Chapter 22 Isabeau
twenty-two
Isabeau
The fire had burned low enough to feel like company rather than heat, which suited me fine. I had Beast’s spine beneath my fingertips and Charlotte’s handwriting swimming before my tired eyes. And for the first time since Papa had been swallowed by these woods, I felt something close to settled.
Beast’s light snore rose and fell in rhythm with the shifting embers.
He’d stretched himself across the hearthrug with the boneless authority of a creature that understood, on some ancient cellular level, that the best spot in any room was the one closest to warmth.
His massive tail curled lazily over one paw.
The honey-brown of his fur glowed amber where the firelight touched it, and I couldn’t help running my palm down the ridge of his back in a slow, idle stroke.
He didn’t stir. Just snored a little louder, which I chose to take as a compliment.
I’d learned his rhythms the way you learn the hours of a house. Not by studying them but by living inside them long enough that they became your own.
Mornings belonged to the beast. Not cruelly, not with menace, but with the frank simplicity of a creature that hadn’t yet found the man beneath the fur.
He came to me in those hours with something freshly hunted draped across his jaws, dropping it at the hearth’s threshold like an offering, his eyes watchful and direct in the way of animals who hadn’t yet remembered to be anything else.
I’d come to love those mornings, actually. There was something that mattered about the way he’d lower his head when I reached for him, that moment when my touch pulled him half an inch closer to whoever he’d been before the curse took him. Like I was a candle held near something cold.
Early evenings were different. He returned to me more formed, more layered, but curt. He wasn’t unkind. He’d proven that in every way a creature without language could prove a thing, but there was an economy to him in those hours.
He moved with purpose, settled beside me with the deliberateness of someone who chose their company rather than stumbled into it, and still kept himself at a slight remove, the way a man does when he’s feeling something he hasn’t decided yet whether to say.
The bowing in the grove. The way he’d listened to me read fairy tales in the library with his whole body angled toward the book.
That was his evening self. Present and particular.
And then there was night.
At night the curse thinned. I didn’t know another way to describe it except that, the veil going sheer. The moon had something to do with it, I’d decided, the same moon that pulled the tide back and let the seafloor show. The same moon that declared a sacrifice from my village once a year.
He came to bed each night more himself, less the thing the forest had made him.
His eyes held entire thoughts in those hours.
His touch had intention and gentleness in equal measure, and whatever passed between us in the dark was nothing like what I’d been taught desire should look like. It was better. More.
No matter which version of him I was with, though, no matter how much of the man remained accessible to me, he understood what I needed when he took me. Completely and without hesitation.
Which was exactly why I needed to stop thinking about it.
I shifted in the chair and pressed my thighs together very deliberately and looked back down at the journal.
The journal. Important. Full of answers. Not at all related to the warm ache spreading low in my belly.
Right.
Beast chose that moment to wake, which he did the way large animals do.
All at once and without apology. He stretched his massive forepaws forward, arching his back until his spine popped, and then rose to all four feet in one fluid motion that rippled every muscle he owned.
I watched him shake himself and felt my thighs betray me again.
“Going out?” I asked, which was becoming our ritual.
He turned to look at me, amber eyes calm and content in the way of creatures with no unfinished business. Then, without ceremony, he stepped toward the chair and dragged his wide tongue up the entire left side of my face.
The sound I made was not dignified.
“Beast!” I swiped my sleeve across my cheek, laughing despite myself. The wet warmth of it still clung to my skin, and his eyes crinkled at the corners in that unmistakable way before he turned and padded out of the sitting room without a backward glance.
“Goodbye to you too,” I called after him, still wiping my face and still laughing.
Once I felt clean enough, I settled back into the chair, pulling the journal open to where I’d left off, and told myself firmly that the laugh warming my chest was just relief at the quiet and nothing more complicated than that.
At least I had a distraction from the rampant feelings whirling in my chest.
Queen Charlotte’s handwriting had changed in these later entries.
Still elegant, but with the hurried quality of a woman transcribing thoughts before they outpaced her pen.
She’d written about the forest first in terms of abundance.
The nightingales, the blooming trees, and the impossible sanctuary her family had built within the Enchanted Forest. She called it that throughout.
The Enchanted Forest. Not the Forbidden Forest of village whispers I’d grown up with.
But then, names changed along with the people who feared things.
The location had to be the same. Everything else matched.
She’d started noticing her in spring, she wrote.
A woman at the garden’s edge, standing just beyond where the cultivated ground surrendered to wild undergrowth.
Never stepping closer. Never calling out.
Just watching with a quality of attention that Charlotte described as possessive, as if the gardens were hers and the queen was the intruder.
Her husband, Henri, had dismissed it. Imagined things, he’d said, which was what men always said when women noticed something men hadn’t.
Charlotte hadn’t imagined it. The entries that followed tracked the encounters with the precision of someone who had decided to understand rather than dismiss.
The woman was older, with the look of the deep forest about her—bark-tan and root-gnarled in a way that had nothing to do with age, strikingly beautiful in appearance.
She had been there before them. Before the castle, before the family, before whatever charter had granted them stewardship of these lands. That was the crux of it, Charlotte finally wrote, the word underlined twice: before.
The forest witch’s hatred for them wasn’t personal.
It was territorial. The Enchanted Forest had been hers—hers alone—and the castle’s presence, the family’s warmth and laughter and playful children, was an affront she could neither forgive nor accept.
She glared at Charlotte in her own gardens.
She stood at the boundary of the magical acres as if testing the limits of whatever kept her out.
Charlotte feared the day she broke through.
I turned the page, fingers moving faster.
That was the last entry.
Just like that—mid-sentence, mid-thought, as if Charlotte had been called away from her desk intending to return. The final line read only: She was in the courtyard this morning, and the roses had all gone dark.
I sat with that for a long moment, staring at the page as if I could compel it to produce more words by force of will alone. The witch had hated them. The witch had been at the edges of their world, moving inward. The forest had been cursed. Beast had been transformed.
The shape of it was plain enough. What had happened, something the witch had done in her fury, was written in every dead tree and blood-drinking rose in this forest.
But how? What had she done, and to whom, and was there anything left of Charlotte and her husband and the life she’d described in these pages? I pressed my thumb to that last line, as if I could feel Charlotte’s urgency through the ink.
I needed more. The journal had given me enough to name the villain, but not enough to stop her. Not yet.
He came back to me smelling of cold air and pine, the way he always did when the forest released him for the night.
I’d already set aside the journal by the time I heard his familiar tread in the corridor.
His particular rhythm of weight and claw on stone that I’d learned the way you learned a person’s knock.
He pushed the bedroom door open with his shoulder and found me already in bed, the fire I’d built banking itself down to a steady glow that turned the room all amber and shadow.
He climbed up beside me the way he always did. All that mass and heat folding into the space next to mine, the ancient frame groaning its protest.
It started the way it always started with him above me, all that warm, dense fur and the particular weight of him that I’d stopped bracing for and started welcoming.
The familiar stretch as he found his way home inside me, his stare dropping to my face with that look he only wore at night.
The one that held everything in it. Questions he couldn’t ask and answers I hadn’t found words for.
He moved. Slow at first, deliberate, the way the night version of him approached everything. And then his head dipped down.
I didn’t know what he intended until his tongue found my nipple.
“Oh—” The word came out stripped of everything except pure, unguarded surprise. The texture of his tongue was something I’d learned in other places, rough and warm and generous, but this was new territory entirely.
He lapped at the stiffened peak with the same thoroughness he brought to everything else. He circled it with slow, heavy strokes that sent a completely different current through my body than I was accustomed to managing at once.