Iona
The beast had lost its bite, but as the weeks passed, I began to see who he might have been. He kept his word faithfully and was always a gentleman. Initially, I could see times where he would purse his lips to refrain from losing his temper. Or hear a roar from the other side of the castle.
Poor Borin always came to me for comfort.
Restlessness had taken hold of me so I threw myself into the kitchen or the garden with vigour.
It took me longer than I care to admit to understand what the restlessness actually was.
I had spent so many years bracing for cruelty that I had never learned what to do with its absence.
Every day I waited for the man who had bruised my wrists and cracked my ribs to return in some new shape, wearing Varga's face this time instead of my husband's.
Every day, he did not come. Instead there was only Varga, quietly attentive in ways I had not been taught to recognise, let alone trust.
He noticed things. Small things. That I preferred my bread torn rather than sliced, the way my mother used to serve it.
That I flinched less when he entered a room from my left rather than my right, some old instinct from the husband who had always struck from that side.
He never asked me why. He simply began entering from the left, every time, until I stopped flinching at either.
I learned, too, that his castle watched over me even when he did not. A serving girl I had never properly met brought fresh linens the very morning after a nightmare woke me weeping, though I had told no one of it.
Borin appeared at my door within moments whenever my temper flared at the empty hours, as though summoned. When I asked him once how he always seemed to know, he only tapped the side of his misshapen head and said, “Master's eyes are everywhere, Mistress. Master worries.”
Varga worries, I had thought, turning the words over as though they belonged to a language I was only beginning to learn.
I did not know what to do with a man who worried over me.
I had spent my whole life being an inconvenience to the people meant to love me, a burden passed from a dying mother to an indifferent father to an aunt who sold me for the price of my own suffering.
No one had ever kept watch over my grief before, only profited from it.
And yet here was a beast who had once broken me open with his own claws, now arranging his household around the shape of my smallest sorrows.
I told myself it meant nothing. I told myself a great many things, in those weeks, that grew harder and harder to believe.
I even tried to teach Borin how to read. That did not end well for either of us. The slightest criticism and he was back to hitting his poor head on the wall. But nothing cured the restlessness.
Not the garden, weeded down to bare soil.
Not the kitchen, where the cook had begun hiding her good knives from me out of sheer self-preservation.
Not even sleep, which came easily enough now that the nightmares had thinned, but left me waking each morning with the same unnamed ache beneath my ribs, waiting to be filled by something I did not yet have the courage to name.
I told myself it was only restlessness.
I was not yet ready to call it anything else.
? ? ?
I took another deep breath, yet persisted in pacing the hallway, catching a glimpse of his new bedchamber door each time I walked the length. I talked myself into being here.
I was here because he left it in his old bedchamber. I paused in my pacing.
Yes, this was all his fault. He did this. Varga did it.
Or did he put Borin up to it?
I began to pace again.
A door opened.
I swivelled around to see Varga standing with his brow furrowed.
“Are you ill?”
Anger made me snap.
“Yes, I bloody well am.”
His jaw dropped and he stepped into the hallway.
“What is it? Are you hurt?” His voice grew louder with each word.
I strode across the hallway and shoved the balm at his chest. His hands came up to grab it before it fell.
“What—?”
I sighed and walked into his bedchamber.
He still stood out there holding the small jar.
I grabbed his sleeve and pulled him into the room.
“Can you not take a hint?”
He stared at me for a moment. It was the same blank stare that Borin had at times. He lifted the jar and stared at it.
“Oh.”
I smiled and even before I leaned in, he pulled me in and wrapped his arms around me.
“Are you sure?” he whispered.
“Oh, yes. Very sure.”
“I am begging you, please do not change your mind,” he groaned.
I began to laugh.
Carefree laughter that had long eluded me.