Beast

by Abigail Barnette

  When Philipe had learned the extent of her injuries, laid out in gruesome detail by King Albart’s own surgeon, he’d panicked. He’d thought he’d loved her, but he’d feared facing her. With her beauty gone, he found it impossible to think of anything else.

  It was better that he ended it then, for the both of them. He did not regret his choice. He would not have been able to keep up the pretext of marriage to a woman so scarred that her own servants cringed to look upon her.

  Wilhelm, breathing hard under the weight Philipe could not support for himself, negotiated him up the stairs, which swayed alarmingly. When the firm stone of the balcony steadied the world, Philipe noted his surroundings. The tower room they had entered was simple. A scorched wooden bed served as storage for a few burlap sacks. On a long wooden table, a few meager root vegetables had been abandoned. A pot over the fire simmered violently, splattering sizzling bursts of liquid onto the coals.

  “Your kitchen girl has run off,” Philipe slurred, forcing his eyes to come into focus.

  Wilhelm leaned Philipe against the wall and set to clearing the sacks from the bed. A thin feather mattress gave up puffs of dust as Wilhelm wrestled the bags away. “We do not have a kitchen girl. It is just myself, and my sister, as I have said.”

  “Sorry. I was preoccupied.” Philipe tried to lift his arm, but the pain stopped him. He staggered to the bed, not waiting for further invitation, and collapsed upon it.

  Footsteps echoed outside the door as Johanna made her way down the stairs.

  “Don’t let her see me,” Philipe begged, summoning the strength to grip Wilhelm’s arm.

  Wilhelm shrugged off his hold. “She must see you. She is the only one who can help with your wound.”

  “See who?”

  Philipe turned his head, his vision swimming. He caught sight of a woman, clad like Death in a black shroud. Ghastly pink hands flew to her veiled face, and Philipe tried to rise. The movement made the edges of his vision flicker, and he slumped back, fighting for consciousness. Even as Johanna ran from the room, Wilhelm just steps behind her, Philipe tried to speak. He managed a ragged, “I’m sorry,” before darkness overtook him.

  Chapter Two

  “Why is he here?”

  When her brother did not immediately answer her, she stalked from the window over the courtyard to the other side of the tower, near the hearth. But not too near. If she felt too much of the heat upon her face, old burns protested in memory. She slipped a hand beneath her veil to feel the stiff scars. Every whorl had been etched there in fire and blood and pain. She had traced their edges so many times, physically and in her memory, in a sick ceremony to keep her heart hard. Concentrating on the pain of the burns had kept that other pain at bay for years.

  Now, that pain had ridden to her door, and it begged for shelter.

  Wilhelm stepped behind her and laid a hand on her shoulder. “He is wounded, sister. Would you refuse him aid?”

  “I would.” The answer took no thought, no examination of conscience. She had begged for aid, all those years ago. Her letters had gone unanswered, her maiden’s heart had aged in weeks, then years, leaving behind something far more like a wounded animal. It was not a matter of conscience to turn on him, but a matter of survival.

  Wilhelm’s footsteps retreated, to the other side of the small room they had shared since the harsh winter following the summer of the fire. When everyone had been dying of the cold, he’d huddled them all in this room, covered the windows, filled every space with available firewood and saved them from the harsh winds and snows. There had been eight of them, then, Wilhelm, herself, Nurse, and a few servants who had remained loyal to them.

  Now, only she and her brother remained. She could imagine the look on his face, as he struggled with his once sweet sister’s reply. She had seen it enough, and had tried to make him understand. The fire had touched him, too, turning his strong sword arm to a mass of raw red. But he had been spared the worst of it, rushing out to defend against the mob while the fire raged inside.

  The fire had robbed him of his brother, his Jacob, who had shared their mother’s womb with him. The two had never been separated for even a day, until Jacob had willingly surrendered that last, gasping breath in the darkness of his sick room. Yet neither of these things had hardened Wilhelm as they had Johanna. Long ago she had reconciled herself to her brother’s unfailing belief in justice and right. The flames had baptized her in hatred, but they had not given Wilhelm that same rebirth. Sometimes, she feared that made this all the harder for him to bear.

  For him, to uphold his fantasy of a world in which right and wrong still mattered, she turned and gave him her bravest face. She let her eyes shine with tears she did not feel, so that he could believe his sweet sister still lived in the monster who stood before him. “I am sorry, brother. Old wounds are long in healing, and I fear his return has opened some of mine.”

  Wilhelm came to her with his arms open, to enfold her against his chest. He kissed her scarred pate through her veil. “I cannot imagine what you must feel with him here. But father would have wanted us to offer him aid. He was ever loyal to King Albart.”

  And his loyalty finds us living in eternal smoke and blackness. Her father’s loyalty had caused the revolt among people who longed to be free from Albart’s taxes, Albart’s laws, that had been tailored for his southern lords. The people had loved Lord Köneig, but that love had been cast aside when he’d proved loyal to the king they had despised.

  They were gone now, all of them, cut down by Albart’s soldiers and then starvation. It had been the very last favor the southern king had lent the Köneig holdings. After that, no aid had come. And no letters, from his council or his son.

  The thought of Philipe, all those years ago, his fine strong arms around her as they rolled in the grass, the way his blue eyes had sparkled when he stole a kiss, all the memories that had once been beautiful now turned against her, brought her back to the long days waiting in her bed for some word that he loved her still. Word that had never arrived.

  She wasn’t sure when she’d given up all hope, but it had not been quick, nor clean. It had been another fire ruining her, where she would have preferred a headman’s axe.

  The words came from numb lips. “I will find Nurse’s chest of salves. Perhaps there is something inside that will help me tend to his wounds.”

  Wilhelm kissed her again, his arms tightening around her. When he hugged her, he often did so as though the pressure of his embrace could soften her into the sister he remembered. Sometimes, she would allow him to think so, but not today. Not when he already asked so much. She pushed from his arms and said, “If you care so much for him, you should attend him, while I gather Nurse’s things.”

  She watched her brother go, feeling a twinge of guilt. It did her heart grievous injury to keep him at a distance, but it would be better for him. Let the lesson, that love does nothing but harm, come from someone who did truly love him. Would that the world had done her such a courtesy.

  She found Nurse’s chest beneath the bed in the little pantry the old woman had taken to living in during the last stages of her illness. It had been easier to keep warm there, she had insisted. Easier to keep warm, and to keep the shadows away. In her dementia, Nurse had confided to Johanna her fear of shadows. They reminded her too much of the space between flames.

  “I found you in the shadows, sweet girl. Your hair all burned off. I wished for a light, to see how bad it was, and then when I saw it, I wished you had just died. I wished it.”

  Nurse had not said those words to hurt her, Johanna knew, but they had shocked another part of her soul to stone, all the same. She banished the old woman’s voice from her mind, and opened the chest. Most of the potions and poultices had gone to rot, but there were strips of linen and a jar of liniment made from honey that would still be sound. She closed the lid and hefted the heavy chest in her arms. There would be time later to sort through it, and to record what she had thrown away. There wa
s little hope of discerning what Nurse had made the numerous medicines from, but if she could, it would be worth the effort. Someday, someone worthy might have need of them.

  Philipe lay on a pallet of furs atop the bed in the tower room. She would not look at him, more than to check that he still breathed. It had been here, on a fire-scorched feather mattress, that her father had died. Wilhelm said they’d had to burn the mattress, so soaked it had been with pink-tinged fluids from Lord Köneig’s wounds. Such morbid thoughts came to her often, from the many reminders left in the castle.

  Philipe’s eyes were closed, but his breathing was such that she knew he was awake. Before he could open his eyes and see her, the ruin of what she had become, she pulled her veil down and the cowl of her cloak up. Then, she dropped the chest to the half-blackened table and flipped it open noisily.

  He startled, blue eyes flashing as they darted about the room. It was his eyes that caught her, and a soft cry came to her throat. Swallowing it away pained her as though she’d swallowed down a chunk of glass. All at once, the despair of the last fifteen years crashed over her, and she braced her hands on the open chest.

  If the years had aged him poorly, if he’d grown fat from drink, as she’d imagined would happen, if some pox had ravaged him, as he deserved, she might have been triumphant. The man that lay there was indeed changed by time, but not in the way she had hoped he would be. His face was leaner now, all traces of boyish softness vanished. And while the sharpness that remained left a nose that was a bit hawkish, and hollows at his cheeks, it did not rob him of his handsomeness. Would she have noticed that change, had she been his princess? In the intervening years between the wedding that never happened and the present that could not be, would she have admired the way her prince had grown into a man more handsome than she could have planned?

  “Do you have…” his voice scraped from between lips cracked by cold, “Do you have a cup of wine?”

  The laugh that tore from her was ugly and harsh. “We have not had wine at Hazelhurn for fifteen years, Your Highness. Water is all you’ll have.”

  “Water?” There it was. The spoiled edge to his voice that she remembered all those years ago. She’d not liked it then, but she’d made so many excuses for it.

  She would not excuse it any longer. “It has been boiled to perfect safety, I assure you. I’ll fetch some, after we bind your wound.”

  His dark hair curled, sweat-damp, against his forehead. “It is but a scratch, lady.”

  Lady. He didn’t remember her, did not know the sound of her voice, though his haunted her dreams so that it seemed they had only just parted. The sting of tears infuriated her, and she blinked them away. “Don’t be a fool. There is an arrow sticking out of your shoulder. That is more than a scratch.”

  She lifted the huge shears from the chest and approached the bed, careful not to meet his eyes or show him her face more than she would have to. “Lift your arm.” When he hesitated, she snapped, “Do you value your fine shirt more than your life?”

  “I only feared you might cut the whole arm off, to spite me,” he said, dutifully complying with her order. “I do recognize you, Johanna.”

  It took only that. The way he said her name, the same after all these years, though now tinged with sorrow, as if he ached with regret, as well, and she could no longer bear her anger. She slid the bottom blade of the unwieldy scissors into his shirt sleeve, nicking his skin and turning the fabric crimson with a drop of his blood. The temptation to spill more of it, to cut him, to beat him, to hurt him until he felt the weight of those miserable fifteen years, was almost too great. She tore, more than cut, the sleeve free, and tossed the shears aside.

  “You look well,” he continued, as if he had not noticed her rough handling of him, as if he could talk the truth away.

  “This is no drawing room,” she snapped, laying the torn sleeve aside to view his wound. The arrow had entered deeply, and dried blood had turned his skin into a mass of glittering brown flakes that fell away beneath her fingertips. There was more muscle there than before, when he’d had the skinny arms of a boy. She pulled her hand back. “And I will not forget what passed between us to comfort you.”

  “I would never ask you to.” He hissed when her hand fell on the shaft of the arrow. “Careful. It met the bone. I could tell by the sound.”

  She feared he was right, and then wondered at that fear. It mattered not to her if he were maimed for life. “Bone or no, it must come out.”

  Going to the door, she called for Wilhelm. His footsteps sounded on the stair before his voice. With no fine tapestries on the walls or carpets on the floor, sound travelled well. “You called, Johanna?” he asked at the top of the stair, and when he entered she glared at him. He had known that she would try to conceal her identity from Philipe, and he had planned to spoil it.

  “We need to pull out the arrow.” She wrapped a strip of linen bandaging tight around his arm and knotted it. “You’ll have to hold him.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Philipe took a deep breath and fixed his stare at the burned-out canopy above him. “When you’re ready.”

  Johanna rolled her eyes at Wilhelm, but he did not move. How like men, to work together in their asinine delusions. She gripped the fletched end and pulled, twisting.

  The sound Philipe made was not unlike the sound of a pig being butchered. He rose up from the bed with the arrow and grabbed her hand.

  It was like being burned all over again. That simple contact awoke long dead memories, the giddy feeling of his hand in hers all those summers ago. A thousand promises of love, none of which had proved worth the breath she’d wasted repeating them, tortured her. She let go of the arrow and let his wounded arm flop back to the bed. He swore, and she leaned over him, her veil scraping his chest.

  “Take this off, damn you!” Philipe’s cry was tinged with pain and frustration, masking the intent of his words for one crucial heartbeat. Before she could comprehend his action, he gripped the veil and tugged it from her head.

  Shrieking, shameful tears stinging her eyes, she stepped back, covering her face with both hands. She heard the thud of fist against flesh, and raced to Wilhelm’s side to stay his arm before he could strike Philipe again. Despite what the spoiled prince had done to her, Johanna did not wish to see Wilhelm beat a wounded man. “Brother, no! What would father say?”

  Panting, Wilhelm stepped back. With trembling fingers, Johanna reached down to pluck her veil from Philipe’s chest. She saw his look of disgust. She did not meet his eyes. She knew what he had seen. A head with naught but a few, scraggly jet strands sprouting to lay against skin melted like the wax of a candle. Eyes that did not completely close, even when she slept, for the lids had burned away. The slits of nostrils where her nose had once been. The cheek and lips that had not been touched by the fire, in some cruel jest that reminded her daily of the beauty she’d once possessed.

  She no longer needed beauty, and she did not need pity from the man who’d so carelessly abandoned her. Let him see, she thought. Let him see the wife he could have had. If there is any conscience in him, let it be salved by being saved from a fate worse than death.

  Though her own burden was eased by her vicious thoughts, she replaced her veil. He did not deserve to see. He did not deserve to rest easy.

  “Brother, hold his arm.” She turned away from the bed, returning to Nurse’s chest of medicine. At the bottom, beneath the surgeon’s implements Nurse had learned to use so efficiently all those years ago, she found the thick braid of leather. She brought it to the bed and placed it against Philipe’s lips. “Bite down on this. It will give you some comfort.”

  “I doubt that, lady.” Blood trickled from where Wilhelm had burst Philipe’s lip with a single hard blow. She would not tend to that wound.

  “Do not doubt, for I can tell you that it does bring comfort.” She met his eyes through the sheer fabric of her veil. “For I did the same when my Nurse had to scrub my cooked flesh raw, to clean
it and speed healing. I learned many tricks during those long, vile hours, to lessen pain.”

  “I bow to your superior experience,” he said, and the edge of the spoiled prince was there, not so far beneath the surface.

  She pushed the cord into his mouth, and he gagged and worked it forward with his tongue. She nodded to Wilhelm, who pinned the patient’s arm. With a knee on the mattress, Johanna gripped the arrow and pulled with all her might. It budged, but only barely, and Philipe screamed around the leather cord. Bracing herself more solidly, Johanna pulled, using Philipe’s long, muffled wail as strength she could draw upon. The arrow slid loose with a sucking sound. Blood welled at the wound, but it did not spray.

  Philipe’s cry had stopped, and she’d not noticed until she looked up to see him, sweat streaming down his unconscious face. Her stomach turned over, and she wiped her bloody hands on his ruined shirt. “Leave the tourniquet, stanch the bleeding. If it does not stop, come for me.”

  “Where are you going?” Wilhelm asked, panicked, as she pressed a square of linen into his hands and guided them to the wound.

  “I need a moment.” She rose and stepped over the arrow that now lay harmlessly on the ground. She was certain she would vomit, and the smell from the stewpot didn’t help to calm her stomach. She fled to the balcony and down the stairs, the winter air opening her lungs.

  At the bottom, she clung to the splintered railing and doubled over, willing herself to heave up and have done with it. But nothing came, and she instead sat down on the wet stair, a sense of disappointment assailing her. It would have been so cleansing and dramatic to run down from the tower and vomit, before collapsing in the snow. Then Wilhelm would fear for her, as he always feared for her, and he would feel the terrible press of great responsibility on his shoulders.