Beauty and the Werewolf (14 page)

In abstract, she knew that this was how it had to be. Part of her knew that this was the only decision they could make. But part of her felt not only afraid, but betrayed. The King and the Godmother were supposed to take care of you! They weren't supposed to be the ones who watched impassively as you went to your doom—or worse, took you to the edge of the Doom Cliff and shoved you over it!

And if the King and the Godmother, both of whom were extraor
dinarily
good
people—she and everyone else in this Kingdom had evidence of just how good—could hide this ruthlessness, then how much darker were the things that not-so-good people hid? What villainy lurked behind the smiling faces she saw every day?

So her safe little world would never be safe again… She knew that the nurturing hand also held the knife, and that was very unsettling. And now if she got the least hint that there was something beneath the surface of an action or a comment, she would be suspicious of anyone she didn't know well.

She felt the urge to go and unwrap that mirror, so that she could watch someone she knew and loved and trusted, and again resisted. She already knew what she would see, and it would only make her unhappy and lonely. What she needed was something to keep her mind busy. It would be easy enough to keep her
hands
busy, but she needed something to occupy her thoughts.

Well, she was in a Manor filled with books. There might be a clue about Sapphire and the other unsummoned invisibles in them. She might as well start looking for books about magic creatures.

Although the likelihood of finding anything here in her suite was pretty remote, she had to start somewhere—and besides, so far as she had been able to tell, the books here weren't organized at all. For all she knew, something had gotten borrowed and left here by a previous guest. She might just as well remedy that before she turned to the larger library.

When Verte turned up to summon her to supper, she had rearranged about half of the books on the shelves, and had already determined that there wasn't anything about magic or the history of Redbuck here. But really, when she considered who had probably used these rooms, it wasn't all that likely that the guests had been interested in magic at all. This had probably been a suite for important guests, so the books here were designed to amuse or serve
as resources on questions of the Kingdom. They were divided unequally between various sorts of stories for the purposes of amusement only, and books on history. There were even a few about other Kingdoms. Such people had their own wizards or sorceresses to advise them about magic; they didn't need to learn about it themselves.

She was about to leave the room when she realized that she had never asked Verte the question that had led her to discover the invisibles were not all the sorts of creatures that Sebastian had thought they were. “Verte, are any of your musicians willing to play for me?” she asked.

“Yes,”
he wrote on his slate.

Could ghosts be musicians?
I don't know why not. They can obviously be seamstresses; why not musicians?

She hesitated a moment, then made her request. “I should really like to have some music,” she said, wistfully.

The reply was immediate.
“You shall.”

Sebastian was already eating when she came down, with a book propped up in front of him. He was shoveling the food into his mouth automatically, completely absorbed in what he was reading. As she entered the dining room and the invisible servant pulled out her chair for her, he actually jumped, as if she had startled him, and scrambled to his feet.

“I am so sorry. I beg your pardon,” he blurted, blushing. “I got involved in researching things, and completely forgot that I wasn't alone here. I'm just not used to having any people here but Eric anymore, and most of the time he's off doing whatever it is he needs to do.”

“Do you often read while you are eating?” she asked, taking her seat and nodding when the invisible steward offered her some of the first course.

“Generally, yes,” he admitted. “Eric rarely eats supper with me, and even when he does, he's not much of a conversationalist. I think he prefers it when I read, actually. It keeps him from having to try to make conversation.”

Why am I not in the least surprised?
she thought.
Eric does not strike me as a fellow who considers conversation necessary at a meal.
Then again, she couldn't really blame him. Sebastian probably wouldn't want to talk about anything Eric was interested in. What
would
Eric be interested in? Women, she supposed. She couldn't picture Sebastian in a convivial, hearty, semidrunk discussion of women, the way many young men seemed to occupy their time. The sorts of things she had seen going on in taverns, but also in the private parlors of the wealthy when they weren't out being polite to the young women they were supposed to be assessing for marriage. There were any number of parties she had gone to because Genevieve insisted, where she had taken to wandering off to see what she could find. It was amazing what young men would say when they thought there were no parents or young women about.

But Sebastian didn't seem at all the sort who sat about and boasted about what he'd been doing with the first chambermaid. Which sent her mind off briefly on a tangent…
Could
you get up to mischief with one of the invisibles? They had hands, but she wasn't sure from Sapphire's and Verte's ministrations if they were human hands or not. And if you wanted to, how would you know which one was in your bed? She supposed an invisible lover might be very titillating for a while, but they were silent as well as invisible, so would that be off-putting?

Ruthlessly she dragged her mind out of the gutter and back to the dinner table, blushing a little at herself.

Considering the number of meals she had taken in her life where
mindless chatter had virtually dominated every bite, she wouldn't have minded a few meals in silence herself.

“I can see that. Eric does seem to be the sort who won't use three words when one will do. So, what had you so enthralled?” she asked. If this was a book about magic, it would probably give her the opening she needed to start asking questions of her own.

“I don't know if
enthralled
is the word I would use,” he said, making a sour face. Unlike Eric, who seemed to have two expressions, arrogant and sullen, Sebastian practically radiated everything he was feeling. “It's not very pleasant reading. It's about accidental Transformations, times when something went wrong and a person or object got transformed that wasn't supposed to be. I thought I would see if there were any were-creatures that had ever been created that way, and if there were, if they were infectious afterward. It's just not fair for you to be locked up here for three months if there's no need, but before I can say ‘there's no need' I have to have evidence. So since no one knows how I got this way, it seems reasonable that the same rules would apply.”

Good heavens, he is taking his responsibility to me seriously!
This was somewhat unexpected. She'd thought she would have to keep at him about it. Evidently not. “Why is it unpleasant reading?”

“It's a set of very detailed accounts. And since these are accidents, the results are, as my father would have said,
‘Not appropriate for dinnertime discussion, young man.'
” He smiled at her over his spectacles, inviting her to share the joke. “That used to strike me as grossly unfair since he and his men saw nothing wrong with discussing tournament wounds, bloody battlefields and detailed ways they'd dispatched whatever it was they had been hunting that day over their food.”

She laughed at that. Then felt both surprised and gratified that she
could
still laugh.

But after talking with the Godmother, after seeing her father, she felt a great deal better. Not that she wanted to
stay
here, but she did feel better, less frantic—and here was Sebastian looking up yet another reason to think that she wasn't going to change because of his bite. “I can sympathize with your feelings, but I would prefer not to hear the details of that book,” she told him. “I am enjoying this fine cooking, and I would prefer not to have it spoiled.”

“It's good to hear you laugh. I take it that the mirror worked for you?” He closed the book and set it aside, changing the subject.

“It did. It did, quite surpassing my expectations.” She paused. “I confess that now that I have had something that magical in my own hands, I see the attraction of magic,” she replied slowly. “I never really did before. Partly it just didn't seem real in the way that something I could measure and shape was real. Partly because magic things always happen in stories to other extraordinary people, and I am, as my stepmother says, so ordinary I positively repel magic. And partly, well, it just doesn't seem…the sort of thing that a rational person would want to be involved with. It always seemed to me that either magic was too large and uncertain to be controlled, or that you could get the same results with less effort and means that were not magical.”

“It
is
uncertain, but The Trad— Ah, it's more predictable than you might think,” he responded, flushing as he corrected whatever it was he had almost let slip. Since she couldn't begin to imagine what “The Trad” both he and Elena had mentioned might be, she simply set it down as some sort of magician's secret. “It does take an awful lot of effort, though. You are correct about that. And more often than not, it
is
more efficient to do things without it. I've been studying magic since the Godmother identified me as having the sorcerous talents and I still find it a lot easier to just go fetch what I need from the storerooms and light candles with a wax-dip. Since
I was about four when I started, I've had a lot of experience in figuring out when not to do things.”

Four! And here I thought he was just a sort of dilettante who took up magic when he was confined to his estate!

“‘What is wisdom, then, but knowing when it is best not to speak, and when it is best to hold one's hand,'” she quoted, and winked at him. “So wise for one so young!”

He turned serious and she saw the weight of responsibility he suffered under. “I wish I were wiser. I could probably come up with answers faster. Most of what I do, when it's not repeating spells that I know work, is trial and error. Mostly I make things for other people; I'm quite good at protective amulets, for instance, and the Godmother relies on me for them. Since I don't go out and ride the boundaries of my property, I have my servants place more of those amulets at key places to keep my people safe from supernatural and magical hazards. I have Eric to ensure that they are safe from ordinary perils. I've been working on my own problem ever since it happened, when I'm not making sure my people are safe from me, and from things outside. At least I am fairly certain
I
didn't transform myself. The things I was doing before I changed were all tried-and-true spells and I definitely took all the right precautions.”

“Do you think your servants might be humans that had been transformed?” she asked. “The invisible ones, that is. Transformed from humans into whatever it is that they are.”

“Oh, a magician could do that, but why would he?” Sebastian returned a logical question for hers. “You've seen for yourself that having invisible servants is deuced inconvenient. I frankly cannot think of any creature so hideous that making it invisible would make up for not knowing where it was, and I can't think of any other magicians, even the nasty ones, who wouldn't feel the same. Especially the nasty ones. The nasty ones are always having to look over their
shoulders for enemies. Can you imagine how having invisible things lurking about would make them feel? Besides, I already know what they are. They're Spirit Elementals.”

“Pardon?” She had heard of Elementals before this, but…not that sort. “Spirit Elementals? Aren't all Elementals spirits?”

“There aren't four Elements,” he explained. “There are five. Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Spirit. Only magicians ever bother about the Spirit Element—look, if you are finished with dinner, come up to my workroom. It's easier if I show you.”

She considered this for a moment. It wasn't as if she had anything important to do—she could go stare at the mirror for a while, and then go cry herself to sleep, or she could take him up on the invitation and learn something about the invisibles. Or more accurately, learn what he
thought
they were.

“All right, I would like that,” she responded. He beamed at her. It was rather charming, actually, to see him so enthusiastic.

They left the yellow-scarved servant to clear away, and Bella followed him down—or rather,
up,
an entirely new path in the maze that was Redbuck Manor.

In the rare moments when she had pictured a magician's lair, it had been a place dark, mysterious, wreathed in smokes of various odors—most of them probably nasty—and definitely underground. So going up quite a long staircase was certainly a bit of a surprise.

Instead of a dungeon, he brought her to what must have been a room in the highest part of the Manor. It had windows on all four sides, all of them glassed. The sun was down, but there was just enough light left in the sky for her to go to the windows and see that the Manor was built in the form of a square with a cross in it, so that there was not one, but four little enclosed courtyards. By going from window to window, she quickly determined which one was “hers.” She couldn't see the conservatory from here, but she
already knew it was somewhere on the exterior of the building—the sole exception to the fortified nature of the place.

This part of the Manor was a squat, square tower that formed the center of the cross. The rest of the building looked to be about three stories tall, and the tower rose another story above that.