“It’s so pretty,” Malin said, earning a glare from Loretta that made her flinch back, the faint aura around her flaring briefly.
Loretta redirected her glare to what she could only describe as a costume. It was far more deserving of her ire than Malin. Fortunately, the little monkey beast had a resilient sense of positivity about her. She bounced back from any scolding or tongue lashing in seconds. Loretta hoped the cloth wasn’t half so durable. Perhaps she could set it on fire before Moreau returned?
The order barring her from the use of Kerkenhal’s hot spring had been lifted and they had all enjoyed their soak. There was something about the spring that, even apart from the healing properties, seemed to restore the spirit. She found a sense of serenity welling up inside of her, as if her very soul had sipped upon the best cup of tea and taken a long sigh. Stress and worry simply melted away with her wounds, as if they had never been. She hadn’t even noticed the shared nudity this time around. That was simply how things were in the spring.
Only now, standing with a towel wrapped around her and a provocative costume dangling from her claw did concerns of appearance and propriety reassert themselves. She could not wear that. More importantly, she would not wear it.
She tossed it on the bed in disgust. “If you like it so much, you can wear it.”
Malin wasted no time, leaping upon the cloth, her own towel sent flying in her haste to try the outfit on. Loretta found her mouth trying to turn upward into a smile. There was simply something about Malin’s exuberance that was infectious. She turned away before she could get caught up in the watching and went to the basket where her garments had heretofore been kept.
In the days following her incident with Gegenteil, Moreau had allowed the pair of them the continued use of his quarters, taking his rest in an armchair while Loretta recovered in his bed and Malin slept in an improvised hammock strung up between the bedposts. Why Malin should prefer to sleep over a bed instead of in it, Loretta could not say. On the second night, she had invited the girl to rest with her instead of above her. Malin had climbed into the bed with her without putting up her hammock, but when Loretta awoke, she discovered the monkey beast once again sleeping while hanging from the bedpost.
She sighed thinking about it, glancing over her shoulder at her menagerie sister as Malin tried to slide herself into the voluminous pants. Her hips were too thin, her legs were too long, and the thumbs on her feet kept getting caught on the billowing fabric. Determinedly, tongue sticking out the side of her mouth in focus, Malin set about trying to adjust the belt of coins around her waist to hold the garment up. It seemed deceptively weighty, sagging down in odd places when, given its apparent composition, it should not have had an issue staying up, belt or no.
Loretta turned her attention to her basket and froze, finding it empty. Not so much as a stocking waited for her inside. Her tail shot up and her ears lowered flat into her hair.
“You know, you are really, really scary when you show your teeth like that,” Malin said, looking up from fiddling with the belt.
A knock came upon the door. Loretta could sense Moreau on the other side through the strange connection that bound them together. She stormed over and threw the door open, directing a finger at the partially dressed Malin. “What the hell is that?”
Moreau raised an eyebrow in that cocky way of his that made her want to smack him. “That would be Malin trying on your new outfit.”
“You expect me to wear that thing?” she said through her teeth.
He stepped inside, moving around her, and closing the door. “Malin, would you care to try on the outfit I procured for you?” He gestured toward a changing screen in the corner.
Malin shrugged, let the pants drop, and bounded naked across the room to the screen, ducking behind it.
Moreau blinked. “I think we might have missed the point of the privacy screen, Malin.”
“What is the point of it?” Malin asked. “We all saw each other naked less than an hour ago in the hot spring.”
“That is different,” Loretta snapped. “That’s bathing and healing and—and it is not proper to change in front of a man.”
“Actually, I’m pretty sure only noble ladies and diamond souled give a damn about that with regards to beasts,” Moreau said. He carried a bundle in his arms, Loretta noted.
She should have noted that sooner. She was missing so much lately, caught up in so many emotions. It was like she was set to permanent internal sensory overload. There had to be a way to correct this at least, if nothing else about her condition.
“Don’t let men see you naked,” Loretta said loudly, electing to ignore Moreau’s words, her own words making her suddenly aware that she was clothed only in a towel.
She hurried behind the screen, nearly running into Malin as she changed. The girl had pulled on a black tunic and tight black trousers, belted with a black belt that matched the bracers she was affixing to her forearms. The bracers had sheaths built into them and each held a trio of knives. A second set awaited her, set aside on the floor. Loretta barely had time to wonder why the girl would need two sets when she picked one up with her hand-like foot and set about fastening it on to her lower leg over her calf and shin.
“Why does Malin get to dress in actual clothes while you expect me to parade about all but naked in that costume?” Loretta demanded.
Malin giggled and fastened on the last bracer to her leg. Was it still a bracer if one wore it on the leg instead of the forearm?
“Because her equipment plays to her strengths, just as yours plays to your strengths,” Moreau said from the other side of the privacy screen. Malin twirled out from behind the privacy screen, leaving Loretta behind.
“How does that tawdry outfit play to my strengths? Am I supposed to distract the enemy with a shimmy of my hips whilst you blow their brains out?”
They had been given an assignment. A mission. Loretta did not know the details yet, only that it was the reason—the only reason—that she had been allowed to return to the hot springs for healing. The uncomfortable sensation of not knowing how to feel was becoming all too familiar. On the one hand, doing anything was better than being trapped in bed for days on end while recovering from, as Moreau had none to gently put it, a lesson on the cost of stupidity. On the other, a mission with a knight keeper working for a company of mercenaries promised violence and danger and Loretta could not retake her place as the heir of the Maradona line if she were killed.
That thought worried her far more than the promise of violence itself. It should have scared her more than it did. It should have had her palms sweating, her knees shaking, and her stomach in knots. Instead, she felt anticipation. So much so that it frightened her. Had she come to love killing so much so soon? Was that what it meant to be a beast? Existing in a near perpetual state of bloodlust, always eager for the next conflict?
“It’s a dancer’s costume,” Moreau said from the other side of the privacy screen. He sounded like he was moving around. “I had it tailored to your build and modified to better protect you.”
The part of the outfit that could generously be called pants was tossed over the screen. Loretta snatched them up and held them high for him to see. “These are designed to protect me?”
Malin giggled.
“They’re woven from the silk produced by a beast with a spider seed,” Moreau said.
“Ew.” Loretta very nearly tossed the pants aside.
“Spider silk is stronger than steel,” Moreau said.
“I have never encountered a spiderweb I could not sweep away,” Loretta replied, still glaring at the colorful pants as if they might begin crawling of their own accord.
“That’s a matter of scale,” Moreau said. “If you spun steel as thin as those natural spiderwebs, you’d have no issue tearing right through them either. At this size? Those pants are all but impenetrable.”
Loretta held them up before her and delivered an experimental swat
, making one of the legs billow out. “They still don’t seem like much in the way of protection.”
“They won’t diminish the force of an impact,” Moreau conceded. “But they will prevent arrows or small caliber bullets from being lodged in your flesh, and may even turn away bladed weapons. The other part is made of similar material and has strategically placed coins woven inside to help protect your vital organs.”
“Just not my abdominals,” Loretta said. “Because there’s nothing vulnerable about the belly, is there?”
“Put the outfit on, Sauvage.” The use of that name made her tail shoot up. She wanted to wad the outfit up and hurl it at Moreau’s stupid face. Preferably with a heavy rock in the center of it. “See how you feel about it after that.”
Gritting her fangs and grumbling under her breath, Loretta dressed herself in the costume, and glided out from behind the screen.
Malin clapped. “Very pretty.”
“I feel like a whore,” Loretta said.
“And your body?”
“Naked.”
Moreau gave her a deadpan look.
Loretta sighed and took a proper stock. She felt…lighter, oddly enough. Experimentally, she spun, twirling across the room. She was fast. Faster than usual. Not so swift as when Moreau had played his music for her, but it was still a marked improvement.
“I feel…more control, centered. If that makes sense,” she said, hesitating as she searched for the right words.
“You’re fast,” Malin exclaimed, clapping. “Wow!”
“I thought that might be the case,” Moreau said, nodding. “Your orbis seed responds very powerfully to external stimuli. Music increases your speed, agility, and coordination, so it stood to reason that other things that other instruments of dance would as well.”
Loretta gave him a flat look and gestured at her body. “And this is what you came up with?”
Moreau offered an unapologetic shrug. “The dance attire you’re used to would hardly be practical in the field, would it? You still need to be able to fight.”
She kept up her deadpan look.
“Also, that stretched our budget to the limits,” Moreau admitted.
Loretta let out a long-suffering sigh. “Very well. If I am to be a dancing beast, then I may as well look the part.”
Her hands shook and she looked at them. She tried to make them stop. They would not. She had just admitted, out loud, that she was a beast. Fall or no Fall, she could not deny that any longer. Not even to herself.
“Did you speak with Master Jacquemin about…” She trailed off, unable to properly formulate her thoughts into words.
“I did,” Moreau said. “According to him, there is no doubt that you are a beast.”
Loretta couldn’t help the broken laugh that escaped her throat.
“According to Gegenteil, it’s not unusual for beasts who Fall from nobility to make up stories to explain their circumstances.”
She whirled on him. “Is that what you believe I am doing? Making up some story because I am too weak and broken to handle the truth?”
“I believe you,” said Malin.
“I believe that you believe,” Moreau said calmly, voice stern. He was not wielding his anima. He did not need it. The aura of command had simply come upon him, natural as a man sliding on a coat. “I believe that your story is worth investigating, and so that is what I am doing. I believe that if you are indeed correct, your story will have far-reaching, severe repercussions for us at every level of society. You’ll forgive me if I proceed with due diligence and caution.”
Loretta said nothing for a moment, and then nodded. She had been so caught up in becoming human again that she had hardly stopped to consider the consequences of her actions should she succeed. Lorenz Gage’s new magic could change everything. There might even be parties, should they learn of her secret, who would want to keep her as a beast.
She should have thought about this. “I used to be good at thinking things through,” she said. “Seeing all the goals and angles. It came to me as easily as dancing does now.”
“In your defense,” Moreau said. “You have been through a few upsetting changes.”
This time, her laughter was real.
~ ~ ~
In addition to Sir Dupont, they were joined by a wiry, bespectacled man who appeared more scribe than knight, and his menagerie. Both he and Dupont had three beasts in their keeping, and, for the first time, she felt herself wishing that Moreau had another beast, if for no other reason than to even the numbers out. It made sense for a knight keeper to harvest as many beasts as he could manage for the variety of their abilities and the strength provided by multiple fighters. The more beasts a knight keeper had, the more dangerous and effective he and his team could be.
Loretta had known this before, of course, though she had never allowed herself to dwell upon it and experiencing the frustration of not having enough beasts in her knight’s menagerie was very different from calculating the logistics on a piece of parchment. She scowled at herself as she ran alongside the horses with the other beasts. When had Sir Ragamuffin Moreau become her knight?
“Blackberry?” asked Schwarz, the thorny feline beast from Dupont’s party. “You look like you could use something sweet after whatever thoughts are going through your head.”
Loretta thanked her and popped the proffered berry into her mouth. The sweet tartness exploded upon her tongue and she moaned. “That was the sweetest blackberry I have ever tasted. Where did you find the vines? I must have overlooked them.”
Shwarz laughed. Her smile was not confined to her fanged mouth but spread to her eyes and long, tufted ears, which quivered with amusement. She pointed to the tangled nest of thorny vines that grew from her head. There, hidden among the thorns and rough leaves, grew ripe bundles of blackberries. “Thanks for calling them sweet!”
Loretta nearly choked.
Schwarz laughed harder and pointed to herself. “Blackberry lynx. What are you?”
It took Loretta several moments to answer. Partly because she wasn’t sure how to feel about having eaten a berry that had grown from a beast’s head, no matter how delicious, and partly because it took her a moment to understand the question as it applied to her. After her crash course in beast classifications with Master Jacquemin, she had made it a habit to try and identify the seeds of every beast she saw. Some were fairly straightforward, such as Ballista, Sir Dupont’s boisterous marble boar. But others, such as herself and Schwarz, could be tricky.
Knowing their seeds somehow made it easier to…not understand the beasts, exactly, but appreciate them. Her analytical mind liked being able to categorize, recognize, and label what she saw. Whereas before, all she saw when she looked at a menagerie was a colorful collection of creatures that looked like flawed imitations of true women, now she could see how they were naturally equipped, and what roles they might play in their menageries. Flora and phenomenon seeds still gave her pause, but she imagined that she’d get better at recognizing them with time.
She finally pointed at herself and said, “Dance weasel.”
The word weasel nearly stuck in her throat. At best, the things were good as ratters and pest control. At worst, they were pests, killing chickens and ruining eggs. A vermin that preyed upon other vermin.
“Vicious,” Shwarz said. “Bet you’re really quick. Good animal, that.”
Loretta raised an eyebrow and leapt a fallen log. They were heading west. Something about that tickled a memory. She pushed it aside. This was more important. “Pardon me, but how is a furry snake with legs a good animal?”
“You got to let go of a lot of your perceptions and see the use of your seeds,” Schwarz said. “Weasels are fast and tenacious. They go after prey that’s much bigger than they are, and when they grab hold, they don’t let go.”
Loretta had to think about that. Was that what she was? A tiny predator that was refused to let go of prey that was much larg
er than her? That seemed distressingly accurate. She was caught up in something so much larger than herself that she couldn’t even begin guessing how to unravel the mess of it.
“Can I have another blackberry?” asked Jagdhund, a svelte turquoise wolfhound, jogging over to them. She was a part of the newcomer, Sir Eckart Balzac’s menagerie.
She appeared cast entirely out of her mineral, making her the most colorful beast present, and her personality seemed about as sweetly canine as could be. She even had that dopey, open mouthed grin dogs did. Loretta struggled not to judge the beast an idiot. She wasn’t certain she succeeded. Of Sir Balzac’s menagerie, Jagdhund seemed the only one combat ready, with an impressive mace slung over her back.
Loretta hadn’t been able to determine the orbis seeds of the studious looking knight’s other two beasts, but, of all things, they appeared to be a ladybug and an alpaca, though the ladybug was clearly a flora type of some kind with leafy twigs, bark-like skin, and foliage upon her carapace. Loretta wondered if the wings beneath could support her in flight. She doubted it, as Tinte, the beast in question, ran alongside the rest of them.
Schwarz plucked another blackberry from her vines and handed it over. Jagdhund wolfed it down and offered up another doggy grin. “Thanks!” She pulled ahead to take point.
“She and Ballista will take lead tracking the targets tomorrow,” Schwarz said. “Just watch.”
Loretta couldn’t keep the skepticism from her voice. “Her and Ballista?” The dopey dog beast and the boar who even now could be heard laughing uproariously at something Joie, Dupont’s rare beast with the oxidation and fire coral seeds, had said. The pair were loud, brightly colored, and about as subtle as a shotgun.
“Wolfhound and boar,” Schwarz said, tapping her nose. “Amazing senses of smell.”
That made sense, Loretta supposed. She also supposed that whoever had kidnapped the Leloup heirs would hear them coming from a mile away and prepare for them. At least with the pair both being mineral types, they could likely bear the brunt of whatever offensive their enemies chose to execute.
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