The Beggar Princess (Fairy Tale Heat Book 4)

by Lidiya Foxglove

  Chapter Fifteen

  Princess Bethany

  Black watched as the gray wolf disappeared into the forest, and I tried not to imagine what that wolf might do to Jack if they crossed paths. How good was Jack with a weapon? He claimed he could fight a wolf, but I had no idea.

  Black walked onto a rock near where I was trying to stay absorbed in the business of scrubbing, his long legs folding down beside me.

  “You make magical applesauce, eh?” he said. “But that’s not all he was doing with you. He was fucking you.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “I heard that elves like it dirty.”

  “No.” My cheeks burned. “I’ve never heard that.”

  He laughed. Even his laugh was more like a low growl than a true laugh. “I’ve never heard it either, I just wanted to see what you’d say. Now I know he’s fucking you. One of the lordlings, is he? You’re his little pet, eh?”

  “No,” I said, cheeks burning.

  “I’d like to know what he does.” He put a hand on my thigh.

  “Don’t,” I said coldly.

  “You think I’m just a brutish animal?” Black asked, and there was anger in his tone that I didn’t quite understand. Why should he be angry? I was the one who was a prisoner.

  “I never said anything like that,” I said.

  He spat. “All girls like you think I’m a monster.”

  “Well, kidnapping me and threatening to eat me doesn’t help my opinion.”

  “When I was young, we came upon an abandoned village deep in the forest and lived in it for a year. I found books in the houses. Alphabet books for civilized children. I taught myself to read. When I was fourteen I left my pack and went into Arindora, to the House of Scholars, and applied to go to school. Gray made fun of me for going. But the head scholar was so impressed that he took me in—as a curiosity. Could wolves be civilized? I remember him asking that precise question like it was yesterday.” He paused. “They cannot.”

  “Why not?”

  “My nature is both man and animal. The man part of me wanted something more than what I had. But the animal in me could not suppress his instincts. I was always getting in trouble, getting jeered at by my classmates. Once they realized I had so little control, and yet they outnumbered me, they started to egg me on. They tried to fight me, a whole pack of them at once.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “And they said I was an animal. Well, I’ve learned that it’s no use fighting it.”

  He had shifted just behind me, and slid his hands around to cup my breasts. I went rigid, biting back my fierce instinct to fight him off. He wanted me to fight. In some ways, I thought, this reminded me of Lord Stormwild trying to prove himself to the other high elves after he was raised by pirates.

  “You don’t sound like an animal,” I said. “You sound like a quitter.”

  He grabbed me more tightly. “What do you mean?” he growled in my ear. I clutched the wash rag I was holding, fighting to maintain the illusion that I was not afraid.

  “You wanted to learn, and the elves didn’t accept you. Well, it isn’t as if you’re the only person who ever faced that problem. Lots of people want to do things that aren’t wrong, but are socially unacceptable. Sometimes you just have to keep pushing and doing it anyway.”

  “What do you know about that?”

  “I write novels,” I said. “Women aren’t supposed to write novels, and if they do, they have to be nice stories, but I don’t like writing nice stories. Every novel I write is a little less nice than the last one. So I keep it a secret. But I still do it.”

  “I see,” he said. “Well, don’t you think you’re a little rogue? But I believe it’s too late for me. I killed two boys in my class. And I liked it.”

  My breath hitched. “Oh.”

  “You know, I can be very charming when I want to be,” he said. “Sometimes I come to villages, a weary traveler. I tell them how I dream of an education. I won’t hurt you, I say. I smile at the innkeep’s daughter, and after a moment, she smiles back. We get to talking and I tell her of the books I’ve read, the places I dream of going.” He hissed in my ear, “She’s the first to die.”

  He continued, “Do you know what they call me? What Black is short for? The Black Death. Because when I come to a village these days, I kill half the population. Just like the plague. And the other half? I like to leave them just alive enough to watch.”

  I glanced around at all the rocks on the riverbed, noting a few with sharp edges. I dreamed of striking him. But I knew I had no hope of winning a fight against him. He was a monster. All the so-called villains I’d ever written now seemed incredibly stupid.

  “Keep working, little maid,” he said, giving my breasts another squeeze. “You serve me now. Any way I like.”

  I nodded slightly and kept scrubbing, as if I scrubbed pots every day. Yes, I told myself, I was a cook in the king’s employ who had a bit of witchcraft, who knew how to make magical applesauce. I was too clever to be afraid of wolves. I’d gotten myself out of scrapes before. Maybe if I told myself I was someone else, it would start to feel true, just the way I became my heroines when I was scribbling away.

  But there were tears in my eyes. Bravery was a lot more difficult in real life.

  When the dishes were finally clean enough, I was almost sorry, because it meant I had to tackle the next task, and the sooner I got to the next task, the sooner they might kill me. My back was cramped, and yesterday I would have been very put out by the pain in my back and my arms and my chafed ankles, but right now I just wanted to stay alive. Every moment I was aching was good, because I was still here in the world, with the comforting smell of dead leaves and thick forest and clean autumn air. I lugged the pot to the stove. Black had started a fire going already, thank goodness, because I had no idea how to begin with that.

  I picked up a broom that was sitting in the corner. No one had used it in so long that spiderwebs clung to the handle.

  “What’re you doing?” Black asked as I started to sweep all the dust toward the door. He was outside, pacing and watching.

  “I can’t cook food in such a dirty room!”

  “Why not? We do.”

  “This isn’t just any food. This is enchanted food. It has to be just so. Haven’t you ever heard how spells work?”

  “Wolves don’t have magic. Don’t need it. We are magic.”

  “Your loss. You’ll feel even more powerful once you’ve had enchanted food, and you’ll see what you’ve been missing. When you make food with magic, everything has to be carefully considered. Even going back to when the apple seeds were planted to grow the trees, a hundred years ago. Every year they must be blessed. They have to be pruned in a certain way. They have to be picked at a certain time. And the room in which you make the applesauce must be clean!”

  He raised an eyebrow at my vehemence. “All right, then, girl. Just make it quick.”

  I swept every corner of that room until there wasn’t a single cobweb or clump of dirt left anywhere in it.

  “Come on, now,” Black said. “I’m getting very hungry. You don’t want me to get too hungry, do you?”

  I shook my head. Finally, I had to slice the apples and put them in the pot. When I was done slicing, I tucked the tiny knife inside my corset. I went to the river to fetch water for the pot, and by this time the sun was low enough that it was filtering through the tree trunks and spangling the river with flashes of light. I put sugar and cinnamon and cloves into the pot. It smelled a little strange, and perhaps I had put in too much, but it didn’t really matter. I stared into the glow of the fire and willed Brennus to come, because I could not stretch time any more, and Black was watching me.

  He was smiling at me, and his eyes were cruel and hard.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Princess Bethany

  I stirred the applesauce almost constantly, trying to pretend I was doing something important, for a long time. My arm was getting tired but I didn’t dare look away. It was almost
dusk by the time Gray came back. “I haven’t seen anyone around,” he said.

  My heart sank into despair. I feared that Jack was having a hard time finding me, and it was getting dark.

  “What’s she doing?” Gray demanded. “What are you doing, girl?”

  “Stirring the applesauce.”

  “Hell, it looks done to me. Waste of a pretty girl, right now.”

  “I need to stir it a little longer,” I said. “To make sure the magic of the apples comes through.”

  Black laughed. “We’ll take our chances. Tie her up.”

  Gray reached for my arm. I flipped the spoon out of the pot, flinging hot apple mush toward his face, trying to make it look like an accident, but he didn’t even blink. He was so fast, grabbing my arm before I could do anything else. He pulled my hands behind me and tied them again, and then he dragged me toward the door. I stumbled on my hobbled feet and he immediately slapped my face.

  “Please,” I begged. “Please don’t hurt me.” I hadn’t been struck since I was a very young girl, and one of my tutors used to get impatient with me because I preferred writing my stories to studying histories. I had told Father and the woman was immediately sent away.

  There was no Father to protect me anymore.

  Gray tied the rope around the trunk of a slender tree. Then he stood over me, intimidating me with his mere presence. He dragged his finger over the apple mush on his face and licked his fingers. “Hurt me again and I’ll kill you.”

  “Aren’t you going to kill me anyway?”

  “I’ll kill you slowly…human girl. I like to hear your cries. I like to see the furless folk suffer. I’ve seen wolfkin babes mowed down by arrows. You will pay for their deaths.”

  “I’m—I’m sorry. I don’t know anything about that. This is the first time I’ve ever even been to the forest!”

  “Your kind don’t like my kind. And I don’t like you.”

  He put a hand on my chest and slid it down my stomach. My flesh tingled like the time I felt a spider race across my back as I slept. I was starting to feel that if they touched me one more time, I would lose it completely. I would scream my head off. And if I did, I knew he would do something far worse. I had to keep my composure no matter what it took.

  His claws dug into the neckline of my dress and ripped it. He tore the drab fabric almost in half, and let it drop to the ground. “Pretty corset for a peasant girl,” he said.

  “It was a hand-me-down from one of the court ladies,” I said.

  Black looked out the door. “No unwrapping the package without me!”

  “Fine.” Gray shoved me against the tree and headed toward the shack. “Is it done yet?” I heard them speaking to each other, but they were just out of earshot now.

  Maybe I should tell them I was the princess of Lainsland. It might be my only chance. And yet, I had a feeling they would only take more pleasure in torturing me if I told them. They were angry at the elves and humans for shunning them and beating them back into the woods, for apparently killing their kind. If I was royalty, I was part of the problem. They might hold me for ransom, but likely they wouldn’t trust my father or Jack to keep a promise, and they would be right to think so. Why should Jack leave them alive at all, much less offer them money, if they killed people in his kingdom as they said they had?

  I had a feeling that it was better they thought me a whore than a princess, although neither was good. And pretty soon, I would be out of options either way.

  Gray started a fire outside, but its warmth didn’t reach me. Black carried the pot of applesauce outside and a pair of bowls. He put them down and looked at my pale, goose-bumped flesh. I was shivering by now, without my dress. Gray glared at him, and Black gave him a hard look back. He was the alpha. Nothing would be done to me until he said so.

  They were going to make me keep waiting and yet, I knew the thread of my life must be getting tighter and shorter. I didn’t have long. I started to wonder if I could be brave when I died. A princess should be brave until the end, but I wasn’t sure I could do it.

  Black sat down and dipped out some of the applesauce. They took a couple of bites. I could see them considering their first bites and thinking that the applesauce didn’t taste very magical. Gray got up and tore a leg off the deer carcass, ripping the skin back with his teeth and dipping the raw meat in the applesauce. Now I felt I might be sick.

  I had almost given up hope that Jack would find me, but still, I thought…I must do something. I must fight for my life any way I could.

  “Would you like to hear another story about a powerful wolf while you eat?” I blurted out. Black liked the first story I’d told him. “This one is about a king who had a terrible secret.”

  I could see them trying to pretend they didn’t really care. “What secret?”

  “Well, if you listen to the story, you’ll find out,” I said. “You see, once there was a wolf who was very, very clever. He realized that if he learned to read—”

  “This isn’t a story about me, I hope,” Black said.

  “No, it certainly isn’t. This wolf didn’t go to school. He wanted to become a merchant. He went to the human city to sell the pelts of animals he hunted. He was so good at it that he became the richest man in the city. He started trading with other wolf clans for more pelts, and human and elves and faeries of all kinds, until he was so rich that even the king of the realm took notice…”

  I realized that I had grabbed their attention. They wanted to know what would happen to this wolf. He wasn’t even real, but in some part of their mind, he had become real.

  I knew that neither of these men had read my books, so I could pull threads from stories past and weave them in. I put in a beautiful lady and a rival human knight and a ghost. I made the wolf dark and troubled, yet noble, and the king into a villain who used the wolf for his wealth and then tried to have him killed.

  Bowls were set aside. Darkness fell. I kept talking and talking, never stopping, because if I stopped, I knew they would kill me. I packed the story with so many twists and turns that I wasn’t sure if it was making sense anymore.

  Gray was starting to look at Black impatiently. Black ignored him, picking at his claws. The dim light of the fire cast an eerie orange glow on their faces and made them seem more fierce than ever.

  “Finally,” I said, trying not to pay attention, “The wounded knight tried to deal a final blow to the wolf. Beneath his fine clothes, he was still a wild animal of the forest, stronger than a knight. He dodged the blow and he couldn’t contain himself anymore…he started to change. Fur sprouted from his skin. His teeth grew longer. And with one twist of his lean animal form…” As I was speaking, Black got to his feet.

  He was right in front of me.

  I faltered.

  “Is this story almost done?” he asked.

  “N—not quite.”

  “I think it’s time I finished for you. The knight dies. The wolf wins the lady.” He laughed dryly. “If only real stories ever ended that way.” He dug his claws between my corset laces and snapped them open, one by one.

  I was out of plans.

  “Please!” I cried. “Please don’t…”

  “I can and I will.”

  “If you hurt me, the whole human army will be after you. I’m the Princess of Lainsland.”

  “Princess? Hmm!” Just as I feared, he only looked more eager than ever to do what he wished to me. “Do you think that means anything to me? I’m a wild animal. And I’ve always wanted to taste royal blood.”

  The corset fell to the ground and the knife with it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  King Brennus

  I was hot on her trail. My clever girl, she had dropped apple peels for me. Whenever I started to second guess my tracking skills, I would see her silent message to me. This was precisely the sort of thing I would expect from the girl who was also Lady Whittenstone. Maybe she couldn’t make oatmeal, but she could make plans. I walked for a time, and I was no
t afraid. I knew I would find her. But she must be afraid, and I had never, ever wanted to make her afraid.

  And then I came to the river.

  The water was fast, but so shallow it was no danger. I would have loved to play in it as a boy (or, I must confess, even as a man, were the circumstances different). It was full of rocks and the rush of the water filled my ears, drowning my thoughts.

  The trail was gone.

  Or disturbed, rather.

  Here I saw the tracks of a wolfkin in his beastly form, going both north and south along the banks and also straight west into the woods. One of the wolvenfolk had done this on purpose, to confuse me—the crafty little bastard. I kicked my shoe through the print of one of his large paws.

  “Where is my queen?” I demanded of the thick forest around me.

  An elf who had spent his life here might have gotten an answer. But for all the times my father took me to the cabin, for all the time I spent hunting and fishing, it was still not enough to form a true relationship with the trees. They say no living thing on earth is as slow to trust as a tree. They are so old, and every being with two arms and two legs wants to cut them down. Elves respect the forest more than humans, but in the end, we still want to take an axe to them. We need houses and fuel and ships as much as anyone. I did not speak to the trees of my own woods; I had men and women who did it for me.

  I cursed under my breath. The best thing I could do was wait for my soldiers to catch up. And if there was one thing I had learned as a king, it is that rushing headlong into something is never wise. And yet, I did love a good headlong rush. It had never been so hard to resist.

  I sat down at the banks and took a drink. I waited for a time, my ears pricked for the sound of either horses or wolves.

  “King Brennus of the Wood Elves…”

  I looked up. The voice that had spoken was an odd voice. It sounded like the wind, or simply my imagination. And yet, I knew what it had said.