Once Upon a Time

The servants of Chanceux Chateau would have screamed if they could when the stain glass skylight in the little hall shattered and a young woman fell through the ceiling with the broken glass. She dropped like a twisting cat and landed with an ominous crack.

A footman and one of the grooms reached her first. She was passably pretty but plain, wearing the muted colors of a villager. Her breathing was ragged and her face was tight with pain. “NO!” she screamed when the groom tried to roll her on her side.

The footman and groom leaped backwards. They thought for sure she was unconscious, but the young lady opened and rolled her eyes. She didn’t cry, but she clenched her cloak close to her body with shaking hands.

The groom inched back to her side and extended a cautious hand to her skirt, intending to remove bits of glass that were digging into the cloth.

“Don’t,” the young lady whispered. “My leg—,” she broke off, hissing in pain.

The groom turned helplessly to the footman, who was already signaling a chamber maid to fetch the staff physician.

Hesitantly, the groom crouched at the girl’s side and nudged glass away from her.

“What happened?” a voice growled.

The footman lunged to his feet and hurried to stand in front of the chateau’s lord, gesturing at the broken skylight—where night lurked like a pool of black ink—and then to the fallen girl.

The groom stood as well and bowed to the lord, but he sank back into a crouch when the lord dismissed him.

The groom carefully scooted around the girl’s body, brushing glass away as her breathing came in pained but steady gasps.

“Duval has been called for? Good, he may see to her and send her on her way,” the lord said, his voice the lowest of baritones.

The footman hesitated and pointed to the skylight and a hall door before lifting his hands in a plea.

“I do not care if it is late. She shouldn’t have been skulking around the castle,” the lord said.

The groom stood and waited until he had his lord’s attention before he gestured at the intruder’s leg.

“Fine. Put her in a bedroom for tonight. She leaves at dawn.”

The groom bowed and happily returned to brushing glass away from the intruder/guest. He accidentally nudged her leg when he tried to extract a large shard of red glass from under her cloak.

The girl screamed. It was an utterance of mindless pain that seemed to be squeezed from her heart. “My leg,” she groaned, clenching her eyes shut and finally throwing her arms wide.

The chateau lord turned to the footman. “Shut her up and move her. Immediately!”

The groom almost fell as he tore across the hall to the steward and castle lord like a frightened colt. He frantically slapped his arm before pointing to the girl.

The castle lord sniffed the air, but he need not bother. Even in the dim torchlight he could see the blood spilling from lacerations on the girl’s arms. He growled and stalked to the injured intruder, entering the ring of torchlight.

The girl opened her eyes when she heard him draw close. When she saw him her mouth opened, but nothing came out. Her terror was a sharp scent in the air, and her whole body trembled.

The chateau lord was a beast. He had the head of a black cat. His nose was flat and his teeth were too big for his mouth and poked out of his lips. He had pads on his fingers and palms like a dog, and his finger nails were more like claws—which extended as the frightened girl shivered.

He was broad shouldered like a massive dog, and his legs were like the hind legs of a cat. Instead of bending forward on knees his legs curved back and gave him a swaying gate.

He was covered in black fur, but the worst of it was his eyes. His eyes were amber and the pupils were slitted like a mindless beast.

The chateau lord ignored the reaction and picked her up like she weighed no more than a corn husk.

Sound finally ripped through the girl’s terror. She howled as the lord carried her—jostling her leg. Her eyes rolled back and she fell silent when she fainted.

The chateau lord glanced up at the hole punched through his ceiling. “She fell from there? It’s a surprise she’s alive,” he said as he left the little hall, his nails clicking on the floor as his servants scurried around him like fleas.

Once upon a time there was a handsome prince who was cursed by an evil witch.

No.

Once upon a time there was an illegitimate prince—the son of the King—who was sentenced to insanity by a wicked witch and was rescued by the curse of a beautiful enchantress.

The fairy tale was a stark reality for those who were connected to the crown of Loire. To everyone else it was a fable, a tale told to teach children morals. Elle had fallen straight into the fairy tale.

The pain woke Elle like a starved animal.

She remembered chasing after the villagers who were poking around the castle and stomping through the gardens. She had just followed them out of the rose garden and had leaped from one piece of the castle’s sloping roof to the next. But it was black, and Elle miscalculated her landing. Instead of hitting shingles she hit glass and plummeted straight through. She didn’t remember much after that besides pain and a beastly shape.

Someone touched her leg, and Elle groaned.

When she finally opened her eyes there were three people in her room. A woman stood at a fireplace on the far end of the room, a second woman stood at the door, and the third person in the room was a man who was nodding at her bare leg.

The bedroom was posh, better than any room Elle had ever stayed at in her life. It smelled woodsy, probably from the pile of herb roots the man was grating and stirring into a large bowl.

Elle rubbed her nose, pausing to consider the bandages wrapped around her arms. The gesture drew the man’s attention, and he straightened up and smiled at her, giving Elle the chance to see his face—or what little of it wasn’t hidden. A black mask edged in blue partially covered his forehead, swooped down over his nose and cut off just above the lips, running across his cheeks. It was too dark to see what color his eyes were, but he smelled like the herbs in his concoction.

The man hefted a slate in the air, holding it steady for inspection.

You broke your left leg when you fell. I already set it with some aid. I am preparing a pack of Comfrey herb.

Elle stared at the words for a moment before looking him in the eyes and lying. “I cannot read.”

Elle’s words caused the woman by the fire to tumble across the room. She threw herself in a wooden chair that was placed at the bedside, across from the man—who was presumably some sort of barber-surgeon. The woman behaved more like a hunting hound, eagerly wriggling in her chair, than the ladies maid she was very likely to be based on the fine cloth and elegant cut of her dress. Both she and the maid at the door wore masks identical to the man’s, although theirs were edged in the maroon shades of fine red wines.

The barber-surgeon let his mouth hang open in dismay as he looked back and forth from Elle to the slate. He wiped away the words and wrote something new on it with chalk before showing the slate to the ladies maid and the woman by the door.

One of the women covered her mouth in a gesture of horror. The other whipped out a small slate and began writing on it.

Elle briefly closed her eyes, the pain was incredible. Her leg throbbed and ached with a fierceness Elle thought only torture could deliver. The cuts on her arms stung and prickled. She tried to clear her mind and think through the haze.

Elle hadn’t seen the chateau staff before—she always took the night watch, when everything was quiet and no one stirred.

The gossiping servants of Noyers—the capital of Loire and home of the Royal Family—said the illegitimate prince’s servants had been cursed along with him. The stable boys claimed they were turned into animals, and the kitchen staff insisted the servants were completely invisible, but Elle put the most stock in her superior’s guess. Farand said they had lost their voices and faces. Apparently he was right.

The shush of skirts scraping across the floor prodded Elle from her musings. She opened her eyes just in time to see the maid leave the room, the door closing behind her.

The remaining female servant—the one that looked like a ladies maid—perched at Elle’s side, wearing an eager smile.

Elle gasped in pain when the barber-surgeon began wrapping her leg in bandages that were dripping with the odd smelling sludge. It was hot on Elle’s bare skin, and it oozed, but the bandages were skillfully wrapped.

Elle clenched the blankets on the bed, but the barber-surgeon’s hands were gentle. He gave Elle a sympathetic smile, but did not pause in his task.

The ladies maid reached out and patted Elle’s hand before retrieving a comb and teasing Elle’s black hair out of her face. The two servants worked silently. Elle’s unsteady breathing and the crackling fire were the loudest sounds in the room.

The silence was broken a few minutes later by a thunderous voice that stalked towards the room. “—makes sense she can’t read. She’s an unschooled peasant. That means she is an idiot.”

The barber-surgeon plunged his hands in a bucket of water and hastily wiped them clean before he started scribbling away on his slate. The ladies maid at Elle’s side did the same, and both of them leaped to their feet and held their slates out when the door was nearly thrown off its hinges.

“I will not waste my time again by acting as a translator. Although I will suffer this girl’s presence in my chateau I do not want to see her again,” the voice growled before a beast entered the room.

He was a horrifying combination of cat and canine, all death and wildness although he spoke crisply with careful enunciation. He was no less terrifying to behold now than he was in the few woozy moments Elle was conscious after falling through the ceiling. If anything he was more alarming, more wrong as his hulking body loomed in the cheerful light of the fire.

The maid scurried at his side, but the beast waved her away as he read the slates his other servants held out to him.

The beast—the cursed, illegitimate prince Severin—snarled gutturally in his throat before he turned to Elle, who was sinking low in the bed.

“Your leg is broken. Don’t move it or else. Duval will do whatever needs to be done. If you disrespect him I will have you thrown from the castle, broken leg or not,” the beastly prince said. He turned on his hind legs—a movement that was too smooth to be human—and started for the door. The ladies maid at Elle’s bedside knocked a stool over as she darted in front of the prince and again held her slate up.

“What is your name?” the cursed prince asked without turning around.

Elle deliberated on her answer for a moment, but hastily spoke when the prince started to growl. “Elle.”

“This is Emele. She will see to your needs until your leg has healed sufficiently for you to leave the castle.”

He was out of the room before anyone else could push a slate in his direction.

The barber-surgeon—the cursed prince had called him Duval—shook his head as he presented a glass of liquid to Elle.

Elle sniffed it, blinking when the contents burned her eyes and nose. “Alcohol?”

Duval nodded and went back to wrapping Elle’s exposed leg.

Elle took a swig of the drink and almost coughed. The alcohol was potent and powerful. The whole glass was going to get her drunk worse than a villager during Christmas time. Elle winced and her leg ached. She supposed being drunk was better than being fully conscious of the stabbing pain. “Bottoms up,” she said, toasting the air before tipping the drink back.

When Elle finally woke from her alcohol induced stupor the bandaged sludge on her leg had hardened to a plaster consistency. The barber-surgeon was gone, and light leaked through the top of the heavy, velvet curtains that covered the windows. It was daylight.

Elle shifted, and Emele looked up to smile at her.

“Morning,” Elle said, pushing through the pain to adopt the persona of a meek villager. Emele put her work aside before she pulled back the curtains—letting an ocean of glorious sunlight drift across the walls—and straightened the blankets and pillows mounded around Elle.

“Beggin’ your pardon, uh, miss, but I’ve got questions ‘bout my leg. Can I talk to sumone?” Elle asked before Emele briefly disappeared out of the room. A bell rang, and Emele was back.

“Oh, thanks,” Elle said, taking the damp towel Emele presented. She wiped off her face and hands before carefully feeling her scalp for slivers of glass. She remembered being blanketed in the jagged stuff when she first fell, but the servants must have swept it all off.

“Um, ‘bout my—ouch,” Elle said when the ladies maid began attacking her hair with a comb before tying it off with a ribbon. Elle’s scalp still stung when Emele fluttered to the door after a bell rang, she returned to the bed carrying a tray.

“Say, can you—,” Elle started, she cut herself off when Emele placed the tray on a small end table near the bed.

The tray was filled with scrumptious food. There were slices of cheese, wonderfully spiced meat pasties, turnips, and asparagus that dripped with butter.

Emele smiled and poured Elle a cup of tea as Elle slowly cut into the breakfast, reveling in the excellent food. When Elle realized Emele was watching her with round, curious eyes behind her mask, Elle switched to devouring her food with gusto and a general lack of table manners. Even though Elle shoved huge chunks of turnips into her mouth, Emele seemed pleased as she brought Elle a second tray.

When finished, Elle sipped her tea and lounged in the bed, her stomach happily filled for the first time in weeks. Emele settled into her chair at Elle’s bedside, resetting Elle’s thought process.

“What I’ve been meanin’ to ask is, what did the barber-surgeon say ‘bout my leg?” Elle asked, cringing when she shifted and jarred her aching appendage.

Emele did not respond and instead held up a slate that had the word cheese written on it. She picked up the plate that held a few leftover slices of cheese from Elle’s breakfast and gestured to it before slowly tracing her finger below the word.

“Cheese?” Elle said.

Emele nodded and set the cheese down before erasing her slate and writing with chalk.

The ladies maid from the night before, Emele, was still sitting at Elle’s bedside, stitching the seam of a blue gown.