Beauty and the Werewolf fhk-6 Read online

  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 not 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 this. 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.”

  Once again, Bella felt her throat close at the memory of her father’s haggard face. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this! What do you mean by my father’s duty? Why are you keeping this so secret? It’s not as if Sebastian and I are important. You could just — ” she waved her hands vaguely “ — put us on an island or a deserted tower in inaccessible mountains or something. If you’d done that in the first place with Sebastian, none of this ever would have happened to me, and I would be back at home right this moment!“ She couldn’t help herself; there was accusation in her voice and she wasn’t going to apologize for it, either. If Sebastian had been put somewhere where it wouldn’t matter if he escaped confinement, she would be at home, safe, right this minute.

  “Such places are harder to come by than you might think,” the Godmother said, dryly. “Adventurers have this habit of stumbling on them. But that is not why we are trying to keep this from being generally known. The truth is, we do not dare do anything that will attract attention to Duke Sebastian or his condition, and relocating him most certainly would have. We face a dreadful unknown here, one with potentially devastating implications. Sebastian was not changed by any means that I, nor any other Godmother, have ever heard of.”

  “Wait — what?” Bella replied. Sebastian had already told her this, of course, but she hadn’t altogether believed him. He might be a sorcerer, but he wasn’t all that old, and he seemed to be pretty much self-taught. He could scarcely be expected to know as much as, say, a Godmother. But for the Godmother to admit that there was some sort of magic at work that she didn’t recognize —

  Well, that meant that there was something operating here that she couldn’t predict. And when the Godmother couldn’t predict something, it meant everyone was potentially in danger.

  “It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate his magic from the signs of someone or something else working magic on him,” Elena continued. “I will simply describe it as holding a lit candle between yourself and the sun, and trying to separate the light of the candle from the sunlight. So without knowing who or what the other worker of magic is, we cannot work out what was done to him. All we can do is eliminate things.”

  “Such as?” Bella asked, uncertainly.

  “He was never bitten by another were, which is the commonest form of the change. And contrary to popular belief, it is the easiest to cure, provided one has the sympathy of a Godmother. The bite of a were leaves a permanent scar, and one that is easy to recognize. Sebastian has no such scar.”

  “But — ” Bella began.

  “I assure you, we did not simply leave it at that,” the Godmother continued. “It was possible he could have been infected by a very minor wound, and one that would leave so small a scar we wouldn’t recognize it. One of us even suggested a number of other implausible means of infection, so we assumed nothing. But despite vigorous searching, we never found another were, nor signs of one anywhere in the Redbuck Forest, nor within even the most pessimistic distance of the Redbuck Forest.”

  “Oh…” she said, and bit her lip. I really should know better than to question a Godmother…

  “That left us with two other common options. The first is that he was a terribly wicked person who died as a result of a specific curse on the part of one of his victims, was buried and returned as a were. Mind you, while I call this ‘common,’ it’s not, and has never been heard of in any of my Kingdoms, but it is known in others, and had to be considered. However, since he is not wicked, did not encounter the sort of shaman who would make that kind of curse and obviously did not die, that could not be the case.” The Godmother turned her head slightly, and looked at Bella again. Seeing her reaction? Probably. She seemed satisfied by it.

  “The second possibility was more likely than the first, since we already knew that he is a sorcerer. There is a specific spell which requires a belt of wolf skin that allows someone of sufficiently depraved character to physically become a wolf. I say ‘depraved,’ because part of the spell requires that the person first eat human flesh. As it happens, since we found no such belt, and he has transformed without any such belt, this also is obviously not the case.” Elena finished transplanting the seedlings, and dusted off her hands before looking back at Bella.

  “Haven’t I heard — I mean, I thought — Are there other ways?” she said, flailing a little, mentally.

  Elena nodded. “But all of them are less common than those three, and all of them were easily disproved. He didn’t drink water from a wolf footprint, he wasn’t born on the last moment of the winter solstice, he never ate the flesh or brain of a wild wolf, there is no magic pool that causes Transformation closer than a thousand leagues, he didn’t even know how to make the Transformation potions or salves, and he certainly never swore a pact with infernal forces in exchange for revenge. And none of those causes of Transformation has ever been known to occur within my Kingdoms. There is no explanation for what happened to Sebastian. He was a perfectly normal young man until one full moon he suddenly became a werewolf.”

  �
��I’m not sure what all this means,” Bella replied, feeling bewildered. Elena was getting at something, but what was it? She felt as if she must be missing something.

  Fortunately, Elena didn’t take this amiss, and seemed to be perfectly happy to explain. “This means either he was cursed by someone untrained, but extremely powerful, someone we have not been able to find, or there is another way to make someone into a were-beast, one that none of us have been able to determine. It is also a means that can be worked, without detection, on someone who was relatively closely watched because he was the heir to a noble household. Now, can you see where that places us?”

  Bella’s mind went blank for a moment, then began racing. She had always had a particularly good imagination; that was one way in which she ensured against problems cropping up — or rather, was prepared for them when they did. And once the Godmother had pointed out the circumstances surrounding this —

  “If it can be done to Sebastian — it could be done to anyone,” she said, slowly, a feeling of slow horror dawning on her. “Anyone at all. The King — the Prince — ”