Beast of Rosemead: A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast (Fairytales of Folkshore Book 4)

by Lucy Tempest

  But in the maelstrom, fragmented recollections started to rain down, lodging together like a shattered window reforming. Still, none led back to the point that had brought us here.

  I now clearly remembered the past week, as the town had gotten ready for our midsummer bonfire. I remembered everything up to yesterday, when Adelaide had gifted me books she’d stolen from the Dufreyne mansion.

  One of the books, a magnificent leather-bound tome, was called The Known World. It had held a map of the Folkshore, a world our entire land knew nothing about, or had forgotten. According to everyone in Ericura, our island was the whole world, and we were the only ones left in it. Aside from the fairies we believed lived across the border of Man’s Reach, what manifested in our town as the Hornswoods that no one could cross.

  I’d always hoped everyone was wrong. And as I’d stared at that map, I’d become certain they were. The Known World told of a vast world beyond our island, reigniting my desire to leave home, not to travel the island, but to go beyond it.

  The words on Sir Dale’s sword had come from a tale I’d read years ago, about a land called Arboria. On the map of the Folkshore, it lay across a Forbidden Ocean that separated it from fairies in their Fair Folk’s Shore, with our island caught between them. That Arboria, what I’d thought our ancestors had hailed from, had been my desired destination.

  And Castor had just said I was there. If this Arbore he’d mentioned was the same place.

  I swayed, feeling faint. “Do you mean Arboria? And what do you mean ‘fabled island?’”

  Castor came closer, offering me a soothing smile. “Your father here is trying to convince us he’s from the lost island of Hericeurra. Don’t worry, it’s nothing a visit from the town’s nurse and a good week’s rest won’t fix.”

  He called Ericura Hericeurra, just like the book had. So the world had forgotten about us as we’d forgotten about it.

  “There’s nothing wrong with him,” I said. “We are from Hericeurra—Ericura. And the people there think your land is the fabled one, or that it got swallowed by the ocean.”

  Castor shared another look with Sir Dale, who shrugged and sighed. “One person is concussed. Two people are delusional.”

  “What about three?” I looked around the room, briefly checking the three other men. One was tall, slim and dark-haired and was twirling throwing knives. Another was as tall and big as Castor, but strangely wearing a green, hooded cloak indoors that totally obscured his upper face. The third appeared the youngest and to be Dale’s brother, with the same face, but beardless and with redder hair.

  “Who’s the third loon?” Dale asked only to be elbowed by Castor.

  A sudden chill settled over me, like being drenched in cold sweat on a midwinter morning. “You don’t have Adelaide?”

  All five men now looked at one another, each offering up a gesture of confusion or ignorance that made me cling to Dad for support.

  “We only found the two of you,” said Castor. “Perhaps another hunting party got your…sister?”

  “Cousin,” I said, a half-truth, as our late mothers had been friends prior to our births. Apart from becoming my best friend, I felt that also made us the only family we both had. “She’s very tall, as tall as you.” I pointed to the one with the knives. “Black-haired, brown-eyed, was in men’s clothes, possibly wearing a wooden mask.”

  “Men’s clothes and a mask. What kind of place is this isle of yours? One where the men wear gowns and the women farm the land?” Dale’s brother laughed, earning a quick knife-toss that buried the blade in his cloak, pinning him to the wooden wall. He gaped at the slim man. “Will, what gives?”

  “My sister was a better hunter than you ever were, Glenn,” Will said sarcastically, pointing the other knife at him.

  “Yes,” Glenn snapped. “And her insistence on doing what no girl should and you letting her join our hunts was what got her carried off by the fairies.”

  Will stiffened, anger straining his voice. “I wouldn’t talk about missing sisters if I were you, considering yours got gobbled up by the Beast.”

  Face twisted with fury, Glenn launched himself at him but got yanked back by the knife in his cloak.

  “Enough!” Castor’s shout filled the room, his furious intensity raising all my hairs. “Scarlet, Quill—we’ll avenge your sisters soon. We’ll avenge all our loved ones. But first, we must find out if theirs is still alive.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be alive?” My father asked in alarm, his step forwards hindered by the ball-and-chain.

  Dale rubbed his forehead with a sigh, looked at me with solemn eyes. “Since you’re not from here, you clearly don’t know that Rosemead is home to a monster that no one has survived an encounter with. Every month, the people offer it a sacrifice to stave off its fury, keep it away from us all.”

  “We started off giving it the best cuts of meat, then entire animals, going from birds to elks,” Castor said bitterly. “The best we catch has to go to it every month to ensure that it doesn’t do to us what it did to the inhabitants of the duke’s castle. But nothing seems enough for it.”

  “So you now give it people?” I gasped, horrified.

  Sir Dale shook his head. “But it does seem to want more every month, and since we couldn’t find your cousin, we’re afraid the Beast might have taken her.”

  Imagining Adelaide in some monster’s clutches had weakness invading my limbs with a vengeance. My heartbeat hammered too fast, and sweat cascaded from my scalp down my back, like I’d been running for hours and was about to collapse.

  But no! Ada couldn’t have been taken by the Beast. Even if she had been, she’d escaped so many terrible situations, from the dangers of harsh nature to those of predators of all sorts. Surely she’d given it the slip. After all, no one was more slippery than an accomplished thief. And she was the very best!

  She was fine. She had to be.

  “How exactly did you get here?” Castor asked my father before either of us could ask anything more. “If you’re really from this place that has been so isolated it has forgotten the Folkshore, how did you venture here?”

  Instead of answering, my father raised his bound leg. “Do you mind?”

  Castor gave him a sarcastic smile. “Will you attack me again? The gods have given me this face, and it’s survived several swiping claws and snapping jaws unscathed. I’d hate to accidentally lose a tooth to a flailing old man.”

  “You’d be surprised how much damage this old man can do,” my father said gruffly.

  If I weren’t too caught up in my worry, I would have been puzzled by this statement. Though years of hammering metal and working in a forge had toughened my father up, he wasn’t the type to argue, let alone fight. And he didn’t only seem ready to, but they’d bound him because he’d already attacked them.

  Castor took a key out from his pocket, kneeled to unlock the anklet. Leaving my father struggling to get it off, he rose but stopped on my level. Nose almost against mine, I could see nothing but his face and feel nothing but the restrained intensity radiating off him. It was like standing too close to a furnace, the warmth pleasant at first but quickly becoming too much, prompting me to step back.

  Then he spoke, and all those reservations melted away. “You have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen.”

  I flushed, not knowing what to do with myself. It was one thing for older people to tell me I was pretty to flatter my father or in an attempt to secure an acceptable wife for their sons, or the sons themselves paying me clumsy compliments to the same end. It was a completely different feeling to have someone as beautiful as him look at me that way.

  “How about we settle down, have some tea and discuss all this from the start?” he said. “Get to know each other?”

  I nodded enthusiastically and only managed to intensify my dizziness.

  He set a hand on my shoulder in a steadying grip as he led me to the couch where Will had sat back down. Castor kicked his legs. “Up.”

&n
bsp; Will rolled his head towards us lethargically. “Get her her own chair.”

  “I’ll stick your stupid knives up your nose if you don’t get up,” Castor bit out, his sudden temper startling me. “Make us some tea while you’re at it.”

  Will opened his mouth to object, but the hooded man grabbed him by the arm as he passed, dragging him along. They left the room, squabbling. Glenn left us, too, saying he’d go downtown to get some supplies.

  Castor and I settled on the couch, while my father and Sir Dale did on the armchairs across from us, framed by the animal remnants that decorated the room. If anyone could call this macabre array a decoration. Between the smell of wolf hide draped along the back of the couch and the unblinking eyes of every mounted head, distress crept within me, different from the one elicited by our displacement or Ada’s disappearance.

  I supposed this was deep, primal disgust, a feeling I’d never felt even towards things like rotting food. I found flaunting the animals they’d killed this was at once outrageous and sickening.

  “So, Fairborn, was it?” Sir Dale asked my father, seemingly willing to go along with what he clearly thought a delusion. “Sounds Arborean. Perhaps your ancestors were from here.”

  I forced my thoughts away from our surroundings and situation, the new topic capturing my attention. “That’s what I thought.” All the men turned to me, and I continued, my voice sounding small and breathless. “I had a book that detailed the Folkshore, or as it was centuries ago. It said that our island had two waves of migration, people who settled in the north and ones who populated the south. I figured the north population had to be from Arbore. It’s why I wanted to come here.”

  My father raised his dark brows at me, wrinkling his forehead. Guilt pricked at my sides, making me slide further down the smooth couch. I hadn’t mentioned any of this to him, partly because I hadn’t known how.

  “So, though you planned on coming, you don’t know how you got here?” Castor summed up.

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  My father gaped at me. “You and Adelaide were going to just up and leave?”

  “No! Well, yes, but not anywhere too far,” I said hurriedly. The last thing I wanted was to upset him, but with our situation, that intention was as pointless as it was late. “We discussed traveling to another city, like a trip to Galba so I could go fishing and walk on the seashore. Leaving Ericura was just a fanciful idea.”

  “Now a grim reality,” he huffed, settling back in his seat, hand going to his chin, stroking it thoughtfully. He suddenly ripped his hand away, looking startled.

  It was only then that I noticed it, too. A beard! How had he grown one?

  He beat me to the question. “How long have we been here?”

  “In Rosemead or at my house?” Castor threw an arm along the back of the couch as he turned my way, watching me intently. “We’ve had you for a week. You were asleep the entire time, then within an hour of each other, you were both up.”

  “Going by the condition we found you both in, covered in moss and cobwebs, you must have been there at least as long,” Dale added. “I’d say you were put under some enchantment and left there, by a witch or a fairy, I can’t tell.”

  “Going by my state, I’d say you’re right.” My father stroked his beard, gloominess seeming to weigh him down. “Two weeks, if not more.”

  I couldn’t sit up anymore, sagged back in a boneless slouch, breathing heavily.

  My dream of coming here had gone from the frivolousness of a grasp at trailing smoke, to the reality of being pitched into a flaming wicker figure. Like the ones we were meant to burn at the bonfire the night before. No, the fortnight before.

  “And we somehow ended up in the one place where you wanted to be,” my father said, his disappointed tone making me want to curl up into a ball, hide my face in shame. Even though this wasn’t my fault, couldn’t be my fault, I had intended to leave. Most likely without telling him, because he would have said no.

  But he was looking at me as if he needed an explanation why I’d wanted to leave, and I finally felt compelled to tell him. “I’m sorry, Dad, but there was nothing more I wanted than to leave home. You let me do nothing, in the house or outside it, and the idleness became too much, especially after I finished school. I wanted to see new people, other places, do things myself, get some answers, and that feeling intensified when Adelaide came to town. She’d traveled the island bottom to top and was full of stories of places, people and adventures.”

  “Ada lived a difficult, terrible life,” he said, his voice roughened with emotion. “She came to us so her struggle would end. She wanted the life we had.”

  It was true. Once she’d settled with us, she’d refused to budge any further. Aubenaire—with its cyclical schedule and humdrum society, packed with people who didn’t care to know anything new or to have their patterns disrupted—was where she’d made her home. She hadn’t wanted any more surprises, had only wanted the mindless routine and a quiet future with a local boy. A desire I couldn’t grasp, a life I couldn’t continue in.

  “I can’t believe you were going to drag her along on this ridiculous journey of yours,” he continued. “You know she didn’t cross the land for the fun of it, but because she was forced to, and that she hated it. She came looking for family, because her mother abandoned her.”

  “Her mother died!” I objected, even when I knew my father would never excuse Ada’s mother for inexplicably leaving her before she had. “Just like mine did. When Ada came looking for her, it was the first time I knew we knew anyone beyond our corner at the end of the world. How else did you expect me to react? I had to know more about what she’s seen, maybe find out where Mum came from—because you won’t tell me anything about her!”

  His face hardened with what looked like a dozen objections, but when he answered, he only said, “She must have tried to dissuade you.”

  “She did,” I said sadly, remembering our argument in the tavern, the distress she’d expressed at the idea of leaving the prison that she considered a haven. “It’s why we compromised on traveling to a seaside town, not sailing beyond it.”

  “I would have been fine with that trip. I would have locked up shop and chaperoned you.” He stopped, grimaced, looking pained. “Was our life so bad?”

  There was no easy way for me to explain my feelings, not without coming off as silly or shortsighted. But I’d wanted the chance to be both, to experience something, anything, see with my two eyes that life did exist beyond our dirt roads and open fields. I’d hated the idea of living my life where people found me bothersome and bizarre, and thought my interest in our past, in the fairies and anything beyond our town disruptive and dangerous. I’d hated knowing that all my reading would win me nothing but a teaching position at our local school, and if I were lucky, the title of schoolmistress in a decade. Though I was grateful for the tomes Schoolmistress Bertha had lent me, and the history books she’d borrowed for me from the nearest monastery, I’d still hadn’t wanted to be her successor.

  But I’d resigned myself to that fate, until the instant I’d found that map in The Known World. It had been then the hope of finding a world beyond our island had fired up my urge to leave town. When Ada had resisted the idea, I’d instead suggested that we tried to go through the Hornswoods to Faerie and…

  “We saw something in the woods,” I gasped, a memory bursting in my mind, vivid and overpowering. “Some kind of creature with big, glowing yellow eyes.”

  While it had scared Ada, it had only encouraged me, solidified my belief in life beyond our borders. And I’d wanted to see it at any cost. If not through the woods then across the sea to Arboria, if it still existed.

  And it did. The Kingdom of Arbore, a land of blossoms, knights and adventure, with folk heroes in every city and mystical creatures breathing magic into its history and…and I was in it!

  My father frowned, looking like he was remembering, too. “Was it that woman—the one who said came from beyond th
em, whose carriage you brought me to fix?”

  I shook my head. “She came to the tavern asking for help the next day, before we left for the bonfire. I left to fetch you, and Ada went with her to the woods to search for the piece that fell from her carriage…” Suddenly my last and haziest memory flared in my mind. “…we arrived to find her and Ada in front of a hole in the air, made of revolving wind and light, and…”

  Nothingness. Until I awoke upstairs.

  “Things are starting to make sense,” Dale commented.

  Castor looked at him as if he too needed treatment. “They are?”

  Ignoring him, Dale looked at me with sympathetic eyes. “It seems your Adelaide was taken by a fairy. And you must have tried to follow it. The same thing happened when they took Will’s sister, Marianne. Fairies plucked her from their group through a portal and flung the rest across the river. But when you plunged into that fairy’s portal, your urge to visit our land must have influenced its magic, sending you here.”

  I gaped at him. Could it be? We were here because of me, after all?

  “But at least that means the Beast didn’t get her,” said Castor, his arm now off the couch and around me.

  The foreign intimacy made me sit up rigidly. “Is a fairy kidnapping her any better?”

  Castor shrugged. “At least she won’t eat her.” He bent over me, staring into my eyes intently. “But it’s a good thing we found you, or else the Beast would have gotten you.”

  Shaking myself out of my stunned numbness, I waved a hand at the room’s morbid décor. “What kind of beast could you not have stuffed and mounted by now?”

  “The biggest and deadliest of them all,” Castor spat venomously, his arm tightening around me in an uncomfortable grip. “But don’t worry, I will catch it soon. I will kill it, slowly, then I will have its head placed outside my home, as a warning to anyone or anything that I am to be respected and feared.”

  Confidence radiated from him as he puffed out his chest, making him look so fearless, so capable that I believed he could do anything.

  Will returned, carrying a tea tray. “We’ve already told you, we’re not hunting the Beast.”