Beauty and the Werewolf (24 page)

He could be in earnest. It went without saying that he didn't often meet a woman who stood up to him, nor one who was willing to don men's clothing and work as he did. And he was very handsome. When he wasn't frowning, that saturnine face had a melancholy to it that was extremely attractive. When he laughed, a genuine laugh, he was completely transformed. He was a great deal more intelligent than she had thought. He was treating her rather as an equal, which was incredibly rare. And sometimes there actually was a happy ending…

But then she remembered the Wool Guild dance.

Yes, this was the same man who had been perfectly willing to prey on any girl he thought would not be able to defend herself, and who had no obvious Guardians or Protectors.

“Well, then, treat me as Abel, your young squire, that you are teaching all these useful things to,” she said lightly. “I'm starting to like being a boy. There's a lot of freedom in breeches!”

A succession of emotions chased across his face, all in an instant. Surprise. Disbelief. A great deal of disbelief, in fact. This was not the response he had expected—which argued that he had some experience in what he
could
expect from that sad, sad story.

Well, so this
was
a ploy, and you were counting on me to respond to it! You, sir, are a bastard in more than just birth!
A very brief moment of anger consumed her, anger that she forced herself not to respond to. He mustn't guess that she knew what he was up to. She needed to keep him friendly. She also needed him not to be angry at
her,
because angry men did unpleasant things. “Who knows, maybe I'll take to swaggering about taverns in breeches when this is over and scandalize the entire city. Or at least my stepmother.” She chuckled, inviting him in on the joke. “Can you imagine what Genevieve Beauchamps would have to say about
that?
And can you imagine the reaction of the King, since he's the reason I'm here in the first place?”

Another moment of surprise, and then an answering chuckle. “I just might help you with that, then,
Abel,
” he said. “That could be a hell of a jest.” The chuckle deepened. “Nothing wrong with tweaking the King's britches. Old bastard's got a stick rammed up his arse, he's so stiff.”

She laughed, and slapped his shoulder as a man would. “It's worth thinking about. But later. There's a roast of venison waiting for us, and I'm perishing for food.”

But as they parted where the corridor divided, her laughter faded, and she shivered. That had been a very narrow escape.

And how many more lay ahead of her?

NO ONE, NOT EVEN A DEDICATED HOYDEN, COULD
possibly have thrown herself more earnestly into the role of “Abel” than Bella did. From the moment they sat down to dinner to the moment when she left him after the second riding lesson, she acted as much the boy as she could, deliberately aping every would-be young swaggerer she had ever seen—and since there were generally a lot of them swarming around her sisters, and they tended to ignore her in favor of the twins, she had been able to observe quite a few in action.

It seemed to work. By the time they parted to get their respective suppers, he was treating her as he had out in the tin country—like a boy.

Which was all very well, except as she settled down to her book on The Tradition with the beeswax stuffed in her ears and another flagon of hot mulled wine beside her, and picked up where she had left off, she came across another Traditional Path she was going to have to steer wary of—
Gone For a Soldier
—the girl who really was disguised as a boy, and who subsequently fell in love with the man in whose company she found herself most. Usually this was a girl
who, fed up with a stifling life at home, or overwhelmed with patriotism—or just having no other options but to go whoring—struck out for adventure in breeches.

There were variations, as always. Sometimes it was a girl following her lover to war—well, at least she wouldn't have to worry about that one. Sometimes it was a girl escaping marriage to someone awful, and very rarely, it was a girl taking the place of her father or brother to save them from conscription.

Now, so long as she steered clear of the trap of falling for Eric, that could play out
for
her, she realized, since The Tradition had very firm ideas about the conduct of the man in question. According to the book, he seldom realized that the “boy” in whose company he spent so much time was really a girl. It generally resulted in a surprise revelation after the girl had heroically saved his life and gotten dangerously wounded. Sometimes the “boy” would tell him of a beautiful sister until he fell in love with the girl she actually was, and eventually she would come forward as the sister, her ruse abandoned.

Well, I won't be doing anything like that, thank you very much.

Just as long as
she
kept a firm grip on what she was doing, and he became oblivious to her femininity, she just might manage to steer clear of any complications with Eric for the next two months. Complications with Eric…surely the very last thing she needed right now.

At least I am not going to become a she-wolf.
That was…well, it made this look like a trivial hurdle to jump, truth to tell.

If she closed her eyes, she could feel that pressure, now, like a storm waiting to break. The Tradition really
wanted
to find a place for her.

She rubbed her temple and sighed. All this was hideously complicated. People had
no
idea how much they did was being dictated
by this force! And this was just ordinary life, without any magic involved! It was a wonder that Godmothers didn't go mad.

Then she turned the page and read some more.

Oh, wait. They do….

As the full moon passed into the waning moon, Bella took advantage of Sebastian's absence to continue searching his parents' rooms for clues as to the curse.

She found clothing, carefully preserved, and a few very rudimentary books on magic in his mother's rooms. She found a chest of baby clothing, and in it a box of tokens of Sebastian's infancy: a lock of hair, a silver rattle, an ivory teething ring. Buried deep behind the closet were half-embroidered garments and bed linens, sad evidence of the things she has left behind at her death. But there were no letters, no journals. A check of the Old Duke's belongings was even less fruitful; she couldn't even find any evidence that the Old Duke had done any of his own correspondence, much less kept any sort of journal. In neither room did she find any token or suspicious object that might have carried a curse. A bit discouraged by her lack of success, she reported to Elena, who encouraged her to keep investigating.

After the three days, Sebastian was at breakfast again, and tilted his head like a curious bird to see her in her new guise. “Are those my old clothes?” he asked.

She nodded, her mouth full—deliberately copying how Eric ate, rather than abiding by the appropriate—and ladylike—table manners she used at home. “Eric's teaching me his business. Can't do that sort of thing in skirts. Have to say, I like it! I may never go back to skirts again!”

“I'm putting it about that I'm training an assistant,” Eric explained. “If people think there's going to be a man regularly patrolling at night as well as by day, they'll be less inclined to prowl the
woods by dark. It won't matter when she leaves—she'll have been seen with me for two months, and people will assume she's still here.”

Sebastian looked worried, his brows creased, and his eyes clouded with concern. “But will you have time for magic lessons now? I mean, if Eric is taking you out on his rounds. If that is what you want to do, I don't want to interfere, but I promised the Godmother I would see to it you got all the magic lessons I could give you—”

Eric guffawed. “Don't fret. Abel's mine in the morning. You get her in the afternoon.”

Sebastian tilted his head the other direction. “Abel?”

“Abel. Bella. It's what we're calling me so they think I'm a boy,” Bella said with a guffaw. “Poachers are getting bolder—that's why Eric's putting it about he's training an Under-Keeper.” She jabbed her thumb at her chest. “I think I can do a convincing job of it.”

Sebastian blinked, then she saw something dawn on him, though what, she couldn't tell. He nodded cautiously. “Right, then, Abel, Eric. I'll see you at dinner.”

“Or after, if we're a bit late.” She finished an instant before Eric did, and shoved away from the table. “All right! I'm ready! Let's go put the fear of the devil into those bastards, since God doesn't scare them!”

They were “in luck”—though it wasn't very lucky for the poor fellow they caught—for one of them must have noticed Eric's absence in the woods over the past three mornings and changed his own routine.
She
was the one that noticed the telltale, furtive movement into cover, and pointed it out to Eric. She hated to—she knew this was going to get ugly when the man was caught—but she also knew the fact she'd seen the man before Eric had was just pure luck. The Tradition would see to it that she became a good Gamekeeper—she was beginning to think that it was due to The Tradi
tion that she had mastered riding the hunter, using the crossbow and defending herself so quickly.

Which made her wonder, had it been luck, or had it been The Tradition that let her spot the man?

It doesn't matter. What matters is what I do, not how it gets done, as long as I keep making Eric treat me and think of me like a boy.

But Eric was giving her directions, his horse pressed up against hers, his voice pitched low and soft so it wouldn't carry. “You ride down that way, and keep your eyes on that trapline—see it? There's a fat hare in the noose right there—”

She nodded.

“Don't look away from the traps. He'll be watching you, anxious about his traps, and forget about me. I'll circle around behind him, and run him down if I have to.”

She felt sick inside, knowing that he would do exactly that, but nodded, clucked to her horse and carefully steered him through the snow-covered bushes in the direction of that dead hare.

She couldn't help it; this wasn't just a lawbreaker to her, this was a person. Just how desperate was this poacher? Did he have half-starved children at home? Or was he purely poaching for profit?

Wait, Eric had said “trapline”—and now, as she stood up in her stirrups for a better view, she could see four more snares from the vantage of the saddle, two of them with something in them. A poor man couldn't afford that much wire—

“Got you!” Eric shouted in triumph.

She snatched up her crossbow as the horse responded to Eric's shout by pivoting on his heel and lurching toward the sound of Eric's voice. There was only the sound of Eric's voice this time, raised in altercation. The horse plunged through the snow, snorting with excitement. Evidently he was used to this sort of thing. She stuck to him like the proverbial burr, as firm in the saddle now
as she had been uneasy a few days ago. As she cleared the trees that were between her and the men, she saw that Eric was still in the saddle, holding a man by the collar, and mercilessly beating him with a short, stout club as he covered his head with his arms and tried to escape, crying out with pain.

But a savage blow brought him down into the snow, and Eric leapt from the saddle to finish the job, ending with a vicious kick to the ribs. While the man lay there, only semiconscious, Eric lifted a heavy string of rabbits and hares from behind the bushes the man had been hiding in and fastened it to the back of his saddle.

Her horse whickered, and Eric turned to grin at her. “Abel, go collect those snares as I showed you. I'm going to have a little discussion with our friend here about why it isn't wise to steal someone else's game. When you've finished, come back. I want you to see how it's done proper.”

It was quite a long trapline. She found more than twenty snares, and a total of six more rabbits and hares. It was obvious this was a man looking to turn a profit; no one could eat this much meat, no matter how big his family was. She felt a little better about her part in all this.

But when she returned, and saw Eric bending over the man with a knife, for one horrified moment she thought—

Then she saw the hank of dark, matted hair being tossed aside. And another. And another.

She rode up to see that Eric was shaving the unconscious man bald.

“What—” she began.

“Mercy, Abel, and more than he deserves.” Another hank of hair was tossed aside. Eric was literally shaving the man bald with his hunting knife.
That knife must be incredibly sharp,
she thought, watching Eric continue to work with the same fascination with which she
watched spiders catching flies. “The constables and I have an agreement. If they see someone who's been shaved bare and has my sign inked on his pate, it means he's a poacher and they can throw the weight of the law on him. Now, I
could
brand him, and I used to do that, but that's a nuisance—you have to build a fire and get the iron hot, and then there's all the screaming. And worst of all, the stink of burned hair!” He laughed. “So Sebastian made me a thing like a wax seal for sealing letters, only it makes an imprint on skin and carries its own ink.”

“So, he might
not
get the constables on him?” she hazarded.

“I'm a hunter at heart. I like to give the game a fair chance to escape. Everyone knows the game. Now, all our poacher here needs to do to stay out of gaol or avoid a
real
branding is to lie low until his hair grows again. But he won't be going into the city or the villages to sell his catch for all that time, and he won't be running his trap line, because why bother when he can't sell the catch? So he gets off with a beating, and losing his livelihood, unless he's got another besides this. If he's smart, he'd better find one, because if I catch him a second time, it'll be the worse for him. Depending on how I feel, I'll either brand his face myself, or cut off his first finger.”

“He's a butcher,” she said, instantly. “I know him.” To her surprise when Eric had turned the man's head a bit she had recognized him as one of the butchers she occasionally bought meat from. “Alain Charpentier. He has a butcher shop near the Bell Gate.”

“Really? Well, his 'prentice is going to be tending the front of the shop for a while. Or else he'd better make himself a wig.” Eric dropped the man's head, reached into a belt-pouch, and pulled out a wooden square about half the size of his fist. He pressed it into the skin of the man's head and took it away. Now stamped into the skin in black ink was an
E
with an arrow for the upright. Eric stood up and gave the man a final kick. The man didn't even whimper.
“Hell. I didn't hit him that hard. Soft bastard.” He bent down and shook the man roughly until he groaned and opened his eyes.

Terror crossed his pulped features. “Please, master—” the butcher said mushily. “Please, master, don't kill me—”

“Oh, as soon as you start to feel those bruises, you'll wish you were dead,” Eric said cheerfully. “You've been branded, coney-catcher. You know what that means. Right?”

The butcher nodded his head, water streaming from his swollen eyes. Eric stood back, arms folded over his chest. “Now, run along home and stay out of sight of the constables, and be glad I decided to not outrage my new partner's sensibilities by knocking a few of your teeth out as an added lesson.”

Babbling as best he could with swollen and bleeding lips, the butcher scrabbled to his feet, and staggered off, swearing to never touch a snare again.

“Would you really have knocked out his teeth?” Bella asked.

“Depends on my mood,” Eric replied carelessly, swinging himself back up into the saddle. “He didn't fight back, so my mood is generous. Now comes the question, which I will ask you to decide, Abel. There are more coneys here than we need by far. So…what to do with 'em? Sebastian won't care if I sell 'em, but that's tedious, though profitable—and it would be amusing to sell them right back to the bastard. He wouldn't dare refuse to pay anything I asked, either.” Eric tilted his head to the side, watching her closely.

“Take them to Father Gentian, at Four Saints,” she said instantly.

“Oh so? And why should we be giving them away? I want to keep people terrified of me, not thinking I'm some sort of benefactor.” Eric looked at her curiously—but not angrily, so she continued.