She turned away, moving back toward the fire as if seeking its warmth. “Sorry doesn’t change anything.”
“I know.” I watched her silhouette against the flames, this woman who had defied everything I thought I knew about the world. “But I’m ready to listen now. Ready to hear whatever truth you want to share.”
She remained silent, staring into the fire as if reading secrets in its depths. When she finally spoke, her voice was so quiet I had to strain to hear it. “How do I know I can trust you?”
The question hung in the air between us, heavy with the weight of her past betrayals. By Gaspard. By the Dark Lord’s servant. By me. Men who had claimed to protect her while building her cages.
“You don’t,” I admitted. “I’ve given you no reason to trust me. But I’m asking anyway.”
She turned back to me then, something fierce and vulnerable warring in her expression. “I told you before, and you dismissed me as traumatized, delusional. What’s changed?”
“Nearly dying,” I said simply. “Seeing my sister’s face in the water when that should be impossible. Being saved by a creature that shouldn’t exist. Take your pick.”
That surprised a small, genuine laugh from her. A sound so unexpected and lovely that I found myself smiling in response despite everything.
“The impossible has a way of becoming rather ordinary around here,” she said, returning to perch cautiously on the edge of the bed. Close enough that I could see the firelight turningher hair to living flame, but not so close that I could touch her without straining against my bonds.
I didn’t strain. Didn’t test the restraints. Let her have this control she’d been denied so many times before.
“Tell me,” I said softly. “Everything. I promise I’ll listen.”
She took a deep breath, her eyes fixed on some middle distance beyond my shoulder. It took her a moment to find her thoughts, but I left her have it, patiently waiting.
“It started with Gaspard. The perfect man of our village, or so everyone thought. When my father was taken as the forest’s sacrifice, Gaspard offered me protection for the town to believe I’d be his ward.” Her mouth twisted into something too bitter to be called a smile. “Protection that quickly became possession.”
The fire crackled in the silence that followed, as if encouraging her to continue. I remained still, afraid that any movement, any interruption, might cause her to retreat back into herself.
“He raped me,” she said flatly, the words dropping like stones into still water. “Not just once. Whenever he wanted. And when I fought back, he created... devices. A contraption for my face with a wooden ball to gag me. A metal collar that he could chain to the wall so I couldn’t escape while he was away.”
My fists clenched involuntarily, straining against the cloth that bound them. The rage that flooded me was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Pure, incandescent fury that this man had touched her, hurt her, treated her like an object for his pleasure. I wanted him dead. Wanted to be the one to end his perfect face, to make him suffer as he had made her suffer.
But my anger wouldn’t help her now. Would only prove I was another man ruled by violence. So I swallowed it down, forced my hands to unclench, and kept listening.
“It was only when he declared he was going to breed me, to force our marriage the next day, that something changed,” she continued, voice steadier now. “A raven had bitten me earlierthat day after visiting me a few times. And somehow, when Gaspard came at me that night, my magic woke up. I threw him across the room without touching him.”
She glanced at me, gauging my reaction. I kept my expression open, encouraging. “The same magic you used to heal Thibaut? To heal me?”
She nodded. “I think so. Though I didn’t understand it then. All I knew was that suddenly I had a weapon, a way to fight back. It’s how I escaped the drowning cage too, when they tried to execute me as a witch. But it only came out when my life depended on it.”
“And then you ran to the forest,” I supplied, pieces falling into place. “Where you met the beasts.”
“Yes, following the raven like I did to bring us here.” Her fingers traced patterns on the bedcover, not meeting my eyes. “They... claimed me. Mated me. I thought it was just one beast at first, but later I realized there were three of them. Three princes cursed into monstrous forms and trapped in a hell dimension by the Dark Lord’s sorceress.”
I remembered the marks on her shoulder, the bites that I’d dismissed as evidence of her abuse. “The claiming mark,” I said slowly. “That’s from them?”
She nodded, a flush creeping up her neck that had nothing to do with the fire’s heat. “Yes. It binds us together. Helps me communicate with them across the barrier between worlds.”
The idea should have disgusted me. This woman I’d begun to care for, mated to not one but three beasts. But after what I’d seen in the river, the impossible vision of my sister’s face, I couldn’t dismiss anything as too fantastic to be true.
“And my sister?” I asked. “You mentioned Odette.”
Isabeau’s eyes darkened. “She was here, in the castle. A wraith, a ghost-like figure who watched me. I only saw her once, but Ibelieve she was spying for Gaspard. He arrived shortly after her appearance.”
I felt cold despite the fire’s warmth. “Spying? Odette disappeared when she was sixteen. They said she was visiting my mother’s family, but she never returned. If what you say is true, if she was here...”
“Then Gaspard has been involved in this longer than we realized,” Isabeau finished. “I don’t think she was acting of her own will. I think she was under his control somehow, just as he tried to control me.”
I closed my eyes, remembering the vision in the river. Odette, telling me to listen to Isabeau, that the forest spoke through her.