“Indeed, milady.” Hemsworth sketched a quick bow.
Callista took a deep breath, trying to steady herself. She was unaware that her hand had risen to press to her stomach as though she was trying to force the butterflies down until she noticed Hemsworth watching her. “Well, I’m here,” she reminded him, repeating the words to steady herself as much as to say anything to him. “And I might as well get settled in, wouldn’t you think? Unless you’d like for me to return home and come back later.” Though she had not the faintest idea how to go about doing that, especially as the magic mirror that apparently made the instant transportation possible had been left with her sisters, in the hopes that messages back and forth would be easier to pass.
“No, milady. It’s good that you’re here. I’m afraid His Majesty is still in his rooms and likely to remain there for a bit, but there’s no reason that you can’t spend some time getting acquainted with the place. Ah—” Hemsworth considered her. “Do you have things for us to settle?”
“Oh!” Callista pressed a hand to her forehead, feeling foolish. “I have a trunk—I couldn’t carry it myself, and since I didn’t see anyone—”
“Of course.” He bowed quickly. “I’ll have it taken to your room.” He eyed her. “Did your sisters happen to mention the more, ah, unusual happenings about the castle?”
“Millie mentioned that there were more servants than she thought she ever got to see,” Callista admitted. “And Erin said that there were invisible servants, but she didn’t go into any detail.” And she was starting to wish that she had quizzed her sisters more than she had, even though it had been incredibly difficult for her to pull any kind of real information out of either one of them. Maybe if she had just listened harder, she would feel slightly less out of her depth in this strange place. It was unlike her sisters to have made it so difficult to drag the details out of them—almost like they had been trying not to tell her.
“Hm.” He linked his hands at the front of his body. Callista had the feeling that he was studying her, and she wondered if he found her competent or thought that she was wanting in some way.
“I don’t mind seeing the castle for the way it is,” she pointed out quietly. “It is, after all, my home for the next year. There’s no sense in everyone in it trying to hide its true nature, especially since it’s just the…” She counted quickly. “Five of us. You said you, two others, and the prince, right?”
“Indeed, milady.” Hemsworth still didn’t look convinced, but he did snap his fingers twice, then spoke with authority to thin air as though he fully expected to be obeyed. “The young lady’s trunk will need to be delivered to her room,” he said firmly. “She’ll have the blue room, I think.” He glanced at her. “It’s not the room your sisters used, but Griffin—er, His Majesty—thought that it would be more suited to you, based on their descriptions.”
“All right.” Callista smiled. “I’m sure the castle has plenty of bedrooms. I don’t mind having a different one from my sisters—and that way, they can have the room they’re used to when they come for a visit. At least…” She worried her lower lip between her teeth for a moment. “They are still going to be permitted to come to visit late in the summer, aren’t they?”
“I think so.” Hemsworth gave her a reassuring smile. “His Majesty really does want you to be comfortable here. He knows that it’s not the best of circumstances, but he hopes that you’ll join with him in making the best of it.”
“That’s what I plan to do,” Callista said resolutely. “Make the best of it, I mean. It makes no sense to spend an entire year sulking about the place and complaining, does it?” She had to swallow hard to get all the words out. Every time she mentioned the full year, it made her stomach jump a little bit with nerves. A year was a very long time to spend in a castle with just four other people, none of whom she had ever met before and at least one of whom was a prince who had done something to get himself cursed into a terrible beast. Neither Erin nor Millie had ever bothered to ask him what he’d done to get himself cursed, but Callista knew her stories: people were only cursed when they had done something foolish or hurtful or both, and that meant that more than likely, this prince had done something that was very bad indeed.
But she also knew that curses were designed for people to learn from them, and the prince had been cursed for a long time. That, she decided, would matter, too. He might not be her perfect knight in shining armor, but she was sure that he had at least begun to learn from the curse that had been placed on him by now, so she couldn’t judge based just on the fact that he was cursed.
Could she?
“I’ll show you to your room, milady.” Hemsworth gave her a reassuring smile. “Come. You’re free to wander about the castle as you like, of course. If you have need of anything, just snap your fingers twice, as I did a moment ago, and one of the invisible servants will attend to you.”
Callista studied him. “Just two snaps?” she wanted to know.
He nodded. “It seems the right way to catch their attention. I’ve never had any complaints, anyway.” He began striding down the corridor. His steps were a little longer than was proper for a lady of her station, but Callista was used to walking with Theo. She didn’t have any trouble keeping up. “They’ll also bring you back if you get lost, if you’ll just ask them. I will ask that you stay far away from His Majesty’s suite unless invited—he prefers his privacy.”
Callista’s eyes narrowed at that, but Hemsworth wasn’t looking at her and didn’t seem to notice. He liked his privacy, did he? She supposed that was possible, but she suspected that it was equally possible that the safety of his room was the only place the prince felt it was appropriate to remove his mask.
She’d let him have the space—but if the mask was as off-putting as her sisters had described, she didn’t think she was going to spend a year looking at it every day. His Majesty was just going to have to get used to the idea that she wasn’t the sort of girl who fainted away at the sight of something a little bit different—not to mention the fact that she wasn’t going to put up with any nonsense from him about her not being able to handle it.
Hemsworth kept walking, describing the castle to her as they went. He promised her a proper tour later, but Callista took no more note of that than the fact that he was putting it off for later—which meant that he had another goal in mind for himself right now. He certainly wasn’t depositing her in her room because he wanted her to have time to get her bearings; and anyway, she would have been perfectly content to go exploring instead of just “getting her bearings” by sitting in a room by herself, her stomach twisting in knots while she thought all about the prince she had yet to meet and everything it was going to mean when she did finally meet him.
“I’ll send Mrs. Picard up to see to you soon, and I’m sure she’ll take you down to meet Mrs. Martel,” Hemsworth informed her, gesturing her into her bedroom at last. If he’d intended to confuse her with his whirlwind walk through the castle, Callista thought, he’d certainly succeeded. “Feel free to explore all you like; the invisible servants will bring Mrs. Picard to you when she’s ready.”
“Ah—thank you,” Callista said softly. It seemed to be all he needed from her; as soon as the words were out, Hemsworth was gone.
“She’s what?” Griffin stared at his butler as though he hardly recognized him—perhaps, he thought ironically, as though Hemsworth was the one who had suddenly been transformed into some hideous creature out of a dark fairy’s nightmare.
“She came early this morning,” Hemsworth informed him, seeming to relish his sudden discomfort. “Just stepped straight on through the mirror, she did, like she had nothing better to do than to check out her new residence and see what life here is going to be like.” He hesitated for a moment. “Griffin…she’s different from the others.”
“I sincerely hope she’s different from her whining, complaining sisters,” he muttered a little more irritably than he’d really intended.
�
�She is definitely that,” Hemsworth said seriously. “You remember what the first one did when she got here, right?”
“The same thing all of them do, I presume.” Weeping about her lost year and complaining about the place where she’d found herself, even though of course, being a palace, it was rather the lap of luxury. Griffin had developed a strict policy of keeping his distance for the first few hours after a new girl arrived primarily because he was tired of listening to them weep and directing their ire at him, even though the truth was he had never directly been the reason any of the had been sent to the castle.
“Hm. Yes,” Hemsworth agreed. “And the second one—she was downright rude to everyone she encountered, remember?”
“Including the invisible servants.” It took effort to offend them, Griffin had realized early on; or at least, he hadn’t been able to do it, even though he’d railed at them more than once as he’d adjusted to his new circumstances. It was probably lucky that they were both invisible and, as far as he could tell, incorporeal until they wanted to affect the material world, because he’d thrown quite a few things in anger before he’d realized that giving in to temper only made him appear more beastly than he already was.
“Indeed.” Hemsworth smiled faintly. “But not this girl.”
“Really?” Griffin couldn’t stop the fact that his hands were tightening at his sides, and since he wasn’t wearing his gloves, he couldn’t get them into his pockets to hide it, either. “Different in what way?”
“Callista,” Hemsworth told him with the air of someone delivering very interesting news indeed, “is exploring.”
“Exploring?” He kept asking one-word questions. He was going to have to stop that eventually and start sounding like the intelligent, educated young man that he was, but Hemsworth knew him well enough to know that in this particular instance, clinging to short questions was keeping him from bursting out with rather more emotion.
He was ready for different. Nearly a dozen young ladies had now come and gone from his castle, and while he appreciated all of their better attributes, he was also quite tired of many of the other characteristics that they shared—most notably the whining and crying that seemed to accompany them from the moment they set foot in the castle. They missed their families—he understood that. They feared they were going to lose a year of their lives, though the truth was, once he was sure that they wouldn’t suit, he and Hemsworth were likely to find a different way to handle the debt, or the promise, or whatever had convinced the young ladies to enter his castle in the first place so that they could leave again.
So far, of them all, Erin had lasted the longest, and she, he often suspected, only because she had hung on out of sheer grit and family loyalty. She certainly hadn’t cared in the slightest for him, preferring that he keep his distance and glowering at his masked face any time it came into view.
Sometimes, he wondered if it was the castle that drew out the worst in these girls, or if there was something in him that caused it. Of course, forced captivity certainly couldn’t help; but surely it wasn’t captivity alone that had managed to turn every single girl who had set foot through the doors into a whining, complaining example of a prissy princess who was completely unhappy with her lot in life!
But not this one. Not Callista.
"She's...exploring," Griffin said slowly, turning the word over on his lips again.
"Mm." Hemsworth smiled. He wasn't sure whether it was a nice smile or not. "She stayed in her room just long enough to discover that the invisible servants were delighted to unpack for her, and then she decided to start wandering about the castle." The butler hesitated for a moment. "I mean, I did encourage her to do so." Which was nothing more or less than he had encouraged of every other potential princess to come through the castle, but which, so far as Griffin knew, none of them had ever actually taken him up on before.
"Interesting," Griffin said slowly.
"There's something different about this one." He always tried not to ask for Hemsworth's appraisal of the girls before he'd met them for himself. He would ask his butler—the only other man in the castle—to confirm his opinions, but he wouldn't ask for them until he had formed his own. He owed the girls that—and after all, he was the one who was going to have to live with the results of his opinion, when it was all said and done.
This time, Hemsworth had an opinion. It was also, as far as Griffin could tell, the first time he had offered a positive opinion of one of the girls who had come to visit the castle. Some of them had been tolerated; none of them had been well liked.
"I think that I would like to meet her," Griffin admitted. "Tonight. I had thought I might give her some time to settle in, to get used to the castle before she had to figure out how to deal with me, but this girl..." he hesitated. "Do you see something in her?"
"She's different from any of the others who have been here," Hemsworth repeated. "That's all I can say on the subject. There's no telling how she will react to you, Your Majesty."
Griffin made a face, though since it was concealed tightly behind the mask, he knew Hemsworth couldn't see it. He understood the message, though he hated it: different or not, better attitude or not, Callista might not be able to handle him in all his beastly glory.
But he could try—and that, at least, was more than he had felt encouragement to do in a very long time.
He waited until dinner time, as was his custom. He had no idea how much Erin and Millicent had told her. For that matter, he wasn't entirely sure how much they had remembered, once they'd left the castle behind, since their memory of him would begin to fade as soon as they passed beyond its walls. Still, it seemed reasonable that she wouldn't expect him until dinner time.
If he was being honest, he was giving himself time to brace—time to set his defenses back in place. He wasn't just talking about the mask, either.
Callista was standing in the entryway when he walked up to it, twining her fingers together in a nervous gesture as she looked about her. She had to have heard his approach. He was clumsy in shoes, now; but he had already decided that he was going to wear them, was going to look as human as possible for the girls.
Even for Callista, who already knew what was beneath his mask.
Still, she didn't turn. Griffin came alongside her, not entirely how to introduce himself. "What are you looking at?" he asked quietly, doing his best to keep the alien rumble from his voice.
"This painting," Callista admitted without looking over at him. "It's fascinating."
Griffin turned to look at the painting: an image of the mountains. "It's pretty, I suppose." He might have liked it more before the curse—when there was at least a small chance that he might be able to visit those mountains without someone catching a glimpse of him and coming after him with torches and pitchforks.
"It's fascinating," Callista repeated. "Look at the texture in the leaves. It's as though the artist somehow captured every one of them. And the clouds...you can almost reach out and touch them."
Griffin looked at the painting again—really looked at it, this time. "Do you live near the mountains?" he asked curiously.
"Right in the foothills." Callista's big blue eyes shone. "My brother Theo and I ride into them all the time. I mean, it's a long day's ride, but they're close enough that we can get there, have a picnic, and still be home for dinner." A bright smile spread across her face. "Theo always complains that it's too long away, that he has work to do, but he doesn't tell me he can't go, either."
If she looked at her brother with her eyes shining that way, Griffin was quite sure that he couldn't possibly turn her down. "It sounds like a wonderful day's ride," he said instead.
"I could take you there someday, if you want," Callista offered. "Once the year is over, maybe?"
It sounded like a wonderful dream—and an impossible one. Griffin tried for a smile anyway, at least enough of one to put it in his voice. Sometimes, he was quite grateful for the way the mask concealed his expressions. "I would l
ike that," he admitted.
"Then we'll call it a date," she said firmly. Finally, she seemed to really look at him, her attention drawn at last away from the painting. "Oh. I'm sorry—I'm really very bad at court manners." She colored prettily.
"I don't think that's such a bad thing," he told her courteously. Actually, from Griffin's point of view, it was quite a relief. He found himself tired to death of court manners, especially after Erin had steadfastly stood on ceremony with him throughout all the months of her stay.
"I hope you don't regret saying that." She smiled a very small, self-conscious smile. He missed the open, unscripted one she'd worn when she talked about her mountains. "Anyway, I, um...I guess you know I'm Callista."
"And I'm Griffin." He sketched her a formal bow. "It's very nice to meet you, Callista. Are you ready for dinner?"
She took his arm, even though he hadn't offered it. For a moment, Griffin froze. It had been a very long time since he had last been touched at all, much less in such a casual way.
Callista didn't seem to notice. She walked cheerfully at his side, letting him lead her into the dining room in spite of the fact that he was quite sure she knew exactly where it was.
He escorted her down the table. It wasn't a long table—there was no real need for one, after all—and took his own seat further down. Dinner was his least favorite time of the day. He was quite tired of trying to fit tiny bites of food through his mask, of forcing himself to make do with less than he really wanted. Less than his body needed, especially with the increased demands of the beastly form.
Callista darted a look up at him as he struggled to get a bite of food into his mouth without ending up with more of it in his fur than he actually managed to consume. He wasn’t sure how well he was managing. It felt ridiculously messy—as usual. “That can’t be very comfortable,” she pointed out softly.
Griffin studied her from behind his mask, waiting, wondering where she was going to go with that statement.
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