Or, indeed, unwelcome.

  The Beast’s castle was vast. Each fresh day and each fresh turn brought a room or hall anew, one Cecille had never seen before. Or one, perhaps, that she had seen before, though in a different part of the castle altogether.

  She spent hours in eager exploration, wandering soaring solars and vast cellars, marble baths carved for the steaming warmth of hot springs, ballrooms that glowed gold with the weight of their gilding, and halls vaulted by beams as thick as the ancient oaks that grew beyond the castle’s gardens.

  And how wonderful those gardens, unending in their beauty and variety: the lush groves and lusher orchards, the hidden follies, the statuary caught, frozen, as if in the ecstasies of passion, and a rose garden of blooms so beautiful and so perfect that they seemed conjured, not of nature.

  But Cecille’s favourite place of all in the castle was atop its highest tower, in the little lookout there, the one hugged tight by the castle’s pale stone and rugged crenelations, where the wind whipped at her hair and her skirts both, chasing away some of the fierce summer heat.

  And it was there that she stood, looking out to the forest, tracing a line in her head, that unseen path back to the village. It was early in the day yet, but she could just pick out the smoke rising from the fire in the blacksmith’s forge.

  Cecille watched the wind catch that smoke and urge it northwards.

  The blacksmith was a good man in a village where most were not. A newly arrived outsider caught in its web. Cecille did not imagine he would stay long. Indeed, she hoped that he would not. She hoped he would leave before the badness of the place seeped into his soul.

  Her most vivid recollection of him came back to her then: the open palm he caught and stopped when her guardian would have struck her about the mouth for words he found unsuitable of a young lady.

  Her guardian had often found her unsuitable — unbiddable, more than not. Such and more was said by many of the menfolk. Though for all they spoke ill of her, seldom they let her be, or left her alone.

  Perhaps then, that was why she enjoyed so very much her new-found solitariness. Cecille had never been truly alone in the village, not in her guardian’s home, where perhaps that would not have rankled, had it not been that she knew no welcome or love there, only the irritation of being an old debt to a long dead patron.

  It was easy enough to be alone amid the castle’s endless rooms and gardens. But Cecille found, now that the choice was given to her, she did not wish to always be alone. The company here was much preferable, after all: whenever she wished to find him, the Beast was always near.

  And so he was then. No scuff of feet or the creak of the latch, but suddenly he was there beside her, his elbows resting on the stone, lent low so that he might catch her eye.

  “You look very beautiful today, lass.”

  Did she? Beautiful was not a word Cecille had in mind when she thought of herself. She was pretty enough. She knew that. But not beautiful, for true beauty required beauty in manners. And she would never have those.

  But the Beast’s words sounded sincere enough. So she looked down at herself: the castle’s teasing hands had dressed her in a loose silken gown of rosy pink. Not something the castle usually conjured for her, in style or colour, but that morning it had felt strangely apt.

  Pink silks on her skin, pearls in her gilded hair, and pale rouge upon her lips. Pink and pearl.

  Beautiful…

  Cecille gave the Beast no answer, for she had none to give. Or none that she could shape her words around, in any case. So instead, simply, she looked back to the view.

  She could see the smoke from the blacksmith’s forge more clearly now, judge the distance more clearly in turn. How strange, then, that a walk of but a morning seemed a whole world away.

  A question took shape in her mind upon reflection of the view. “Do you bring here every girl the village offers as tithe?”

  The Beast shook his head, and his grin sounded sly. “No, not all. Some are terribly afeared of the height.”

  Cecille turned her head, narrowed her eyes at him, at his wilful misunderstanding. “Not to the tower,” she said, even though she knew well he knew. “To the castle.”

  “Yes,” the Beast said, “always.”

  “None go back?”

  “To your village? No, none have ever wished to.” The Beast cocked his head, regarding her with interest anew. “Do you wish to return there, sweet lass?”

  “I would rather die. I would rather—” Cecille stopped then, on a queer and stuttering breath, surprised at the venom that lay thick and clear in her voice.

  But from the warm rumble of his chuckle, it was plain the Beast was not surprised — nor, indeed, appalled by her unwomanly manners.

  Cecille cleared her throat. “The village has always given a tithe?” she asked, a silly question, obvious in its answering. So she tried again, “Why?”

  “An age ago,” the Beast said, “a battle of flame and cold iron set this forest ablaze. The village then was but a year in its building, a hamlet more than not, but a busy place all the same. A place full of life. The fire would have burned that life to ashes.”

  Even in the glaring light of the morn’s bright sunshine, Cecille saw the Beast’s eyes flicker gold.

  “I was injured in that battle,” he said, “and badly, but with the last of my strength I quelled the fire a breath before it reached your village. No one there died. But there was a lass. A lass your age. A sweet, kind lass… She died, where forest became field.”

  He spoke with a terrible ache to his words, but he did not falter.

  “They found her, the villagers,” the Beast said, “and foolish folk that they were, thought I had taken her life in payment for my magic — as it seems they still think so, for though the trees stand tall again and the darkness of the forest troubles them not, with each score year that passes, they still sacrifice another of their young women. And so I save that lass as I could not save the first, and I bring her here, and here she stays — for whatever reason I know not.”

  “She stays because she knows she is safe here with you,” Cecille told him, “and far safer than with the folk who would barter her to some imagined monster, to be ravished and slain.” She spoke those words with the certainty of someone who had lived them.

  “Perhaps,” the Beast allowed.

  “I have always wondered…” Cecille began. “You would think, that to ward off the horror our menfolk imagine you can imbue, they would send you the prettiest girl, or the plumpest, the richest, the most buxom, the sweetest of song.”

  “So you would imagine,” the Beast agreed.

  “But they do not send such girls,” Cecille said. “They send you the orphans and the oddities. The ones they wish to be rid of.”

  Another rumbling laugh. The warmth in the Beast’s eyes seemed hot enough to burn. “The oddities, indeed.”

  “Do none of us stay long?” Cecille asked, for still she had met not a single soul in her wanderings, and had found no sign that anyone save the Beast lived in the castle.

  “All stay,” the Beast said. “Some for days, others years. But all leave in the end. They know this is not the place for them.”

  A place of wonder indeed, and of magic for certain, but already, even to Cecille, the castle felt fleeting to her — an ephemeral, unearthly place. A point along the journey she found herself on, not the end of it.

  “Why?” she asked, though the Beast answered another question entirely.

  “It amuses me. The years are long. The company is welcome.” For a moment, there was a faraway look in his dark eyes. But when the Beast looked back to her then, they glimmered gold once more. “You are no fool, lass. Why were you forsaken?”

  Cecille knew. She knew well, indeed. The answer was plain, made plainer when the menfolk hauled her from her bed and dragged her to the forest, forced her onwards at the points of spears, her wrists tied with biting rope.

  “A man,” she said. “A cruel man. The youngest son of a rich farmer. He wanted me. And I would not marry him. My guardian tried to force me to, but I refused him. Just as I refused to be trapped in that awful place for all of my life, to be kept like some brood mare, to never be free.”

  “Free?”

  “To see the world beyond the Valley,” Cecille said.

  Another smile — slight, indulgent, familiarly sly. “And what do you know of that world?”

  “What do you?” Cecille retorted, sharper than she ought.

  “Much,” the Beast said, not rising to her ire. “Do not imagine me trapped here, in the castle, lass. It is a home, of a sort, a place of waiting, but I am not bound here — and indeed, often I am not here at all.”

  “Where do you go then?”

  “Many a place.”

  Cecille sighed. “You are so fond of answering without answering.”

  The Beast sighed in turn, in gentle mockery. “Then here is an answer for you, lass: I am not long back from the Capital, and before that from the North, where the snows still lie thick and warmth is hard to come by.”

  Warmth was not hard to come by here, even in the brisk wind that whipped across the castle’s highest tower.

  Cecille imagined, from where he stood, that she could feel the Beast’s warmth through the fine linen tunic he wore; and she did not need to imagine the warm muscle of his forearms, braced against the pale stone. If she shifted but a handspan, she would feel his skin against her own. And perhaps, whatever else she might feel through his dark, supple riding leathers.

  She blushed then, her cheeks hot, as an answering heat sparked into life somewhere deep within. She took a breath, not steadily. And the Beast smiled as if he knew the hot turning of her thoughts. But smile was all he did. Not touch.

  And suddenly, how Cecille longed for that — his hands upon her, all of her, bare.

  She let go another shaking breath as a fire of want burned through her. And still, the Beast only smiled.

  “There was an amber trader who passed sometimes through the village,” Cecille said, surprised by how steady her voice sounded. “Passed through on his way to the ports. And when he was deep in his cups, he would tell me of the lands beyond the Windward Seas, lands of sand and spice he called them, where the sun lies high in the sky all through the longest of winters.”

  The Beast reached out, as if to skim his knuckles across her hot cheek. But he did not touch her, for he had said he would not. “And places where winter never comes.”

  “You have seen them?” Cecille asked.

  “I have,” the Beast said, dropping his hand to the stone parapet once more. “I have seen many places in my time.”

  “I wish to see those places too,” Cecille said. “And some of the other women, they told me that the trader…that often he looked at me with interest. I had thought I might — I might lay with him, and after, ask him to take me away.”

  “But you did not?” the Beast said.

  “No. I could not. In the end. I could not bear the thought of his hands upon me, no matter the prize.”

  “Then I am glad. For you are far too fine a prize for a man such as he.”

  Cecille forgot herself again. “I am no man’s prize!” She snapped those words, and heard them only afterwards. Her breath stuttered a beat on the snare of her foolishness, but evened soon thereafter. For she was quickly learning, that for all his beastly nature, the Beast was not quick to anger — less inclined, at that, to anger than any man she had ever met.

  “Indeed,” the Beast said, wry. “You are your own reward, sweet lass.”

  Cecille found no reply, lost in his gaze, which glimmered golden a time or two as he watched her in turn. “What is it that you long for, Cecille?” he asked, his voice low, caught up in the wind.

  “What do I long for…?” Perhaps she had been contrary enough. She was safe here, but that safety came at the Beast’s leave. Perhaps she should give an answer, even just the once, that was expected of her. So, “I long only for a loving husband,” Cecille said.

  “A loving husband,” the Beast echoed, smiling his sly, sharp smile, “and lands of sand and spice.”

  In the Rose Garden

  Summer drifted onwards.

  The castle was a cool and airy haven; the heat outside a living thing, all-encompassing, and it stoked a heat in Cecille too, a fire that had awoken, she thought, that day atop the tower, and had never yet been quenched.

  It flamed higher, and she felt decadent in its incandescent glow. Lush. Like a flower blooming from the bud.

  She dreamed often of lying with the Beast, dreamed it intently as she had only idly thought it of other men — of opening her legs to him, of offering herself to him, of feeling his weight atop her and his heat within her. Sometimes, in those dreams, she lay on furs and silks, sometimes on sun-hot sand, but each time she woke, full of the Beast’s fire and slick with his heat, she knew that dream was all she did.

  Knew it until the morning she woke from the sweetest of fantasies, a dream in which the Beast had taken her atop grass still wet with a morning’s dew, red rose petals lying all around.

  And when she awoke from that dream, she knew then that it was not simply a dream, for there was something of a harkening in it. Something calling her to the rose garden.

  Something calling her to the Beast.

  The garden seemed like a dream itself, too beautiful to be real in a waking world. And yet, in all its unreal splendour, real it was.

  If the garden’s green briars climbed over trellises, Cecille would never know. For the roses grew so thickly there it was as though the flowers themselves were tapestries, hung heavy on the walls, bloom upon bloom — deep, fertile, red, rich as blood and full as wine.

  The roses had been in bud when she first found the garden, during one of her earliest wanderings, but always now they bloomed.

  The summer sun shone down upon her, a slant of light in the late afternoon, the fierce heat of the early day giving way but slightly to a cooling breeze that drifted from somewhere unseen. Drifted, perhaps, through the grand iron gate over which the roses intertwined, the gate she had drawn fast closed behind her.

  The gate that had not opened since, and yet…

  A shift in the air, and every fibre of her being sang with the sudden awareness of his presence.

  The Beast.

  His voice in her ear. “You called for me, sweet lass.”

  “I did not call.”

  “With no words,” the Beast said, “and yet call you did.”

  Perhaps she had called him to her. For though she was as mortal as the roses and the forest that grew all around, in that dreaming, waking moment Cecille felt as if magic thrummed through her, as if it ran through her veins in place of her hot blood.

  She could feel the heat of him intensely, though still he touched her not. She imagined yet that she could feel the breadth of his hard muscle behind her, could certainly feel the brush of his breath against the bare skin of her shoulder.

  If she let her weight fall back but a little, he might set his lips there. How she wished that he would. How she wished that he might touch her.

  And it came to her then, that she need not only wish. All she need do was…

  “You told me once that you would never lay a hand upon me unless I bid you to.”

  The Beast breathed gentle amusement against her skin. Nothing more. But a breath closer and she might feel the brush of his lips.

  Cecille’s own breath left her in a shuddering sigh. “I wish you to lay a hand upon me.”

  He touched her then, though not with his hands: his lips, just as she had longed for. She felt that long-anticipated smile against her skin, at the softness of her nape; then, at last, the sweet brush of his fingertips as he pushed aside what tendrils of her hair had fallen loose of their jewelled net and twisting knot.

  Then with a gentle hand to her arched neck, another firm to her hip, the Beast pulled her tight to him.

  Though his hands did not stay still for long. Given leave, his touch roamed over her. At length, he came to her breasts, held them through the fine silk of her gown and gently took the weight of them.

  Cecille found voice, a tiny groan that broke through her ragged breathing as the Beast pulled at the laces of her bodice until they slackened but a little, until her breasts spilled overtop. He passed a thumb across her skin, not bare yet, but even through the fine linen of her chemise — so fine she could see the pink of her nipples, see them hardening, feel their delicious, harkening ache — that touch was maddening in its pleasure.

  He teased her, wound her tight with anticipation of his next touch. Her hips canted as she pushed back against him, lost to some primordial rhythm, made wilder still and hotter when she felt the long, thick length of him hard against her bottom.

  The Beast’s hand journeyed lower, pressed firm to the silk of her stomacher, but then stopped there, maddeningly still, holding her still.

  And still he did not move.

  Cecille heaved a ragged breath of the close, sweetly scented air, and every inch of her sang anew with hot awareness. “Why— Why do you stop?” she gasped.

  “I have laid hands upon you, lass,” the Beast said. “Was that not all that you wanted?”

  Cecille could hear plain the slyness in his voice. “Oh, you are cruel. You jest, Beast, and you are cruel.”

  “Ah,” the Beast said, smiling still against her skin, his lips a breath of a kiss, “then there is more you wish?”

  “I — what?” Cecille managed.

  The Beast pressed his hand more firmly to her stomach, then paused, question clear, intent plain. “More?”

  “More,” Cecille breathed as understanding took her. “Oh, please, Beast. More.”

  The Beast’s laugh was a ghosting touch across her ear. “Then to give you more would be my utmost pleasure, lass.”

 

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