Beauty and the Werewolf

by Mercedes Lackey

  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 transformed?” 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.”

  She considered this for a moment. It wasn’t as if she had anything important to do—she could go stare at the mirror for a while, and then go cry herself to sleep, or she could take him up on the invitation and learn something about the invisibles. Or more accurately, learn what he thought they were.

  “All right, I would like that,” she responded. He beamed at her. It was rather charming, actually, to see him so enthusiastic.

  They left the yellow-scarved servant to clear away, and Bella followed him down—or rather, up, an entirely new path in the maze that was Redbuck Manor.

  In the rare moments when she had pictured a magician’s lair, it had been a place dark, mysterious, wreathed in smokes of various odors—most of them probably nasty—and definitely underground. So going up quite a long staircase was certainly a bit of a surprise.

  Instead of a dungeon, he brought her to what must have been a room in the highest part of the Manor. It had windows on all four sides, all of them glassed. The sun was down, but there was just enough light left in the sky for her to go to the windows and see that the Manor was built in the form of a square with a cross in it, so that there was not one, but four little enclosed courtyards. By going from window to window, she quickly determined which one was “hers.” She couldn’t see the conservatory from here, but she already knew it was somewhere on the exterior of the building—the sole exception to the fortified nature of the place.

  This part of the Manor was a squat, square tower that formed the center of the cross. The rest of the building looked to be about three stories tall, and the tower rose another story above that.

  “This used to be the ladies’ solar,” Sebastian said from behind her. “Father gave it to me when I started learning magic. ‘If there are going to be explosions, I would rather they were above us than below us,’ he said. ‘And if you get the solar, at least you can open the windows and air out the stench without freezing the rest of the building in winter.’ A very practical man, my father. I wish I had known my mother; I think she was a bit more like me.”

  She turned to see Sebastian grinning as he lit lanterns quite prosaically with a long, wax-dipped wick, identical to the ones she used at home. “As it happens, he was wrong about the explosions—that’s more in the lines of chymists and alchemists—but right about the stench, at least at first.”

  With the lanterns lit, this room was anything but shadowed and mysterious. Between the windows, the walls were floor-to-ceiling bookcases. And yes, again, all the books were in tin bindings, or at least, they were in metal bindings that she assumed were tin. There were several tables, but only three chairs. Among the shelves of books were shelves of neatly ordered jars and bottles and boxes. There appeared to be several projects in progress on the tables.

  And in the very center of the floor was a design that—well, she wasn’t sure what it was, other than that the design was inlaid into the floor itself. She had heard of magic circles; perhaps that was what this was. There were four concentric circles; the two bands formed by the outermost three of these circles enclosed circular processions of letters and signs, but they formed no words that she could understand.

  “Here, this is what I wanted to show you,” Sebastian said, and laid his hand down on the table, palm up, and whistled, as if he was calling a dog.

  The fire that had been burning beneath an empty stand suddenly jumped up and ran across the table to him and into his outstretched palm. She gave a little scream, and looked wildly for something to put it out.

  A moment later, of course, she realized her mistake, and flushed w
ith embarrassment.

  “Sorry, I forgot you aren’t used to magic,” Sebastian said with an apologetic expression. “Look, right now, he’s tuning his fire so it’s perfectly harmless to people. This is a basic Fire Elemental, a Salamander.” He held out his hand, and the fire ran up to the tips of his fingers. Squinting, she could see the fire actually enveloped the shape of a little lizard with big, glowing-yellow eyes.

  “He’s cute!” she exclaimed in surprise.

  “The ones this size are—the ones the size of a cart horse, not so much.” Sebastian put his hand back down on the table, and the Salamander ran back to the fire-pan where it had been curled. “I have him, a Nixie, a Sprite and a Hob. Learning to summon them was part of my education, and they are my special Familiar Spirits. Other magicians will know that they are associated with me just by looking at them. The Nixie is a Water Elemental. Mostly she lives in her bowl over there on the shelf and purifies water for me. The Sprite is an Air Elemental. I think she’s—” He peered around at the ceiling. “There she is, asleep on that beam.”

  Bella followed where he was pointing and could just make out the shimmering form of a little androgynous creature with dragonfly wings; the whole of it was more transparent than glass. “She’s often my messenger to and from the Godmother, among a few other people. The King’s Magician for one, Granny upon rare occasion—she has less to do with the folks I am personally responsible for and more to do with the ones who don’t have a magician to watch over them, so we don’t talk too much, once every three or four months at most. And over there on the hearth, the little fellow that looks like a sleeping garden statue, that’s the Hob.” The Hob did look like a rough-finished statue of a little man. His eyes were tightly shut, and he didn’t move at all, not even to breathe.

  “What does he do?” she asked.

  “When I need bits of specific metals or minerals or gems for a spell, he gets them for me. He can only bring me what he can hold in his fist, which isn’t much, but that is almost always enough for a spell.” He gestured to a chair beside the hearth and she took it. “A spell is a process, not a thing, you see. Just as when you take flour and water and yeast and put them together the right way, you always get bread, but when you take flour and water and butter and put them together a different way, you always get piecrust, when you put the components together one way, you always summon an Elemental of the right sort. You don’t get a demon, or a horseshoe, or a rose—you get an Elemental. If you make a mistake, you might get nothing, or a much more powerful Elemental than you can handle safely, or a much weaker one than you wanted, but you still get an Elemental if you get anything.”

  She considered this for a moment. “All right,” she agreed. “And so this means—”

  “That when I summoned Spirit Elementals for my servants, that’s all I could get. And don’t be overly impressed with ‘Spirit Elemental.’ They aren’t inherently superior, or more intelligent, or ‘purer’ than the others. They’re just creatures from a different Elemental Plane. That’s like a world,” he added, before she could ask what he meant. “And if I start in talking about the Elemental Planes and how they intersect and interact with what we call the ‘real’ world, I will not stop till dawn and it will make your eyes cross.”

  She had to laugh at that. “All right, I’ll take your word for it. But how do you know that the ones who are talking to me aren’t someone else’s familiars?” she persisted.

  “Remember that I told you that other magicians know when they look at my familiars that they belong to me?” he reminded her. “That’s how. We can see magic, which is a form of energy, like sunlight. That energy looks different for every magician that uses it. When I summon an Elemental, I more or less ‘paint’ it with my colors; all magicians do that. I’ve checked and they aren’t wearing anyone else’s colors.” He leaned back against the bench and crossed his arms. “So. Clear as mud?”

  Well, privately she was not as confident that he had seen all of them, but there was no point in arguing with him. “Actually, you describe things very well,” she said instead. “You would make a very good teacher.”

  He beamed with pleasure. “Well, thank you. Now that you’re up here, is there anything you want to know? All my books are here, so if there’s something I don’t know, it will be easy enough to look up.”

  “Well…yes,” she replied.

  And then proceeded to bombard him with questions.

  At first he answered her in a manner that was just ever-so-slightly superior—but she was relentless, forcing him to go into more and more detail, until he began to struggle for the right explanations, and begged for mercy.

  “Please!” he said, falling to his knees and holding out both hands in entreaty. “No more! I crave respite. My poor addled mind is melting!”

  She regarded him haughtily for a long moment, then laughed at him.

  “I’ll let you off this time, only because I am getting very tired,” she warned him. “Next time you will not be so lucky.”

  “I’ll count my blessings, then,” he said, and got to his feet, waving at a red-ribboned invisible that was waiting patiently in a corner and handing it a lighted candle. “I trust you won’t mind if I send a servant with you to light your way?”

  “Not at all,” she said, mockingly. “I have probably so scrambled your thoughts that you would not be able to find the right corridors, anyway.”

  It wasn’t until she got to her suite that she realized how late it really was—and how much she had, quite unexpectedly, enjoyed herself.

  So much so that she hadn’t the least desire to look into the mirror before she went to bed.

  9

  BELLA MANAGED TO KEEP HERSELF FROM GOING TO look in the mirror until after she had eaten breakfast; the morning did not start out particularly well, however. She went down to the dining chamber only to discover, to her disappointment, that she would be eating the meal alone; Sebastian was nowhere in sight. And she couldn’t ask the invisible in attendance where he was, either, as this was not one of the ones who could write.

  She resorted to the mirror, feeling as if she was eating a rich and indulgent sweet to make up for not getting something she wanted, as Genevieve often did. But the sight of her father drove any lingering sense of guilt right out of her mind.

  He didn’t look any more haggard than he had yesterday, but he certainly did not look well. As he worked feverishly over the accounts and invoices, she tried to tell if he was paler, or thinner. Was he eating right? Was he even eating at all? She couldn’t be sure—

  Cook will make sure he eats, she reminded herself. She’ll coax him, and bring him little tidbits. She vividly remembered Cook doing just that for both of them in the last days of her mother’s illness. Mrs. Hennister, the Cook, was a very caring woman. So was Mrs. Athern, the Housekeeper. Actually, all the servants from the “old” household were loyal and actually cared about their master.

  The thought was evidently enough for the mirror; it fogged over and cleared again, showing the kitchen, and Cook laboring over a tray of little puffy pastries with bits of sweetened squash baked into them. She sighed. Father loves those. Cook was watching out for her master; there was at least one person who was going to make sure he was as “all right” as he could be under the circumstances.

  The mirror widened its view. The rest of the kitchen staff was also working on things she recognized as her father’s special indulgences. There was a kettle of thick chicken soup on the hearth—made with cream instead of broth, and with dumplings floating in it. Someone else had just taken out a pan of venison cutlets wrapped in bacon, and she could see preparations for a jugged hare well under way.

  The mirror view shifted slightly, then began moving through the house, exactly as if she herself was making her morning rounds. And everything was going so smoothly she had to blink to be sure she was looking at the right house. Mrs. Athern and Mathew Breman were working hand in hand like old partners, ensuring that there simply were no incident
s that would require the intervention of the master of the house. When they had swept through all the rooms, they parted with a friendly nod. Mrs. Athern then supervised the maids bringing up breakfast for the twins and Genevieve, while Mathew himself brought her father a tray and literally stood there, waiting, to make sure he ate what was on it. She wished that she could hear what they were saying, but it seemed that the only time she could get sound was when she was talking to the Godmother.

  Once her father had eaten, the mirror fogged over again, almost as if it had decided that she had seen enough to make any reasonable person certain that the family was all right and there was no point in fretting anymore.

  Well, yes, and a reasonable person would, I suppose. She got up and went to the window to look down at the snow-covered garden. It would be a nice place to walk in if only it was spring.

  “If I don’t find something constructive to do, I think I am going to go mad,” she said aloud. She hadn’t quite realized how much of her time was taken up with—things. Supervising the servants, overseeing the shopping, going out with the twins on their rounds of visits. Learning things from Granny and putting them into practice at home—

  “Ha!” Now that was one thing she could do!

  This was a proper Manor house. There would be a stillroom.

  What was more, Sebastian probably needed things for his spells, things that she could concoct. She would find that out later. For right now, though…

  Sapphire’s ribbon appeared in the door as if her thought had summoned the spirit. “Sapphire!” she exclaimed. “Is the stillroom properly stocked?”

  Sapphire made for the slate and chalk. “Dun no,” she wrote. “V full. Sho U?”