17. The Prince and the Beast

THE PRINCE AND THE BEAST

T he highest floor of the tower is the place in the castle where the darkness dwells most deeply.

I know that the people in the village gossip about the darkness that has enveloped this place, and there is some truth to those tales. In the first days after the witch cast her curse, the darkness from the storm of her magic seeped into the walls and clouded all the windows, making it dark as night outside even when the sun was high. It drove me to madness; I'm sure of it.

Gradually, as the years passed, that darkness faded. No villagers tried to breach the walls after the mob came after me and failed to kill me, but I assume the rumors stayed stuck in their minds as rumors tend to do.

No, the castle is not shrouded in darkness completely, though the mist still clings in the enchanted forest and my forced solitude has felt like darkness at times. There are parts of the castle that have fallen out of my mind, unvisited for years in a row. I have no knowledge of their state. There have been many days when it did not seem worth the effort of getting out of my bed and the castle may as well have been as dark as the stories say.

In this room, the darkness is real.

It is not a space meant to be seen by visitors, and so is not finely decorated, though the circular room contains carpets and a table and a chair that is well-enough built. On the table sits the glass cloche that contains the rose that bears the remnants of the curse, just as I do. Because of the nature of it, darkness crowds the room like a tapestry on the walls, translucent but not transparent, making the moonlight from the waning crescent seem dimmer and less potent.

I have grown used to the darkness over the years, and even become accustomed to the fact that the rose and its petals are here, a physical representation of what remains of my life.

Staring at the rose in its cloche feels different now.

I sit back in the chair with a sigh and let my eyes linger on the rose as if I have never seen it before. The stem has not changed in appearance since the day the witch cursed me, and the petals are as pink as if freshly bloomed. Its physical state has not changed much since the day I dragged myself back to the castle, beaten and bleeding, and brought myself to this tower to lie on the floor until I could summon the strength to pull myself upright and go down to my bed chambers. I know that must seem senseless, but at the time, in the haze of my wounds, I thought that proximity to the rose would help with the healing. To this day, I have no idea whether it made any difference at all. I only know that climbing the tower steps nearly killed me and when I arrived here, I thought the tower walls would be the last thing I saw before I died.

Clouds must cover the moon, because the light coming through the tower window dims further. The glass still shines, as there is much magic in the tower and the cloche and, of course, the rose itself. It is as if the moonlight is stored within the glass and twinkles whenever the moon itself is not strong enough to shine off it. It makes it difficult to look away from the rose and remember my sentence.

No magic will save me. That has been obvious for a long time. Magic can only extend the curse, in its way, since without magic I would have starved to death or bled to death many times over by now. I have been under this curse for twenty long years. I have been battling the beast for what feels like an eternity, unable to stray far from the castle, as the magic weakens with distance and cannot protect me as I need, even in the village.

The truth is that it is the isolation that blackens my soul far more than the curse. It turns me into a man I do not recognize, even accounting for the beast that steals half my waking hours and perhaps more. The loneliness has been like a noose around my neck, and now I feel I have slipped out of it. Yet there it hangs, for me to witness.

But now Elle is here, and the castle is no longer empty. I can feel her presence through the beast's senses and the magic of the castle. Her bright spirit is undimmed by sleep, and she slumbers deeply in her bedroom, safe under the covers while I am up here with the rose.

As I watch, one of the petals trembles on the stem as if stirred by a breeze that only moves within the cloche. It is such a small movement that a man without the beast's senses might think he had imagined it, but I know I have not. It may not be the first sign that another petal is about to fall, but it is the first one I have seen from this petal, and I know well enough what will happen in due course.

Many years ago, I used to believe that the act of looking is what hastened the petals in falling to the bottom of the cloche, but that was a superstitious thought and one that I eventually stopped having. If it were real, I could stave off the effects of the rose seemingly forever, simply by locking it in a room deep within the castle and never allowing it to see the light of day.

That is not how it works. Whether I look or not, time still passes. What I do in that time is irrelevant to the state of the clock ticking. The petals will still fall. Watching the rose for hours a day does not seem to make a difference. Ignoring the rose for weeks at a time makes no difference. Consideration alone does not affect the curse.

And yet, on nights like these, I find myself before it. I do not find the rose to be entrancing or alluring. At one time I may have looked at the rose the way a solider will look at a wound that cannot be healed but will not cause a mercifully quick death.

The petal quivers again in such a slight motion that I almost allow myself to hope it will not fall. When I was first cursed, it would have been a simple matter to convince myself that it had not moved at all and forbid myself from looking for a month, but now I cannot lie to myself. Elle has changed everything.

Despite my determination to be stoic, the sight of another quivering petal turns my stomach to knots.

I follow the line of the stem to the bottom of the cloche. I do not try to convince myself that the number of petals is unchanged, because every time I come to this room in the tower, the number of petals that have fallen is burned freshly into my memory. I cannot lie to myself about this, either. There are more petals on the bottom of the glass cloche than there were the last time I was here.

Try as I might, I cannot remember when that was. It was before I brought Elle to the castle, but how long before? When I search my memories, I cannot recall how the land looked outside the window or whether there was rain drumming on the roof. I cannot remember if it was dark out or daylight. I cannot remember if it was hot or cold. It makes me feel crazed.

I cannot even remember whether it was this year or last, or even the year before. There have been times in my life when the days blurred together with no way to tell them apart. The beast and I fought for control and space in my body, and the hours passed without notice as I struggled to force him into submission or retreated into my mind and let him run loose when I was too exhausted to keep up the fight.

Other times, though, the years were interminable, each day stretching out until I thought for sure a week had passed, only to find that the sun had not yet set. My mind remained clear during those days, and I dwelled in overwhelming anguish and pain and guilt thinking back to the day the witch came to the castle.

It was too late when she arrived. There was not time to build a wall and keep her out, or to gather any weaponry that could hope to overpower her. There had not been any warning signs, and her arrival was an ambush. All I could do was flee the castle with the people who dwelled there. I gathered as many as I could, every servant I could find, as the witch swept into the castle, and we ran through the forest to the village. The journey seemed never-ending. There was not room for all of us in the inn so we divided ourselves among the homes of the villagers who would take us in.

At first the villagers were welcoming, as they understood the fear of having to flee from a sudden attack. We had escaped with our lives, the most precious thing to defend, and for a short while it seemed as if that would be the worst of it. Perhaps the witch would pass on and we could go back to the comfort of the castle.

I should have known then that we had not run far enough and the witch would never give up the castle without being completely defeated. Black clouds darkened the sky. They were like nothing we had ever seen, swirling in vicious spirals above the village. They cracked open with brutal lightning that set trees on fire and split the earth. It was a warning of what was to come.

At the time I could not understand how it had happened. Dark witches are normally handled by their own kind. They keep each other in line, for their power is too great to be challenged by most others. I had not been prepared for such an attack and I did not have an enchantress at the castle. There was not even a wise woman in the village who could offer the slightest protection.

The storm raged above the village for three days and three nights, and I began to understand that it would not stop without my intervention. I resisted the idea because I did not want to face the witch in a place of power, but when yet another house was struck down by lightning and the inhabitants ran screaming from the flames, I knew I had to act. The people were mine to protect and my cowardice was the cause of their pain.

The townspeople did not have the means to fight the dark witch and her magic. Neither did I, but I was the only one among us valuable enough to speak with her. No one else had more power or standing than I did. Although I asked my closest allies if they would come with me, they wished to stay behind. I could not blame them. As I would learn, she had come for me.

There was no wall then, so I crossed through the trees on the way back to the castle. My home had been turned dark and forbidding by the witch's magic. The clouds followed me through the forest and spiraled above the castle. My heart thundered. I could hardly breathe when I reached the entrance of the castle and went inside.

I found the witch in this very spot, the highest floor of the tower. From here you can see the slope of the forest toward the village and the smoke from the houses rising into the sky. You can see the green country beyond. The witch had taken my power over that country for herself and turned with a gleeful smile as I came into the tower. I could see from her twisted features that she was satisfied with the fear she was causing to my people.

"Well, little prince," she said. "Have you come to bargain?"

I am not little now, and I was not little then, but I was the prince. I straightened my shoulders and my spine. "Yes."

She smiled, slow and deadly. "What do you have to offer me? I have already taken your home and your power. I have driven away your people and could chase them even farther, if I chose."

I knew at that moment that she was right and would take pleasure in terrorizing my people until they were too afraid to ever return to this countryside. She would have no qualms about destroying the village next just to hear the screams of the people who lived there. She was in control of my treasury and all my gold as well as my stores. She already had the power that surrounded such places, like royal castles, and allowed us to live in comfort, and she would take more until there was no more to take. The only thing she did not have at that point was me.

"I will trade myself," I said.

I had almost expected her to refuse, to tell me that I was not worth the bargain, but instead the witch beamed as if I was offering her something truly rare. Indeed, I did not understand fully what she meant to do with me. I thought death. An ending to the pain. I was a fool.

The story that the villagers tell is that I was fed to the beast, but the truth is that it was the other way around. He was fed to me, forced into my body from one of my own goblets. The edge of the cup cut into my mouth. I did not want to drink the bitter liquid that she had made from wine from my own cellars, but I had no other choice if the village was to be saved.

"A sip," she said, and I dared to believe it would end the misery. As if a soul like hers could have mercy.

The curse burned inside me. I remember the sound of the witch laughing wickedly, louder and louder. Her laughter blended in with the thunder and cracks of lightning from the clouds she had summoned. She was triumphant, and I thought for a few moments that it had all been a waste because as the curse took hold, I felt as if I was being torn in two. I was sickened by the magic itself and fell to the ground in a delirium.

When I awoke three days later, the witch's reign had already ended. Her greed had been her undoing. The other witches, who would have stopped her from seizing the castle at all, had heard what their sister had done. I have a faint memory of her screams as they bound her in the courtyard and lit her aflame, extinguishing her evil soul.

The damage had already been done.

I was doomed to a life of madness and animal urges. In the beginning, the beast was stronger and I was less able to fight him. The magic would enforce the power of the rose.

So long ago, I did not think of what would happen when the last petal fell. I thought I would go mad long before then.

In time, I've realized I might live long enough to see the last petal fall from the rose. "If you do not find your fate before the last petal falls…you will become nothing but the beast inside of you." The witch had warned.

Of course I did not give up so easily then. I raged through the castle destroying tapestries and paintings and vases for days until I could control the beast. When I finally trusted myself enough, I was covered in sweat and weaker than I had ever been, but with the last of my strength I dragged myself outside.

The wall had been built by magic while I was inside the castle. It was too large and too sturdy to have been built by human hands and had the scent of magic about it. I thought it had been built to keep the villagers away, to protect them from me, but once I passed through I began to reconsider. The magic was weaker outside the iron gates, and I felt weaker as I walked. By the time I reached the village I knew I had made a terrible mistake.

The villagers were terrified of me. They did not trust me and looked upon me as a dangerous animal who could not be allowed to live. There was not only terror, but there was anger and even hate. All they knew of the prince was that he had been fed to the beast, and when I spoke, my words did not fall on their ears as any language they could understand. They had begun to confuse the power of the witch with me, and stories had spread about how I could not be controlled. They had already imagined the worst and turned on me, trying to kill me. They beat me until I was almost senseless and when I ran, trying to get to safety, they chased after me.

Their betrayal was my undoing. Still now, I regret sacrificing myself for their souls.

The magic was too weak near the village to protect me, and I could not defend myself. I barely made it back to the castle, bloodied and terribly injured as I was. The magic inside the castle did its best to help me heal, but as it did, the villagers began storming the estate.

They brought planks and long nails with them, and their plan was to crucify me in my courtyard.

No, that is not true. Their plan was to crucify the beast, and they could not see that I was still part of him. The anger and pain still brew inside of me at the memory. I can still hear the thunder.

I was the only one in the castle by then. There was no one to defend me save myself. I did not want to kill them, but they could not understand me or did not want to. I still remember their screams as they died. I still remember their bravery, fighting to the last man. When the final man had fallen, the women fled to the village. I have no doubt they told the tale of what a vicious animal I was, though I was only trying to stay alive. I know they would not have told the stories in the way I remember it, because all they saw was a bloodthirsty beast.

In fairness, there are days when I am as bloodthirsty as he is because the nature of the beast is overpowering. There are times when I hardly remember my life as it was before I was cursed. Tendrils of darkness swirl through the mists of the forests to this day, and enough of the villagers are aware of them that they look upon those remnants as proof that evil still inhabits the castle.

I blink several times, returning from my memories. On the rose, the petal that had been quivering in that invisible breeze comes loose and floats to the floor of the cloche.

I release a heavy sigh, doing my best to come to terms with my thoughts.

The truth is that I no longer wish to stop the petals from falling. In the early days of the curse, I was so desperate to stop it that I would have held them onto the stem with both my hands, withering away in this tower room. I tossed and turned in bed, trying to find a way to free myself from the curse through the power of my will and finding nothing but dead ends.

Now, I no longer need to search for a way to keep the petals on the stem. It is no longer my most important consideration. I will no longer dwell on the days I have left, for there is no sense in it, and counting them will not change their number.

I will have this peace with Elle for as many days as I can. Numbing my pain. She helps me remember who I used to want to be. I will accept the peace I have with her for that long and no longer, because I will not be here when it is done.

I let out another sigh, stretching my stiff limbs. I cannot go to Elle and wake her without blindfolding her, and I do not want to disturb her pleasant sleep, so I will not. The days I have with her from now until the end will have to be good enough, for there is nothing else to be gained from this life. What's strange, though, is that the magic allows her and no one else. It's odd and I've been trying to understand why it offers her peace. Why it grants her welcome. Is it to further my pain in some way? I can't imagine she is a gift although that's what her presence feels like. I do not trust the magic. None of this feels as though it will stay. It is a trick, I'm sure.

There is only one final question that plagues me as I stand, looking at the cloche in the moonlight, preparing to leave it:

What does the magic want with Elle?