Midnight for a Curse

by E J Kitchens

  She sensed Beast glance at her curiously several times before he finally asked, “What are you reading, Miss Lambton? Nothing so studious as to require a desk and paper?”

  A half-grin twisted her mouth, half of relief and half of amused gratitude. “Don’t over fertilize” apparently required days of silence and an adventure book. She considered implying she was plotting something, but she decided to forgo the pleasure. Instead, she merely raised the book to let him read the title, quietly re-arranging her yellow shawl over her shoulders with her free hand as he read.

  “Ah,” he said, recognition in his tone.

  “It’s something I hope will be a pleasurable experience. My father once recommended it.”

  Beast nodded, and returned his interest to his own book. “He has good taste.”

  “I’ve always thought so,” Belinda replied, and let the room lapse into silence. She didn’t speak again for some time, not even to goad Beast when he swapped the collection of plays for another book, one she couldn’t catch the title of without him noticing her attempt to do so. The dullness of the cover indicated a work of a serious nature, which surprised her, but she couldn’t confirm it.

  Lyndon joined them for dinner, and they played a game of riddles, Belinda very nearly, but not quite, understanding Beast’s proposal. When they returned to their books later that evening, each supplied with a hot chocolate, Belinda quietly took up the explorer’s biography again. An hour later, she was surprised when Beast, with genuine curiosity in his tone rather than mere politeness, asked her what she thought of it. She was even more surprised when her answer, the kind her father enjoyed but made her sisters roll their eyes, led to a short, but satisfying, discussion of it.

  The skies cleared mid-morning the next day, and Belinda, having learned the healer had no need of her herbs at present, decided to go for a ride and map the location of the wild plants she found for future reference. The healer assured her such a map might come in handy.

  The smell of forest and the rustling of leaves soothed Belinda’s soul as she led Marigold through a break in the steep bank to reach the stream whose rush of water she’d been following for some quarter of an hour. That the stream was near the border of Beast’s lands she knew, though how she knew, she wasn’t sure, nor did she care to concern herself with the how of it. What she did know was she should have asked Lyndon for a proper map to record her findings on, rather than attempting to draw her own, but she hadn’t seen him that morning.

  As Marigold drank at the stream’s rock-and-sand edge, Belinda studied the stream, as she did every body of water. Having her father lose his fortune—and crews she’d never known and now never could—to shipping disasters had given her a respect and fear of the sparkling, alluring sustainer and taker of life.

  This was an ordinary, pretty stream, likely crossable by wagon at this particular spot in the dry season. Large boulders, clothed in flat, gray-and-white lichen, sat serenely in the channel a little farther down, not caring how they diverted the flow and made eddies in the water. Belinda wasn’t sure whether to admire their tenacity in the face of such roaring onslaught or pity them, knowing how the water would wear them down eventually. She felt the danger of that wear in her own soul: Go home and marry Gaspard. You know you will eventually, so go ahead. Do you think you deserve someone better? That someone better would want you?

  Gritting her teeth, Belinda picked up a pebble and hurled it at the largest boulder. It hit with a sharp thwack, then plummeted to the stream. The boulder remained, unmoved. She threw another pebble, then another and another, each hit echoing more loudly than the last.

  She stopped, panting slightly, and rubbed her aching arm. That’s what she thought about such gray thoughts. They were as useless as they were foolish.

  Returning to the bank, she leaned into the crook of a tree that had grown parallel to the ground for a few feet before it remembered it was supposed to chase the sun, and pulled out her map. She marked the stream’s course and the plants she spotted along its bank. That done, she took up her mare’s reins again, but the soreness of her thighs convinced her that walking was a good thing to add to her outing.

  “Come along, Marigold.” Belinda led them back through the gap in the bank and onto the flat floodplain beyond it. “Let’s see how many species we can find before another storm sends us to the castle.”

  “I wish you could tell me,” she said a few minutes later, stopping to mark a clump of ginseng on her map, “who Beast is. Every time I think I figure it out, my nose itches and I forget. That bloody enchantress could have at least used a more dignified means of distraction, a spasm of the little toe or some such thing. I could do something about that with no one noticing.”

  The horse whinnied and shook her head, sending a fly away from her golden mane.

  Belinda shooed it with her hand, and noted a patch of blackberry canes topping a rise in the bank just ahead to her right. “You’re not telling me you’re really a servant, are you? Or that dealing with a spasm of the hoof would not be less dignified than scratching your nose?”

  The horse snorted and pricked her ears toward the rise. Belinda quickly glanced around, but when she didn’t see or hear anything to cause her alarm, she dismissed Marigold’s nervousness as her imagination. Marigold pranced as they started forward. “All right. No questions about the master. I know that—”

  The hair on the back of her neck stood as limbs snapped ahead of them. A buck burst from the shrubs and trees, a broken arrow in its chest. Its crazed eyes found them just before it charged.

  The mare reared and darted to the bank’s edge, dragging Belinda with her, until Belinda’s foot caught in the hole of a decayed tree. Screaming, she tumbled to the forest floor, her arm catching on the toothy stub of beaver-ravaged sapling as Marigold charged on. The sapling ripped through her sleeve, gashing her arm, as blackberry canes clung jealousy to her skirt.

  The buck stumbled and collapsed a few feet to her left. It rocked its massive head and shoulders up, struggling to get its legs underneath it, but each jerking movement only shifted it closer to where Belinda raced to free her skirt. The buck reared and collapsed a final time. Belinda shrieked as its antlers hammered her legs into the leaves and wild gingers. She scrambled forward, desperate to escape the dead thing, rough bone and thorns gouging her legs. What had she been thinking, going into woods she knew were hunted without telling anyone!

  From just over the ridge where her horse had fled, came an equine cry that chilled her blood. The mare burst back over the rise. Belinda scrambled backwards and covered her head as the mare leapt over both her and the deer. The ground trembled as she landed, faltered, then galloped away.

  Only the tremble of the ground under heavy footfalls didn’t end when the mare vanished among the trees. Over the bank, limbs snapped and air ruffled through a large snout. A bear nearly as large as the mare, hunkering on all fours and moving fast in its bow-legged fashion, lumbered over the bank. It drew up, standing at the top of the ridge, and sniffed. Its gaze switched from the horse’s path to the bloody patch that was Belinda and the deer, then surged toward them, all fur and fang and muscle.

  Knowing her voice was her only true weapon, Belinda screamed, scattering dirt and leaves as she scooted further under the deer’s rack and grabbed for the little, useless knife in her belt.

  A blur of soft blue velvet and coarse fur sailed over her head and collided into the bear in a blend of roars that were all animal. Beast and bear tumbled over the bank.

  “Beast!” The rough weight of bone and deer dug into Belinda’s leg and back as she fought to pull her knees underneath her. But the ground was slick with moist leaves and blood, and the deer was heavy. She collapsed, gaining a scrape along her side to match that on her legs. Her cry of pain and frustration echoed a fiercer one along the stream. She had the horrible idea it should have been a man’s yell, but wasn’t. Unable to move, she buried her head under her arms, desperate to block out the snarls and yelps from ove
r the ridge, both horrified and grateful the dominant roar had a familiar edge to it.

  “Miss Lambton! Hurry!” The call came to her attention as the weight of the antlers eased off her back and legs. Lyndon grunted as he heaved the buck to the side by its massive rack. As his hands circled about her waist, Belinda managed to uncover her head. With him pulling more than assisting, she staggered to her feet.

  With a crunch and a cry that made Belinda sick, the fight over the ridge went silent. Lyndon steadied Belinda, then darted toward that lack of sound. Belinda ran, swaying, after him, topping the rise just behind him.

  “Master! Are you all right?” Lyndon cried. Belinda grabbed his arm to keep herself from falling down the bank.

  Unhearing, Beast rolled away from the bear’s broken carcass, spitting out blood and chunks of fur and flesh. He scrambled back and frantically wiped his mouth over his sleeve, smearing blood rather than getting it off. With a guttural cry, he ripped his jacket and waistcoat off, yanked off his partly unsoiled shirt, and scrubbed it over his face and paws.

  “Beast! Are you okay?” It was a fool’s question she knew, but she couldn’t help herself.

  Beast hunched over, shifting on his knees until his back was to them. “Get her away, Lyndon.” His rumbly voice cracked.

  Lyndon grabbed Belinda by the shoulders and spun her around.

  “But, Beast—?”

  “Get her away!”

  Lyndon dragged Belinda back over the bank, stopping some twenty feet away to bandage the gash on her arm with his handkerchief, then helped her limp through the woods until they found Marigold caught in a thorn patch. They rode back to the castle in grim silence. There, he handed her off to the servants and hurried back to the forest.

  Sometime later, Belinda heard a commotion in the corridor outside her room, but invisible hands wouldn’t let her up from her bed. Exhaustion, blood loss, and, she suspected, medicine soon sent her to sleep.

  She dreamed Beast came and inquired about her, a bandage about his hand and angry welts on his arms and neck. When the servants told him she would be fine so long as the fever didn’t linger long, he sent everyone but Lyndon from her room. She wanted to speak, to ask if he was truly well, to tell him how sorry she was, how grateful she was, but she couldn’t get her mouth to work with her thoughts. She couldn’t get her eyes to open enough to show that she knew he was there.

  “Belinda Lambton, will you marry me, a beast?” he asked coldly, then left.

  She hadn’t even thanked him.

  As the day turned into night, the dreams shifted, growing more disoriented and wild, becoming twisted versions of things she didn’t want to remember at all, sounds that made her stomach churn, sights that made her heart quake. She woke in the wee hours, feverish and sweating, and curled in on herself, her thoughts churning and tossing her like a boat in a typhoon.

  She’d nearly been killed by a bear.

  Beast had saved her.

  He’d nearly died, and it had been her fault.

  Beast had saved her.

  He’d had to act the animal he appeared to be, and for that, he’d never forgive her.

  It was all her fault.

  He’d nearly died. For her.

  Dreams warped by fever took her again until the cool mist of dawn, a swirling vapor about Beast as he walked the forest path past the gates, calmed her. He didn’t look particularly heroic, but looks could be deceiving, she decided. But did heroes forgive? She’d done nothing but wrong him.

  She woke as Beast cleared the gate a second time, an angry, saccharine-coated warning following him.

  Chapter 7

  The fever eased to mild warmth by dinner the next day. That and her pleading gained her permission to go downstairs. Gray was in her bones and she felt in need of color. Was Beast as well as the servants claimed? Why hadn’t she thought to let Beast and Lyndon know she would be out in the woods, where they might be hunting?

  It was a slow journey to the dining room, her legs and back scraped raw and bandaged and a jagged cut on her arm sewn and wrapped.

  The room was empty when she reached it. A waver in the air followed her in and pulled a chair back for her. She sat gingerly, and waited.

  And waited. She’d left nothing behind upstairs, she admitted to herself shortly, simply given her pain and thoughts a different background; a different tone of ticktock, ticktock; a different rhythm of wood popping in a different fire. All still gray.

  Was he all right? Would he come down? Would he forgive her?

  The fringe of her shawl was beginning to fray from her twisting of it when the clock struck the quarter-hour. Belinda jumped, and the door opened.

  He’d nearly died for her.

  “Beast!” she cried in greeting, rising from her chair.

  “Forgive me for keeping you waiting, Miss Lambton.” Beast’s cold reply as he walked in beside Lyndon settled Belinda back into her chair as if blown into it by an icy wind.

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” she stammered. “I was concerned you were unwell.”

  “Beasts heal quickly and fully.” There was a strange edge to his voice, and a glance from Lyndon, that gave the boast some additional meaning she couldn’t decipher. Beast seated himself and spread his napkin across his lap before looking back at her. “And you, Miss Lambton, how are you? I hear your fever is better.”

  “Yes, it is. I am merely … tired and in some pain, but it’s not bad, not like it could have been. I want—”

  “I’m glad your fever is better.” There was an obvious finality in his tone, an icy wind again.

  Belinda blinked rapidly and shut her mouth. She was right. He’d never forgive her. She’d never convince him to change, never help her father by it and free herself of Gaspard in the process. If he wished to remain as he was, who was she to interfere anyway?

  At least, she thought sadly as the wavers in the air backed away from the table, leaving a steaming bowl of soup for her, she knew one thing about Beast: he was not the type who did things “freely,” yet always reminded her of what she owed. She had no need to fear there.

  “Beast,” she said softly. “I’ve troubled you enough. You’ve been a generous host, but I will go home tomorrow.”

  “You can’t.”

  Belinda blinked, and in that blink, a hint of the fire’s red glow drove away some of the gray. “Why not?” she said sharply.

  “As of yesterday, it would be a very long trip.”

  Yesterday? “What do you mean?” An unpleasant conclusion wove itself together in her mind. She expected her nose to itch, but it didn’t. Her throat tightened instead.

  “The village outside the castle shifts daily. The cycle will not return to your village until six weeks from the day you joined us. You’re currently across the kingdom, and neither I nor my servants can accompany you to keep you safe.”

  Shock strangled the gray chill, and she wasn’t sure whether it was relief or horror, or both, that wove together to form its strong fingers.

  “I warned you not to come.”

  “I remember.” She fumbled for her spoon with her left hand, her injured right tucked against her chest. Why had she trusted him enough to follow him in the first place? Had she been so desperate?

  “When your village returns, I will send you home to your father.”

  “And if he’s not there?” Lyndon asked, a paternal concern to his voice that brought the ever-present ache of her heart to the surface.

  Beast said nothing.

  Lyndon frowned at him, then sent Belinda a look telling her to stay as long as needed.

  She returned a sad, noncommittal smile, and feigned focus on her meal. She stirred her soup awkwardly, paying little attention to it as she lifted the broth-filled spoon to her mouth, then fished around the bowl absently for another spoonful.

  What’s your choice now, Belinda, if he doesn’t return on time, or ever? A lonely castle with a Beast who despised her presence or a father-less home with an unrelenting Gas
pard? Gaspard who always got what he wanted.

  Everything except her. Perhaps that was part of why he wanted her.

  Before she left, she’d begun to fear what he might do, to her even, to make her marry him. The thought made her shiver, and clench her fist. More of the fire’s crimson filled her bones, and she stoked it to combat the gray.

  Six weeks. A different village each day. Beast could have explained that before she’d entered the castle.

  But if that much of her dreams was true, how much else was?

  “It’s a vegetable soup.” Beast said it as if she were a complaining child refusing to eat.

  Belinda glanced questioningly from her nearly full bowl to Beast, but he was studiously avoiding her gaze.

  Had he actually, really looked at her even once since entering? A bit more red heated her bones.

  “In case you’re wondering, Miss Lambton,” he continued, “I did not eat both the deer and the bear. I arranged for them to be dressed and left at the house of the local clergyman. He will know who has need of the meat. I had no desire for it.”

  Belinda’s spoon clanked to her bowl, splashing broth across the tablecloth. “I didn’t think that!”

  “You must be very dense not to, or very naïve,” he snapped, pain giving his voice a cutting edge.

  Belinda’s jaw worked several times before words could coalesce into solid thought. Not until she threw her napkin down beside her bowl was she able to throw out a reply. “I may be a fool in some ways,” she spat, “but not in the way you suppose. I can tell a dangerous person from an angry, embarrassed, self-pitying one!”

  He’d nearly died for her.

  But he could still be a jerk.

  Belinda glared at Beast, whose hairy face was showing signs of shock. Not used to being told unpleasant truths, are you? She considered storming out of the room, but since she could only walk one foot a minute, she didn’t think it would be the dramatic exit her anger warranted. Nor very mature of her. Beast might run away from trouble and responsibility, but Belinda would hold her ground.