Rachel Hawkins - Grim

The three girls shuddered.

“I pleaded with the Beast, told it that I had a family, and the Beast offered me a bargain. He said that he needed a boy to serve him and care for his infernal steeds. I promised to send him my son.”

Beauty looked up from the hands twisted together in her lap. “What?”

Gabrielle and Suzanne were already smiling, the same smile they had worn at court, as if they understood something Beauty did not.

Her father was smiling, too. “Don’t you see?” he said. “I tricked the Beast. I promised him a son, and I have no son to give! The oath is void. Any dark enchantments he tries to cast will fail.”

Gabrielle clapped him on the back. “Oh, well done, Father.”

“But,” Beauty said. “But what about honor?”

Honor had been a watchword at court: to keep his honor a man could never cheat at cards, refuse a duel, break a betrothal or bear another gentleman’s insult. Above all else, he had to keep his word.

As a child Beauty had believed she had to keep to all those rules, as well, and had been scared to play card games with her sisters in case she found herself cheating by accident. Then she grew up and learned all a lady’s honor seemed to demand was that she not commit indiscretions with a gentleman. It was probably childish of her, but Beauty had still never told a lie in her life.

Suzanne laughed. “Do you think you’re a knight in one of those moldering old books you read?”

Her father snapped, “One does not have to deal with a beast with honor.”

“It’s your honor, not the Beast’s,” Beauty said. “Shouldn’t you have it all the time?”

Her father’s face shaded from displeased to actually angry, and Beauty stood up from the hearth, shutting her book and tilting her chin up defiantly.

Then her father laughed and turned back to his meal. “Oh, little Belle, my Beauty, why am I even trying to explain to you how matters of honor work? You’re a woman. You know nothing of honor.”

The dismissal stung more than his anger.

The next day, Beauty rose from her warm bed in the cold dawn and did not do her chores. Instead she cut off her golden hair and put on the old footman’s uniform that Gabrielle had been planning to pick apart and use to patch their dresses. She saddled Snowball the horse and rode in the direction of the castle.

It was not hard to find, though it was a long journey to get there. All Beauty had to do was follow the road south and keep riding, and soon she saw the castle outlined against the sky.

The sun had sunk behind the tower by the time Beauty rode into the courtyard. The courtyard was gray with the coming night, but Beauty suspected it might be gray anyway—there was an empty fountain with the briars of dead roses curled all around it, and gravel that had not been disturbed by carriage wheels in years.

Beauty dismounted and knocked on the tall gray door. The sound echoed in the silence, sending tremors down through her bones.

The door creaked open of its own accord. Beauty drew in a breath at this clear sign of magic, but she stepped through all the same. Above her, the chandelier tinkled, though there was no wind to stir it. A curtain drew back with no hand to assist it, revealing a portrait of a staring man.

The Beast leaped from the top of the curving flight of marble stairs to land crouched in the center of the floor. The tiles were already broken there, Beauty saw, crushed beneath his weight and his claws.

She looked at the tiles so she would not run or scream. She was here for her father, she told herself. She was here for her family’s honor.

She looked up, from claws to fur to fangs, and intent, terrifying eyes.

“I am the boy you wanted to care for your horses,” she said. She had intended to mimic a man’s voice, but in this moment, before the Beast, all she could manage was a low whisper.

“Dude,” said the Beast, “am I glad to see you.”

Beauty blinked. His eyes were light, light brown, almost amber: almost an animal’s eyes.

“Every time I go near the stables the horses freak out,” the Beast said. “I just feed them and run. It sucks because I like horses, you know? Before all this happened, I used to play polo.”

Beauty blinked again. “I apologize,” she said at last. “The tongue of beasts is not familiar to me. I do not fully understand your idiom. But I am here to serve, Beast, and happy to care for the horses.”

“Awesome,” said the Beast. “So come in. Pick a room. Oh, uh, and how much do you want to be paid? I’ll be honest here, this is kind of a buyer’s market, I’m desperate and I have piles of gold around. You can just pick up the stuff, basically.”

“I think I’m misunderstanding something, Beast. I actually thought you just said that you were going to give me piles of gold.”

“Well, in return for looking after the horses,” the Beast said. “Obviously not as, like, a present. We just met, dude. Maybe on your birthday.”

Beauty stared. “I am looking after the horses in return for my father’s life!”

“You what?” said the Beast.

“My father said you were going to eat him.”

It was hard to tell, with a visage that was mainly fur and those fearsome teeth, but Beauty thought she saw the Beast make a face.

“Whoa. I was not going to eat him. I’m not a vegetarian or anything, but I draw the line at eating people. I thought that your dad trespassing to steal flowers was a bit much, but I hadn’t talked to anyone in weeks and trying to make a help-wanted sign was getting embarrassing, what with the claws. All I did was ask if he knew someone who’d look after the horses for me.”

She was already here. She could see no reason for the Beast to lie to her, no advantage to him in doing so.

She had never felt quite so stupid in her life.

“I suppose my father panicked,” she said eventually.

“I mean,” the Beast said generously, “I’d panic, if I thought someone was going to eat me.”

Her noble sacrifice was now basically ridiculous. Beauty could go home, she supposed, but she could not bear the idea of that long ride and how her father and her sisters would call her a stupid, stupid girl.

She looked at the Beast, and tried to see him clearly. He looked something like a wolf, and something like an ape, something like a jungle cat and even something like a man.

Looking past the long fangs and the other teeth distorting his jaw, she thought she could see an expression of friendly bewilderment. When he moved his pawlike hands, claws glinting, Beauty steeled herself for a blow, and instead his claws clicked together like dominoes and he looked down at them as though vaguely startled by the fact that they were there. He was, Beauty saw, wearing clothes, even if they were strange, ragged things: trousers of some rough canvaslike material that were simply shreds at the end, and something that might once have been a shirt and now was a scrap of fabric that stretched across his furry barrel of a chest, and an odd, brief collar that was nevertheless standing up.

He saw her looking, and she was fairly sure he misinterpreted the look when he said, with an attempt at gentleness, “You don’t have to stay here, you know.”

“Let us make a gentleman’s agreement,” Beauty suggested.

“Uh,” said the Beast, “okay.”

“To atone for my father’s crime, O Beast, I shall stay in this castle and serve you for a year and a day.”

That seemed the traditional length of time offered in Beauty’s books. The other options were seven years, which seemed a very long time, or a hundred years, at which point Beauty herself might as well volunteer to be eaten.

“Thanks, that’s very cool of you,” the Beast said, and his huge shoulders slumped with relief.