CURSED TO LOVE THE BEAST KING

CHAPTER THREE: THE STEWARD'S QUESTIONS

The steward's name was Corwin, and he had the kind of face that smiled while his eyes did something else entirely.

"Forgive me," he said, sweeping into a bow that was a fraction too slow to be respectful. "We were not expecting the sacrifice to still be standing. It has been some time since we needed to prepare a room instead of a grave."

"Corwin," Kael said, and there was a warning folded into the single word.

"I only mean to say it is a pleasant surprise, my lord." Corwin's eyes moved over me again, slower this time, the way a merchant looks over a horse he suspects is lame beneath a good coat. "What is your name, girl?"

"Wren," I said, before Kael could answer for me.

"Wren." He said it the way Kael had, testing it, but where Kael's voice had sounded curious, Corwin's sounded like he was searching for a lie hidden somewhere inside four letters. "And where do you come from, Wren?"

"The temple at Ashford."

"An orphan, then."

"Yes."

"How convenient," Corwin said, "that the crown always seems to choose girls no one will come looking for."

I did not answer that, because there was no safe answer to give. Kael's jaw tightened beside me, and for a moment I thought he might say something sharp to his steward, but instead he simply stepped between us, not aggressively, just enough that Corwin's attention shifted back to him.

"She will stay in the east tower," Kael said. "See that a room is prepared."

"The east tower has not been opened in three years, my lord."

"Then open it."

Corwin's smile did not move, but something behind his eyes did, some calculation I could not read. "As you wish. Though I would remind you, my lord, that the last three attempts to break the curse did not end well for anyone involved. It might be wiser not to grow too attached to this one before we understand why she is different."

"That will be all, Corwin."

The steward bowed again, lower this time, and turned to go, but not before his eyes found mine one last time. There was nothing kind in that look. It was the look of a man who intended to find out exactly what I was hiding, and I understood, watching him disappear down the dark hall, that I had just made my first enemy in this castle before I had even learned where I would be sleeping.

"Do not mind him," Kael said once the sound of footsteps had faded.

"He does not trust me."

"He does not trust anyone. It has kept him alive this long, so I have never found much reason to correct it." Kael studied the door Corwin had vanished through, something unreadable passing over his face. "He has served this family since before the curse. He remembers what this castle was like before I became what I am. I think, in his own way, he is only trying to protect what is left of it."

"By deciding I am a threat?"

"By deciding everyone is a threat until proven otherwise," Kael said. "You will find that is not an unreasonable way to survive in a place like this."

He led me himself through the dark halls, past rooms with sheets draped over furniture like shrouds, past windows that looked out over a mountain drop so steep the villages below were nothing but scattered points of candlelight. The castle was larger than it had looked from the gate, and emptier, as though it had been built for a court that no longer existed and had simply forgotten to stop being enormous.

"How long have you been alone here?" I asked.

"Since the curse took hold. Six years."

"And no one has broken it in six years?"

"No one has come close." He said it without bitterness, only fact, the way a man states a distance or a date. "Most of them were afraid before they ever reached the throne room. The curse can smell fear the way a hound smells blood. It does not wait for me to act on it. It simply takes what it is owed."

"And I did not smell like fear to it."

"No," he said, and something in his voice had gone quieter. "You did not."

We reached the east tower as the last of the daylight was fading from the high windows, and Kael stopped at the base of the stairs rather than following me up.

"The room is safe," he said. "Whatever you have heard about me, I have never once harmed anyone within these walls who did not come here to harm me first. You have nothing to fear from me tonight."

"I was not afraid," I said, and it was, again, almost entirely true.

He looked at me for a long moment, something working behind his golden eyes that I did not yet have the pieces to understand, and then he nodded once and turned to go, his broad shoulders disappearing back down the dark corridor the way he had come.

I climbed the tower stairs alone, my hand trailing along stone that had not been touched in years, and did not let myself breathe properly until I had shut the door of my new room behind me.

Only then did I allow my knees to shake.

I sat on the edge of the dust-covered bed and pressed my palms flat against my thighs, willing my hands to still, willing my mother's blood to quiet itself now that there was no one left to see it moving beneath my skin. It had reacted to him the moment I stepped into that throne room, stronger than it had ever reacted to anything in my life, and I understood now, sitting alone in the dark, exactly what that meant.

The curse was not simply cruel magic laid over a bloodline by an angry witch. It was tied to her, to me, in a way the stories had never explained, and if I was going to survive long enough to understand why, I would need to be far more careful than I had been in that throne room tonight.

Corwin already suspected there was more to me than an orphan girl from Ashford.

I could not afford for Kael to start suspecting the same thing, not yet, not until I understood what breaking this curse would actually cost the both of us.

Outside my window, the mountain wind picked up, carrying with it the distant, mournful sound of something that was not quite a wolf and not quite a man, and I lay awake long into the night listening to the Beast King of a cursed and dying kingdom howling alone in the dark, and wondering, despite every warning I had given myself, what it would feel like to not let him howl alone again.