TFT 01 Beauty and the Beast
Read TFT 01 Beauty and the Beast Online
Authors: K.M. Shea
Beauty and the Beast
By: K. M. Shea
a Take Out The Trash! Publication
Copyright © K.M. Shea 2013
All Rights Reserved.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 4: Dressing for Crutches
Chapter 5: Prince Severin the Gardener
Chapter 7: Sickness and Health
Chapter 8: A Discussion of Princes
Chapter 12: Love and Squirrels
Chapter 13: The Plot of Arcainia
Chapter 1
Once Upon a Time
The servants of Chanceux Chateau would have screamed if they could when the stain glass skylight in the little hall shattered and a young woman fell through the ceiling with the broken glass. She dropped like a twisting cat and landed with an ominous crack.
A footman and one of the grooms reached her first. She was passably pretty but plain, wearing the muted colors of a villager. Her breathing was ragged and her face was tight with pain. “NO!” she screamed when the groom tried to roll her on her side.
The footman and groom leaped backwards. They thought for sure she was unconscious, but the young lady opened and rolled her eyes. She didn’t cry, but she clenched her cloak close to her body with shaking hands.
The groom inched back to her side and extended a cautious hand to her skirt, intending to remove bits of glass that were digging into the cloth.
“Don’t,” the young lady whispered. “My leg—,” she broke off, hissing in pain.
The groom turned helplessly to the footman, who was already signaling a chamber maid to fetch the staff physician.
Hesitantly, the groom crouched at the girl’s side and nudged glass away from her.
“What happened?” a voice growled.
The footman lunged to his feet and hurried to stand in front of the chateau’s lord, gesturing at the broken skylight—where night lurked like a pool of black ink—and then to the fallen girl.
The groom stood as well and bowed to the lord, but he sank back into a crouch when the lord dismissed him.
The groom carefully scooted around the girl’s body, brushing glass away as her breathing came in pained but steady gasps.
“Duval has been called for? Good, he may see to her and send her on her way,” the lord said, his voice the lowest of baritones.
The footman hesitated and pointed to the skylight and a hall door before lifting his hands in a plea.
“I do not care if it is late. She shouldn’t have been skulking around the castle,” the lord said.
The groom stood and waited until he had his lord’s attention before he gestured at the intruder’s leg.
“Fine. Put her in a bedroom for tonight. She leaves at dawn.”
The groom bowed and happily returned to brushing glass away from the intruder/guest. He accidentally nudged her leg when he tried to extract a large shard of red glass from under her cloak.
The girl screamed. It was an utterance of mindless pain that seemed to be squeezed from her heart. “My leg,” she groaned, clenching her eyes shut and finally throwing her arms wide.
The chateau lord turned to the footman. “Shut her up and move her. Immediately!”
The groom almost fell as he tore across the hall to the steward and castle lord like a frightened colt. He frantically slapped his arm before pointing to the girl.
The castle lord sniffed the air, but he need not bother. Even in the dim torchlight he could see the blood spilling from lacerations on the girl’s arms. He growled and stalked to the injured intruder, entering the ring of torchlight.
The girl opened her eyes when she heard him draw close. When she saw him her mouth opened, but nothing came out. Her terror was a sharp scent in the air, and her whole body trembled.
The chateau lord was a beast. He had the head of a black cat. His nose was flat and his teeth were too big for his mouth and poked out of his lips. He had pads on his fingers and palms like a dog, and his finger nails were more like claws—which extended as the frightened girl shivered.
He was broad shouldered like a massive dog, and his legs were like the hind legs of a cat. Instead of bending forward on knees his legs curved back and gave him a swaying gate.
He was covered in black fur, but the worst of it was his eyes. His eyes were amber and the pupils were slitted like a mindless beast.
The chateau lord ignored the reaction and picked her up like she weighed no more than a corn husk.
Sound finally ripped through the girl’s terror. She howled as the lord carried her—jostling her leg. Her eyes rolled back and she fell silent when she fainted.
The chateau lord glanced up at the hole punched through his ceiling. “She fell from there? It’s a surprise she’s alive,” he said as he left the little hall, his nails clicking on the floor as his servants scurried around him like fleas.
Once upon a time there was a handsome prince who was cursed by an evil witch.
No.
Once upon a time there was an illegitimate prince—the son of the King—who was sentenced to insanity by a wicked witch and was rescued by the curse of a beautiful enchantress.
The fairy tale was a stark reality for those who were connected to the crown of Loire. To everyone else it was a fable, a tale told to teach children morals. Elle had fallen straight into the fairy tale.
The pain woke Elle like a starved animal.
She remembered chasing after the villagers who were poking around the castle and stomping through the gardens. She had just followed them out of the rose garden and had leaped from one piece of the castle’s sloping roof to the next. But it was black, and Elle miscalculated her landing. Instead of hitting shingles she hit glass and plummeted straight through. She didn’t remember much after that besides pain and a beastly shape.
Someone touched her leg, and Elle groaned.
When she finally opened her eyes there were three people in her room. A woman stood at a fireplace on the far end of the room, a second woman stood at the door, and the third person in the room was a man who was nodding at her bare leg.
The bedroom was posh, better than any room Elle had ever stayed at in her life. It smelled woodsy, probably from the pile of herb roots the man was grating and stirring into a large bowl.
Elle rubbed her nose, pausing to consider the bandages wrapped around her arms. The gesture drew the man’s attention, and he straightened up and smiled at her, giving Elle the chance to see his face—or what little of it wasn’t hidden. A black mask edged in blue partially covered his forehead, swooped down over his nose and cut off just above the lips, running across his cheeks. It was too dark to see what color his eyes were, but he smelled like the herbs in his concoction.
The man hefted a slate in the air, holding it steady for inspection.
You broke your left leg when you fell. I already set it with some aid.
I am preparing a pack of Comfrey herb.
Elle stared at the words for a moment before looking him in the eyes and lying. “I cannot read.”
Elle’s words caused the woman by the fire to tumble across the room. She threw herself in a wooden chair that was placed at the bedside, across from the man—who was presumably some sort of barber-surgeon. The woman behaved more like a hunting hound, eagerly wriggling in her chair, than the ladies maid she was very likely to be based on the fine cloth and elegant cut of her dress. Both she and the maid at the door wore masks identical to the man’s, although theirs were edged in the maroon shades of fine red wines.
The barber-surgeon let his mouth hang open in dismay as he looked back and forth from Elle to the slate. He wiped away the words and wrote something new on it with chalk before showing the slate to the ladies maid and the woman by the door.
One of the women covered her mouth in a gesture of horror. The other whipped out a small slate and began writing on it.
Elle briefly closed her eyes, the pain was incredible. Her leg throbbed and ached with a fierceness Elle thought only torture could deliver. The cuts on her arms stung and prickled. She tried to clear her mind and think through the haze.
Elle hadn’t seen the chateau staff before—she always took the night watch, when everything was quiet and no one stirred.
The gossiping servants of Noyers—the capital of Loire and home of the Royal Family—said the illegitimate prince’s servants had been cursed along with him. The stable boys claimed they were turned into animals, and the kitchen staff insisted the servants were completely invisible, but Elle put the most stock in her superior’s guess. Farand said they had lost their voices and faces. Apparently he was right.
The shush of skirts scraping across the floor prodded Elle from her musings. She opened her eyes just in time to see the maid leave the room, the door closing behind her.
The remaining female servant—the one that looked like a ladies maid—perched at Elle’s side, wearing an eager smile.
Elle gasped in pain when the barber-surgeon began wrapping her leg in bandages that were dripping with the odd smelling sludge. It was hot on Elle’s bare skin, and it oozed, but the bandages were skillfully wrapped.
Elle clenched the blankets on the bed, but the barber-surgeon’s hands were gentle. He gave Elle a sympathetic smile, but did not pause in his task.
The ladies maid reached out and patted Elle’s hand before retrieving a comb and teasing Elle’s black hair out of her face. The two servants worked silently. Elle’s unsteady breathing and the crackling fire were the loudest sounds in the room.
The silence was broken a few minutes later by a thunderous voice that stalked towards the room. “—makes sense she can’t read. She’s an unschooled peasant. That means she is an idiot.”