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

by Lucy Tempest

He began to grin but immediately covered his mouth, hiding his fangs.

  I wanted to reach out and remove his hand, tell him not to be self-conscious, at all and especially around me, when he dropped his hand, no longer smiling. “It really is something to think about, marrying someone you just happened upon. What if there is a secret in their bloodline that blindsides you, showing up in your children?”

  “Like red hair?” I joked.

  He shrugged. “If you’re among the superstitious crowd that considers them signs of witchcraft, that could prove a major problem indeed. But I meant inhuman traits. The idea is that this woman who showed up in a seaside town one day would be revealed as a mermaid, or a man found wandering the side of the road is a werewolf, and you have no idea until your child is born with webbed hands or fur.”

  I shuddered at the image. “It can’t be too common though?”

  He exhaled. “More common than nobles marrying peasants, that’s for sure. There are rumors of men who marry fairy women here in Arbore, and along the Northland Kingdoms. Robin’s mother was rumored to be a fairy herself, as her family came from Nexia.”

  At that point, I could believe anything. And I wouldn’t put it past Robin with his infallible aim.

  But now I remembered a map of the Folkshroe showing an island called Nexia between Faerie and Armorica, one of the lands Arbore was fighting. That could be a place with a fairy population living alongside humans, intermarrying over generations. One had to wonder what such offspring would look like. And if that was the reason Robin was always shrouding his face in that hood.

  The mad, rhyming threats of the vicious redcaps wormed their way back into my thoughts.

  I shook my head as if to clear it of the terrible memory and asked, “Do people keep track of such things? Who might be part fairy or part witch?”

  “They do. In some lands they’re proud of such crazy couplings. I heard that Orestian men marry nymphs and that Oponans have wizard noble families. I’m not sure what is real and what is folktales in that, though.”

  “If it’s real, then those people must lead very interesting lives, full of magic and things we could only guess at.”

  His eyes roamed the library, as if checking for eavesdroppers, before reluctantly agreeing. “If anything, they must be living the stuff of our fantasies.”

  “There’s a ‘but’ in there somewhere.”

  “But, as I said, you might not know what you’re getting yourself into, especially once it comes to becoming a family.” He suddenly coughed a laugh. “Imagine having a witch for a mother-in-law.”

  “She might be very useful to have around,” I said, liking it a bit more each time I saw him smile or heard him laugh. “As long as you keep your wife happy.”

  The mirth in his gaze fled as he sighed. “Maybe. But it’s a huge risk, more so for nobility and royalty. A common man can choose his path, since his actions would only affect him and his line, not a whole city, or even a kingdom.” He picked a book from the pile before us, flipped to a page, and showed me a detailed family tree of an ancient dynasty. His. “This is why marriage matches are made with such care, with both sides having everything in their lines documented, from history, to relatives, to prior conflicts and diseases, so we can take all things into account.”

  “It sounds so cold, like a business deal.”

  “It is.” He frowned down at the book then at me. “What did you think marriage was for?”

  I couldn’t say love, since I’d already said the two things didn’t necessarily mix. “I don’t know, having common interests, values and goals and wanting to build a life together? Liking and trusting a person enough you want to have them as the other parent of your children? And I do know people marry for love. My parents did.”

  “That’s not why most get married, let alone nobles and royals. Marrying for love or even personal preference is a luxury few can afford.” Sad notes permeated his words, scraping an aching tune on heartstrings already wound tight enough to snap. “As for true love, that is even more difficult to come by. Why do you think we love hearing about it in stories so much?” He looked at his hands, failing to fully clench his fists. “And why it’s the key to unlocking curses such as mine?”

  “I thought the fairy queen made it a stipulation because she knew you’d grow to be unlovable…” I cringed immediately. “I meant you were, in the past tense and…” I stopped, tried again. “I mean…”

  He let out a tired, rumbling chuckle. “Don’t worry. I understand. At this point, mine is a face not even my mother can love.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I’ve grown quite used to it.” I reached over, pushing a chunk of his long hair off his face and behind his angular ear. He maintained some of what must have been his original bone structure—high cheekbones, a strong jaw and a sloping forehead. His nose and mouth didn’t look too odd from a side view, so he retained a powerful profile.

  I couldn’t decide if his looks had improved with his behavior lately, or if I’d gotten over the shock of his appearance, or if it was starting to appeal to me the more I enjoyed his company.

  In the span of two weeks, I’d gone from wanting to run from him to wanting to talk to him all the time. From finding him a monstrous sight to seeking out his eyes and watching his peculiar face to see the explicit way his expressions matched his words.

  Whatever I felt when I was with him, it was a whole new feeling, one I didn’t have a word for. It felt different from the fondness I had for Jessamine, the love I had for my father and Adelaide, or even the friendship I had with Clancy. It had elements of each, mixed with—something else.

  The slashed painting by his room flashed in my mind. At first, it had been an unnerving fact that he’d once been a normal person. But now it was a maddening curiosity. I wanted to one day look at the real him, and see how his disparate parents intersected on his face.

  I wanted to see a face fully capable of smiling at me.

  Finding him staring at me, blue-green eyes wide with surprise brought me back to the moment. I had my fingertips on his jaw, under the ear I’d just tucked his hair behind.

  A sudden heat flared up to my face, no doubt making it match the pink dress I’d ended up wearing. “Um, what were we saying?”

  “The politics of marriage and importance of genealogy?” he said, voice tight.

  I rose and settled down on the couch beside him, blindly reaching for one of my books on the table. “Tedious topic, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is, for someone who doesn’t know her own grandparents’ names.”

  “I know their names!” I protested. “Keenan Fairborn and Fiona Teagarden.” He raised his eyebrows when I didn’t name my mother’s parents, and I said, “What about you?”

  “King Florent the Tenth of Arbore and Princess Marguerite of Lyonesse, and King Xerxes the Second of Cahraman and Lady Morgana Makhzan of Anbur. I can list their parents and grandparents going back eight hundred years.”

  I made a face at him. “No wonder you’re grumpy, having to learn and remember hundreds of pompous names like that.”

  He boomed a laugh as he rose, saying he’d fetch more books.

  I cracked open the one on my lap, unable to help being bothered by how lacking my answers had been compared to his. They would be compared to most everyone’s.

  After a few absent page flips in, I went back and read the book’s title. It was the one I’d picked right before Adelaide’s portal had opened. Færie Flora & Fauna.

  Short, handwritten paragraphs were arranged around beautifully detailed watercolor plants or strange animals. My eyes roamed over the neat script, noting odd facts about giant birds or man-eating flowers as I went through the alphabetical order.

  Halfway through the B-section, my breath caught in my throat.

  Under a tall stalk covered in blue flowers shaped like sleigh bells with bright centers and darker outlines, the name struck me like a blow to the gut.

  Bonnibel.

  Heart stuttering,
clutching the volume with shaking hands, I snapped up straight, unable to read fast enough.

  ~ BONNIBEL ~

  A perennial bright-blue flower typically found in the woods of the Spring Court. It drinks in the sunlight during the day to emit a glow at night, creating bright swaths of woodland roads that lead directly to fairy paths.

  Its scent is bittersweet, and culinary uses include jam and tea made from its petals, which are tart and are believed to stimulate the third eye, and a paste made from its pollen that transfers its glow to the skin and eyes of its consumer.

  It is used by travelers in place of torches and lamps, and given as a crib-toy to fairy children, specifically changelings, as the soft blue light lulls them while they are being swapped for human babies. This practice is so common that fairies have come to name their changeling girls after the flower.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I dropped the book as if it burned me.

  It thudded to the floor, still open on that page.

  Unable to tear my eyes away, I slumped back, trembling all over, unable to manage a full breath.

  No wonder I’d never seen or heard of my namesake flower in Ericura, and neither did Leander in Arbore. We didn’t because it didn’t exist on the Folkshore.

  Bonnibel was a fairy flower.

  But the rest—it couldn’t—couldn’t be what I thought it was, could it?

  I felt I’d choke on my heart as I kicked the book closed, as if it would stop the doubts, erase them. But it was too late. A slew of facts about myself tangled with recent and half-formed memories, all slotting into place, framing an awful context.

  My size and the intense color of my eyes. The monstrous fairies calling me “pretty fey” and “pixie” and “sprite”, calling Castor my “human prey,” and not attempting to drink my blood, saying it was foul. My father never allowing me to do kitchen work or taking me to his forge. The pain I’d felt as a small child holding an iron pan, even when it hadn’t been on the fire. Trying to bake behind his back and getting burned inexplicably...

  Everything gathered, cutting off my breathing, coalescing into one crushing suspicion.

  Was I a changeling?

  Was I a fairy weakling who’d been unable to survive in Faerie, and had been swapped for a healthy human girl? Had I been sent to the human world, while she’d been taken to the Spring Court in my place? Was that why I had that name, like the book suggested?

  My father had once told me he’d wanted to name me Fionula after his mother Fiona, but had never given a reason why he hadn’t. Had it been mind-altering magic the fairies had worked on my parents, after swapping their human child for me? To make them blindly accept the changeling found in their crib? But had they learned the truth eventually?

  No one had known what had killed my mother in her prime. What if it had been the shock of discovering I wasn’t hers, and her heart had broken beyond repair?

  And my father? If he’d been overprotective because he knew what I was, when had he found out? Before or after my mother’s death? Was that the reason he’d cut us from both his and my mother’s families? So no one would suspect, and harm me? Even kill me? Was that why he hadn’t wanted me to leave the house, or work or travel, so I wouldn’t be exposed to people and materials deadly to my—kind? Had it all been to protect me, and to stop me from learning my truth?

  Was my whole life a lie?

  Leander startled me by setting a hand on my shoulder. “Are you feeling unwell?”

  There was no point in saying I was fine, because I burst into overwhelmed tears.

  “What is it?” Leander dropped beside me, sounding panicked. “Tell me how I can help.”

  I opened my mouth, ready to vomit out the terrible conclusion I’d reached, but a primal tug of fear for once tethered my tongue.

  Leander, and everyone in this castle, hated fairies, and they had the best reason to. If I suspected I was one, I had to keep that to myself, or else it could ruin all the progress we’d made.

  Leander arms hovered around me, hesitant. Needing his nearness even when I couldn’t test his understanding, I leaned towards him and with a forceful exhalation of what sounded like relief, he pulled me into his hulking, warm embrace.

  His massive, clawed hands patted my back with shocking gentleness, and his fanged lips roamed over my hair and forehead. “Whatever it is, stress, worry for your friend or for us—it’s all going to be fine, eventually.”

  “Wh-what makes you say that all of the sudden?” I blubbered pitifully into his chest, staining his shirt. “You’re the one who always believes the worst in any situation.”

  A sound reverberated in his chest below my cheek, the rumble so oddly comforting. “I’ll admit I am not the biggest proponent of hope, but I am starting to believe that our situation won’t have a grim end.”

  “Why not?”

  He began to gently stroke my hair, another unexpected gesture that had my blurry eyes sliding shut, savoring the affection. “Because you promised.”

  I barely held back a wet snort. “That’s what you built your belief on? My word?”

  “Yes, I….” He paused as his claws snagged on some hairs and he disentangled them as carefully as he could. “I know you better now, know that you’d stick through with any choice or promise you made. So, when you said you’d see us free of this curse, I believe you will.”

  “But what if I can’t? What if I’m the wrong person for this job?”

  What if I’m not a person at all?

  “I’d say it’s far too late for you to have applicant anxiety.” A smile entered his voice, calming me even further. “You’ve already signed on and been unanimously accepted.”

  He was right. I’d made a promise, and I was seeing it through. As for my bout of mindless panic—I could be overreacting.

  It was just a name in an old book. It could have been carried down from Faerie to Arbore to Ericura, and my parents had just thought it pretty.

  Deciding I’d been jumpy, and jumping to all the wrong conclusions, I looked up at him. Feeling so pleasantly swamped within his arms, I attempted to lighten the mood. “So—does that mean I get a salary like the staff?”

  He chuckled, the deep rumble buzzing pleasurably along my every nerve. “If you’d like, though you won’t be able to make much use of it for a while.”

  “Then I’ll be saving up for a shopping spree.”

  He quirked a bushy eyebrow at me. “And what would Miss Bonnibel Fairborn, the serial rejecter of expensive gifts, splurge on?”

  “Buy my father new tools for his forge, and a tavern or inn for Adelaide,” I said without hesitation. “Owning her own business was something she dreamed of.”

  “Here or on Hericeurra?”

  “Wherever.” And I believed Adelaide wouldn’t mind where, as long as she had us, her family, with her.

  “If you stayed here, wouldn’t you miss your home?”

  While Aubenaire was the only place I’d ever known, I certainly wasn’t homesick for it. I’d spent my life wanting to see beyond its borders, my plans anchored to it only for my father’s sake. But if we broke the curse, rescued Adelaide and reunited with my father, we could settle here. There were far more people, bringing more opportunities and customers for both of them, and answers and discoveries for me. As a reward for saving the crown prince, I could request a job as a royal librarian—if there were such a position.

  “Home is not a place to me.” I breathed out, washing away the last of my distress. “It’s wherever my family is.”

  Hesitation gone, he pulled me deeper into his embrace. “I understand completely.”

  He paused his strokes to roll a lock of my hair around his fingers, watching it reflect the light in an undulating gleam. I supposed fairies, even the weaklings they cast away, wouldn’t have my split ends, would they?

  Letting myself sink into the comforting warmth and strength of his arms, I felt my heartbeat steady as I listened to his own, and that new feeling I felt for him
surged.

  But was this warm, intensifying affection enough, for him, for them all?

  It clearly wasn’t since nothing changed about him.

  So what would it take if not what I now felt? What was that true love that persisted in timeworn tales and locked fairy curses? And how could one recognize it?

  Leander tensed around me, dispersing my fuzzy thoughts. “Did you hear that?”

  I blinked up at him. “Hear what?”

  As if in response, a loud slam came from outside, followed by another and another, then the screech of stressed metal hinges.

  The gates! We were under attack again!

  Leander surged to his feet, still pressing me to his side, defensive and territorial as he took us to the nearest window, peering over its edge and down at the grounds, just as the gates gave way.

  My blood froze as they screamed open, and our attackers poured in, their chorus of rabid shouts carrying the threat ahead of their torches and weapons.

  Not a handful of men like last time, but dozens. This time, they’d come in force, intent of wiping everyone out.

  And this time, I could see no way they wouldn’t succeed.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Cursing viciously under his breath, Leander sprinted out of the library.

  I felt like a ragdoll in his arms, tried to make him put me down. His protective hold only tightened as we reached the entrance and he panted, “You will stay in the highest chamber of the East Tower until this is resolved!”

  Before I could choke out a question how he thought it could be, or a refusal to leave him, a rock crashed through one of the windows by the main doors. The battering ram slammed into them almost simultaneously, the boom deafening, winding the barbed wires of brutal fear into my bones.

  Leander had barely started on the stairs when the doors burst open. Against the faint light coming from outside, I saw only ominous silhouettes and the menacing glint of weapons in their torches’ orange light—lances, poleaxes, hayforks, hammers and even butcher’s knives.