Eighty-Two
It served him right.
How many people had he stolen from? How many had he lied to and tricked?
As Beau trudged through the snowy woods, his own court of emotions tormented him. He felt raw. Angry. Bewildered. Broken.
Arabella had told him that she loved him. What he had felt when she touched him, when she kissed him—that was real. She wasn’t a good enough liar to fake that. No one was.
But then her words came back to him, and he knew it was only wishful thinking … Did you think for a moment I could fall for you? You’re nothing but a thief …
She didn’t love him, that was a fact. If she did, she would’ve been able to cross the bridge. That invisible barrier was real, too. He’d felt it with his own hands. His despondency deepened as he remembered how Hope and Faith had searched for their sister, but had not found her. Of course they hadn’t. What would Love want with the likes of him?
Winded, Beau stopped walking for a moment, leaned his head back, and stared up at the lowering sky. Words from the clockmaker’s poem drifted back to him.
And when to love you finally learn
You will be loved in return.
When Arabella truly loved, she would be free. But she didn’t, so she wasn’t. Maybe next time. When a better man came along.
Beau wished he could just hate her. That would make things so much easier. But he didn’t hate her; he loved her and missed her and wanted her here, by his side. He missed brainstorming with her late at night at the great hall’s table, a pot of hot coffee and a plate of cakes nearby. He missed hammering and banging and building their crappy bridge. He missed celebrating each time a piling stood up, and swearing—precisely and creatively—each time one fell down.
Once, he’d thought that picking a diabolically difficult lock or breaking into a well-guarded mansion was the highest form of achievement, the greatest thing he could ever aspire to, but his time with Arabella had taught him differently. Discovering what that fierce, haunted creature truly was, who she truly was—it was the best thing he’d ever done. He’d unlocked the strongbox of her heart and the riches there had dazzled him. Arabella had given him back something that had been stolen from him—a sense of possibility. She’d seen something in him, a flicker, a glimmer, a bright promise that he could be something more. Someone more. A man who didn’t take, but gave. Or so he’d thought.
You really are nothing but a thief, Beauregard. A no-account boy from the slums. Your neck should’ve been broken by a noose years ago …
Espidra was right: He wasn’t good enough for Arabella. If he were smart, he’d do his best to forget her and focus on getting to Matti as quickly as he could.
Beau walked on, mile after mile through the dense forest, shoulders hunched against the cold, wishing that the mix of feelings that had descended on him—melancholy, loss, and a strange, prickling uneasiness—would lift, but they only deepened.
His hands and feet were half-frozen by the time he saw the signpost: VILLE DES BOIS-PERDUS. A few minutes later, he was walking down the town’s main street, looking for an inn or coffeehouse where he could buy a hot meal and warm himself by a fire. He’d left Camille’s rolls in the snow by the moat.
His first glimpse of the town revealed a sad, dreary place with little promise. And then, with a startle of recognition, he realized he knew it—the bones of it, at least—even though he’d never set foot in it. He’d seen it changed, transformed, stitched in silver on the underside of a bedcover. But could this gray, lifeless place really be the foundation for Arabella’s Paradisium?
Beau squinted, and the ugly square, with its rusted fountain, came to bright, beautiful life, planted with shady trees, dotted with benches, full of laughing children. The sooty village hall, its facade scrubbed, stood newly proud. And the school, its pediment crumbling, its windows boarded up, became the town’s newly painted and polished centerpiece, the jewel in its crown.
He opened his eyes wide again and the vision faded. The broken-down little town was anything but a paradise, but Beau knew Arabella could have made it one. Like the greatest of architects, she saw with her heart, not her eyes. She saw not what was, but what could be.
A church bell rang, letting him know it was already noon, reminding him that he had things to do. He felt for the emerald ring. It was still safely tucked away in its hiding place. His thumb slid over it, back and forth, worrying at it. He knew he should be happy to have the ring, but he wasn’t. It felt like an ugly scar, a reminder of something painful.
He started toward the blacksmith’s, knowing that a large part of a smith’s work was shoeing horses, and hoping this one might know of a sound animal for sale. As he crossed the square, he saw a group of thin children in threadbare coats and woolen mittens. Some were making snowmen. Two girls played a hand-clapping game as he passed them by, rhyming in unison:
Clockmaker, clockmaker, wind your clock.
Watch the hands go tick, tick, tock.
Round and round the dial they spin,
Who will lose and who will win?
Gray stone castle, murky moat,
Where the living dead men float.
Black rock, silver stream, split oak tree,
Run like the devil if these you see.
Beau stopped dead. A chill rattled through him. He turned around, hurried to the children, and crouched down by them.
“Hey, where did you hear that rhyme?” he asked them.
Startled, the children backed away from him. “Dunno,” one said.
An older boy stepped forward protectively. “It’s just singsong, mister. It don’t mean nuthin’.”
“But where did you hear it?” Beau pressed. “Who taught it to you?”
“Hey! You!” a voice bellowed. “What d’you want with those little ’uns?”
Beau’s head turned. The words had been uttered by a large man standing in the doorway of a butcher shop. There was a menace in his voice and a cleaver in his hand.
Beau rose; he held his own hands up to show that he was no threat. “Just asking about the rhyme they were singing.”
The man’s scowl deepened. “You’re too old to be playing kiddie games, son.”
Giving the man a conciliatory nod, Beau continued on his way. He felt suspicious eyes upon him and upbraided himself. What was wrong with him? What was he thinking? Accosting little children like that? And yet, he couldn’t let their strange rhyme go. The castle it described … it was just like Arabella’s. The signposts it mentioned, the things that said turn back—the black rock, the silver stream, the split tree … hadn’t he just passed all three of them?
Don’t be ridiculous, every forest has streams and rocks and damaged trees in it, he told himself, and there are plenty of castles along the borderlands. And yet his nagging sense of unease deepened until he stopped again, gripped by a conviction that he should turn around now, right now, and go back.
Beau ignored the feeling and walked on, trying to reassure himself that the children’s rhyme had nothing to do with Arabella or her castle, but just as he reached the blacksmith’s, the children started clapping and singing again.
Gentleman, butler, gardener, groom,
None of them can escape their doom.
Maids and ladies, hear them cry.
In a hundred years, they all will die!
And there it was—the answer.
With a jarring dread, Beau realized he’d never heard the last lines of the clockmaker’s spell. Because Arabella had hurled an inkwell at the mirror before he could. Images swirled through his head now—the cellar stuffed with enough provisions to feed the household for a century, the barrels of wine from a chateau that had burned down decades ago, the rotting finery guarded by a mirror-eyed monster. And Arabella herself, driving them to finish the bridge.
The curse ended in a hundred years, and the hundred years were up. “You stupid, stupid fool,” he whispered.
He’d left her. Even though he loved her. He’d cut and run, just like he always did. Why? Because he believed the worst of her? Or because he believed the worst of himself?
Beau turned around and broke into a run. Out of the square, out of the town, back to the woods.
He ran faster than he had when the merchant’s men were after him. Faster than the night he’d tried to escape from the beast.
Faster than he’d ever run in his life.