Dares to Watch a Beast

Harleywood Jenkins Paranormal Urban

Cloistered KinThe kingdom of Vasnora sat where three seas refused to meet. Black-salt cliffs held them apart, glittering even in summer like frost that never melted. It was a small place, proud beyond any reasonable measure, ruled by a king who had already buried two wives and raised his only daughter as if the world were actively trying to take her next.Isolde Varen counted things. Candles in the great hall: two hundred and twelve. Stairs to the eastern tower: one hundred and four. Days since her mother’s death: she stopped at four thousand because the number started to feel like a kind of madness. Counting made the world small enough to hold in her hands. Her nurse said it was no way for a princess to live. Isolde had decided years earlier that “princess” was just a costume she wore over something else that wanted out.She found the door on the night of her nineteenth birthday. A masked ball filled the hall with light and noise and perfume so thick it clung to the back of her throat. She slipped out through the servants’ entrance into the kitchen gardens for air that didn’t taste of other people’s celebrations.That was where she met Corvin.He was leaning against the garden wall like he’d been carved there. Dressed too well for a stranger and too plainly for a guest. Skin the color of moonlight on marble. Eyes the deep red-brown of wine held up to a candle. When he smiled he didn’t show his teeth. She would understand later that this was a kindness.“You’ve escaped your own party,” he said. Not a question.“I could say the same. I don’t recognize you, and I know every face in that hall by rote.”“I wasn’t invited.” He said it without shame. “I came for the wine cellar. Your father keeps a red from the Ostrid valley that hasn’t been made in eighty years. I have a fondness for things that no longer exist.”She should have called the guard. Instead she asked, “Are you going to hurt me?”“No.” The flatness of it—no flourish, no attempt at charm—made her believe him more than any oath would have. “I only came for the wine. You’re an unplanned pleasure.”They talked until the moon had crossed half the sky. He didn’t tell her what he was that night, though she guessed from the cold of his hand when their fingers brushed reaching for the same fallen plum, and from the way he never once looked toward the kitchen door where a lantern threw long light across the grass. As if he already knew exactly where every living thing in the garden stood.He came back the following week. And the week after that. Isolde, who had spent years counting candles and stairs and days to keep her grief in order, began counting the nights until she would see him again. She couldn’t make herself stop.Across the city, in the crumbling bell tower of the old chapel—decommissioned decades earlier when the archbishop of the time decided the acoustics offended him—lived a warlock named Thistlewood Ash. He had rented the space from the diocese for the price of never being seen, and he had kept that bargain for eleven years.Thistlewood was not evil, whatever the village children whispered. He was tired. Real magic, the kind that bent the marrow of the world instead of just dazzling it, cost something every time it was used. He had spent decades paying that cost for small, unglamorous mercies: curing a farmer’s blight, quieting a colicky infant, once talking a drowning man’s lungs into holding air a few seconds longer until help arrived. He had no interest in crowns or curses. What he wanted, if he was honest, was someone to talk to who wasn’t a raven.He got his wish in the form of a werewolf who broke into his tower during a hailstorm, bleeding from a hunter’s arrow and cursing in four languages.Her name was Rasha. She led what remained of the Kessa pack—eleven wolves, down from the forty her grandmother had commanded before the crown started paying bounties on wolfskin. She hadn’t come to the tower by choice. She’d simply run until her body gave out, and the crooked door had been the nearest shelter from both the hail and a second arrow.Thistlewood pulled the arrowhead out with tools meant for herb-cutting. His hands shook only a little. He didn’t ask what she was. The fur climbing back beneath her skin as the moon-sickness passed had already answered that question thoroughly.“You’re not going to report me,” Rasha said. It wasn’t quite a question. Everyone in Vasnora seemed to have gotten into the habit of stating things at each other rather than asking.“I’ve never reported anyone for what they are,” he said, wrapping the wound. “Only for what they do. You haven’t done anything to me yet except bleed on my floor.”She stayed three days recovering. She stayed a fourth because the hail turned to ordinary rain and she found she didn’t want to leave. By the time she finally climbed down the tower stairs and vanished into the tree line, Thistlewood had learned the particular quiet of a person choosing to trust him.

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