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

by Lucy Tempest

  His amusement faded. “That’s not possible. That island doesn’t exist.”

  I flicked a hand at him. “Neither does the wicked King of the Beasts. Yet here we are, having tea.”

  The look of concern in his eyes grew, as if he feared I was losing my sanity.

  I sighed. “You have a rose tree as a curse-clock in your garden and a giant snake as your housekeeper and you don’t believe I’m from a lost island?”

  He blinked, let out a ragged exhalation. “You’re right. Belief in the mythical lands beyond the Forbidden Ocean should be easy at this point, but—it just feels too much.” He scratched his head, making me cringe at the thought of him scraping his scalp. “All my life, the Lost Isle of Hericeurra was a very popular myth, a land that people migrated to, to venture into Faerie, before we discovered the use of fairy paths to their world.”

  I nodded. “That’s the story of Saint Alban.”

  His eyes rounded in stupefaction. “Saint? Alban? You mean the story of Madman Alberic who believed he was a lost prince of the Winter Court and followed fairies that said if he brought them thousands of humans they’d lead him ‘home?’”

  I frowned at him. “No, Saint Alban was a hero who led his people away from persecution and some vengeful sun god, but he couldn’t make it past Man’s Reach so he settled in my town. It’s even named after him. They called it Alban’s Lair, that somehow became Aubenaire.”

  “What persecution?” he scoffed. “And what sun god? The man came from Ancient Arbore where our pantheon was as it is now, with a temperamental weather god. The Lower Campanians, Orestians and the folk of The Granary are the ones with the sun god!”

  Now that he’d said all that, it made better sense than the story told as historical fact in Aubenaire. I’d already suspected the truth had faded into simplified myth when Adelaide had given me The Known World. But it still disturbed me that it appeared to be completely bogus. It went to show I couldn’t trust second-hand accounts, or make them the basis of any belief.

  But then I’d always questioned so-called established faiths and facts. Now I would more than ever.

  “If what you say is true,” he said. “That would make you a descendant of the foolish Arboreans who followed Alberic to that island before it floated into Faerie.”

  “It didn’t. If it has ever moved, it stayed on its doorstep, from what I can tell. No one from my island has ever crossed what we call Man’s Reach into Faerie—also as far as I know.”

  “How did you get here then?”

  I gazed at my reflection in the cup, memories swamping me all over again. “It was the bonfire night when we celebrate Alban’s arrival to Ericura and the founding of our town when this woman came to the tavern my friend worked in claiming her carriage broke down. She said she needed help looking for the broken part, took Ada to the woods we believe borders the fairy realm. Dad and I followed them to fix the carriage and we saw them before this portal of wind and light—then we woke up here. I think she was a fairy, and for some reason she wanted Ada, but we got sucked in by mistake and she tossed us here because we weren’t of use to her.”

  He interrupted his absorption with my account to ask the next logical question. “Why here of all places?”

  Another wave of guilt stormed through me, knotting my insides. “I’d just learned of Arbore, and wanted to come here more than anything, to see the land of my ancestors. Then I did, just not in the way I wanted. But I can’t help but believe it was my desire that drew us here.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you are here.” He hesitated before he reached over and touched an uncertain hand to mine. “With me.”

  Since I couldn’t say the same, heart heavy and blood cold, I settled for changing the subject. “Anything else you want to ask?”

  He sat back, seeming disappointed. “What sort of a name is Bonnibel?”

  “It’s a flower.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “It is!”

  He snorted in amusement. “I think I would know, considering Arbore is the flower capital of the Folkshore.”

  I pouted, getting cranky. “A bonnibel is a blue flower.”

  “Surely you mean a bluebonnet? Or a bluebell? Maybe your parents confused the two or merged them into bonnetbell, then simplified it to bonnibel?”

  I wanted to blurt out why he assumed it wasn’t a flower native to Ericura, or if Bonnibel wasn’t the colloquial name for either flower there? But I couldn’t.

  I’d never heard of it on my island, knew it was a flower only because my father once said so. The only other person who’d ever said that had been Miss Etheline, owner of the Poison Apple tavern, where Adelaide had worked since she’d come to town. The first time I’d met Etheline, she’d told me it was “A lovely flower, blue like your eyes.”

  So just because neither of us had heard of it, didn’t mean it didn’t exist!

  His insistence that it didn’t annoyed me more than it should have, so I fired back, “What sort of a name is Leander? It’s the strangest name I’ve heard in Rosemead so far.”

  He quirked one bushy eyebrow. “How so?”

  “Everyone here seems to have outdoorsy names…”

  “Outdoorsy,” he deadpanned. “How eloquent.”

  I chucked a cookie at him. “Would you let me finish?”

  He caught it in his jaws, the clack of sharp teeth making me shudder. “Please, entertain me with your observations about our naming conventions.”

  Amazing how he’d gone from being the scariest thing I’d ever seen to a moody and morose boy. What he must be under all that hair and misshapen flesh, and for the best of reasons.

  Pity and another burst of guilt pooled in my stomach like a gulp of scalding tea, softening my tone, subduing my voice. “I mean, Florian, Dale, Glenn, Robin, Jessamine, Ivy—these all come from nature, but your name and—” I eyed the figurines. “Fey-ruh-za?”

  “Fay-roo-za,” he corrected, wincing, as if saying her name hurt. “Fairuza is Cahramani for ‘turquoise.’”

  Turquoise, like his eyes. A feature he shared with his sister, the one thing that remained human about him. At least, when he wasn’t angry.

  But this was the third time I’d heard of this Cahraman. The map of The Known World hadn’t had a land by this name, so it either hadn’t been discovered yet then or it had gone by a different name. I’d gathered from Clancy that it was very far away, all across the Folkshore.

  “Is Leander also a Cahramani name?”

  He leveled me with a fed-up stare as he sat up from his slouch. “No. My father wanted to name me Oleander for his favorite uncle, but my mother refused to name her firstborn after a poisonous plant. In the end, they compromised by shortening it to Leander, which sounds more Orestian—a middle ground, like Orestia itself is between their kingdoms.”

  “What is it like over there? Cahraman, I mean.” I sat forwards, anxious to hear about that land, and about the story behind his parents’ meeting.

  “It’s very hot, arid, rains a handful of times per year, and there is one major river and sand everywhere,” he quoted monotonously. “It’s the largest country in its region, home to many related ethnic groups and cultures and was once part of the Avestan Empire. They export most of the Folkshore’s spices, a lot of the perfume and elaborate artworks, most famously their carpets.”

  This wasn’t the description of someone who’d ever seen any of this for himself. Like me, he’d gotten all his details from secondhand accounts and books.

  “How did your parents meet then?” I looked around, trying to pick out anything else that could be from Cahraman. “That must be a very interesting story.”

  I could see it now—a foreign prince traveling to the end of the world, for business or politics. He meets a girl in a market or in the palace where she works, and they fall in love. Then the time for him to return home comes and he asks her to go with him. Thinking he is poor, her family opposes the match, wanting to elevate their position by marryin
g her to a merchant. But she chooses him anyway and runs away with him from the dunes to the forests. And her soulmate turns out to be a prince, who’d since become the king.

  It must have been a rare love that had united both ends of the Folkshore, must be the stuff of epic poems by now…

  “It was an arranged marriage.”

  Leander’s terse response felt like being dunked in icy water on a deep winter’s day, dousing my illusions, and scribbling all over my romantic story, turning it from a thrilling fantasy to a dull footnote.

  “Oh” was all I could say.

  “Disappointed?”

  I wanted to blurt out “YES,” that everything had been one disappointment after another since I’d woken up in Arbore. Everything I’d ever dreamed about from my secondhand knowledge of life had fallen flat onto the ground of depressing reality.

  I reeled my reaction back. “A bit, yes. But why would anyone arrange a marriage to someone so far away?”

  “Because the world is becoming more connected thanks to the invention of trains, and the establishment of great naval fleets, so it is wise to forge alliances far from home. My parents’ marriage was a political pact between my father and hers, the late King of Cahraman.”

  I digested the new fact that he was royalty on both sides as I asked, “Are you arranged to marry someone from another land?”

  “I was supposed to be, but even before this happened to me, the arrangement was dissolved. Once war broke out between Arbore and Avongart, and the Armoricans took Avongart’s side, everything else between our lands got tossed out.” His eyes flitted to the figurines. “My sister’s arrangement is still intact thankfully, as all hope to save her from her curse hinges on it.” After a beat he raised his pensive gaze to mine. “What about your family? Who are the Fairborns of Hericeurra?”

  “Stone masons, smiths and a few carpenters, I’ve heard. We had relatives in the middle of the island, but I’ve never seen any of them.” I felt myself wilting. A part of my plan for Adelaide and myself had been to seek out relatives, learn more about our history—feel less alone in the world. Now, like her, this dream was lost.

  “You mention only your father—is your mother dead?” I swallowed the lump that expanded in my throat, nodded. “No other family?”

  I shook my head, exhaled. “I had an uncle, Ossian, who disappeared before I was born. And my grandparents died when he and my father were boys. As for my mother’s family, I don’t know anything. All my father ever said about them was that they didn’t want her to marry him.”

  Leander’s thick brows furrowed. “So, she left her family to run off with your father and was disowned?”

  “That’s what my father says.”

  “Your parents never told you anything about them? Names? Stories? Anything?”

  “My mother died when I wasn’t yet six, before I began to have questions, and it always seemed to pain my father when I mentioned her, so he never said much about her family, always saying the one important thing is that we had each other. That was why I was so desperate to leave home, to find answers about everything, starting with myself.”

  His gaze seemed to turn inwards. “Strange, that one could know so little about their own history. I know my relatives on both sides going back eight generations—who they were, what they did, and which of my heirlooms belonged to whom and what they used it for. In fact, I was required to know odd tidbits like how my great-grandmother Queen Wisteria always played the harp by plucking the strings with her nails rather than her fingertips.”

  He continued to list off both important and inconsequential details about his family, and the desire to fill the gaps in my own history, to put names and lives on the branches of my unknown family tree, came back with a vengeance.

  When he mentioned how the dukes in his distant relatives would succeed his family should something happen to them, all known by name, age and order, it reminded me that as far as I knew, I was the last of the Fairborns. It made me yearn again to find out what had happened to my uncle Ossian or who my mother’s family was. A yearning that would most probably go unfulfilled.

  The rest of the morning passed uneventfully as we continued to ask each other questions, and share anecdotes from our lives.

  It was shockingly pleasant, talking with him for hours on end, leaping from one topic to the next, without running out of things to discuss. I couldn’t remember this ever happening, talking to someone, even my father or Adelaide, without a single awkward pause or the conversation fizzling out.

  When lunchtime rolled around, and he invited me to go back to the dining room, I took my chance to broach the subject again.

  “I feel we know each other better now,” I said as we exited the room. “So please tell me how I can help with the curse.”

  His gaze swept to the end of the hall. Following it, I find silhouettes huddled together in the shadows, watching us. Among them I could pick out Clancy’s horns. From the urgency in Leander’s gaze, it seemed he wanted his friend to direct him like he had during our first meeting with more guiding whispers targeting his heightened hearing. But there were none this time.

  Without warning, Leander turned to me and blurted out, “You can marry me.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  I blinked at him once, twice, his words hurtling in my mind like a rock thrown through placid waters, thudding to the bottom and sending out endless ripples.

  Then I burst out, “What?”

  He began to kneel. “Bonnibel Fairborn, will you do me the honor of being my—”

  “Stop!” I yelled, hands held out, pushing and pulling at him, and trying to stay upright. “Get up, please—get up—and explain.”

  When he finally stood, the spying staff scattered like startled pigeons, leaving only Clancy who appeared to have his face in his hands. Leander looked down at his bare, hairy feet, finding his overgrown, claw-like nails very interesting all of the sudden.

  If I had any coordination, I would have stomped my foot. “Why on the Field Queen’s green earth would you ask me that?”

  “Your earth goddess is called the Field Queen?”

  “Yours is Rosmerta, right—oh, no, you don’t.” He had the gall to try and sidetrack me? And it had nearly worked. “You’re going to answer me. Why did you ask me to marry you?”

  “Because if you do, we believe that’s what it will take to break the curse.”

  “Is that true?” I called out to Clancy.

  He came out of the shadows, his clomping reluctant as he approached. “There’s a lot more to it than that, but yes, essentially.”

  I walked towards him, stopping at the midpoint between them. “What exactly did the Spring Queen say when she cursed you? And why do both your curse and your sister’s require marriage to be broken?”

  Leander walked towards me. “For my sister, her curse said that only when the noblest of men pledges himself to her will her curse be broken. We never worried much about her curse, since she’s been pledged almost from birth to such a man, the crown prince and future king of Cahraman. The situation changed when that prince asked for a bridal competition before he wed her, but Fairuza will surely win it. There’s no one more beautiful or accomplished than her.”

  It was sweet that he thought that of his sister. But if she was anything like him or their mother, the woman whose temper and lack of judgment landed them all in this mess, then that prince would for sure pick someone else.

  “If war broke your own arrangement,” I said. “Why hasn’t anyone sent you another princess to break your curse?”

  “My curse wasn’t as simple, because nothing ever is with fairies.” He stared more in my direction than at me. “It sounds simple enough, but it seemed impossible—until you showed up.”

  “What exactly did the fairy queen say?”

  Sighing dejectedly, he quoted:

  “Shirk kind gallantry to favor cruelty,

  And lose the shelter your face provides,

  With roses your keeper, an
d no more liberty

  Your body baring its ugly insides,

  You’ll live within the vileness you wove

  Reviled and feared from west to east

  Unless you’re given true beauty’s love

  You’ll fleetingly live and die a beast.”

  I repeated the words after him in my mind, storing them for later examination before I said, “And how did you figure the answer to this riddle is me marrying you?”

  Clancy clomped closer, arms behind his back. “We believe the reason the fairy made him like this was to repel potential brides, so that prince or not, no one would ever accept him, and therefore have the curse run its course. If it does, it seems we’d all turn to our respective beasts completely. Then we either die at once, or do so after our shorter lifespans as animals end—that is, if we survive being hunted. We thought we had over a year until that happened, but now we only have three months.”

  My heart convulsed at the reminder of how I’d made things so much worse.

  Leander came to stand beside me. “We also believe that the only way to break the curse is to have someone who only saw me as the Beast agreeing to marry me regardless.”

  “So when you arrived at the castle,” Clancy added. “We all thought it must be a sign, that you are our only chance. Why else would a beautiful girl be delivered to our door?”

  “I didn’t exactly come here to visit, if you remember,” I mumbled.

  Clancy shrugged. “Whatever brought you here, it was fate.”

  Leander looked down at me, turquoise eyes glinting with hope in the torchlight. “So, what do you say?”

  “I say that marriage has nothing to do with love.” And even when it did, like in my parents’ case, it didn’t mean happily ever after. “Besides, I barely know you. We may have had a civil day, but that doesn’t mean I like you, let alone love you.”

  His eyes suddenly reflected the firelight behind me as he gazed down at me. “So, that’s a ‘no?’”

  “Yes. I mean, no!” I shook my head roughly. “I mean yes, that’s a no.”