Beastkeeper (18 page)

It had been like the world twisted off its axis, reinvented itself.

And she'd turned.

She wondered if her father had known about how the curse was triggered. Sarah remembered when she was younger, how her parents would laugh about falling in love at the same moment, as if joking about their ridiculous romance would take some of the fairy-tale sugar off it and make it palatable to others.

Except maybe that hadn't been it at all. Maybe they had laughed because they knew, and if they hadn't laughed they would have cried.

Sarah took a deep shuddering breath and made herself look squarely at Alan. Nothing about him had changed. He was the same lanky, underfed young man with dirty feet, and hair that curled and tangled. And yet somehow it seemed that the light hit him differently, made him impossible to stare at for too long, made him unreal, untouchable.

He'd been a buck. In the forest, he'd been a crowned buck on long graceful legs, and he'd outrun her.

No. It's all just the confusion from last night.
She lowered her nose and whined.

“Your words will come back,” Alan said. “Don't you worry. But you are eating these outside.” He tossed the rabbits through the door. They landed in the grass with two thumps. “Go on, then. I want breakfast too, girl.”

Hunger prodded Sarah out the door, and she nosed her way to where the two rabbits lay, legs akimbo. The wind plucked at the pale fur on their bellies. For now, they were still limp and warm, but it wouldn't be long before they turned stiff, and the last of the blood-heat leached out into the ground.

Ugh. I'm not eating that.
But the smell that rose from them was more appetizing than any of Nanna's stews. And she was ravenous from the fruitless hunt, and the change. Animal instinct kicked in, swallowing up the human thoughts. She dragged the first corpse into a secluded part of the little meadow, and set to breakfast.

*   *   *

She was gnawing on the last of the bones when Alan came across the clearing toward where she was lying.

“Got your voice back yet?” He stopped a few feet away and squinted at her. “We're going to have to find Freya,” he said. “You understand that, right? Wherever she's gotten to, we need to speak to her.”

Sarah whined. It was more important than ever that she convince Freya to tell her how to break the curse. It wasn't just her grandfather and her father who were beasts; she'd been caught in the snare too. There were other beasts in the forest, racing between the trees, smelling the blood in the cold air, and already she'd taken a step closer to losing what was left of her humanity, had let herself get caught up in the pull of the chase, the urge to kill. She'd hunted with one of them last night—

“Beast!” she yelped.

“I'm not blind,” Alan said.

“No. Beast. Other. Who?”

He narrowed his eyes. “You know who. Doesn't make him safe. He's lost her, and it's driven him mad. He doesn't even think like people anymore. It's a good thing he left you with your grandmother when he did.”

“No,” Sarah said. She'd known. In her heart of hearts, of course she'd known; she'd just never wanted to accept that the mindless animal in the forest was all that was left of her father.

Alan dropped to a crouch, bringing his face level with hers. Even now, with her worry and her loss climbing over her like fleas, she found his face too bright to look at. “You can't help him. He's looking for her, and that's all he cares about.”

“Hunt?”

Alan nodded.

And if he caught her mother, the wren-woman … Sarah shuddered. “Find. Bird.”

“What?” A frown pinched at his forehead, and his amber eyes darkened.

“Moth. Er. Find first.”

“It's not that easy,” Alan said. “I've been looking for her, and here I am.” He spread his hands, showing the empty palms. “But,” he said, his voice slowing, his frown deepening, “you could help.”

“Yes.” A shivery thrill danced down her spine and set her tail thumping against the earth. “Yes. Find.” She raised her head, eyes closed, and thought of the smell of her mother, that scent of lilies and vanilla, of starlight and hot chocolate. The sound of her voice singing cradle songs and lullabies, soft and weak and off-key. A beautiful sound, to Sarah. It was there, a memory made real. A connection that only they had. It was a bond she had to use before she lost herself entirely to being a beast. “Can find,” she said.

“And you think you can get to her first?” Alan stood, shrugging his shoulders like a great burden had just been lifted from him. “Before your father?” For a moment, Sarah let herself look at him properly. It hurt, but she stood firm, eyes unblinking.

The curse said that she would be saved only if the person she loved fell in love with her. Alan wasn't going to do that—he thought she was only a child. And worse, now a child who was mostly not even human.

It was love that cursed, and love that saved.

So, what if she could make herself fall out of love with him? It didn't matter that he was kind, that he'd looked after her when no one else would—there had to be something else, something that could make her hate him. He was unpredictable; he was magic and strange. He was probably lying to her about
something.

It didn't help. She concentrated on his physical flaws, on the skewed incisors that twisted his smile off balance, the size of his ears. His chin was too small and his mouth too wide. Taken separately, every feature was wrong. Unfortunately, together they made Alan, which wasn't helping. Sarah growled and shook her head.

He was older than she was, perhaps by hundreds of years. Time in the forest was always shifting. It meant nothing. It meant everything.

“Find her, girl. And we can maybe save one life.” Alan looked past her, toward the forest. “And that'll be something, at least. Almost as good as breaking a curse.” He looked suddenly contrite. “We'll find something to fix you,” he said. “I'll make certain of it. Freya will help you. I know how to make her change her mind. How to get her on my side.”

Sarah felt her heart step out of time and discovered, with a mixture of relief and despair, that beasts couldn't cry.

*   *   *

They'd been wandering the forest for hours. Occasionally Sarah caught a delicious curl of a familiar smell, but the scents were faded, and the trails always seemed to end in nothingness, doubled back on themselves.

Alan said nothing about her failure as he plodded behind her.

A musky beast-note came strongly from the east, and Sarah sneezed, backing up the trail they were on.

“And?” he asked, finally shaken out of his silence.

“Beast,” said Sarah.

“What about her? Your mother?”

Sarah shook her head and tasted the air again. The frustrating thing was that the memory-smell of her mother was everywhere. And if she pricked her ears, she could hear her voice, sounding like it did when Sarah had put her ears underwater when she was younger and listened to the indistinct sound of her parents' conversations through the pipes and walls. Her voice ran under the forest ground, through the leaves and the pine needles. It was in the wind. It came from everywhere and so was nowhere. “Can smell. Can hear,” she said. “Can't find.”

“Well, tell me what she was like—the things that made her happy.”

“Warm,” Sarah said, then sat down to ponder. Anything: her favorite colors, the food she'd liked. But all those details had slipped away. Even her face had become doll-like and unreal. She knew her mother's eyes had been brown, but she couldn't picture them. She'd worn yellow dresses in the summer and red ones in the winter. And always, she'd looked like the warmest thing in the world. Red, and yellow, and then at the end when she'd stopped being in love, she'd dulled into nothing-colors. Had worn a coat of winter blue that washed her pale.

She'd been angry and sad, and her songs had changed. She'd listened to old radio stations that played music by dead singers. She'd started going outside to stare at the sun and hold cigarettes that she hardly smoked.

Maybe that was why it was so hard for Sarah to picture her mother—she'd never been sure which of them was the real one.

Except for arum lilies. Her mother had always liked those, no matter what persona she'd been wearing. And she'd liked bees. Sarah remembered how her mother would always rescue bees from pools. That had never changed.

Sarah pricked her ears, stilled, and waited. Her mother would be with the bees, with the lilies. She wouldn't be here in the forest. This was her father's realm—and hers now, she supposed.

Sarah turned her face, feeling the sun pull her. Even though it barely dripped through the leaves, and when it did its light was muted and green, the sun called her, and Sarah knew where to go.

The light drew her back, away from the cold heart of the forest and the icy pull of the Within where the witches used to live, back to the castle.

The woods bowed out of her way, and the drone of bees vibrated the air. A sound she was so used to ignoring, and now it had become the most important thing in her world.

“You're sure you're going the right way?” Alan drawled.

Sarah huffed once without looking back at him, and walked faster.

The last of the trees gave way, and there before her stood the crumbling remains of Nanna's castle. The grass grew dark and wiry, but it was spotted here and there with little dark blue flowers like sleeping stars. Sarah trotted out along the widening path toward the vegetable garden with its low, crumbling wall and the damp shadows where the lilies clumped together, showing their regal white trumpets and long yellow tongues. Their season was long over, but here they stayed, even though their edges were withering brown.

The lilies.

And the bees.

“Here,” said Sarah, and wondered why she hadn't realized it before. That her mother had been here, watching her. Perhaps, even as a bird, there'd been some last thread of mothering instinct that had tied her to wherever Sarah was. She breathed in deeply, and there it was, stronger than ever, an elusive smell on the air. Not perfumes or memories of meals and blankets, but a taste of salt and human sorrow.

Sarah sat patiently, and closed her eyes against the thin sun. The bees droned louder, the doves purred liquidly from the treetops. It wasn't them she was interested in.

It came softly across the grass, dancing with the hum of wings. A small sound. Her heart beat faster, blood thrumming in her ears. She could feel every shift of the world against her fur, each slight change in the wind, she could feel the earth spinning beneath her paws, the roots of dandelions and aspens alike, threading through the mantle of soil.

Even wings of small creatures change the shape of the universe, Sarah understood suddenly. She didn't have to go hunt her mother down—not like Alan did, not like her father. Her mother's love for her was still there, sleeping under her skin.

All she had to do was be still, and to understand how the forest worked. It gave you what you wanted, whether you knew you wanted it or not. “Mother,” she said, her voice almost human.

The bird flew across the clearing.

Even with her eyes still closed, Sarah knew. She felt the passing of its shadow, could smell feathers and hear the thrum of its heart. She felt it land before her, tiny claws pricking at the world-skin.

Sarah opened her eyes and looked down.

The bird really was small, just
so big
, no larger than could fit in a palm. It was plain and brown. It could have been any of a thousand birds, nondescript, nothing. It watched her with its beady eyes, and the last bit of magic holding the miasma of memory around it finally left.

Alan moved so quickly that Sarah didn't even have time to blink. One moment, the bird that had been her mother was hopping on the ground before her, and the next, it was cupped in his hands like a dark secret.

The bird was just a bird now. The last of the magic that had tied the bird to her was broken. Sarah could feel the loss of her mother inside her, like a hand twisting out her organs, rearranging them to fill the missing spaces.

Alan ignored her. “Freya,” he yelled to the castle ruins, but there was no sign of any of the inhabitants. He called her name again. “Come to me,” he yelled, and held one hand high. “I have her, Freya. Come to me.”

Even Sarah, who was not being commanded to do anything, could feel the power behind his words. He was stronger than she'd realized.

A white shimmer swept out from over the forest, and the raven fell toward them like a hurled stone. She landed on the bare soil before Sarah's paws. The white bird looked to Sarah and shook her head. “I thought you safe still. You were too young.”

“Freya,” Alan said again, and the raven finally turned her attention to him.

“Beastkeeper,” she said. “A loyal boy, but foolish. You should have gone back to the city and left your love for the forest behind.”

“I couldn't,” he said. “You had made me too much a part of the land by the time Inga cursed you.”

The raven nodded. “I saw, but I hoped that with me gone, you would find your way back to being human. There was none of my magic to keep you here.”

“You were wrong,” said Alan.

“I always was.” She hopped forward. “You did this to the girl?”

Alan looked over at Sarah. He'd known why she'd changed. She could see it in his eyes. He'd always known. It felt like being drowned, like seeing the last of hope slipping away like tiny silvery bubbles of breath.

“It wasn't meant to happen that way. I befriended her, but I didn't expect—” He shook his head. “I needed her,” he said. “I needed her to find the wren.”

“For what?” the raven said, and Sarah was glad the raven had asked, because her own words were stuck deep inside her now, the last gasps of air she could not let go.