The saying of my name shattered the magic holding me in my young lover's preferred form. His face contorted in abhorrence as I became the minder he had known all his life. He cast me off him with the strength of disgust, and seized a blanket as he came to his feet, covering himself from my gaze. "Aunt Nell, what—what have you done to me?"
I spat, "Nothing you weren't eager for," but he shook his head, dark eyes large and horrified.
"No. No, I wanted my little Helen, not—" A shudder ran through him. "What a fool I am. Nell. You might have called yourself Cornelia, too, or Ellen, and I never would have thought. Mother, Mother, I—I didn't know, I didn't want—!"
"You are never to blame," Queen Irindala said. For the first time I saw her as a queen, as a great and terrible warrior, and I knew that in a handful of heartbeats, her wrath would fall upon me.
"Traitor!" I shrieked at her son, knowing him to be the weaker of the two. "I raised you, I loved you, you desired me—"
"No more than I desired a beast!"
A wicked laugh shot from my throat. I pointed at both of them, Queen and Prince alike, and whispered, "Oh, but your mother knows love for a beast, do you not, Irindala? I curse you," I spat. "I curse the blood that runs in your veins, child, that it shall never let you die. I curse the body that you live in, that it should be as a beast's. I curse the walls that you call home, that they should forever be an unsolvable maze. I curse those who serve you that they should be as unseen as they are unappreciated. I curse the very land that you walk upon that it should be as if salted."
A maelstrom rose, the prince's cries at its heart. All the beasts of the forest and plains fought to become a part of him, his bones breaking and stretching, fur erupting from his skin as he screamed. Power flowed from me, ripping away the vestiges of humanity I had so long worn and revealing the immortal, ethereal beauty that was my own, for in no other form could I convey deathlessness upon a mortal creature. I shrieked in outraged pleasure, then, through the howl and the wind, through the shattering of stone and the falling of walls, heard Irindala whisper, "This land is mine," and I knew I had made a mistake.
I had given her the spell myself, told her how to waken it, how to bind the borders of the land against her enemies. She had bled for it, buried bones for it, spoken prayers over it, and made it her own. It was a spell to last forever, holding the borders of her country so long as the blood of the queen who laid it ran true in the veins of its royal family.
But as much as it bound the land to her, it bound Irindala to the land as well, and not even the faery queen herself could contain all the power of the earth within her mighty grasp.
"You can't!" I cried. "You cannot! The borders will weaken, your reign will end! You cannot, Irindala! It loses you all you have fought for!"
"It gains me my son." Soft, implacable words, and with them she tore from me the darkest aspects of my curse: that immortality should only last so long as the beastly form, and that the form itself could be undone by a lover's willing touch. That the maze of his home should become an endless palace, the servants offer what solace they could, and the land barren but for gardens of roses.
We fought, myself with the power borne within me, and Irindala with the power of the land. Forest grew around us, and a palace rose, and all the while the prince roared and sobbed and struggled with his transformation. I seized the roses, making them mine: should any traveler seeking shelter enter this sanctuary, they might leave safely unless they plucked a rose. Irindala poured strength into the forest, extending it as her beastly son's demesne; I took away his freedom to roam it, but could not prevent her making him its protector, and the protector of all the beasts within. I stole his rationality; she returned a thread, which grasped, might lead him back to thoughtfulness. On and on we went, until she cast the last and greatest counter to my spell: the land itself rejected me, casting me beyond the borders into my own land, and her voice lingering in my ears promised me that I should never return unless love itself carried me past the bone-bred barriers.
I howled protest, digging my hands into earth I had not set foot on in a hundred years or more, and wept as a rising spring showed me a face that was my own.
I opened my eyes with a head on me like a drum, and for some time lay where I was, with no idea and not much interest in where that might be. Only my head hurt. It seemed like my belly ought to, where I'd stabbed it, but when I flexed the muscles there, I felt no protest of pain, or even bandages. Looking hardly seemed worth it. Not when I could see, as if at the backs of my eyes, the vision I had been left with.
I'd known the eyes, the quirk of the lips, the unevenness that made it compelling. I had not known the highness of the cheekbones or the slight length of jaw; those things belonged to Pearl, not me. Neither had I known the ears, long and slender and pointed, not unlike the Beast's. But the face, yes. I had known that face, because it was my own.
I tried to sit up with the grim intention of finding the Beast, and discovered two things: one, sitting up was all but beyond me, and two, the Beast sat beside me as if he had not moved for hours. He was reading, in fact. He wore a carefully constructed set of spectacles, and was reading aloud, though I had hardly heard him in the midst of my own thoughts. I recalled the last words he'd said with a hazy memory: something of morning and evening mists, and now, as he made to close the book, I said, "I'm afraid you'll have to start again. I seem to have missed most of the story."
"Amber!" He cast the book aside and caught one of my hands in both of his enormous paws, engulfing half my arm in the effort. "Amber, thank the stars."
"I'm having a hard time moving. I feel like I've been sleeping for a week."
"Not a week." His voice lowered, vibrating through me. "Ten days days, Amber."
"Ten days." I understood him, but in the same way I had when he had first captured me and told me I had to stay: I understood the content of the words without them meaning much. Then, as his worried expression made it clear I must have, indeed, been asleep a very long time, I said, "I suppose I must be very hungry, then. And that I need very badly to pee."
Both of those things, having been considered, became violently true. I still all but lacked the strength to stand, but the Beast whisked me from the bed with the grace of practice, and deposited me over a chamber pot. I squatted there for some time, too relieved both literally and figuratively to be humiliated, and simply said, "Help," when my bladder had emptied and I couldn't yet push myself up. The Beast lifted me again, his head close to mine as he rumbled, "The bed or a chair?"
My eyes closed as I inhaled his scent. "You're still wearing my perfume."