by Lucy Leven
Claria could not help the tiny, wavering moan that broke from her then. It was thrilling and strangely freeing to think of Armand in such a way, as she had never allowed herself to think of him before.
She conjured his likeness in her mind and imagined his hulking breadth in the shadows, imagined him watching her as she had imagined her shadow of smoke.
Oh, the thrill of it.
She moaned before she could help it — a quiet sound, but loud enough in the sleeping hush. Claria froze, but the Beast beside her stirred not at all, his breath against her shoulder deep and long.
He knew not what she did.
And that was another kind of thrill altogether, one that called forth a fiercer swelling of her heat. A moan threatened anew, and Claria bit down on her knuckle so as not to be heard.
Her hips shifted of their own accord, lifted a little, circling, seeking pleasure. But she did not touch herself — not there, not in that way. For she had learned that to deny herself so, even for just a moment, would make the breaking of her pleasure all the sweeter.
So instead, with one hand to her bosom, and the other wrapped lightly around the warm, solid strength of the Beast’s forearm, Claria imagined all the things she had closed her mind to before.
She imagined Armand bending her over his workbench, his hands dusted with flour as he lifted her skirts and had his way with her, ruthlessly and with abandon.
She imagined him pressing her against the knotted wood of the bakery door, tearing her smallclothes away and pressing up into her, hard and fast and slick, where anyone might see.
She imagined him in all his strength sending her sprawling across the bakery tabletop, throwing up her skirts, and bending to feast upon her soft, wet heat.
Armand — he wore a full, thick beard. Had for all the years Claria had known him.
Her heart pounded as she imagined the brush of that coarse hair against her softest places, imagined the sight of Armand’s kind mouth all slicked with her wetness.
Imagined opening her legs for him in their marriage bed, man and woman wed. Imagined his gentle kisses, his whispered words of love.
Love…
And what of it? Armand, she was sure, had never held any for Claria.
For what man would forsake his love so? What man would believe such awful lies? What man would give his heart’s own to a beast to be ravished and slain?
Claria’s hips stilled with the souring of her thoughts, her whole being doused with a chill she did not enjoy in the least.
Or not — not her whole being. The Beast’s arm around her was as warm as it ever was, and she could feel his breath against her shoulder, for his face still lay so close to hers…
Claria glanced at him. The Beast’s eyes were closed, his long lashes casting dark shadows against his cheek. And his face was smooth and gentled by sleep — all save his mouth, which was quirked just a touch, just at the corner of his lips.
And that was when Claria realised. “You were awake.”
The Beast’s eyes flicked open, glowing gold and molten, no veil of sleep upon them. “Enjoying yourself, lass?”
“You were awake,” Claria repeated blankly. Then with resignation, “Of course you were awake.”
For of course he was awake, with her wriggling and writhing beside him like a bag of deranged ferrets.
“Why did you not…?” she began.
“Interrupt,” the Beast said. “I did not wish to, for you seemed to be well occupied.” An eyebrow quirked. “Until you were not.”
“I thought a sour thought,” Claria explained.
The Beast lifted himself up on an elbow so that he might look down upon her, so that he might brush her curls from her eyes. “Ah, but how can sourness live in someone so sweet?”
Claria rolled her eyes at him and his awful humour. But still, “I am sorry I woke you.”
“And I,” the Beast said, “am not sorry at all.”
In one swift movement, his knees were under him. He lifted her by the bottom, lifted her until his face was to her heat, and then he began to feast upon her in the manner she had conjured in her hot imaginings, suckling and sucking and licking up the taste of her pleasure.
Claria flailed wildly, quite overcome with the shock of it, gripping desperately at the slipping silks. She should have slid just the same, but the Beast held her steady and held her tight — he held her just as he wanted her.
Her wetness swelled against his lips and lapping tongue, and Claria was so slick and so sensitive still from her own ministrations that it did not take so very long for that wonderful, tumbling, shivering, shaking feeling to overtake her.
When she came back from it, the Beast was smiling down at her, slick and sly. He licked his lips, said, “You taste so well, lass.”
Claria’s breath still came in hitching gasps, and his words made her heart hitch too. “Sweet— sweet as honey?” she asked.
No answer, but before she could fathom it, the Beast dipped his head and licked a broad stripe, from where she was soft and open to him, all the way up to her throbbing, aching bud. His smile turned slyer still.
“Sweeter,” the Beast said.
Magic at Work
Dusk brought yet another fierce fall of snow. In the frozen quiet, that snow banked deep against the castle’s walls, and the orchards and the outer gardens were all but hidden under a thick cloak of white
But the rose garden, in all its strange wonder, had welcomed only the faintest of dustings. The snow lay as a powdered shimmer, like sparkling sugar atop a freshly baked cake, glittering in the fierce chill of the suddenly clear night.
And chill Claria would have been too, but her cloak was warm, the furs under her were warm, and the Beast was warmer still. She huddled into his heat, where she sat next to him on the bench in the middle of the garden, surrounded by a tapestry of blooming roses.
Claria had never seen their like before. So deep a pink as to be almost purple, the colour of old, rich wine poured fresh from the jug.
Such strange, odd things they were — odd in their blooming, strange in their colour. But awfully beautiful all the same, gilded silver in the light of the rising full moon. But a golden glow hovered at the edge of her vision too.
Magic was at work in the garden that night, and the Beast had wished for her to see it.
For in the shadows, another kind of shadow coiled. This shadow was not of darkness or shade, but of smoke, roiling and shifting, alive and watchful.
So watchful that it seemed an echo of her dream, too strangely coincidental to be mere happenstance. A dream given life, perhaps, by the same magic that gave life to the castle.
But if it was an echo of her dream, it was a fractured echo. For Claria was wrapped warmly in her cloak, not stretched bare upon the furs — like a wanton, like a trull — showing off her womanhood for any man who might care to see.
The thought made her treacherous heart beat a little quicker, and the shadows began writhing and stirring with vigour anew, as if they were trying to throw off a cloak of their own, just as the castle had that first, fateful night.
“What is it trying to show me?” Claria asked. “Your clever castle? Its clever magic?”
The Beast did not glance her way, too busy watching the roiling shadows himself. “A memory, perhaps,” he said. “Or a desire. One from deep within. An untold longing mayhaps.”
A longing. Claria sighed a quiet breath. Longings — she seemed formed of them, all untold. If the castle meant to give shape to all of her deepest, most yearning desires, they may very well be sat there still when the sun rose anew.
A strange, slipping shift in the air. The Beast’s brow creased, just a touch, as he regarded the shadows with a sharper intent. Claria turned her attention that way too and—
“Oh!” she gasped.
The faintest glimpse, the slightest sight of a form taking shape amidst the roiling magic, and that form Claria recognised: Armand. His broad, thick shoulders, his shaggy dark hair, the she
er breadth and the height of him. But he was indistinct yet, like a distant traveller on a foggy morning.
Half a shadow, half a dream.
“Answer me a question, lass.” The Beast turned to look at her then, sudden, and Claria found herself pinned by the intensity of his golden gaze. “What did your officer do?”
Claria could only blink at him, not understanding, not even at all. “What?”
The Beast’s smiled his sharp smile. “Your fine and gallant officer. The one who saved you from the ruffians. The one who minded your reputation. What did he do when he came to your aid?”
She shook her head a little, understanding still eluding her. Whatever did her officer have to do with anything? Still, “He saw them off,” Claria said, “and helped me to my feet.”
“And what else?” the Beast asked, gentle in his prompting but prompting all the same.
“He took me back to the camp,” Claria said, slowly, tracing that long-ago day in her mind, “and he had the camp’s doctor look at all my scrapes and cuts. And then he gave me his cloak and escorted me to the village. The constable was waiting to arrest me, but the officer explained all that had happened, so the constable could not throw me into the village lock-up as he wished to do.”
“And your attackers?” the Beast said.
“What of them?”
“What did your officer do to them?”
“Who says he did anything?” Claria said, cutting her eyes away, then back, a strange feeling in her breast.
The Beast’s smile was sly in its patience. “Lass.”
For a moment, Claria did not speak. She did not know why she wished to keep that memory a secret, why she wished to hold it safe…
But no — that was a lie. She knew. The officer, his actions — they had been a kindness, a fierce one, done only for her, and Claria had not known much kindness before. She had clung to it over the years, just as she had clung to the memory.
But now she must speak it. She knew she must.
“He had them whipped,” she said, and even to her own ears, her voice was low. Hard and steady. “He had them brought out and lashed to a fencepost and whipped for all to see. ”
“Why?”
Claria did not know why, not truly. She had been a foundling grown, not a fine lady with a fine reputation to risk. But even now, years past, she heard the echo of the officer’s words. His voice, so calm and steady. “He said that no man should speak to a lady so. Or treat a lady so. And so they must be punished for it.”
“And he was right,” the Beast said.
But Claria shook her head, all caught up in her remembering. “No, Beast. Not at all. He was wrong.”
A puzzled silence from the Beast, a single beat of quiet. Then, “How so, lass?”
“He said that they must not speak to a lady so. I am no lady, Beast.”
The Beast pulled her to him more firmly — squeezed, gently, the meagre curve of her hip. “Yet you feel a lady to me.”
Claria shook her head again, tried to shake his words away. “I am just a baker’s lass. A nothing of a thing.”
“Your officer did not think so.”
“He did only his duty.”
The Beast smiled. It was another of his smirks, so familiar. Almost comforting. “Having men whipped for horrid words and the theft of but a coin is not the lot of an officer of the King’s army.”
“But he—”
“Lass,” the Beast said. “Claria,” he said, “look.”
She followed the path of that pointing hand. Looked to the silver-gold shadows of the rose garden, and found it shadowed no more.
For the shadows of smoke had taken form amid the moonlight again, but solid this time, and true. A man stood before them, upright and at attention, and that man was not Armand.
It was her officer.
It was the Lieutenant — the Lieutenant in his handsome bottle-green uniform, though his jerkin was unbuttoned, and the loose shirt of fine linen he wore underneath was so fine that she could see the shape of him though it, the sharp cut of his muscles, the finely corded strength of him.
He made a fine figure of a man, as tall as the Beast, but slender, his form compact in its power. Made that way, Claria supposed, as a weapon of muscle and sinew, trained and drilled to perfection.
And oh, how perfect he was. Claria’s breath stilled and caught. She could not look away.
In his quiet rumble, the Beast said, “His name, lass. Your officer?”
“Lieutenant de La Noue,” Claria said, her voice as faint as a dream.
He had told her that day. Enchanted, my lady, he had said, bowing low over her hand after he helped her to her feet.
But this time the Lieutenant did not speak. He stood still instead, so straight and upright, watching her with those dark, dark eyes.
His beautiful hair hung loose from its queue like cornsilk, a gilded, shimmering fall. Claria’s breath caught again at the sight of it, and then left her on a faint sigh.
Oh, he was so very beautiful. Just as beautiful as she remembered. Or perhaps her remembrance had gilded him anew. But could one gild such beauty?
And those eyes — so black as to be almost disconcerting, odd on the face of someone so fair, but yet so striking for it. So inviting.
So tempting…
“I watched,” she said, “after. I watched them down by the river, bathing. The soldiers. Some of the other village women went, giggling, with the thought to spy upon then and…and I followed.”
She could hear the slyness in the Beast’s voice. “How ill-behaved, lass. Perhaps you were a deserving tithe, after all.”
His tone was light, full of mischief as to soften her mortification — and it worked a little, though only a little. She knew what she had done was wrong, just as she knew what she had witnessed was wrong, a thing done in sin and in denial of the gods. But…
“He was so handsome,” she said, “and so very beautiful, cavorting and laughing with the other men.”
“Cavorting?” the Beast echoed, the amused look on his face a touch questioning in turn.
Claria’s own face flushed fiercer and redder still. “You know of what I speak, Beast. Do not make me give words to it, for it is sin itself.”
The amused look faded not a jot. “As is so much of this world in the eyes of your contrary gods.”
“Do the gods watch us now?” Claria asked.
“They would not dare,” the Beast told her, and though his face was still shaped by that soft smile, his tone was anything but soft — it thrummed with such power that every particle of Claria’s being sang with sudden awareness.
Her voice was scarce louder than a whisper when she asked, “Are you a god, Beast?”
His smile, so sly, so cunning. So familiar. “I am no god, lass. Only a beast.” He kissed her with that blasphemous mouth, so wonderfully sinful in all he did. He kissed her until she was helpless with it. “When you saw your fine officer bathing at the river, what did you wish to do, lass?”
A simple question. A simple answer. “To touch him. How I wished that I could touch him. How I wished that he would touch me. That he would see me as I saw him, and that he would want me as I wanted him.”
The Beast brushed back her curls. “Shall I touch you, lass?” he asked.
Her words were gone from her, for she was made suddenly of a muddle of memories and whirling emotion. Claria but nodded.
The Beast put his lips to hers, a gentle press this time, nothing sharp or fierce in it. Only care, sweet and gentle.
But the arms around her were not sweet. They were strong and well-made, and they held her with a possessiveness of touch that made her shiver more than the chill in the garden ever could.
The Beast took her chin, turned it so that she looked once more to the Lieutenant. “Do you wish for him to touch you, lass? To touch you as I touch you, both as one?”
Claria watched the Lieutenant as he watched her, so familiar, a perfect echo of the golden man who lived alive i
n her memory.
And yet…
No, not quite a perfect echo. For if Claria looked as closely as she was able in the silvered, shattered light, she could perceive a faint blankness to his face, a hint of something not quite fitting. Of something not quite right.
“He is not the Lieutenant, is he?” Claria asked. “He is not him? Not truly?”
“No, not truly,” the Beast said, “he is but a shadow of memory, a shimmer of intent, a being made of magic, just as easily unmade.”
And that felt wrong, the thought of it, to have this beautiful phantom touch her. A betrayal, it seemed to Claria, of those memories she had held so close and so dear for so very long.
A betrayal of the Lieutenant’s kindness — of his dark, gentle eyes and courteous ways.
She wanted the Lieutenant — but she wanted the real man, not the Beast’s kindly, clever magic. She knew the truth of her heart. And so, “I do not want for him to touch me so,” she said.
The Beast nodded. There was no surprise in his expression. He had known her answer before she gave words to it.
“But might he…might he watch instead?”
And that — that caused the slightest flick of the Beast’s dark brow. She had surprised him, just a little.
“How brave you are, lass,” he murmured.
It came to Claria then that she did feel brave that night, just as she had that morning, and the morning before. Just as she had every day since she had come to the Beast’s castle.
So brave she felt, and a little silly, and a little shy — but only a little, for there was little left to be ashamed of when it came to the Beast’s golden regard.
“You wish him to watch as you touch yourself?” The Beast’s voice was pitched low — almost too low for her hearing. The timbre of it shivered across her skin and urged her nipples tight and pebbled. “Watch as you tease that little bud of yours? Watch as you slip your fingers inside of yourself and bathe yourself in pleasure?”
For a moment, Claria could only breathe around the hotness that fired her being, the flaming heat of it. Then, “Oh, yes,” she said, her voice a thready moan. “Oh, Beast, yes. Oh, Beast, please.”
