Beastkeeper

by Cat Hellisen

  “Moth. Er. Find first.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Alan said. “I’ve been looking for her, and here I am.” He spread his hands, showing the empty palms. “But,” he said, his voice slowing, his frown deepening, “you could help.”

  “Yes.” A shivery thrill danced down her spine and set her tail thumping against the earth. “Yes. Find.” She raised her head, eyes closed, and thought of the smell of her mother, that scent of lilies and vanilla, of starlight and hot chocolate. The sound of her voice singing cradle songs and lullabies, soft and weak and off-key. A beautiful sound, to Sarah. It was there, a memory made real. A connection that only they had. It was a bond she had to use before she lost herself entirely to being a beast. “Can find,” she said.

  “And you think you can get to her first?” Alan stood, shrugging his shoulders like a great burden had just been lifted from him. “Before your father?” For a moment, Sarah let herself look at him properly. It hurt, but she stood firm, eyes unblinking.

  The curse said that she would be saved only if the person she loved fell in love with her. Alan wasn’t going to do that—he thought she was only a child. And worse, now a child who was mostly not even human.

  It was love that cursed, and love that saved.

  So, what if she could make herself fall out of love with him? It didn’t matter that he was kind, that he’d looked after her when no one else would—there had to be something else, something that could make her hate him. He was unpredictable; he was magic and strange. He was probably lying to her about something.

  It didn’t help. She concentrated on his physical flaws, on the skewed incisors that twisted his smile off balance, the size of his ears. His chin was too small and his mouth too wide. Taken separately, every feature was wrong. Unfortunately, together they made Alan, which wasn’t helping. Sarah growled and shook her head.

  He was older than she was, perhaps by hundreds of years. Time in the forest was always shifting. It meant nothing. It meant everything.

  “Find her, girl. And we can maybe save one life.” Alan looked past her, toward the forest. “And that’ll be something, at least. Almost as good as breaking a curse.” He looked suddenly contrite. “We’ll find something to fix you,” he said. “I’ll make certain of it. Freya will help you. I know how to make her change her mind. How to get her on my side.”

  Sarah felt her heart step out of time and discovered, with a mixture of relief and despair, that beasts couldn’t cry.

  * * *

  They’d been wandering the forest for hours. Occasionally Sarah caught a delicious curl of a familiar smell, but the scents were faded, and the trails always seemed to end in nothingness, doubled back on themselves.

  Alan said nothing about her failure as he plodded behind her.

  A musky beast-note came strongly from the east, and Sarah sneezed, backing up the trail they were on.

  “And?” he asked, finally shaken out of his silence.

  “Beast,” said Sarah.

  “What about her? Your mother?”

  Sarah shook her head and tasted the air again. The frustrating thing was that the memory-smell of her mother was everywhere. And if she pricked her ears, she could hear her voice, sounding like it did when Sarah had put her ears underwater when she was younger and listened to the indistinct sound of her parents’ conversations through the pipes and walls. Her voice ran under the forest ground, through the leaves and the pine needles. It was in the wind. It came from everywhere and so was nowhere. “Can smell. Can hear,” she said. “Can’t find.”

  “Well, tell me what she was like—the things that made her happy.”

  “Warm,” Sarah said, then sat down to ponder. Anything: her favorite colors, the food she’d liked. But all those details had slipped away. Even her face had become doll-like and unreal. She knew her mother’s eyes had been brown, but she couldn’t picture them. She’d worn yellow dresses in the summer and red ones in the winter. And always, she’d looked like the warmest thing in the world. Red, and yellow, and then at the end when she’d stopped being in love, she’d dulled into nothing-colors. Had worn a coat of winter blue that washed her pale.

  She’d been angry and sad, and her songs had changed. She’d listened to old radio stations that played music by dead singers. She’d started going outside to stare at the sun and hold cigarettes that she hardly smoked.

  Maybe that was why it was so hard for Sarah to picture her mother—she’d never been sure which of them was the real one.

  Except for arum lilies. Her mother had always liked those, no matter what persona she’d been wearing. And she’d liked bees. Sarah remembered how her mother would always rescue bees from pools. That had never changed.

  Sarah pricked her ears, stilled, and waited. Her mother would be with the bees, with the lilies. She wouldn’t be here in the forest. This was her father’s realm—and hers now, she supposed.

  Sarah turned her face, feeling the sun pull her. Even though it barely dripped through the leaves, and when it did its light was muted and green, the sun called her, and Sarah knew where to go.

  The light drew her back, away from the cold heart of the forest and the icy pull of the Within where the witches used to live, back to the castle.

  The woods bowed out of her way, and the drone of bees vibrated the air. A sound she was so used to ignoring, and now it had become the most important thing in her world.

  “You’re sure you’re going the right way?” Alan drawled.

  Sarah huffed once without looking back at him, and walked faster.

  The last of the trees gave way, and there before her stood the crumbling remains of Nanna’s castle. The grass grew dark and wiry, but it was spotted here and there with little dark blue flowers like sleeping stars. Sarah trotted out along the widening path toward the vegetable garden with its low, crumbling wall and the damp shadows where the lilies clumped together, showing their regal white trumpets and long yellow tongues. Their season was long over, but here they stayed, even though their edges were withering brown.

  The lilies.

  And the bees.

  “Here,” said Sarah, and wondered why she hadn’t realized it before. That her mother had been here, watching her. Perhaps, even as a bird, there’d been some last thread of mothering instinct that had tied her to wherever Sarah was. She breathed in deeply, and there it was, stronger than ever, an elusive smell on the air. Not perfumes or memories of meals and blankets, but a taste of salt and human sorrow.

  Sarah sat patiently, and closed her eyes against the thin sun. The bees droned louder, the doves purred liquidly from the treetops. It wasn’t them she was interested in.

  It came softly across the grass, dancing with the hum of wings. A small sound. Her heart beat faster, blood thrumming in her ears. She could feel every shift of the world against her fur, each slight change in the wind, she could feel the earth spinning beneath her paws, the roots of dandelions and aspens alike, threading through the mantle of soil.

  Even wings of small creatures change the shape of the universe, Sarah understood suddenly. She didn’t have to go hunt her mother down—not like Alan did, not like her father. Her mother’s love for her was still there, sleeping under her skin.

  All she had to do was be still, and to understand how the forest worked. It gave you what you wanted, whether you knew you wanted it or not. “Mother,” she said, her voice almost human.

  The bird flew across the clearing.

  Even with her eyes still closed, Sarah knew. She felt the passing of its shadow, could smell feathers and hear the thrum of its heart. She felt it land before her, tiny claws pricking at the world-skin.

  Sarah opened her eyes and looked down.

  The bird really was small, just so big, no larger than could fit in a palm. It was plain and brown. It could have been any of a thousand birds, nondescript, nothing. It watched her with its beady eyes, and the last bit of magic holding the miasma of memory around it finally left.

  Alan moved
so quickly that Sarah didn’t even have time to blink. One moment, the bird that had been her mother was hopping on the ground before her, and the next, it was cupped in his hands like a dark secret.

  The bird was just a bird now. The last of the magic that had tied the bird to her was broken. Sarah could feel the loss of her mother inside her, like a hand twisting out her organs, rearranging them to fill the missing spaces.

  Alan ignored her. “Freya,” he yelled to the castle ruins, but there was no sign of any of the inhabitants. He called her name again. “Come to me,” he yelled, and held one hand high. “I have her, Freya. Come to me.”

  Even Sarah, who was not being commanded to do anything, could feel the power behind his words. He was stronger than she’d realized.

  A white shimmer swept out from over the forest, and the raven fell toward them like a hurled stone. She landed on the bare soil before Sarah’s paws. The white bird looked to Sarah and shook her head. “I thought you safe still. You were too young.”

  “Freya,” Alan said again, and the raven finally turned her attention to him.

  “Beastkeeper,” she said. “A loyal boy, but foolish. You should have gone back to the city and left your love for the forest behind.”

  “I couldn’t,” he said. “You had made me too much a part of the land by the time Inga cursed you.”

  The raven nodded. “I saw, but I hoped that with me gone, you would find your way back to being human. There was none of my magic to keep you here.”

  “You were wrong,” said Alan.

  “I always was.” She hopped forward. “You did this to the girl?”

  Alan looked over at Sarah. He’d known why she’d changed. She could see it in his eyes. He’d always known. It felt like being drowned, like seeing the last of hope slipping away like tiny silvery bubbles of breath.

  “It wasn’t meant to happen that way. I befriended her, but I didn’t expect—” He shook his head. “I needed her,” he said. “I needed her to find the wren.”

  “For what?” the raven said, and Sarah was glad the raven had asked, because her own words were stuck deep inside her now, the last gasps of air she could not let go.

  “This,” Alan said, and raised two of his fingers, enough that the little wren could struggle its head free. “I’ve come to free you,” he said, and twisted his hands just so.

  15

  TOWARD THE WITHIN

  THE RAVEN WAS WRONG. Falling out of love was not always a slow descent, too dull for stories. Sarah fell out of love as quickly as the snap of a neck.

  The raven cawed, but that was the final harsh note it made. A high screaming filled Sarah’s ears, a howl of wind and beast. The air froze around them, and in one moment, the world turned from fading warmth to the bitter snowstorm fury of the Within, freed now as its ruler was.

  The scream went on forever, a kettle that never stopped boiling. Sarah couldn’t move for the pain of it; the sound dug needles into her head. She curled up, trying to protect herself from the raging storm, from the razor shards of ice blown around her.

  And then it stopped.

  A sudden silence, no movement. She raised her head warily, and saw a world frozen in time. The ice and snow hung in the air as if held by invisible wires. They twirled in place, scattering light between their thousand broken crystals. At the center of the motionless maelstrom stood two figures.

  Alan, with his offering held out before him, its neck limp.

  And the witch. Freya. The other grandmother. She wasn’t pretty or terrible. A handsome woman. Ugly-beautiful, with proud eyes. She was wearing a cloak of white feathers that pooled heavily about her feet. Her hair was silver with age, but her face was unlined, her eyes the pale blue of a winter sky. All about her hung a feeling of immense power.

  It pressed Sarah down, held her in her place.

  Then Freya spoke. Her voice was no louder than the softest hush of a playful wind against the very tops of trees, but at the same time, it was loud enough to shake the bones of the world. “What have you done?” she asked, staring at the boy, and at the dead bird in his hands.

  “Freed you,” Alan said, and let the bird drop. “Because you wouldn’t do it yourself.”

  “I would have stayed cursed,” said Freya. She did not look down at the little corpse at her feet. “I would have stayed cursed.”

  Alan swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “She was dead anyway, the moment she left him. You know that. She couldn’t live unless you lifted the curse from them all. And you never would because it would cost you all you are.” He held his ground, eyes like suns. “If you’d loved her like you said, you would have set her free no matter what. She was already dead. Your curse did that. You did that.”

  “I could not lift it.” Freya stepped forward, breaking the spell that held the world still. The ice crystals dropped to the ground, covering it in a sea of shattered glass.

  Sarah tensed, feeling herself rise with the release of the pressure. She wanted to tear Alan’s throat out. She wanted to make him run.

  And then I will be nothing more than a beast, truly. The curse was far from broken. She still had to hold on to what was left of the human parts of her. The struggle was immense. Froth built up in her mouth and dripped from her jaws with the effort of keeping herself from leaping up at him, from feeling his windpipe crushed between her teeth. Instead, she looked at her grandmother’s feet, at the dead bird there. It was just a bird, as Alan said.

  It had stopped being her mother the day it flew from her life.

  The truth of it didn’t make things better.

  “I did what I had to,” Alan said. “I only did the things you should have. It was that, or leave you to die a slave to your own hatred.”

  Freya put her hand to Alan’s cheek. “So loyal, after all these years. And all done to free me.” She slid her hand back into his hair, and tightened her grip. “Did you think I would be pleased?”

  “Yes,” he said, but it came out a hiss of pain. “I gave you back to yourself, returned all your power.”

  “She was my daughter.” Freya glanced down at Sarah. “My granddaughter is a beast now, her life ruined, and what did you do in exchange? Hunted down one little bird and snapped its neck.”

  “One little bird who never loved you,” Alan said. His eyes were streaming, but he kept his voice even, low. As if he was trying to calm the very different beast that Freya had become.

  “I had a selfish daughter, a flighty daughter, a daughter who changed her heart as easily as her outfits.” Freya smiled, showing her teeth unnaturally. “I did not need a beastkeeper to remind me of that. Still.” She released Alan. “I suppose I owe you some small reward, at least.”

  Alan looked away for the first time. “I want nothing from you, just for you to be free. Before you took me in, I was nothing more than a starveling child with a dead family. I owe you at least a life.”

  “I should have left you where I found you.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  The silence streamed between them, and Sarah concentrated, trying to piece together these last bits of Alan’s and her grandmother’s story—a chance bit of compassion, and this was what had come of it.

  “I didn’t save you out of pity, boy. I needed a beastkeeper, nothing more. And now you think to repay my thoughtless kindness with some of your own. How noble you think you are,” Freya said. “Fine, then. You’ve freed me from my curse. Ask for one thing. Contracts are contracts.”

  “Change the girl back,” he said.

  Sarah’s heart leaped up, beating against her rib cage.

  “I cannot,” said Freya. “You stupid, stupid child.” She moved forward, her arms lifting the white cloak of feathers around her, and embraced Alan.

  The storm rose as suddenly as it had stopped; a brief roar of icy wind passed through the clearing and was gone again.

  And Freya and Alan were gone with it.

  * * *

  The birds in the forest boughs resumed their song as
if nothing had happened. The ice was already melting into the ground; the bees began their relentless drone.

  A small breeze ruffled the feathers on the wren. It lay in a puddle of ice water. Sarah shuffled closer and picked up the body as carefully as she could with her sharp teeth, not wanting to break any more bones, even now.

  From the castle came a bang as the doors crashed open. Nanna stood outlined in the castle mouth, like the start of a scream. “Where is she?” Nanna said. Her eyes narrowed as she took in the animal standing in the clearing and realized it was Sarah. “And you too, now,” she said. “Well, I suppose there’s a certain irony to that.”

  Her eyes went to the little corpse Sarah held so tenderly.

  “What have you done? You’ve set Freya free, you ungrateful little wretch!” She spread her arms, her cloak of fur flapping heavily behind her, and a raking wind sprang up around Sarah, furnace hot, clawing at her eyes and mouth and nose. The wind tugged at her fur with cruel fingers, dragging her across the earth toward her grandmother. “First him, and now this?” Nanna’s screech was as rabid and fierce as the wind itself. “For this, girl, you will suffer. I’ll see to it.”

  Sarah shook the magic off with a huge burst of will, and tried to run. She needed to be far from the castle and from Nanna’s sphere of power. The falling-down turrets and the broken walls overrun with nettles were all that was left of Nanna’s magic. Freya had told her that Nanna’s power didn’t extend all the way to the river. If she could get there, she would be safe, at least.

  She strained against the pulling wind, head bowed as she struggled to take one step after the other toward the forest. It was not safe either, not at all, but it seemed now that nowhere was safe. The people who should have loved her hadn’t; her enemies wore smiles, and her family, snarls.

  The wind released her as her grandmother’s burst of power faltered, and finally Sarah leaped free, galloping for the cool dark of the shadowed forest.

  If nothing else, now that she was a beast, the forest accepted her completely. Sarah raced through the twisting deer trails, following the secret magic of the ancient land. It is an old forest, Alan had said, and old forests remember. He had shown her how to do this, but it had seemed strange and unbelievable to her—certainly not something she’d ever be able to do herself. But now, as a beast, the woods flowed around her, dragging her on. Now she understood—it was about being one with the forest, and as a human girl, she’d never been able to do it.