each petal will fall. He knows exactly how long he has. He meant to keep his curse until the last moment. Stubborn fool.
She might think him a fool, but what did he think of her?
“The rose was the only way to reach you,” Belinda said hastily, crossing the straw-dusted floor between them. But it isn’t a way to get out. “I didn’t know Lady Violetta before I came to the castle. I swear it, Beast. I didn’t lie to you.”
He watched her as she approached and hesitantly examined his shackles, yet didn’t respond. She pulled a ring of old rusted keys from her satchel. Say something, Beast. Anyth
ing.
She tried a key in the lock, then another, neither turning it. “She just showed up that first afternoon and nearly scared me out of my wits,” she said, comparing the tip of the next key to the lock’s opening.
A chuckle rumbled softly in Beast’s chest, plugging the holes his silence and her guilt had made in her own.
Gathering her pluck, she smiled archly. “She asked me to help her out with a curse on a rather stubborn, anonymous individual.” Her smile fell. “I guess I didn’t have a right to interfere, but she said it was for the good of the kingdom and my father, so I told her I would try.” She hurried on, finally daring to meet his eye for a brief second as she fit the last key into the lock. “I can’t break the curse, but he can … and I wish he would, before it’s too late.” I don’t ask you to do it for me. I know I don’t have that right, but please, you’ve kept it long enough.
A sad smile barely curved Beast’s lips in acknowledgement. “I’m glad you’re okay, Belinda,” he said at last, his voice thick. “When I heard you screaming earlier, I thought …” He shuddered.
Stretching up, she slid her hand into his, startling him before he closed his hand around hers. “I wasn’t screaming for myself.”
He bowed his head. “She was telling the truth then? About Robert being hurt?”
“Yes … It’s partly my fault. He was trying to protect me—You’ve talked with her?” An arrow, tipped with gray but thatched with red, pierced her. She clutched at the red. If noble Beast thought he had to marry that woman because of some stupid curse’s forced proposal, she’d … she’d knock some sense into him! She yanked her hand back to her chest, keys clanking as she put away the useless collection.
A hint of a smile flashed across Beast’s face. “I pretended to be unconscious when Lucrezia came in to gloat. She didn’t buy it but said her piece and warned she’d be back tomorrow for my answer.” The unexpected lightness to his voice quickly faded to seriousness, and Belinda’s hands slowed to a more sure than reckless pace as she searched the recesses of her satchel.
“Has he a chance?” Beast asked, his whole heart seeming to be in the question. “Robert’s like my brother, and it’s my fault. Not yours.”
Her hand paused its search, considering both the vial beneath her fingers and the question. “I’m no physician,” she said slowly, releasing the vial and withdrawing her hand, “but I think, poison reversed, the wound could go either way.” She balled her fist around the satchel’s leather strap. “I think that was the intent.” Lucrezia liked to hold on to all her cards.
Beast nodded, but then straightened, rattling the chains, reminding Belinda to include them in her silencing spell. “Do you have any angry skunks or rabid raccoons up your sleeve, Miss Lambton?”
“I did promise I would earn my keep.” Forcing down the ever-present gray, she called up her best cheeky grin and pulled a short, round jar from the satchel and unscrewed its lid. “No animals this time, I’m sorry to confess, but I have something else.” She dipped two fingers into the thick, greasy potion filling the jar and began rubbing it around his left palm and wrist, careful not to get any on the shackles.
Beast watched, incredulous. “No amount of grease is going to get my thick paws out of these chains.”
“This isn’t grease. It’s a mild, temporary shrinking potion.” And it smelled of strawberries, which she found rather unnerving.
Beast’s gaze darted from the jar to his wrists, his eyes widening. “A … what! Belinda, if you got that from the enchantress I think you got that from, I don’t want it.” The rusty iron chains clanged as he tried to shift his wrist away from Belinda’s potion-lathered hands.
“Don’t be silly,” she said, grabbing for his paw. “You don’t want to stay here, do you?”
Beast opened his mouth but then shut it. Belinda captured his wrist without trouble and recommenced application.
“I hope you know that stuff is not comfortable in fur,” he groused as she moved around him to his other wrist.
“Then get rid of your fur.”
Beast’s gaze bored into her, then darted away.
That’s right. Think on it. She dabbed her fingers into the potion and gently touched the fur of his wrist, her heart twisting as she rubbed over dried blood and torn flesh. He flinched ever so slightly but didn’t complain. “Big baby,” she teased.
He cocked an eyebrow at her, then assumed an offended tilt to his chin. “You’re lucky I’m sweet-natured. Any other beast would eat you for this.”
“You terrify me.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
She laughed.
“I’d like to terrify Gaspard,” he added with a growl a moment later. “You wouldn’t try to distract me this time, I trust?”
“I imagine you’d have to fight the constable for him, but I wouldn’t object.” She gave the wild fur of his wrist a smoothing pat, then held her own hands up in front of her. They looked … oddly small. Flexing her fingers, she brought her hands closer, wrinkled her nose at the strawberry-ish odor, then held her hands out again. Definitely smaller.
It worked. It actually worked!
Stifling a giggle at her ridiculous appendages, she returned the jar to her satchel and wiped her palms on her cloak. She wrapped both hands around Beast’s forearm. “Try to work your paw—sorry, I know you prefer hand—down through the shackle while I tug.”
His arm muscles stiffened under her fingers. “The shackles aren’t going to suddenly shrink when the potion on my hands hits them, are they? Because then I’ll be stuck, and the potion on my wrists will wear out before the potion on the shackles.”
“Oh … um … We’ll just hurry. On my mark: Austen … Brönte … Shakespeare!”
She tugged, he squeezed, his hand slipped out, she tumbled back. His body went limp and fell away toward the support of his bound hand. She grabbed for his jacket as his other hand slid free under his weight. He fell back against the wall, Belinda toppling with him. Beast grabbed her round the waist, and they landed on the floor, with a thump and a poof of dust and straw, Belinda safely in Beast’s lap.
“Why, Miss Lambton,” Beast said, grinning at her without the slightest move to release her, rather tightening his hold about her waist. “I didn’t think you were the type to throw yourself at eligible bachelors.”
The ghastly, toothy smile set the ridiculous, misinformed butterflies in her stomach into motion as an image of a Robert-like face overlaid the familiar, furry one in her mind. “Self-deception is so very easy for the so-inclined,” she said, lifting his paw from around her waist by two fingers and letting it drop out of proximity to her. She scooted to the edge of his lap and made to stand.
“Ouch.” He gave an exaggerated flinch but made no move to stop her, helping her instead. A church bell chimed a quarter after eleven, and they both stilled. Spells are midnight things. Would the castle move without them? Or would whatever building Beast was in move? If the tower moved instead of the castle, Lyndon’s approaching help would go to the wrong place.
The church bell continued to peal its tuneful warning. In the silence after it, Beast sniffed. Boots scraped against the stone floor beyond the door—a door with a window in it looking directly toward the wall of empty shackles.
Belinda’s heart leapt to her throat as Beast pushed her off him and bounded clumsily to his feet, taking up his old, stretched position in the tangle of shadow and light. She crawled under the light’s path to the darkness beside the door. Holding the shackles in his fisted hands, Beast let his head hang down.
A rounded, head-shaped shadow moved over Beast, then retreated. The lock rattled, but the thump of boots against stone retreated. Letting out a great sigh, Beast sank to the floor, his ankles still shackled.
Without thinking about it, Belinda found herself nestled against his side, her shoulder pressed against his, her arms hugging his. “How often do they check on you?” she asked.
“Every half hour or so, I think. I was … thinking on o
ther things and not paying them much attention.”
Hearing the pain in his voice, she squeezed his arm tighter and laid her head on his shoulder.
He pressed his hand over hers and stared at the door, his brows a furry, almond line across his forehead.
“We can’t go out that way,” she said. “There’s a shaft from here up to the old torture chamber at the top of the tower. We can hide there until Lyndon arrives with help, or we can go out the tower window. You can climb the shaft, can’t you?”
“Yes …” The touch of his fingers over hers lightened, and something about his stillness set her at unease. “Belinda,” he said slowly. “You know who I am, don’t you?”
The cold weight of the golden vase in her satchel pressed against her leg, sending an icy shot to her heart. Belinda stiffened. Sitting up, she pulled her arms from around his.
“I see that you do,” he said sadly. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him hesitate, then curve his arm as if to fit it around her. But she was no daughter of a duke.
Belinda scooted forward to his feet and ran her fingers lightly over the plum-sized lock holding his shackles together, ignoring the soft brush of fabric as Beast lowered his arm back to his side. Her heart twisted at his sigh, but one of them at least had to be sensible, and she certainly didn’t have time for such sentimental nonsense as wishing she were his equal in rank. She gave the shackles an experimental shove toward his ankles. They barely moved.
Behind, she sensed more than saw Beast examining his hands. “This had better be temporary. By the time my feet shrink enough to get through those shackles, they won’t support me.”
She pushed up from the floor and brushed rust and dust off her hands. “Which is why we’re not using it on them.” She stalked around the sizable cell with its several molded straw ticks, bending to peer into corners warded by sticky webs and to peek into nooks and crannies in the walls.