ill forget us completely!”

She wept bitterly, but Isaura did not shed a tear. She snatched me by the wrist and pulled me out of the dark, sending me stumbling to the Wizard’s feet. It was only then that she and Imogen saw their mother’s stare, cold as gallows. Imogen cried harder, and touched my sleeve imploringly. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, try to understand…” she whispered. Isaura pushed her aside.

“Try it on. Try it on and rot, Magadin,” she hissed.

I drew myself up before the Wizard, who grinned like a jungle cat who has just made a meal of a particularly fat vole. He held out the collar but, with my stepmother’s eyes burning on my skin, I refused to bend my neck towards it. He pursed his dry lips and stepped forward, clapping the thing around my throat with alarming speed.

It fit so perfectly I hardly felt its weight. There was no sound in the hall, but I saw Isaura smile into her sleeve. The Wizard checked the joints of the collar and gave me over to his men, dropping three silver coins into Iolanthe’s hand in exchange for me.

As I was pushed out of my house, I heard behind me the soft thump of my stepmother collapsing onto the tile.

“SO YOU SEE HOW IT IS,” THE BEAST-MAIDEN SAID. “There was no apprenticeship at all. He locked me up here without even taking me to the Palace, and here I have been for fifty years and more. Each fortnight he comes and forces me to drink terrible concoctions, he rubs unguents over my body, causes the lightning to burn my veins. He keeps me young and strong, for I have lasted longer than any of the others, and he has never had so likely a subject. He cannot lose me to hag-hood. But it is not working, and soon I will be hung on the wall like the rest, and he will begin again with some other maid. I will be forced to watch her die as they watch me.”

The Witch raised up the maiden’s face and smoothed her tears away as though she was erasing a canvas. She smiled at the helpless girl, her face lighting like a midsummer fire. “He once held me prisoner to discover the same secret—the old man is obsessed with it—and I escaped. So shall you. Never put your faith in a Prince. When you require a miracle, trust in a Witch.”

“There is nothing you can do,” I protested. “She is too far gone; even I can smell that. Throw her from the tower and put her out of her misery.” But the Witch only chuckled deep in her throat, the gurgling of a hundred mountain streams.

“I have made it my specialty, Beast, to thwart the magic of this particular man. I have grown since our last meeting; he only wallows in the depths of his few filthy skills.” She stopped, and her eyes grew sad. “I am afraid I cannot erase the beast from you, however. I cannot make you the girl you were. These things cannot be undone, once they have gone so far. In the old days it could be done, and easily, by any of my mothers before me. But much has happened. I cannot rejoin you to the tribe of maidens. But I can welcome you into the tribe of monsters. You will live; you will be rescued.”

The beast-maiden’s eyes grew large with the weight of bitter tears. “But without my beauty, what am I? I cannot marry this way, and surely by now my father and stepmother are dead. I am as stupid as the day I left her; in fifty years I have learned nothing that would make her proud of me. This is all I am, a maiden in a tower, and for that sad race there is no salve but a Prince, hung around their necks like an anchor in epaulets. What else is there for me?”

“Nothing,” a voice growled from the shadows. One of the heads curled her lips backward into an O of hate. “You are ugly now; no one will have you!”

“You’ll stay with us and like it, dog-daughter!” The beaked head cawed laughter, smacking her gums.

“Good for nothing but the circus!”

“Maybe the wife of a farm goat, eating garbage in the pen!”

“Queen of the dung flies!”

“Empress of monkeys!”

The heads cackled together, spitting and snarling. A few simply wept without words. The Witch scowled.

“Don’t listen. They are already dead. The Wizard gave them voice to torture you—they long ago escaped this place.”

“We’re not dead, little Witch! Try your parlor tricks somewhere else! She’s ours!” The heads pealed off into laughter again.

“Where could I go?” Magadin asked pathetically. “How could I live?”

“Beast owes me,” the Witch answered. “He will take you to the sea, where you can find work on the ships anchored there. Or you can take one to lands far away, where no one can follow you. If I am not mistaken, he thinks you very lovely now.” She grinned knowingly at me.

“Certainly, my dove,” I replied with dignity, “the fur much improves what I saw from the foot of the tower. I have friends in the seaport of Muireann. With me at your side no one will refuse you. You are one of us, now. I assure you, we are gentler to each other than the wretched race of maidens. I will watch over you.” The woman seemed to acquiesce. Her eyes lit like yellow candles.

“Now,” said the Witch, “you cannot go anywhere bleeding and broken like a bird who has fallen from her tree.”

She took the maid’s face in her hands, winding her fingers in Magadin’s dusk-honey hair, and closed her lips softly over the beast-girl’s mouth.

All the muscles in Magadin’s tortured body seemed to relax. The wounds caused by the sprouting of her wings healed in a breath, feathers covering the ruined flesh. Her tail became healthy and full, while her fierce claws receded a bit, into a civilized length. The fluttering wings at her braid tips melted into the rest of her hair, darkening it to a burnished bronze and thickening the mass into a leonine cascade. Her legs straightened slightly so that she could walk again, though they kept their rounded doe-shape, and the fish scales did not disappear from her calves. Her skin took on a rich, even tone, and the stripes on her flesh grew darker, more vibrant, seeming to become their own natural shade rather than a stain on her skin. Magadin was altogether a radiant beast now, her transformation complete, yet forever unfinished. I approved greatly.

But the heads howled in loathing and horror, their taunts dissolving into spittle-filled gibberish. As they parted, the two women glanced at each other in triumph and walked towards me hand in hand, ignoring the thrashing heads entirely. The maiden’s deer gait would always be strange, like a foreign dance, but she was smiling. The three of us left the tower as swiftly as foxes, emerging onto the snow-dead grass as the tower began to shake with the rising screams from within.

The Witch never looked back, but gestured carelessly towards the black monolith with her left hand as she and Magadin climbed onto my back. The tower promptly shuddered like a coughing crone and crumbled into the earth.

In the Tower

VISIONS OF SHORN SKINS AND BEAST-MAIDS MILLING IN HIS MIND like harem girls, the boy left the cedar grove and the girl, who now slept on the bed of pine needles, exhausted by the telling of her own story. He thought he could see the bright pale eyes of wild birds in the branches, like pearls strung on threads of darkness, waiting for him to leave so they could tend to her.

Tags: Catherynne M. Valente Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net