They walked, hunched over so far they might have been better off crawling, for several minutes, until the tunnel opened out into a man-made cave, with a door at the far end and a small hole in the ceiling that let in a shard of natural light from the surface several feet above them.
Rumplestiltskin had clearly tried to make it home and as well as two beds and piles of books there was a table holding a jug of wine, some fresh bread, cheese and a leg of roasted pork.
‘If you’re hungry, take something,’ he muttered, clearing some papers from a chair so Petra, still slightly winded from the weight of the wolf, could sit down. The wolf’s arrival and their subsequent flight had calmed him.
‘You dug this place out? Yourself?’ Petra asked, dabbing a piece of cloth over the cut on her neck to stem the blood.
‘We had nearly a hundred years.’ Rumplestiltskin put his knapsack down and sat on the bed. ‘Relatively, it didn’t take very long.’
‘We?’ the huntsman asked, and then just as the first ray of sunlight pierced through the narrow skylight, the wolf began to change.
His fur glittered a thousand colours and his yellow eyes widened as he whimpered. Myriad lights lifted from his coat and spun in a whirlwind around him until they were so bright the huntsman had to close his eyes. Even then the brightness made him flinch. The beast let out half a howl and then there was silence.
When the huntsman risked looking again the room was back to normal. The light was gone. So was the wolf. In its place, a man lay on the rough ground. He coughed twice and then sat up.
‘That never gets any easier,’ he groaned, and sat up, dusting off his white shirt and black jacket. His hair was thick and dirty blond and his eyes were green with yellow flecks.
‘You’re a man,’ Petra said quietly. She stared at him. ‘I knew you weren’t just a wolf. I knew it. All those times I listened through the wall it was you.’ She smiled, and the man smiled back, and the huntsman felt the magic between them. It hummed in the room far greater than the glittering lights had shone.
‘You’re the girl who howls back.’ The two stared at each other with the kind of recognition only people who have never met and yet are destined to be together could share.
‘You saved my life,’ Petra said.
The man nodded, but his jaw clenched with shame at his deed. ‘I’m sorry I killed him,’ he said. ‘Things are different when I’m the wolf. There are no grey areas. I act on instinct.’
‘I’m not sorry you killed him,’ Petra said. ‘He was going to kill us, after all.’ Her elfin face glowed slightly and she trembled.
‘Then you’re welcome.’ Rumplestiltskin had poured the man some water and he drank it and then got to his feet. He bowed to Petra. ‘My name is Toby.’
‘You’ve been awake all this time too?’ The huntsman asked.
‘Yes.’ The gregarious grin left Toby’s face. ‘I was cursed. There was a witch in the city, an older woman, and she fell in love with me. She was a beautiful woman, famed for the diamond slippers that had enchanted many men before me into her bed, and she pursued me relentlessly. But I did not love her and she did not take my rejection well. One night she saw me with a lady of the court and her jealousy overwhelmed her. She cursed me. Every full moon I would spend the nights as a wolf. The first time it happened, my family were terrified. Rumours spread of a wolfman, and I was hunted. I hid in the forest and would only creep back into the city to forage for food and drink. It was on one such trip that the forest formed a wall behind me and the city fell asleep. I can only presume that because I was already cursed, the second curse didn’t affect me.’
‘Was she sleeping?’ Petra asked. ‘Will she be awake now?’
‘No, I went to her house. She was dead in her bed. Murdered. I wonder if she had picked a man to lure to her bed whose wife’s jealousy overwhelmed her fear.’ Toby shrugged. ‘The city will be better without her. She brought her fate on herself.’
‘And I am forever grateful for that, despite your being trapped in this ageless time with me,’ Rumplestiltskin squeezed Toby’s shoulder. ‘I would have gone mad without you.’
‘Why didn’t you sleep?’ Petra asked the old man.
‘I caused the curse. The magic doesn’t affect he who carries it. Time froze for me, but I did not sleep.’ He poured himself some wine and the huntsman noticed his hand was trembling. It had been a long hundred years. But why had he brought it on himself? He seemed a harmless man, unless some natural viciousness had been beaten out of him over the century. It was unlikely. Viciousness grew with bitterness and a hundred years alone would make any man bitter.
‘Did you curse the wrong sister?’ he asked. ‘Surely you didn’t mean to attack Beauty.’
‘The wrong sister?’ the old man smiled, wistfully. ‘It was so easy for people to believe that story. The dark days. The second sister. The evil twin. One dark with hints of blonde, one blonde with hints of dark. One so kind and gentle and pure, the other wild and wicked and filled with her mother’s magic.’
Somewhere overhead a flash of blue lightning crossed the sky and lit up their cave, and thunder rumbled so hard that the ground around them shook.
Rumplestiltskin looked at the huntsman, his eyes tired. ‘There was only one child. They named her Beauty. And beautiful she was. But she was more than that: she was Beauty and the Beast.
The young king and his people grieved for their beautiful queen and returned her body to the waters from whence she’d come, but still they stayed bitter, and the king did not blame the spirits of her ancestors for their anger. Being a kind and optimistic man he hoped that one day, when his daughter was grown, they would forgive him for his selfish act of loving the water witch and see that something beautiful could come from the union of earth and magic.
He took great comfort in the infant Beauty for she was a good-natured baby and rarely cried. She smiled and gurgled in her father’s arms and soon, although his heart would never truly mend, the cracks began to heal and he poured his love into his little girl, just as his dead wife would have wanted him to.
All the kingdom loved Beauty. It was impossible not to. Even the old and cynical ministers’ hearts warmed at the sight of her. Goodness shone brightly from her every pore and she loved them all in return. It was her nature to love. For her fourth birthday there was a feast and the whole city rejoiced. She was showered with gifts, given not for political advantage, which was so often the case with royal children, but from the heart. She received so many that she insisted on sharing them with the poorer children of the city, and that just made the people love her more.
The only present she didn’t give away was the one that made her eyes sparkle more than any other: a black and white kitten she called Domino, a present from her father’s best friend and closest advisor, Rumplestiltskin. Domino was just like her, she said, his hair was black with some blond bits too. She smiled and cuddled him and all was well.
Beauty loved Domino and the cat loved her back. Unlike most felines he did not crave his independence but, like a puppy, would follow the little girl wherever she went and slept curled up on her pillow. Some said – or whispered – it was because Beauty came from witch’s blood and all witches had a way with animals, but even those who found the kitten’s behaviour odd couldn’t bring themselves to think badly of the little princess who was always so full of kindness and love.
Domino died three years later on the first dark day. They did not call them dark days then, and none had any idea how dark they would become, but it was the first time that Beauty changed. There was no trigger for it. Perhaps if her mother had still been alive, she would have known what to do with her child to make it better. But the water witch was dead, and the half-child princess was alone in the world of men.
It was a perfect day and the princess had finished her music and dance lessons and returned to her rooms to play. Thankfully, her servants were dismissed and she was alone.
It was the king and Rumplestiltskin who found her
and for a while it would be their secret to bear. They had planned to take Beauty riding, but the clear summer day had suddenly grown cloudy and rain had burst from the sky. The king, perhaps because of the loss of his beloved wife, was protective of Beauty’s health and decided that they would stay inside and play cards instead. The two men were laughing together when they opened the doors to her apartment.
The laughter stopped immediately.
All the king could see was blood.
At first he thought the blood was Beauty’s and he ran towards her in panic, ordering Rumplestiltskin to fetch the doctors. But then, as he got closer, he saw the bloody sewing scissors and Domino’s glassy eyes staring up from the mess in his daughter’s lap.
‘His fur wouldn’t change,’ Beauty snapped, her voice sharp and irritated. ‘His fur wouldn’t change. And he scratched me.’ She was indignant and her normally beautiful face was screwed up so tightly it was ugly. ‘He scratched me.’
‘What have you done, Beauty?’ the king asked in horror, unable to absorb what was so clearly in front of him. He crouched and took the wrecked, lifeless body of the beloved cat from her.
‘Look at her hair,’ Rumplestiltskin said, having closed the door and locked it to prevent any passing servants from seeing the awful sight within. ‘What’s happened to her hair?’
‘His hair didn’t match mine,’ Beauty muttered, although she now sounded slightly confused. With bloody fingers she pulled at her own locks. ‘He wouldn’t change it. Why wouldn’t he change it? Why did he scratch me?’
Her hair, which was normally black with two blonde streaks of her mother’s colouring, had reversed, leaving her head a cool blonde with midnight stripes on each side of her cherubic face.
‘This isn’t right,’ Rumplestiltskin said, grabbing a towel and wrapping the dead cat up in it. ‘This isn’t our Beauty.’ For she was more than just the king’s daughter, she was loved by them all. ‘Is this some kind of terrible magic?’
‘Daddy?’ Beauty was frowning now, looking up. ‘Daddy, what are you doing here?’
Her hair began to change again, returning to its natural state, the two opposing colours bleeding into each other, and through the window the first shard of sunlight cut through the rain, the weather changing with her.
The king swept his daughter up and took her into the bathroom. ‘Get rid of that cat,’ he growled. ‘Where no one can find it.’
Rumplestiltskin did as he was told. There were plenty of places he could have thrown the stabbed and half-skinned animal, but he found a quiet place in the orchard and buried Domino. He had been a good cat and he had loved the young princess well, and Rumplestiltskin, a kind man with a daughter of his own, felt responsible for the animal’s fate. A little sweat was not too much to give him. That and a grave where the foxes couldn’t scavenge his corpse in the night.
By the time he got back to the princess’s apartments, she was washed and changed and sitting on the bed playing cards with the king. She looked up and smiled, all light and laughter again.
‘Have you seen Domino?’ she asked. ‘I don’t know where he is.’
From where he stood in the doorway, Rumplestiltskin could see that the king had hastily rolled up the bloody rug and shoved it under the bed.
‘He’s probably gone to the kitchens,’ the king said. His face was a picture of forced normality, his smile stretched across his face as if it were on a rack. ‘Maybe he wanted some milk.’
‘That’s probably it,’ Beauty said, but Rumplestiltskin could see the worry on her pretty face for her missing pet. ‘I just wish I knew where he was. I don’t remember him leaving.’
‘He’ll be back,’ Rumplestiltskin said cheerily as he sat on the bed. ‘I’m sure of it.’ Inside, he felt a small part of him die with the lie, the first of what he feared would be many, many lies, and life in the castle had changed that day. Of course the change in her had been magic. But it was a magic that she held. This was nothing to do with the witch and her talk of spindles. Beauty was cursed from within.
Beauty was inconsolable for weeks when Domino, rotting in the orchard, failed to return to her. Everyone searched for him, but the little cat was of course not found, and although she missed him terribly Beauty had the resilience of a child and her nature was too full of joy to hold onto her sadness. Eventually she stopped asking after him and life moved on.
The king and Rumplestiltskin remained watchful and stayed close to the princess as best they could to watch for the signs of change. The instances were at first so rare that, for a few years, they did not cause too much consternation, the two men simply sweeping up the child and locking her in her rooms until the skies outside cleared of rain and they’d know that their good girl had returned to them.
They chose her maids carefully but even so, after a while, there were rumours that another child was in the castle, a blonde girl uncannily like Beauty but who huffed and puffed and stamped her foot.
Being a wise man, and knowing in his heart that now that a door had unlocked inside Beauty it would stay that way, Rumplestiltskin didn’t try to quell the rumours. Instead, he added one to circulation – that there had been two babies born to the king and queen. Twins. But the second girl was a difficult child who needed special care and the king had chosen, for her own sake, to keep her out of the limelight that came with being part of the royal family. When the rumour was whispered back to him he knew he’d been successful. Should anything untoward be seen then Beauty would not be blamed and that was all that mattered.
The king hoped that as Beauty grew her changes would become less frequent, but it was a false hope. The princess reached puberty late, but as soon as she woke, bloody, just after her fifteenth birthday, things grew worse.
The changes became more frequent. And when the other girl was in charge, she now had all her mother’s repressed magic at her fingertips. It was no longer possible to lock her away in a room until the moment passed, and instead of simple thunderclouds in the sky, blue lightning would crack across the city and rain would flash-flood the streets. She was wild, this blonde girl who ran, laughing and dancing wantonly through the castle corridors, tipping trays of food from servants’ hands as she went.
She whipped the stable boy to within an inch of his life for not polishing her saddle well enough, and the king caught her half-naked with one of his ministers.
The man went to the dungeons for that.
That was a mistake.
The princess followed. Not to save him, but to watch the punishment.
She liked blood.
Rumplestiltskin caught her once in the butcher’s yard at the back of the castle, her hands buried in the hot entrails of a freshly killed deer. Her eyes were glazed, and as he pulled her away she licked her fingers. He didn’t tell the king that. His precious Beauty, Rumplestiltskin feared, was also a monster.
The changes did not last long, a day or two at the very most, but they were impossible to hide. Rumplestiltskin amended his rumour to say that Beauty insisted her sister had the run of the castle in her stead for a few days here and there, and although some in the kingdom believed that, the king could not keep the secret from his ministers any longer. But there was no other heir, and for all her wildness and streak of cruelty, the Beast, as she became known on those days, still loved her father, and was always affectionate towards him and Rumplestiltskin as if Beauty, locked inside her, had that much control over both of them.
The king had a bell installed high in the castle roof, and proclamations were sent out around the kingdom that when it rang all the people should go to their houses and stay inside until it was rung again. The criers claimed it was to protect them from the terrible blue lightning that spat at the ground during these times, and the dangerous floods, and although it was the nature of the people to do as they were told, rumours were still rumours and there was talk of a monster in the castle and magic at play.
It worked for a while. Several years passed and the kingdom and the castle settled
into their new routine. Beauty became a young woman her father could be proud of and everyone continued to love her. She was still kind and thoughtful and full of joy. Young men came to court her. One kissed her and fell so passionately in love that when she told her father she didn’t love him the boy hanged himself.
When a second kissed her and also fell completely in love with her – although with less disastrous consequences when she rejected him – Rumplestiltskin and the first minister broached the subject of magic once again to the king. Her mother’s magic was not just contained within the Beast. Her kisses put men under a spell, and perhaps, although none could argue that she was not the sweetest of girls, there was a little magic involved in the unconditional love everyone who met her felt.
They decided this was a good thing. It would protect the princess from any who might harm her because of the Beast, and the king took to touring the city with her to ensure that she had all of their subjects’ love. There was, he reminded them all, no other heir for the kingdom, and the king refused to even consider marrying again. Things continued in their strange new normality.
But as with all things that we pretend are not so bad as they seem, there comes, for each man or woman, a breaking point.
For Rumplestiltskin it was the poisoning of the king.
He had been growing sicker for a while. At first the changes were not noticeable; just a day or two of feeling off colour, a general tiredness, a reluctance to ride. These times came and went and none of the ministers thought anything of it. He grew thinner. Rumplestiltskin and the first minister noticed that the Beast, when she was in residence, was more affectionate towards her father and this caused them both to be suspicious. They kept her from the kitchens when his food was being prepared and she was followed at all times to ensure she did not go near his wine or water.
They saw nothing suspicious. Perhaps the king was just going through a bout of ill-health.