Gordon grumbled for a moment but began his tale willingly enough. He clearly didn’t understand everything he was relating, a by-product of his having heard the stories by listening through doors, I supposed. But he knew enough to paint a frightening picture, and I found myself wishing I had asked the question in a room that didn’t contain a life-like picture of the king glaring down at me.
King Nicolas had used his position and authority to amass wealth and power, repressing his people and taxing them heavily. He made constant use of his mirror to spy on his people, ruthlessly crushing the merest hint of disloyalty. The nobility were afraid to question him, even in the privacy of their own homes, and the people dared not rebel. But conditions in the north of the kingdom became so bad, that a small group of rebels did develop.
Eventually the king rode out himself to find and kill them. He chased the leader of the group to a small, remote village. Whether the people were really sheltering the man, or whether the king merely thought so, no one would ever know. Because, the king had descended on the town with a troop of guards. He had called out all the villagers, and when they claimed no knowledge of the rebels, King Nicolas had slaughtered every single one of them with his own hand. From their oldest elder to their smallest child.
I gestured with my hand for us to leave the room and hurried out without waiting to hear if Gordon had seen me. I was struggling to breathe, too choked up to speak. The monstrosity of it! What sort of sickness lived in such a man, that he would do such a thing, and with his own hand? He had violated the most sacred tenets of a ruler, and I no longer wondered at his bringing down a curse powerful enough to destroy a whole kingdom. The High King demanded love and sacrifice from his rulers. The king of Palinar had shown nothing but hate, greed and selfish ambition.
I found my voice. “And so, the kingdom was cursed for his despicable act?” I had always understood the importance rulers had for the well-being of their kingdoms. When true love governed, prosperity followed for all, after all. But it seemed an injustice to see it working in the opposite way.
Well, no, not right away, said Gordon. He had led me into the queen’s chambers, and this time I didn’t see any of the objects scattered throughout it move. In fact, his voice sounded from right under her portrait, as if he were gazing up at it. He returned home to the capital. And then Queen Ruby died, and that’s when we were cursed.
“How…” I stopped to clear my throat, afraid to hear the answer. “How did she die?”
Dunno. No one ever really talks about her. I just know that everything changed after that. I never felt any different, though. He paused. Are you really sure you can’t see me? Who would have thought being invisible could be so uninteresting?
I shook my head, unable to focus properly on his prattle. Stumbling backwards, I sank down to sit on the bed. I was filled with an absolute certainty that—one way or another—King Nicolas had killed his wife. It turned out that a king violating his responsibility to his people was not enough to bring down a curse. But a king that broke trust with both his kingdom and his own family? Apparently, that was enough.
In my shock, I reached out to Lily, meaning to share the horrible revelation with her, and her now familiar absence hit me yet again. I wished desperately for some sort of comfort in the midst of such evil, and I had not even suffered the worst effects of it.
It still seemed strange to me that the very people to suffer under King Nicolas were the ones to also suffer the effects of the curse. Hadn’t Matthew even told me the royals had been originally excluded from it?
As I pondered this thought, an explosion took place in my brain. I thought back over all the pieces of the puzzle I had been told or had managed to cobble together myself. What if I had been thinking about it wrong all along? What if the servants even had it wrong? What if the people had not been cursed, exactly, but had instead been saved? Moved en masse to another realm where their royal family could not touch them.
And now it seemed that the Beast was the only royal who remained. Was it possible I had chosen wrongly in the forest? Could Lily have been right, and if I had let him die, the whole kingdom would have been free to return to the normal world?
My stomach churned at the thought that his death might be the answer. And that, if it was, defeating the curse might be beyond me. Because I would not have a hand in killing him.
Chapter 18
As I walked numbly back to my chamber, Gordon still chattering obliviously beside me, I fought to control my rebellious stomach. I could not accept the idea that I should have let the Beast die. No part of it felt right. Death was not the answer—surely the story of the Beast’s father demonstrated that.
As my mind continued to cartwheel furiously, further questions appeared. So much still hadn’t been explained. It seemed that King Nicolas’ monstrous acts had brought the godmothers back to Palinar earlier than they had returned to any of the other kingdoms. But they had come with wrath, not assistance.
And yet something had then changed. A godmother had helped Dominic. Another confirmation that my role here was not to bring about his death. But I had yet to hear even a hint of what had caused his beastly transformation. Or when. And the two stories were so hopelessly intermingled, that it was hard to make sense of one without the other. If the original curse had actually been to protect the people against their royals, then giving their prince fangs seemed rather counter-productive.
Or had the later godmother, the one who assisted him to see his people, also been the one to give him his own curse? Giving with one hand and taking away with the other.
I tried asking Gordon about the Beast’s transformation, but he had no idea. He forbade everyone from mentioning his family or from speaking of his curse.
“Then how have you overheard conversations about the king?”
Oh, that was before he returned. We had been cursed for two weeks before he appeared back at the castle.
“And you are not afraid to speak of it, then?”
It’s only the servants he forbade. You’re not a servant. My eyes widened at his strange logic, but I didn’t correct him. I had already benefited more than once from his strange misunderstanding.
Will you tell me about the wolves now? He sounded far too excited about my having been attacked by wild animals.
“Uhhh…” I tried to gather my thoughts together. “Well, I decided to go for a ride on my horse, and I ended up outside the castle grounds.” A less than complete version of events, but enough information for Gordon to possess.
As I told him the story, I lived it again, only this time I had a new perspective. I imagined the Beast not as the villain who had cursed his kingdom, but as a misguided boy, raised by an evil father, who had lost his entire family. Had King Nicolas also killed his own daughter? It was incomprehensible—but no more so than any of his other actions.