Beauty and the Werewolf Read online

  Her hands caressed the silk around the mirror. She was dying to take it to her room and see if it worked, but it would scarcely be polite to run off like a little child with a new toy. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t know,” she replied, apologetically. “The only magic person I know is Granny, and she never did any in front of me. I mean, I know there is a lot of magic in the city. Every shop I go to has charms to bring customers and curses against thieves on it, but…I’ve never really seen anything at work, much less seen anyone doing it.”

  He nodded. “And you won’t generally. Really powerful magicians are rare, which means that most magicians have to be very clever and careful, learn how to do the most that they can with the least power. For that matter, the only magicians who are profligate with power are the bad ones, because they just steal it from people.”

  “Why doesn’t everyone?” she asked, curiously. “I mean, if no one is using the power—”

  “Because it generally kills the people you take it from, or makes them sick,” he told her bluntly. “Besides that, the best magic is unobtrusive. It just makes life go a little smoother. There still are thieves and they still will take things, and they have curse-counters to keep from getting hit by the curses that the shops have. But mostly, they get caught. Or the shop gets a reputation for paying for such good curses that it would be foolish to steal from it. And life goes on.” He sighed, with a glance at the floating armband. “If I had my way, there would not be a single spirit here. It would all be ordinary servants, getting ordinary wages. But things didn’t work out that way, and I’ve created something—well, let’s not mince words here—unnatural.”

  “Your servants aren’t unhappy,” she ventured. “They seem to enjoy serving you, in fact.”

  He smiled wryly, and a shadow crossed over his face as he pushed his spectacles up on his nose. “Yes, but did they have a choice in that?” he countered.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Did they ever have a choice in whether or not they enjoy serving me?” he repeated. “I tried to make my spell noncoercive so that it wouldn’t force any of them here, but did it force them to enjoy their servitude once they were summoned?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t tell, and they can’t tell me. If they even know. That is the problem with magic—it often merely pretends to be doing what you want it to, when in fact it is doing what it wants to.”

  She blinked at him. “You’re talking as if magic is something like a person, with a person’s thoughts and feelings.”

  “And sometimes it acts as if it is,” he said solemnly. “I can’t explain it. I just know that it does. And maybe that is why and how the intelligent ones ended up here. They certainly are not what I asked for when I cast the spell. It has me baffled.”

  “All I can tell you is that the intelligent ones are as good as any servant that I have ever had,” she assured him. “And good servants are loyal. I must say…while I cannot swear that the best of my servants at home would have stayed no matter what had happened to me or what strange things came to inhabit my house, I would like to think they would have at least tried to accommodate everything before giving notice.”

  He hesitated a moment. “It wasn’t only that I changed, or that I started to have the invisibles about. I think there was friction with Eric. You know, he’s neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat, as the saying goes. If this had been a bigger household—or my father had taken more thought about Eric’s situation and done something to give him a defined place in the household…well, he didn’t. What’s done can’t be undone.”

  Her hands unconsciously cradled the mirror, and he smiled a little. “I know you want to run off with that to be private,” he told her, kindly, his eyes behind the glasses a little sad. “So go and do that. But…you are likely to find time hanging heavily on your hands. If you do, I wouldn’t mind you coming to my workshop while I try to figure out a curse-breaker for our condition. Actually, I would like your company.”

  “Wouldn’t I be disturbing you?” she asked. She couldn’t imagine why he would want her there. She didn’t know a thing about magic, and would probably only be in the way.

  “Not at all. It would be useful to have someone to talk to, and you ask very intelligent questions. In fact, sometimes you could help when all I need is an extra pair of hands. I would very much welcome you then.” He made a face. “I know that I have the servants to help me, but they are magic themselves, and sometimes it is not good to have magic creatures hovering about where magic is being done. It’s a bit like having a pot of oil boiling on top of a fire.”

  “Well…perhaps,” she told him, tentatively. “I’m still not sure I can be of any real help, and I might make things worse for you than if I wasn’t there. What if I did something wrong? Or what if something went wrong even if I didn’t do anything?”

  He scratched his head and looked rueful. “Well…I can’t absolutely promise you nothing would go wrong. And I can’t absolutely promise you that you would be safe. Magic has a lot of uncertainty…and as I said before, sometimes it does what it wants to, and not what you want it to do. It is true that the invisibles have their own sort of protections. I would try to keep you shielded from harm, but—well, I know better than to sit here and pretend that you would be as safe as if you were in your own room.”

  At least he was honest. “I will have to think about this,” she told him.

  He gave her a lopsided, rueful smile. “I understand. And I understand that you want very badly to take that mirror away and see your family.” He waved his hand at her a little. “Go on. You deserve more than that. Much more. I just wish I could give it to you.”

  Perhaps it was rude, but she just couldn’t wait anymore. “Thank you,” she managed to get out, as she snatched up her prize and ran as fast as the gown would allow for her rooms.

  Once there, she made sure she was alone. She didn’t even want Sapphire around for this. Then she laid the mirror down on the desk, still wrapped, and carefully unwrapped it. Breathing raggedly she settled into her chair and stared down at her reflection.

  Father, she thought, fiercely. Show me Father!

  There was a ripple across her reflection, as if the mirror was water instead of glass, and had been disturbed.

  Then the surface fogged over—or was it the image in the depths that was fog shrouded? The whole mirror darkened, then slowly lightened. The fog cleared, and she was looking straight at her father, as if she was sitting in the chair across from his desk at his warehouse office.

  He looked haggard, as if he had not slept much more than she had. And he was working with the same dogged persistence she remembered from when her mother was dying, as if by burying himself in his work he could drive everything else out of his mind. That was always his response to trouble, to work three times as hard.

  She knew what had him looking so drawn and sick, and generally horrible. Worry over her, of course. What had they told him? Was it even remotely possible that they had told him the truth? What was he thinking?

  She was dying to comfort him, aching to tell him that she was all right—even to lie to him if she had to. And all she could do was watch him scratching away at things that his clerks could do, in an effort to not think about what was eating him up inside. She choked on a sob, and tears dripped down her cheeks as she watched him.

  She watched until she couldn’t bear it any longer, then turned away from the scene. It faded into black blankness the moment she did.

  She dried her eyes and concentrated on taking deep, deep breaths. This was supposed to be making her feel better, not worse. She wasn’t going to do herself, him, or anyone else any good if all she did was sit in a corner and cry.

  Finally, she got herself back under control. She thought about looking in on Genevieve or the twins, but what possible purpose would that serve? None of them had seen her taken away—Father would have been at his office when the King’s men arrived, while Genevieve and the twins would no
t yet have been awake. So none of them knew the exact circumstances, except what the servants would have told them. If the servants told them anything… Certainly her stepmother and stepsisters wouldn’t even have thought to ask, for it would never have occurred to any of them that the servants could be a source of information.

  She couldn’t imagine that anyone with a particle of sense had told Genevieve anything that she could turn into gossip. Whatever they had told her would have been something utterly boring and ordinary, so the worst that would happen would be that she would be mildly irritated that Bella wasn’t at home making sure everything ran smoothly.

  No, if she looked in on the rest of the family, all she would see would be that they were carrying on as usual. And that would probably make her cry, as well, as a harsh reminder of where she should be and what she should be doing.

  Now she was not entirely certain that this had been a good idea. She couldn’t speak to anyone through this mirror; all she could do was watch them, long to be there and make herself more desperate, the more she watched.

  Was this how the newly dead felt? Watching their loved ones, but unable to touch them, comfort them, tell them anything at all? No wonder they fled this world so quickly—this was sheer torment!

  Unable to stop herself, she turned back to the mirror. But as she fought with the desire to look in on her father again, a new idea occurred to her.

  It could show her her own family—could it show her anything else?

  She concentrated on Edgar Karsten, the old bookseller in the square who always seemed to know exactly what she or her father wanted, and always seemed to have it in the shop. A moment later, the mirror fogged over and cleared again, and there he was, up on a ladder, dusting his bookshelves, pausing now and again to pat the spines lovingly. What would he make of the tin-bound books in Sebastian’s library? she wondered.

  She let the image fade. Other than providing a moment of distraction, this was getting her nowhere…

  Unless…

  She stared into the darkened depths of the mirror. There was one person who might have answers. Maybe if Bella could get a glimpse of her, she could learn something.

  Show me! she told the mirror fiercely. Show me the Godmother!

  In the back of her mind, a little voice was saying sardonically that this couldn’t possibly work. After all, the Godmother had every sort of magic there was at her disposal, and she had presumably created this mirror. Surely she would not make something that could be used to spy on her.

  You really are a foolish wench, you know, that voice in her head told her. And even if it works, what can you possibly learn by watching the Godmother do whatever it is that Godmothers do? It’s not as if this is the largest problem in her Kingdoms that Godmother Elena has to cope with! You and Sebastian are probably somewhere near the bottom on her list of things to do.

  So Bella didn’t really expect anything other than fog or darkened glass or her own reflection as she willed the mirror to show her the woman that had created it.

  She certainly didn’t expect what she got.

  A glowing green face abruptly appeared in the mirror, staring at her with a quizzical expression, as if she had startled it. Just a face, nothing more. It materialized so quickly, and it looked so strange, that she jumped and uttered a stifled yip.

  The face peered at her. “Ah,” said a voice that sounded as if it was coming from the bottom of a well. “Isabella Beauchamps. This is not unexpected, but you are a little beforehand here. We weren’t ready for you to make an effort to talk to us so soon. The Godmother is a little busy at the moment. Can you wait?”

  She stared at the face. It talked! When she had looked at her father and at the bookseller, there had been no voices at all, no sound. But unless she was having a particularly vivid hallucination…

  “You are not having a particularly vivid hallucination,” the face said. “I am very real. The Godmother had high hopes of your intelligence, and she sent you the mirror with the presumption that she would be speaking to you through it eventually. I suppose your level of curiosity is high enough to make you wait. Good. Please enjoy this pleasant scene while the Godmother finishes her other business.”

  The face gave way to a view of a field of flowers with butterflies floating over it. There was the sound of running water in the distance. It was a cloudless day, with no sign of anything like a human being—and after a while, she began to notice that she didn’t recognize any of the flowers.

  She stared at the mirror and the scene it held, too dumbfounded to know what to think at this point. What was that face? It had acted like someone’s private secretary. How had it been able to talk to her? How had it known her? It had addressed her by name!

  Well, the answer was obviously, by magic, but it wasn’t an answer that made her feel any less queasy. The invisible servants were only invisible; she had quickly come to think of them as just people that you couldn’t see. It wasn’t as if they were disembodied arms, or trays on legs. She hadn’t really had a chance to think about the mirror….

  But free-floating faces in unnatural colors that spoke directly to her, well, that was something else entirely. It said magic in a way that she just couldn’t ignore. And she wasn’t sure she liked it. It made all the rules of the world seem as malleable as a handful of warm wax. Anything could happen when you had a world with green talking faces in mirrors in it.

  The scene of butterflies and flowers was not giving her any answers, only more questions.

  Just when she was about to give up and wrap the silk around the glass again, the face came back.

  The effect of the floating green face in a sea of black was doubly unnerving the second time. There was no hint of anything like a body, nothing to indicate that there was anything but the face. It could just as easily have been a floating, talking mask. Hollow. Soulless?

  It was worse when it smiled. “Oh, good, you’re still there. The Godmother likes patience and perseverance and she’ll be pleased that you waited. She’ll see you now.”

  “She—what?” was all that Bella had time for, before the green face faded into white fog, and the white fog resolved into another image.

  This was a lovely, blond-haired woman seated incongruously on a wall around a raised flower bed in what looked like a kitchen garden. She looked to be older than Bella, perhaps her middle twenties, but her unconscious air of assurance and authority made her seem older. Rather than the opulent gown that Bella was expecting a Godmother to wear, the woman was wearing a very plain linen chemise and brown moleskin skirt, with a voluminous apron tied neatly over both. Her hair was tied back with a simple lavender bow.

  “Hello, Isabella,” the woman said, staring right at her as she gaped in surprise. “I rather expected you would be clever enough to think that the mirror could work both ways in some cases. I hope you won’t mind me continuing to work while we talk. You caught me at a disadvantage. I thought you would be so busy looking in on your family that you wouldn’t get around to trying to see me until later today.” She chuckled. “And I had it all planned out, too. Ah, well, that’s overconfidence for you. Instead of my impressing you by looking more regal than your Queen herself, you catch me up to my elbows in planting. Perhaps that is just as well. I never much like trying to intimidate people, anyway.”

  The woman turned back to the bed, in which she was planting tiny seedlings. A moment later, Bella realized that she must be working in another hothouse, just like the one here at Redbuck. Only…much bigger, since Bella couldn’t see any glass walls from where the woman was sitting. That, surely, was the only possible explanation for someone planting seedlings in the dead of winter.

  “Well?” Godmother Elena said, when Bella didn’t immediately answer. “What is it you want to hear from me? I assume you must have plenty of questions, so you might as well start asking them. I can’t keep the mirror spell open between us forever, you know. Even a Godmother has her limits.”

  She was expecting me to try thi
s. I am supposed to ask questions. I am talking to the Godmother of at least four Kingdoms that I know of…. Still not quite over her surprise, she blurted out the first thing she could think of. “What have you told my father?”

  “That is a good, and a dutiful, question. I know he is quite distressed over your problem. Please know that he does not blame you, although for a while, before I convinced him that Sebastian’s escape was nothing more than a terrible accident, I feared he was going to take one of those antique crossbows down off the wall of his study and come hunting, even if he didn’t know what for.”

  She felt a rush of both relief and grief. Her father didn’t blame her!

  And her father knew the truth….

  “You may not be aware of this, but not only is your father a reliable man, a trusted merchant who turned down the position of Guildmaster of the Merchants Guild several times because he wished to devote as much time as he can to his family, he has from time to time served as an advisor to the King.” She nodded at Bella’s surprise. “We knew we could trust him implicitly, so we told him the truth. He deserves nothing less. He is concerned for you, of course, but he agreed that this is the only possible course of action we could have taken,” Elena told her, in brisk and no-nonsense tones. “Privately, he is probably deeply conflicted, but he knows what his duty to his King and Kingdom demand.”

  What on earth does that mean?

  “I don’t know what he told your stepmother and stepsisters,” the Godmother continued. “Likely something less sensational than ‘my daughter was bitten by a werewolf.’ I wouldn’t trust your stepmother with any information that I didn’t want spread across half the city in two days, and we have been working very diligently these past few years to keep Sebastian’s condition a secret.”