Beauty and the Werewolf fhk-6

by Mercedes Lackey

  It certainly gave her something to think about. So, the extra invisibles were somehow “already here,” and had been watching Sebastian. She had the distinct feeling that the intelligent ones were all in that set. And they had insinuated themselves into the household because Sebastian needed them.

  All of these conclusions only opened up more questions. Where had they come from before they were “here”? Could they actually be ghosts, the spirits of former inhabitants of Redbuck? Was that even possible? The only ghosts that she had ever heard of were hardly the helpful creatures that these were — nor were they even a fraction so physical. If they weren’t ghosts, then what were they? Some sort of nature spirit? Something else entirely? The familiars of other magicians who had failed to release them when the magician died? How could she possibly tell?

  She went to her desk, made notes, wrote down all of her questions and drummed her fingers on the desk as she thought. Godmother should have noticed if these were familiars, she wrote. Unless Godmother hasn’t been here herself since Sebastian changed. Something else to ask about. But I would think that even Sebastian would have noticed if they were someone else’s familiars, wouldn’t he?

  I still don’t know enough about magic, she decided. But of course, there was someone here who did, and he wasn’t at all reluctant to discuss anything about magic. Sebastian would probably welcome questions, she thought, with a little amusement. I probably won’t be able to get him to stop once he starts talking.

  The problem was, just at the moment, she wasn’t sure she wanted him to know these things. I need to think very carefully how I am going to phrase these questions, she decided, as she gathered up the items of clothing that hadn’t been carried off, and put them back in the closet. It looked very bare in there now — not only because about half the clothing that had been hanging in there was gone, but because the items removed had taken up so much room.

  She stretched, feeling ever so much more comfortable now that she was in one of her old, practical gowns. Genevieve is right, she thought with ironic resignation. I am never going to be a proper lady. I will never choose style over comfort.

  But the thought of her stepmother gave her pause — not because she was in the least afraid of what Genevieve was saying or doing right now, but because these past few days were the first in a very long time when she hadn’t been responsible for anyone but herself. When she wasn’t trying to fight down the fear of what she might become…it had been rather nice. If the Godmother was right, and she wasn’t infected, in three months time she would be back at home again, and —

  And after this, how can I ever settle into a life like hers? I already loathed gossip and gowns, and now…I am not sure I could ever just go back to supervising a household, not when I’ve seen all this. Which means that Genevieve is right again; no one is going to propose marriage to someone like me. Men want a wife who fits into society, and I am always going to be a little outside of it. Or perhaps, a great deal outside it. And if anyone ever finds out what really happened to me, would I become some sort of freakish thing, someone that people whisper about and wonder about?

  So what was she going to do with herself when she got back?

  She sat on the edge of the bed abruptly. Given what she had just gone through so far, simply remaining the odd spinster who stayed unwedded and made sure that her father’s household ran smoothly did not seem so bad… There was a great deal to be said for not being afraid you were going to become a vicious killer, or be hunted down by your former friends and acquaintances. And if people talked about her, so what? It wasn’t as if she craved all those invitations that came to the household. Granny would still treat her the same.

  Who knows? If I am eccentric enough, that might actually be a good thing. Eccentric people are often looked to for advice if they are wise enough. It might be good for business if I were to ask Father to set me up as an herbseller. And it would give Genevieve plenty to talk about, too, and she might leave the twins to grow into their own selves instead of little copies of her.

  She wasn’t entirely sure she would still be able to suffer Genevieve’s more ridiculous excesses in silence anymore, however. And that could cause more than a few household tremors.

  Oh…but will peace and quiet make up for all the things I know about now, all operating madly beneath the surface, things that people don’t even suspect? There was another thing; now she had seen magic at first hand. She knew, and not just abstractly, that there was so much more outside of the little circumscribed life she had led. Skating expeditions and Guild dances didn’t seem very exciting anymore. Could she ever go back to her old life after this?

  Nor was that all… Things are more complicated than even that. Now she had seen what was behind the faces that the King and the Godmother presented to the rest of the world. She knew now, and could never forget, that both of them were utterly ruthless when they needed to be. She had no doubt whatsoever that while Godmother Elena was going to try to save both her and Sebastian, if it came down to a choice, it would be Sebastian who was saved — and if it came down to “Sebastian and Bella or great danger to the Kingdom and beyond,” both of them would be sacrificed without a moment of hesitation. And for the King? It probably wasn’t even a question. He’d wield the blade himself.

  In abstract, she knew that this was how it had to be. Part of her knew that this was the only decision they could make. But part of her felt not only afraid, but betrayed. The King and the Godmother were supposed to take care of you! They weren’t supposed to be the ones who watched impassively as you went to your doom — or worse, took you to the edge of the Doom Cliff and shoved you over it!

  And if the King and the Godmother, both of whom were extraordinarily good people — she and everyone else in this Kingdom had evidence of just how good — could hide this ruthlessness, then how much darker were the things that not-so-good people hid? What villainy lurked behind the smiling faces she saw every day?

  So her safe little world would never be safe again… She knew that the nurturing hand also held the knife, and that was very unsettling. And now if she got the least hint that there was something beneath the surface of an action or a comment, she would be suspicious of anyone she didn’t know well.

  She felt the urge to go and unwrap that mirror, so that she could watch someone she knew and loved and trusted, and again resisted. She already knew what she would see, and it would only make her unhappy and lonely. What she needed was something to keep her mind busy. It would be easy enough to keep her hands busy, but she needed something to occupy her thoughts.

  Well, she was in a Manor filled with books. There might be a clue about Sapphire and the other unsummoned invisibles in them. She might as well start looking for books about magic creatures.

  Although the likelihood of finding anything here in her suite was pretty remote, she had to start somewhere — and besides, so far as she had been able to tell, the books here weren’t organized at all. For all she knew, something had gotten borrowed and left here by a previous guest. She might just as well remedy that before she turned to the larger library.

  When Verte turned up to summon her to supper, she had rearranged about half of the books on the shelves, and had already determined that there wasn’t anything about magic or the history of Redbuck here. But really, when she considered who had probably used these rooms, it wasn’t all that likely that the guests had been interested in magic at all. This had probably been a suite for important guests, so the books here were designed to amuse or serve as resources on questions of the Kingdom. They were divided unequally between various sorts of stories for the purposes of amusement only, and books on history. There were even a few about other Kingdoms. Such people had their own wizards or sorceresses to advise them about magic; they didn’t need to learn about it themselves.

  She was about to leave the room when she realized that she had never asked Verte the question that had led her to discover the invisibles were not all the sorts of creatures that S
ebastian had thought they were. “Verte, are any of your musicians willing to play for me?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he wrote on his slate.

  Could ghosts be musicians? I don’t know why not. They can obviously be seamstresses; why not musicians?

  She hesitated a moment, then made her request. “I should really like to have some music,” she said, wistfully.

  The reply was immediate. “You shall.”

  Sebastian was already eating when she came down, with a book propped up in front of him. He was shoveling the food into his mouth automatically, completely absorbed in what he was reading. As she entered the dining room and the invisible servant pulled out her chair for her, he actually jumped, as if she had startled him, and scrambled to his feet.

  “I am so sorry. I beg your pardon,” he blurted, blushing. “I got involved in researching things, and completely forgot that I wasn’t alone here. I’m just not used to having any people here but Eric anymore, and most of the time he’s off doing whatever it is he needs to do.”

  “Do you often read while you are eating?” she asked, taking her seat and nodding when the invisible steward offered her some of the first course.

  “Generally, yes,” he admitted. “Eric rarely eats supper with me, and even when he does, he’s not much of a conversationalist. I think he prefers it when I read, actually. It keeps him from having to try to make conversation.”

  Why am I not in the least surprised? she thought. Eric does not strike me as a fellow who considers conversation necessary at a meal. Then again, she couldn’t really blame him. Sebastian probably wouldn’t want to talk about anything Eric was interested in. What would Eric be interested in? Women, she supposed. She couldn’t picture Sebastian in a convivial, hearty, semidrunk discussion of women, the way many young men seemed to occupy their time. The sorts of things she had seen going on in taverns, but also in the private parlors of the wealthy when they weren’t out being polite to the young women they were supposed to be assessing for marriage. There were any number of parties she had gone to because Genevieve insisted, where she had taken to wandering off to see what she could find. It was amazing what young men would say when they thought there were no parents or young women about.

  But Sebastian didn’t seem at all the sort who sat about and boasted about what he’d been doing with the first chambermaid. Which sent her mind off briefly on a tangent… Could you get up to mischief with one of the invisibles? They had hands, but she wasn’t sure from Sapphire’s and Verte’s ministrations if they were human hands or not. And if you wanted to, how would you know which one was in your bed? She supposed an invisible lover might be very titillating for a while, but they were silent as well as invisible, so would that be off-putting?

  Ruthlessly she dragged her mind out of the gutter and back to the dinner table, blushing a little at herself.

  Considering the number of meals she had taken in her life where mindless chatter had virtually dominated every bite, she wouldn’t have minded a few meals in silence herself.

  “I can see that. Eric does seem to be the sort who won’t use three words when one will do. So, what had you so enthralled?” she asked. If this was a book about magic, it would probably give her the opening she needed to start asking questions of her own.

  “I don’t know if enthralled is the word I would use,” he said, making a sour face. Unlike Eric, who seemed to have two expressions, arrogant and sullen, Sebastian practically radiated everything he was feeling. “It’s not very pleasant reading. It’s about accidental Transformations, times when something went wrong and a person or object got transformed that wasn’t supposed to be. I thought I would see if there were any were-creatures that had ever been created that way, and if there were, if they were infectious afterward. It’s just not fair for you to be locked up here for three months if there’s no need, but before I can say ‘there’s no need’ I have to have evidence. So since no one knows how I got this way, it seems reasonable that the same rules would apply.”

  Good heavens, he is taking his responsibility to me seriously! This was somewhat unexpected. She’d thought she would have to keep at him about it. Evidently not. “Why is it unpleasant reading?”

  “It’s a set of very detailed accounts. And since these are accidents, the results are, as my father would have said, ‘Not appropriate for dinnertime discussion, young man.’” He smiled at her over his spectacles, inviting her to share the joke. “That used to strike me as grossly unfair since he and his men saw nothing wrong with discussing tournament wounds, bloody battlefields and detailed ways they’d dispatched whatever it was they had been hunting that day over their food.”

  She laughed at that. Then felt both surprised and gratified that she could still laugh.

  But after talking with the Godmother, after seeing her father, she felt a great deal better. Not that she wanted to stay here, but she did feel better, less frantic — and here was Sebastian looking up yet another reason to think that she wasn’t going to change because of his bite. “I can sympathize with your feelings, but I would prefer not to hear the details of that book,” she told him. “I am enjoying this fine cooking, and I would prefer not to have it spoiled.”

  “It’s good to hear you laugh. I take it that the mirror worked for you?” He closed the book and set it aside, changing the subject.

  “It did. It did, quite surpassing my expectations.” She paused. “I confess that now that I have had something that magical in my own hands, I see the attraction of magic,” she replied slowly. “I never really did before. Partly it just didn’t seem real in the way that something I could measure and shape was real. Partly because magic things always happen in stories to other extraordinary people, and I am, as my stepmother says, so ordinary I positively repel magic. And partly, well, it just doesn’t seem…the sort of thing that a rational person would want to be involved with. It always seemed to me that either magic was too large and uncertain to be controlled, or that you could get the same results with less effort and means that were not magical.”

  “It is uncertain, but The Trad — Ah, it’s more predictable than you might think,” he responded, flushing as he corrected whatever it was he had almost let slip. Since she couldn’t begin to imagine what “The Trad” both he and Elena had mentioned might be, she simply set it down as some sort of magician’s secret. “It does take an awful lot of effort, though. You are correct about that. And more often than not, it is more efficient to do things without it. I’ve been studying magic since the Godmother identified me as having the sorcerous talents and I still find it a lot easier to just go fetch what I need from the storerooms and light candles with a wax-dip. Since I was about four when I started, I’ve had a lot of experience in figuring out when not to do things.”

  Four! And here I thought he was just a sort of dilettante who took up magic when he was confined to his estate!

  “‘What is wisdom, then, but knowing when it is best not to speak, and when it is best to hold one’s hand,’” she quoted, and winked at him. “So wise for one so young!”

  He turned serious and she saw the weight of responsibility he suffered under. “I wish I were wiser. I could probably come up with answers faster. Most of what I do, when it’s not repeating spells that I know work, is trial and error. Mostly I make things for other people; I’m quite good at protective amulets, for instance, and the Godmother relies on me for them. Since I don’t go out and ride the boundaries of my property, I have my servants place more of those amulets at key places to keep my people safe from supernatural and magical hazards. I have Eric to ensure that they are safe from ordinary perils. I’ve been working on my own problem ever since it happened, when I’m not making sure my people are safe from me, and from things outside. At least I am fairly certain I didn’t transform myself. The things I was doing before I changed were all tried-and-true spells and I definitely took all the right precautions.”

  “Do you think your servants might be humans that had been transfor
med?” she asked. “The invisible ones, that is. Transformed from humans into whatever it is that they are.”

  “Oh, a magician could do that, but why would he?” Sebastian returned a logical question for hers. “You’ve seen for yourself that having invisible servants is deuced inconvenient. I frankly cannot think of any creature so hideous that making it invisible would make up for not knowing where it was, and I can’t think of any other magicians, even the nasty ones, who wouldn’t feel the same. Especially the nasty ones. The nasty ones are always having to look over their shoulders for enemies. Can you imagine how having invisible things lurking about would make them feel? Besides, I already know what they are. They’re Spirit Elementals.”

  “Pardon?” She had heard of Elementals before this, but…not that sort. “Spirit Elementals? Aren’t all Elementals spirits?”

  “There aren’t four Elements,” he explained. “There are five. Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Spirit. Only magicians ever bother about the Spirit Element — look, if you are finished with dinner, come up to my workroom. It’s easier if I show you.”