Beauty and the Werewolf Read online

  One of her own jars of liniment came floating into the bathroom as she got out of the bath. Wryly, she thought how glad she was now she had made so many…though she certainly had been thinking of the horses, and not herself, when she had!

  With the liniment rubbed into her sore, sore legs—and the Godmother’s ointment applied to her face—she climbed into her warmed bed, feeling just slightly muzzy from the mulled wine. The last light of sunset was fading from the sky, and Sapphire came to pull the curtains shut over the windows, and light the candles in the headboard of her bed. She had settled in with a book that Sebastian had given her to read yesterday, when she noticed that Sapphire was still there, holding a ball of what looked like beeswax.

  “Wax?” she said, puzzled, taking it.

  The slate rose. “Ears,” Sapphire wrote.

  For a moment, she stared at the word, puzzled. Then it dawned on her what Sapphire meant. “All right, I’ll try it,” she agreed, and rolled the lump of wax in her hand until it was soft, then divided it in two and stuffed it in her ears.

  When the howling began, she could still hear it…but it was muffled, and she could even pretend to herself that it was far, far distant—the howl of something out in the woods, on the other side of the walls. Some wild thing, and not a man she knew, trapped in the mind and form of a beast… The intense relief she felt that she was not going to be suffering the same fate was tempered with pity for him, now that she could afford it. Two more months, and she could go home! But he would still be trapped here, a prisoner three days of the month—and right now, a prisoner every other day, as well, by his own decision.

  Hmm. We’ll see about that.

  The book caught her attention immediately, however, and soon she was too engrossed in it to think much about poor Sebastian—because it was about The Tradition. It went into much more detail than Sebastian had, though that detail was more along the lines of how Traditional power worked in the world, with examples, and possible solutions to common problems. She noted that it must have been written for magicians, not Godmothers, because more than once the solution to a problem stated simply “call on a Godmother.”

  She had to work very hard not to get too angry at this faceless thing that they called The Tradition, because of all things, she detested being manipulated, and this was manipulation on the grand scale.

  Though if she was going to be honest, she would have to admit that she hated being manipulated in part because she did so much manipulation herself. Pot calling the kettle black, she noted wryly. Still…she’d never manipulated anyone but Genevieve and the twins, and that had been to keep peace in the household. Someone had to, or Genevieve all by herself would wreak the havoc of confusion—not to mention shatter the monthly budget. And…well, she more or less manipulated the rest of the household. She called it “managing,” but there was some manipulation, too. But wasn’t that what a good household head was supposed to do? You couldn’t just order people to get along and expect that they would do it. You had to make them want to.

  Oh, yes, there is another excuse. It’s all “for their own good.” Sapphire brought her another flagon of mulled wine, and she took a sip to take the nasty taste of truth out of her mouth. And another, because she knew very well when she got home she wasn’t going to stop manipulating them.

  Ugh. Truth was not fun. And often not pretty.

  But this Tradition is already manipulating them. I’m just trying to counter it…. And that was true—it was right here in black and white. When Stepmothers weren’t Wicked, or downright Murderous, they were generally Vain, Petty and Vindictive. And Stepsisters were perpetually Jealous, just as Petty and Vain, and Greedy. All by herself, without even knowing what she was doing, she had mitigated all of that, so the worst that could be said of Genevieve was that she was lazy and vain, not even Vain with the capital V. And the twins were entirely sweet-natured and well-intentioned. Well, all right, she hadn’t known she was doing all that before now, but now that she knew about the blasted Tradition, she could be more careful about what she did and how she did it. Only for real good, not for my good, and certainly not telling myself that it’s for their good. It was going to be a very hard vow to keep, but she knew she was going to have to do just that.

  She sipped and read—the wine did a fairly good job of keeping her from getting too angry—making mental notes as she went along. Finally, the last of the wine was gone and she put the flagon up on one of the shelves in the headboard, and blinked, feeling it hit her with more force than she had expected.

  Well, then, time to sleep… She blew out the candles, and set the book aside…and the next thing she knew, it was morning.

  For a moment she was confused by how muffled sound was, until she remembered the wax and pulled it out of her ears. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and she groaned as she started to get out of bed, feeling her legs aching and sore despite the hot bath and the liniment.

  I hurt in muscles I didn’t even know I had! she thought, and moaned a little again. Sapphire whisked into the bedroom at that, bringing the liniment with her, and Bella was very glad to see it, too.

  It seemed that Eric had planned more of the same for her today, for another of Sebastian’s old suits had been laid out. But there had been some additions to it—some lovely embroidery at the square neck, and a little lace at the cuffs and neck of the shirt. Nothing that Sebastian would have worn, she was sure, since she had a good idea of his taste now. She smiled to see it, though; this had to be Sapphire’s work, and Sapphire was determined to make sure no one forgot she was a girl!

  But the first thing she did was go straight to her mirror and her message box. She read her letter with one eye on the mirror; she wanted to see her father’s reaction to his. She had written to her father about her adventures in weaponry and horseback riding, and to her relief, he seemed more amused than anything else. His letter had been full of news about the way that the servants were taking care of him, “cosseting me” in his words. And how Genevieve seemed to be working with the Housekeeper, which was nothing short of astonishing so far as Bella was concerned.

  The vague, uneasy thought flitted across her mind. What if they don’t need me, after all? Would she still be welcome? Wanted? It vanished a moment later, but the taste of it lingered.

  Meanwhile she waited, watching, for him to get to the part where she told him that she had not changed on the first night of the full moon. And when he did, the sheer joy in his face practically took her breath away.

  And it quelled the unease. There was no doubt he wanted her back home.

  She went down to breakfast to find Eric there; he didn’t seem to notice the little additions to her attire.

  “Well, how sore are you?” he asked without preamble.

  “Very,” she replied, as the servant put buttered flatcakes on her plate and drizzled honey over them. “And please, do not tell me that the only cure for the soreness is to get on the wretched horse again. My first instructor told me that. Why are your horses so…wide?” she added.

  “Because they all have destrier blood in them. Knight’s horses. Heavier bones, better for jumping and going over rough country, since they’re bred to carry a rider and all that armor.” He was consuming ham single-mindedly as he spoke. But at least he didn’t talk with his mouth full.

  “This morning we’ll be working inside, now that I know you’ll at least not break mirrors and windows when you shoot,” he continued. “There’s a big room here they used to use for balls, but it’s made for practice with weapons. Swords, generally, but we can use some light hand-crossbows in there, and you can practice your knife work.”

  “Oh, I’ve been there,” she said. “Sebastian gave me leave to explore as much as I wanted.”

  “Well, good. As soon as you’re finished, we’ll go straight there. I told the servants to build up the fires so it won’t be hideously cold.” He began mopping the last of the ham juice from his plate with a roll, so she hastened to finish her flatcakes.<
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  “Are we riding this afternoon?” she asked, as they walked toward what she could only think of as the “music room,” and at his chuckle, she groaned. “Of course we are,” she said, answering her own question. “Or at least, I am.”

  “Take heart. You’re going to be less sore tomorrow. In a week, you’ll be fit for the trail on a proper horse instead of that puny little mule.” He handed her a much smaller crossbow than before. “Several things occurred to me. Outside, you have to deal with windage. You don’t in here. And I thought the regular crossbow might be too heavy, considering how many arrows you drove into the dirt. So I reckoned that this might work out better for you. It will still kill a man, or make him hurt quite a lot. It just won’t do so instantly unless you get an insanely lucky shot.” He shrugged. “Unless we’re in a situation where someone wants to kill us, I’d as soon a good healer could save him. He’ll serve as an example to anyone else who gets ideas. Now, try that out, and see how you like it.”

  It was certainly easier to cock. She fitted a bolt into the guide, and took aim at the target—which had been placed against a generous number of straw mattresses leaning up against the wall. Either Eric, the servants or both were taking no chances on her ruining the wood paneling.

  Her very first bolt hit the target! So did her second, and her third!

  None of them got near the bull’s eye, of course, but at least now she was hitting what she was supposed to hit!

  He nodded, suggested corrections, until finally, her trigger finger was actually starting to ache, and she was placing the bolts inside the first ring, consistently.

  “Now for your knife work,” he said, collecting all the bolts and setting them and the crossbow aside. He handed her a wooden knife with blunted edge and point. “First thing—it’s not a duel. Someone who attacks you with a knife means to kill you. Knife work is dirty work, not gentleman’s work, and anyone who’s attacking with a knife is a ruffian at the very best, and he’s probably murdered before. You have to be dirtier than he is.”

  He picked up a wooden knife himself. “Now, assuming you actually see me coming with the knife, what do you do?”

  That seemed perfectly obvious to her. “Run. I run very well, and I am lighter than you. Even if I can’t run faster than you, as long as I can keep out of reach, I can probably run longer than you. And if I can keep running long enough to get to some place where other people are, he’ll give up.”

  He actually grinned. “Well done! Ninety-nine men out of a hundred wouldn’t give that answer.”

  “Women are more practical. And we have no problem with being called cowards,” she pointed out, wryly.

  “Right. So, against someone with a knife, your first priority is going to be to escape. Your second, if you can’t outrun him, is going to be to evade him or hurt him so you can escape. You are unlikely to ever find yourself facing someone your size or smaller, so this is how it’s done.”

  He couldn’t show her everything in one afternoon, obviously, but what he began with was very interesting indeed. Using a cloak wrapped around one arm as a shield, for instance, and the pattern of move out of the way, block the next blow, strike back while he’s off balance, run.

  Mostly, though, he showed her how to evade, how to tell the way that someone was coming at her, and how to squirm out of the way like a ferret. How to cut or stab if she could, and if not, how to punch her attacker with the hand not holding the knife. “He’ll be concentrating on that hand,” Eric pointed out. “Not on the hand he thinks isn’t dangerous. And this is a good time to have a nice, heavy rock, a piece of wood or half a brick in that hand if you can.” He chuckled a little. “I once put a man down with a horseshoe that way. I’d picked it up and put it in my pocket—no point in wasting a good horseshoe.”

  She hardly noticed that as she warmed up with the exercise, she hurt less and less, until, when he called a halt for dinner, she realized she hardly hurt at all!

  “You are being rather nicer to me than you were when I first got here,” she said lightly, as they left the music room to clean up before dinner.

  “I expected someone more arrogant, based on our first meeting,” he said bluntly. “Just another of the same sort of women who used to look down their noses at me.”

  She snorted. “You bullied me, tried to intimidate me and did your level best to terrify me. What kind of response did you expect?”

  “Not what I got, obviously.” He reached out and caught her elbow, making her stop. “Look…I’ll admit it. I wanted to bed you. If I can bully a woman into that position, I will. Most of the women I run into out in the forest respond to that. They’re happy to trade a rogering for getting off with whatever they’ve poached. I get what I want, they get what they want, no harm done. And I’ll freely admit I’m a good customer at the brothels, and when we still had human servants around here, I was known to tumble a chambermaid or three. That’s the kind of women I know best. The only other women I’ve ever met are the nobles who’d look through me as if I wasn’t there.”

  She was not surprised to hear the venom in his voice at that last.

  “I’ve never met anyone like you,” he continued. “I’m not sure how to treat you, what to say around you. All the others, I know right off what my place is, what her place is, and that’s that. But you—”

  He let go of her arm. “You baffle me. I don’t know how to treat you. I just know I like being around you, and it’s not the same as it is with any of those other women.”

  She felt herself warming to his tone, his expression. He was in dead earnest, so far as she could tell. And she couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him—the bastard, snubbed by the noble, resented by the servants. How lonely he must have been! How—

  “It wasn’t a good life, being the unacknowledged bastard,” he continued bitterly. “My father’s people sneered at me when he wasn’t looking, half the time I had to thrash the servants to get them to obey me—and the only reason they did so after that was because I got away with the thrashing. Finally, I got a position, once I was old enough to be useful—they stopped sneering at me openly, but you could still see the contempt in their eyes. I had to fight for everything I got, prove I was better than the other man that might have gotten what I was granted. Sebastian didn’t sneer at me, but he doesn’t sneer at anyone. He had to fight for what he wanted, too, the wizardry business. The Old Duke wasn’t all that pleased about his son flinging magic around until the day the boy dared one of the squires that had been taunting him to fight him, and the brat ended upside down in a tree, hanging by one foot.” Eric smiled grimly at that. “That’s why he and I get along. That’s why, truth to tell, we were both just as glad to see the backs of most of the Old Duke’s people.”

  She could almost see it—and no wonder he bullied people, if he had been bullied himself. That was why she was treating the twins as she did, treating them as a friend and a real sister and an ally instead of bullying them. It would have been easy to bully them, especially when they had been younger. The servants, her father, would have believed her, and not them, if they had complained. But that not only wasn’t fair to them, since they had done nothing to her, it would only turn them into little tyrants when they grew up—children became what they lived with. But Eric had only seen force used against him all his younger life, and fighting back was all he knew. There had been no one to teach him a better way, and—well, even if there had been, would that really have helped him?

  And just as she started to respond to him, something that had been nagging at the back of her mind leapt forward.

  The Rake’s Reward.

  Oh, no. She had just read this very same scenario last night in that book about The Tradition! The poor, misunderstood rakehell…the man who was a rogue because deep inside he was still a lonely, neglected little boy…the good girl who would redeem him with her love and help him become the gentle man he was meant to be…

  Even the fact that he was the bastard son played into that!
r />   Except, the book had noted, that was seldom how the scenario played out, once the rake got what he wanted. The habits of a lifetime are very hard to break, and The Tradition was perfectly happy to perpetuate those habits, so that The Rake’s Reward generally turned into The Sadder but Wiser Girl or, well, any number of other songs and stories about girls who trusted a man’s sad story and wound up with a big belly and no wedding ring. And wouldn’t that be a fine way to go home, knowing that in a few months time you wouldn’t be able to hide what you’d been up to!

  Oh, no, you don’t! she thought at The Tradition, angrily, and as she did so, she could actually feel the pressure that the Godmother had spoken about—the force of the magic trying to steer her into the Path it wanted. And then what? Given the situation here, there were all sorts of ways this could go wrong. She was all alone here, with only the Spirit Elementals, who probably wouldn’t be of much help if she said no, but Eric decided she only needed to be “persuaded” into yes. Or if he decided he was just going to take what he wanted, as he usually did. She rather doubted that someone with his appetites was going to be willing to settle for decorous kisses.

  She also didn’t think he’d be inclined to propose marriage once he’d gotten her where he wanted her….

  With her mind working logically instead of emotionally, other things occurred to her. It might not just be The Tradition at work. This could all be a clever act on his part, the wiles of the practiced seducer. Who knew how many other women he’d cajoled underneath him with that same story of the poor, sad, lonely boy?

  Still, looking at his serious, thoughtful expression, she was tempted….

  He could be in earnest. It went without saying that he didn’t often meet a woman who stood up to him, nor one who was willing to don men’s clothing and work as he did. And he was very handsome. When he wasn’t frowning, that saturnine face had a melancholy to it that was extremely attractive. When he laughed, a genuine laugh, he was completely transformed. He was a great deal more intelligent than she had thought. He was treating her rather as an equal, which was incredibly rare. And sometimes there actually was a happy ending…