Midnight for a Curse

by E J Kitchens

  Dust, cobwebs, and the occasional lizard or mouse skeleton littered the unkempt room. Belinda let out a breath at the sight of such ordinary, possibly useful things, and turned back to Beast. He was staring at her, and though she couldn’t tell what he might be thinking, her feminine vanity couldn’t help but be pleased.

  “You look a bit … bigger than before,” Beast said.

  So much for vanity.

  Self-consciously, Belinda drew her thick cloak closer about her. “Lady Violetta padded my guard uniform to make me look more authentic.” She’d neglected to add weapons, to Belinda’s chagrin.

  “Ah. Clever. I may have to reconsider my opinion of her. She’s only sometimes lacking in sense.” Sitting parallel to the wall, he drew his knees up as much as the chains allowed and rubbed his calf muscles. “By the way, I knew that Lady Violetta recruited you after you’d arrived. I was rather angry for a time when I thought she’d sent you. But I’m glad you told me yourself.”

  “You … you don’t blame me for trying?”

  “No. You wouldn’t be the only one.” A rueful smile crept into his voice. “Lyndon never stops. What are you hunting for?”

  Belinda squatted in front of a stone block with a sizable chink missing at its base, but that didn’t mean the spot was empty. “A key.”

  “And you think a spider used it to decorate his web?”

  “I’m not actually looking for that kind of key. I’m looking for—aha—a skeleton key.” She took out a pinky-sized dropper bottle from a hidden pocket in her satchel and carefully dropped three drops each on her thumb and index finger. She picked up a dusty lizard skeleton of appropriate size, blew it off, and drew it through her moistened fingers. Cupping it into her palm, she hurried back to Beast. She opened her fist before him with a flourish. A short, stout bone-white key lay in her palm. A sparkle lit her eyes as she held it up for Beast’s observation.

  “You’re acquainted with the art of prestidigitation, I see,” he said in a voice trying and failing to be unimpressed.

  “How can you look at yourself and still be amazed at magic? How could you not expect it?” Laughing as she knelt beside his feet, she slipped the key into the rusty lock at his ankle. The strain on the key as she turned thrummed into her fingers. Hold up. Just a little more. The key clicked into place and slid smoothly round. The shackles fell off.

  “Just illogical, I suppose.” Beast stared at the shackles and then at his ankles, which he rotated and stretched. “You have another one of those for the door?”

  She shook her head as the key fell into a pile of tiny, intricate bones in her palm. “It’d take a former prisoner’s femur to survive that lock—we’re all alone. And it doesn’t work on fresh bone,” she added with a significant look, as if to forestall any suggestions from Beast.

  “Pity. I could’ve called a guard in. What’s your plan then? I hope it involves rescuing Robert as well, for I’m not leaving without him.”

  “Not yet. We daren’t go through the tower—don’t try to talk me into it. One sleeping dart and you’re out. We go through the shaft, then hide in the chamber or go out the tower window—don’t growl at me, unless you want another nice long nap. We’ll fetch Robert when help arrives. I know a very respectable, kind-faced matron of the village who would gladly bake sleeping potion–laced snacks for the guards and probably even a cake with an iron file for the bars.”

  Having wisely ceased growling, Beast hmm-ed in appreciation. “How big is this tower window?”

  Belinda sketched it out in the air.

  “I’ll never fit through that, not even with the shrinking potion.” Expectation and curiosity lit his blue eyes as they sought her out again.

  Absurd butterflies. “I wouldn’t dream of subjecting you once more to the torture of greasy fur.” Peering into the inside pocket of her open satchel, she hunted through a stash of bottles and jars, two of which held the voice-activated wardrobe changes. With an exclamation of success, she plucked out a thin, green vial reminiscent of a sapling trapped in glass. “For this, I have a temporary bending potion. For the bars and walls.”

  His eyes cut from the bottle to the ceiling above, as if it were the window, strayed to Belinda, then down to the glow radiating from the open satchel. Belinda’s heart thumped a little harder. You could fit if you weren’t cursed. “You’ll fit. One way or the other.”

  Beast said nothing.

  Belinda replaced the vial and stood, glancing around the coal-black ceiling for the shaft. Lifting the vase above her head, the rose providing an ominous crimson light, she took slow steps around the room. A scrambling noise came from behind her, claws against stone. Her heart ached at the thought of how weakened from the sleeping dart and the torturous stretching of his muscles Beast must be if he were having trouble getting up.

  “Sit back down,” she ordered. “We aren’t going anywhere yet.”

  “Yet? But—”

  “Lady Violetta’s order. We have to wait until the shrinking spell wears off your hands. We don’t want to fall down the shaft.” Like a metronome set at allegro, Belinda’s heart hammered at the idea even though her head saw its reason. They had to wait, yet they had to be out by midnight. “Something about magic resetting itself, or spells needing time to set, or something.” At least that’s what she thought Lady Violetta had murmured. She didn’t quite trust the enchantress’s cunning look.

  A sigh accompanied a thud as Beast settled back onto the floor. She continued her search of the ceiling. On the far side of the lengthy cell, the charcoal stone above her head was replaced by weathered wood and black iron. Standing on tiptoe, she stretched up to push against the trapdoor. Naught but cold air brushed her fingers.

  “You might help me open this, though.”

  “Gladly.” Beast pushed himself up, pressing a hand on the wall for support until his legs steadied. He straightened, shook himself like a dog after a swim, then marched over. His claws scratched lightly against the wood as he traced the edges of the square hatch above him before sinking into the wood around the metal bands. He wiggled the hatch up and down. “Will your silence spell extend to this?”

  “Yes.” If she told it to. She quickly did, grateful for Beast’s forethought.

  “Good.” Stepping away from the hatch, he jerked his chin toward the empty wall by the shackles. “Keep an eye out on the door, will you? I don’t want to ram this into your head on accident.” Beast flicked his wrists. Curved nails as long as Belinda’s hand shot from his fingertips.

  When she was safely at his former spot, Beast sank his claws into the wooden hatch, then began pulling it slowly down.

  “You’re not going to just tear it out?”

  He snorted as he moved his hands closer to the edges, then sank his claws into the wood there. “That would be the beastly thing to do, wouldn’t it? Rip out the hatch and go roaring up the shaft.” The hatch shifted, but only by a hair. Grimacing as if under a strain, he slowly pulled it downward. “Fortunately, your presence has so far civilized this beast as to make him realize that roaring up would only get him a headache when he crashed into the hatch above.” A strip of blackness an inch wide grew above the hatch’s far rim. “If I can force this one open, it might trigger the mechanism and open the one above. Then we can go roaring up.” Four more inches of darkness appeared.

  “What you’re saying is that I’ve made you into a crafty beast?”

  Beast laughed, then said softly, “I have a feeling you could make me into more than that.” He grunted as the hatch snapped open. Belinda’s exclamation of success was cut off by the sound of him slapping his hands together. He squeezed around the open hatch to her. “That would have been so much easier if my hands matched the size of my arms.”

  “They’ll revert soon, I’m sure.” They had to.

  After a brief check of the door, Beast moved back toward the shackles. He caught Belinda’s arm as she went to examine the shaft. “Sit with me. Your hands were affected as well.”

&nbs
p; Having no reason to object that wouldn’t embarrass her, Belinda let him seat her gently beside himself against the wall, the door across. He draped his arm around her shoulders and tucked her against him even as he watched the door.

  You know who I am, don’t you? The question pinged painfully through Belinda’s heart, each echo in a different voice: his mother, his father, Lucrezia, even Robert and Lady Violetta, her own father. Sarcastic, forbidding, shocked.

  They sat there quietly, Belinda stiff yet unwilling to move. But the steady rise and fall of Beast’s chest finally lulled her out of her stiffness, and she relaxed against him. What were a few stolen minutes of friendship? Everyone was equal in a dungeon.

  “I have a limp,” Beast said suddenly.

  The echoes began again. Yes, I know. Everyone knows.

  He sighed heavily. “Not as a beast, obviously. Beast is whole, strong, and heals rapidly. But in my true form, I’m not so fortunate.”

  “You don’t stay a beast to avoid a limp?”

  “Beast can get you out of here, but not the limping Prince Rupert,” he said with a bitter self-pity Belinda knew better than to answer.

  When she didn’t respond, he leaned his head back against the wall with another sigh. “For a while, yes. I have an older cousin—I’m sure you’ve heard of him.”

  Belinda nodded, her stomach twisting at the image of Robert with a knife in his side.

  “Everyone sings his praises. Deservedly so. When I was eight and had been riding a horse a few years, he let me on an unbroken stallion. He thought I was as tough as he had been at that age. He’s always had a foolish belief in my abilities. I didn’t last three seconds. I was thrown from the horse and suffered a broken leg. It never healed properly, and I developed a limp. I think it put as much of a hitch in soul as in my step. I worked so hard to overcome my weakness, to be the best at whatever I was assigned—archery, hand-to-hand combat, swordplay, politics and economics. But Robert always beat me, as did many others. I grew stronger for the beatings and the challenge, but they weren’t easy to take.

  “When I was twenty-one, my father, Robert, I, and many of the nobles went on a hunting trip in one of the more remote areas of the kingdom. We were ambushed. I took an arrow to the shoulder trying to protect my father. Robert took an arrow as well, but he also knocked my father off his horse into the shelter of a small hollow. Father was unharmed, Robert was well in two days, and I …” He paused, then took a deep breath. “I was confined to bed for a month. My injury became infected, and my arm, like my leg, lost some of its strength. But even before that, after I took the arrow for my father, as I lay in the dirt and leaves, bleeding and in agony, Father was yelling at me for endangering myself—the heir who should be protected.

  “He was concerned for me,” Beast hastily continued at Belinda’s indignant gasp. “He doesn’t handle fear for his loved ones well.” He smiled wanly. “I don’t take concern well. Or failure.”

  Impressions of Beast, like strokes in a painting, came together in Belinda’s mind. The enchantress’s description of him as an indolent, self-absorbed Beast. Beast’s own claims to laziness and frivolity but sneaking of kingdom-business books when he thought she wasn’t watching, his care for his servants and her. The two letters, the better discarded. “You gave up, didn’t you, for a time?”

  “Yes.” He said it with a blandness that suggested his mind had gone back to the moment when caring had ceased, and neither pain nor purpose mattered. It held a gray sound Belinda understood far too well. She tugged his slightly small hand into her lap, and he shook himself.

  “Yes,” he repeated, shame in his tone. “I saw the strain being king put on my father, the burdens he bore. I saw the people’s love of my cousin, so strong and whole and confident. I saw myself, bedridden again, never good enough—so I thought: what good was I if not first and best in everything?—destined to a life of responsibility and hardship I wasn’t fit for. So I gave up. Books were my comfort when I was ill, when I was sore and struggling to walk after a day’s training, so I clung to them. I became an indolent prince who lived for nothing but books and tea cakes and quiet firesides. That I was good at being. Father would certainly get fed up sooner or later and name Robert his heir. We could each be what we were good at.”

  “It’s your kingdom,” she said quietly, “whether you limp or not, it’s yours. You don’t get to choose your calling.”

  “Robert would be a good king.”

  Belinda poked Beast in the side. “You know your father arranged the curse to snap you out of your melancholy, right? You’d be a good king too. The kingdom’s always thought so.”

  Beast rubbed his side with a mock glare at her. “I figured out about the curse soon enough, about the same time I realized Father would never give the kingdom to Robert. He’d give it to Robert’s sister’s toddler rather than Robert just to spite my plans. Even if he did, Robert would reject it to spite me as well.”

  “Good for them.”

  “Traitor.”

  Belinda shrugged and snuggled back against him. She fancied a fond smile twitched his lips before he continued, his arm hugging her to his side again. “It was also about that time I realized I could be of use as Beast.”

  Her own smile flattened out. “The mirror.”

  “For a time, I can do more for my kingdom as a beast than a prince.”

  For a time …

  Her hopeful question vanished as he suddenly released her. “Speaking of Beast, we should hurry. My hands just started itching. I’m hoping that’s a good sign.”

  Belinda hoped so to, for her own sake as well.

  Holding up one hand, Beast traced his palm and wrist and on down his forearm, as if feeling their size, then nodded as if pleased. He stood and offered her his hand. She reached for it, but he suddenly drew it back. He locked gazes with her, and something about his earnest stare made her heart ache.

  Please don’t ask me.

  Please do.

  “I said all that, Belinda,” he said, his eyes intent on hers, “to say this: I can’t give up the curse yet—not even for you. Especially not for you. I need it to get us out. Even then, I’m not through with it yet. The kingdom needs it.”

  Yet.

  For you.

  For a moment all Belinda saw was blue, and it was beautiful. Then a gray haze dulled the blue of promise and of hope of a love returned into the royal blue of blood too far above her own. Such hopes were too good for her. She knew better than to dream of wonderful things for herself.

  Beast held out his hand to her, and she hesitated.

  “Belinda …?”

  The chime proclaiming the quarter hour vibrated through the tower stones … once … twice … three times.

  Belinda bounded up, clasped Beast’s hand, and dragged him toward the shaft, its open hatch blocking nearly half of the room’s width.

  Catching her urgency without the need for words, Beast let her tow him until scooting around her in front of the hatch. He knelt, his back to her. “May I offer you the breadth of my back, my lady?”

  Halting in pulling a rope from her satchel, Belinda looked askance at him, then up the seemingly sheer tunnel, and let her shoulders fall in defeat of pride. “Riding piggyback is so indecorous,” she grumbled as she replaced the rope. She clasped her arms around Beast’s neck. “I am not five years old, you know.”

  Beast shifted her arms away from his throat and rose slowly. “Indecorous depends on your culture. And I’ve never known you to let that stop you before.”

  “I thought a gentleman always agreed with a lady.”

  He stepped back, then leapt onto the wall, catching its stone with his claws, and began climbing up the tunnel with the ease of a spider. “I’m a beast.”

  Feeling her heart was out of its proper position, Belinda swallowed hard to push it back to its home before managing a reply. “I thought there was something different about you beyond the extra hair.”

  Beast chuckled.

  S
tone ruffled her cloak, and Belinda flattened against Beast. She sensed more than saw his careful searching of the rock above for handholds in the pitch black. For a moment, she thought she heard a commotion below, but it was probably only the echo of Beast’s claws on the stone.

  “Do Beasts not see in the dark?”

  “Not in this grade of darkness. Hold on.”

  She stifled a gasp as he swung back, twisting until his free arm reached her satchel. He pushed the flap back. A crimson glow dulled the darkness.

  “There.” He swung back around, grasping the wall with both hands before reaching for a higher hold.

  Belinda let out a breath, but it didn’t grant the relief she anticipated. She didn’t like to admit it, but she wasn’t terribly fond of heights. Not terribly afraid, but not terribly fond.

  “What are you hoping to find using the mirror?” she asked as a distraction.

  “I’m not quite sure. The man who tried to shoot my father was killed before he could tell who hired him. A bottle of poison was found in his pocket, but we didn’t think it’d been used on the arrows, since Robert and I lived. At some point, though, it dawned on me that the arrow meant for my father had been poisoned, but with a potion of some kind. I’d always thought there was something odd about my illness after taking the arrow. It wasn’t entirely a festering wound.

  “With my servants’ help, I used the mirror to hunt for and watch every known enemy of my father, every maker of poisons and any enchanter or enchantress with a checkered past, determined to find who tried to poison my father and prevent any more attempts. We’ve actually managed to stop a number of attempted poisonings and deal with the guilty, but we found nothing concerning my father.”

  “But when I looked at the mirror—”

  “It showed the Duke of Marblue. After much research and with Lyndon’s help, I discovered what the poison was: a suggestion potion. Some have to be mixed with blood to work, hence the arrow. Whoever it was tied to—the one who could make the suggestion—must not have reached me to enact it. Before the attack, Father had been after me to marry, and Lucrezia had been rather hinting I should marry her, as we’d grown up together. I told her no in no uncertain terms,” he added quickly, and Belinda wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or distressed that he wanted her to know that. “If my father thought he was seriously injured, he’d insist on my marrying immediately.”