Beastkeeper

 

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at:
us.macmillanusa.com/piracy
.

 

For my daughters, Noa and Tanith, who both know there is always a cottage in the forest and the beast is never
just
a beast

 

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Chapter 1: Fly Away, Fly Away

Chapter 2: An Improbable Boy

Chapter 3: The Not-a-Forest

Chapter 4: The Disappearing Act

Chapter 5: To the Castle

Chapter 6: The Key of Ivory

Chapter 7: In Captivity

Chapter 8: You Can't Lift Curses With Kisses

Chapter 9: We Must Be Enemies

Chapter 10: In Which Most of the Truth Is Told

Chapter 11: The Key of Horn

Chapter 12: Woods-Walking

Chapter 13: Invisible Fireworks

Chapter 14: Hunting the Wren

Chapter 15: Toward the Within

Chapter 16: The Way We End

Chapter 17: After

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

 

1

FLY AWAY, FLY AWAY

THE AIR WAS FULL
of ice the night Sarah's mother packed all her bags and walked out. That was the thing Sarah remembered most. How it was so cold that the weathermen had said it might snow. She lay awake, listening for snow hushing against the roof—and instead she heard her parents arguing.

“I can't do this,” her mother said. She was whispering so as not to wake her daughter. She never seemed to realize that Sarah was almost always awake. The smallest sounds could keep her from sleeping.

Sarah uncurled herself from her warm duvet, stretched out in the crisp air, and lay very still. Sometimes when she woke in the dark she would play little games with herself—games that she knew she should have already outgrown, so she never spoke about them to anyone. They were silly, childish things, and she knew enough to understand that there was no admitting to silly childish things when you were past a certain age. Sometimes in the dark she would pretend that she was a mouse, waiting for a snake to pass, and she would hold herself so still she could feel her own heartbeat vibrating her body. Sarah liked to think that night was the best time to work on staying silly and childish. Darkness always seemed more understanding about those sorts of things. More accommodating.

Tonight wasn't right for games, though. The night felt wrong, and it gave the unexpected cold a different bite, like a knife edge. It was the burr in her mother's voice, that sound of tears caught sticky in the throat—they gummed up her words.

Not good
, Sarah thought.
The very opposite of good, in fact.
Softly, softly, she slipped her bare feet to the ground and padded to her door. Her toes were numb even against the springy wool of the carpet. She frowned and hugged her nightgown quickly around her. It hardly ever got this cold. And when it did, her parents would switch on the space heaters and keep the house warm enough to melt the butter on the bread.

Her mother hated the cold. Hated it fiercely. She gritted her teeth against it and would refuse to go outside if the temperature dropped. When winter came she cocooned herself in blankets and scarves, even as the heaters clicked and hissed the house warm.

Sarah opened the door to her room and peered out along the landing. The only light came from under her parents' bedroom door, and from a blue pool of moonlight under the small window at the far end of the passage. Her mother's voice was clearer now.

“I can't, Leon. I've tried—you know I have—but it's been long enough.” Her mother sounded not so much sad as defeated. Sarah could picture her face, still and beautiful and expressionless. She was a woman who never let herself smile. Occasionally she would forget and the corners of her mouth would flit up for just one moment, and then she would remember herself, and her face would go calm and smooth as nothingness again. That was how she kept herself so very beautiful. Strong emotions leave their marks on a woman's face, she'd once said. “Never get sad, never get happy, never get angry.”

But she was angry now, in a dull sort of way. Angry enough that Sarah could imagine the faintest lines of a frown pinching the skin of her mother's forehead.

“We'll move,” her father said. His voice was rough, thick and choked up as tangled fur. “Someplace warmer—we'll go to the tropics—”

“It's not about the weather,” her mother said. There was a thud. “Just hold this closed so I can get it—” A snap and a click. The sound of bags being struggled shut.

As if her mother were going on vacation to someplace with palm trees and colored fish that hung like ornaments in the slowly rising walls of the waves.

“Then what is it about?” But Sarah could hear that he already knew.

Sarah had discovered that while she liked to ask questions in the hopes that someone or other could answer them, adults liked to ask questions they already knew the answers to. She wasn't sure why exactly that was, and had finally decided that as people grew older, the more important something was the easier it became for them to forget. They had to keep asking as a way to help them remember.

There was a long silence, drawn out and stretched like a strand of bubblegum.

Sarah tiptoed along the landing toward her parents' room and wondered what flavor silence was, and if it grew hard and brittle if you threw it away, or if people sometimes stepped on wads of discarded silence and it stuck to the soles of their shoes and made their footfalls softer.

She stepped on the silences, and padded fox-quiet.

“I have to go,” her mother said, instead of answering her father's question. “I can't stay and watch us falling apart, and watch it happening.”

“You know what waits for you if you walk out of here. You can't just—”

A closet door banged, and then her mother's voice came soft, tired. “I know, Leon. That's why I'm leaving. Better that than to sit and watch you turn, to know there is nothing I can do to stop it.” She took a gasping breath, and when she spoke again her voice had a thick sound, clogged up with tears. “And to know that one day the same thing is going to happen to my little bear…”

Sarah paused. They were talking about her. Her mother expected something to happen to her, and a fiddlehead of apprehension unfurled in her chest.

“You're a coward.”

She'd never heard her father say anything like this to her mother. Even when they did fight, he always withdrew himself, like a monster into a cave, and left her mother to work her own way through whatever had upset her. Sarah wondered how her mother would respond to this accusation.

Her mother only said, “I have been many things in my life. Now I choose to be something else.”

“This is madness,” her father said, but there was a serrated panic under his words. “You can't do this,” he said. “There's no coming back. Please. You can't—”

The door swung inward, and Sarah was staring into her mother's face, which was still and cold as the night and unmarked by sadness or anger or hurt. If Sarah hadn't heard the tears in her voice earlier, she would have had no idea that her mother felt anything at all—until Sarah looked into her eyes, the only things that gave her away.

“Sarah.” Her mother's dark eyes gleamed bird-bright. She looked like a small animal caught in the headlights of a car—half terrified and half resigned to its death.

Sarah had never seen her like this, not in all the winters she could think of. And winters were when her mother was at her worst, her love at its most brittle.

Her mother swallowed, began to stammer something, then shook her head, the fear fading from her eyes and being replaced by a glassy blankness instead. “You should be in bed. It's late, and it's cold out.” She stepped past Sarah and went down the unlit stairs, the tail of her winter-blue coat flapping about her calves, her matching scarf wound tight around her throat like she was trying to stanch a wound, her bag thumping after her on its ridiculous little wheels.

“Merete,” her father said, but her mother never even looked back at the sound of her name.

After the door had closed—gently, because Sarah's mother hardly ever slammed things—her father sighed and rubbed one hand across his chest like he'd eaten too fast. His face twisted, just once, a terrifying snarl of despair and rage, and then it was smooth again.

He was also dressed, though it was late. They'd been up the whole time, Sarah guessed, having an argument as chilly and quiet as the stars themselves. “Your mother's right,” he said, as if she had not just walked out the door. He smoothed his heartburn out of his chest. “It's cold. Go back to bed—we'll talk about all this in the morning.”

“I can't go back to sleep now.” Sarah said the words very slowly, worried that she'd somehow startle this man, this father who wasn't acting a thing like her father. He didn't even care that his wife had just walked out in the middle of the night. Had she left him? Left
her.
“I can't—” She pointed down the stairs instead, waiting for the flood to build up. Her heart was fluttering,
hurting
, it was beating so fast. “Mom just packed and walked out of the house, and you want me to go to bed? Is she going to be all right? What happened? Do you know where she's going?” The questions tumbled over themselves trying to get out of her mouth.

“The power must have tripped,” her father said, as if he hadn't even heard Sarah at all. “That's why the heaters went.” He flicked the hall light switch up and down to show her, though Sarah didn't care. She'd always been able to see well in the dark. Then her father coughed. It was a hard, tearing noise, like he was going to rip apart right before her eyes. The coughing fit shuddered all down his body, shaking his bones about.

For a moment Sarah thought it might be all the tears he was trying to pretend weren't inside him, but when she reached out to touch his shoulder he pushed her hand away.

As the coughing finished, her father straightened again, eyes streaming and one hand still clutched over his mouth like he was frightened he was going to cough up his own lungs. Without speaking, he raced down the stairs.

Sarah's heart soared right up into her throat. He was going to burst out into the night and call her mother back. It had just been a stupid little fight that had gone a step too far, and now it was over, and her father would draw her mother back into the warm nest of home, and they would all go to sleep, and this would be a bad dream. Just tangles to be brushed away in the morning.

There was a clicking from downstairs in the kitchen, and the hallway light flooded on. The house—which had been remarkably silent—began its regular whir and hum.

Her heart plunged back down, and Sarah stared at her toes, frozen nubs in the deep blue of the hall carpet.

Around her, the air began to warm.

Sarah wondered if she should run after her mother—running was, after all, the only thing she was really good at, the only thing that ever got her noticed at school or after school. But her feet, which could strike the earth so hard, push her through the air like a racing deer—they seemed now to be weighted with lead, too heavy to lift, sinking her into the ocean of the carpet.

*   *   *

Her parents had always moved around a lot. Partly it was because of her father's work, but her mother had called it sun-chasing, so Sarah knew there'd been more to it than just following the money. Not that there was very much money. Her mother normally worked from home, sewing clothes and making alterations, and her father went off to do whatever it was that fathers did. He'd always come back smelling like metal and diesel, and he would wash his hands with a special, strong soap-cream that her mother bought in bulk. He would clean under his nails and around them, grooming himself with catlike fastidiousness before he would come to dinner.