CURSED TO LOVE THE BEAST KING

They dressed me like a bride and called it mercy. The seamstresses in the north tower had worked through the night, sewing white silk over my shoulders as though the color could make what was happening to me look like a wedding instead of an execution. I stood still and let them do it. There was no point fighting people who weren't the ones who had decided my fate. "You're lucky," one of them whispered, tying the last ribbon at my back. She wouldn't meet my eyes in the mirror. "They say some of the girls before you screamed the whole way to the gates." I didn't answer her. I was too busy counting the ways I was not lucky at all. My name was Wren, or at least that was the name I had grown up with, the name stitched into the orphan registry of a temple three villages from the capital. It was not my real name. My real name was older than the temple, older than the kingdom itself, and it was the reason I was standing in a wedding dress waiting to be fed to a monster. I was the last daughter of the witch Yselde. Nobody in this castle knew that. If they had, they wouldn't have wasted a wedding dress on me. They would have burned me in the square and called it justice instead of sending me up the mountain in silk. The soldiers came for me at dusk. Four of them, faces hard, eyes carefully avoiding mine the way you avoid looking at something you've already decided is dead. Their captain, a broad man with a scar through one eyebrow, took my wrists and bound them in front of me with rope so soft it was almost an apology. "Is this necessary?" I asked him. "Orders," he said. "The last one ran." "Did it save her?" He didn't answer that. He didn't have to. I already knew what had happened to the girl before me, and the girl before her, and every girl for three years back , sent up the mountain to the Beast King's castle to break a curse that had never once been broken, and carried back down again in a box small enough that people stopped asking questions about what was inside it. I let them lead me to the carriage. I could have run. I was faster than any of them knew, faster than a girl who scrubbed temple floors for a living had any right to be, because my mother's blood ran quiet in me but it ran deep, and it had taught my body things my mind had never been told outright. I could have slipped my bindings somewhere on the mountain road and vanished into the tree line before the captain even noticed I was gone. I didn't run, because running had never been the plan. I had spent six years hiding what I was, waiting for a reason to go anywhere near the throne that my mother's death had cursed. The kingdom thought it was throwing away a peasant girl to appease a monster. It didn't know it was handing that monster the one person alive who might actually be able to end him one way or another. The castle came into view as the sun went down, and I understood immediately why the villages at the base of the mountain called it the Grave. It didn't look like a home. It looked like a mouth. Black stone towers curled up out of the rock like teeth, and no light burned in a single window, not one, in a castle that was supposed to house a king. The soldiers stopped the carriage at the outer gate and would not go a step further. The captain untied my wrists himself, quickly, like the rope was something he wanted off his hands before whatever happened next happened. "The gate opens itself," he said. "It always has. Walk straight to the throne room. Don't run. Don't scream. He smells fear before he sees it, and fear is what" He stopped. "Fear is what kills them," I finished for him. "I know the stories." He looked at me properly for the first time since he'd come to collect me, and there was something in his face I hadn't expected. Not cruelty. Pity. "Then I hope the stories are wrong about you," he said, and turned the carriage around before I had even reached the gate. It did open itself. I felt no wind, no hand, no magic that I recognized as magic at all ,the great iron doors simply swung inward, slow and silent, as though the castle itself had been waiting for me specifically. I stepped through into a hall so dark I could see nothing but the pale stones under my own feet, glowing faintly, laying out a path like a row of dying stars. I followed it. My mother's blood was loud in my ears now, the way it only got when I was close to something old and cursed, and by the time I reached the end of the hall my hands had stopped shaking, because I finally understood . I wasn't walking toward a monster's den. I was walking toward the source of the curse itself. The throne room was enormous and empty except for one thing. He was sitting on the floor at the base of the throne, not on it , a king who did not sit on his own throne , with his back against the stone and his head bowed so low I couldn't see his face, only a mane of dark hair and shoulders too broad and too still to belong to anything fully human. His hands rested on his knees. Claws, black and curved, longer than any blade I'd ever seen a soldier carry. I had been told a beast would tear me apart before I finished crossing the room. I made it all the way to the foot of the throne, close enough to smell smoke and old blood and something underneath it that smelled, absurdly, like rain, and he still hadn't moved. "I know why you're here," he said. His voice came out low and cracked, like something that hadn't been used in a long time. "You don't have to pretend you're not afraid. Every one of them was afraid. It's the only honest thing any of them ever gave me." "I'm not afraid," I said. It was, for once in six years of carefully constructed lies, almost entirely true. He lifted his head then, slowly, and I finally saw his face , not the face of the monster in the stories, not fully, though there was enough of the curse written into it that I understood why the villages screamed. Golden eyes, too bright, too animal, set into a face that was otherwise, impossibly, beautiful in the way that ruins are beautiful. Something that had been a man once and hadn't finished forgetting it. He searched my face like he was looking for the flinch. When it didn't come, something shifted behind those gold eyes , confusion, maybe, or the first thing close to hope he'd let himself feel in longer than I could guess. And then, in front of a witch's daughter he did not know he was looking at, the Beast King of a cursed and dying kingdom did the one thing no story had ever told me to expect. He knelt.