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  A Tithe to Be Paid

  A Tale of the Dark Forest

  Lucy Leven

  Contents

  A Moonlit Midsummer

  A Strange and Wonderful Dream

  Atop the Tallest Tower

  In the Rose Garden

  The Beast's Lair

  The Stableboy

  A Hunting Party

  The Years Are Long

  To the Sea

  Tales of the Dark Forest

  About the Author

  A Moonlit Midsummer

  Midsummer, and the night was warm, but the shift Cecille wore reached barely to her knees, and the linen was coarse. It scraped at her skin with every stumbling step she took.

  But she took them, as quickly as she was able. For she would not live to see another night like this — she would not live to see any other night.

  So she stumbled forward, aware that each ragged breath she heaved may very well be her last, for already something was hunting her.

  Someone.

  She could feel his presence behind her, gaining on her — the weight of it, the sparking power in it.

  The Beast.

  They had given her to the Beast.

  None of the young women given to the forest had ever come back. Cecille knew that just as she knew the moon in the starlit sky, the startled birdsong in the air.

  A tithe paid each score year: a girl of twenty, born the year the last was given, sacrificed to the Beast, to satiate his monstrous whims, in bargain that the village be left alone, its inhabitants unmolested.

  But the menfolk had given the tithe early that year — she had been given early that year — because in as long as anyone could remember, the Beast had taken what he had not been given.

  A girl, at first, gone with not a trace. Then the men, later, dead, where the forest met the fields, their broken bodies tangled in the undergrowth, run through with jagged, awful wounds no dagger could ever hope to make.

  The Beast had killed them.

  He had not eaten their flesh. He had left them to be found. A trophy. A warning.

  Pay what you owe.

  And so here Cecille was, a trophy in turn. But here she would not long remain.

  A clearing ahead, the moonlight shining bright. Some long-forgotten, primordial instinct urged her onwards. She ran, the rough ground tearing at her feet. A fallen tree branch barred her way. She saw it — but too late.

  It sent her tumbling hard to her bound hands, to her knees, sent her hair tumbling about her face, a hang of black. With wild hands, she reached up to scrape at it, to scrape it back, so that she might see her way again.

  And what she saw…

  “Oh, the gods,” she whispered.

  Claws longer than her hand dug deep into the rich earth a bare foot away from her.

  That was enough to know. She need not look up. She did not wish to look up. Indeed, all but everything in her screamed against it.

  All but everything.

  She looked up. The Beast.

  Every story Cecille had heard, every tale whispered by the dying embers of the fire, every horrified, awe-filled wondering spoken into a forgiving darkness.

  All of them, each and every one of them — they were wrong. Because the truth was so much worse.

  He was near thrice her height, his shoulders broad and thick with muscle, his arms corded just the same.

  Dark hair ran like a pelt down his taut-defined chest and stomach, like an arrow drawing her eyes down to where the essence of him hung heavy between his thighs, the girth unimaginable even as she did not have to imagine, even as her eyes perceived what her mind could hardly fathom.

  And from the peak of his head, conjured from shadow and mist — whether they were the antlers of a stag or the horns of a bull, Cecille could not say. They were monstrous, that she knew. Monstrous like the Beast that bore them.

  Cecille found breath to gasp. She scrabbled away, and the Beast made no move to stop her. She scrabbled in turn to her feet, spun an unsteady circle.

  Mighty oaks grew all around. Some had shed a bough. One, cleaved to pieces, lay but a pace away.

  She slid one frantic glance to the Beast. Still he did not move. And that was when she decided: in her last moment, if this was to be her last moment, she would not be meek — for she would not be here if she was meek, she would not be her if she was meek.

  And so Cecille seized the branch to her and brandished it, an awkward, quavering warning. “Stay back! I will spear you, foul beast!”

  The Beast’s strange and awful face shifted then, a baring of sharp white fangs, something like a smile. Something of amusement. Nothing like fear.

  But Cecille would show him fear. She lunged, took the branch as a spear to his side. Thrust with all her strength.

  The branch struck him there, her aim true — and the branch crumbled in her hands. The wood was rotten, the weapon no weapon at all.

  Her breath left her in a disbelieving rush. It left her hollow and numb in her fear, left her with not even the will to stumble backwards anew.

  The Beast huffed, in irritation or amusement she did not know. He came towards her, one clawed hand outstretched.

  Cecille could run no more, and no good would it have done her. Trees and a tangle of thorns all around, darkness beyond — and from that darkness, growling.

  There was to be no escape.

  Despite her fear, Cecille’s hands had held steady. Now, they began to shake. She swayed where she stood, overcome, suddenly, with a swell of awful dizziness.

  She had not eaten since the morning last, no drop of water had passed her lips in just as long. She was so weak. She could cling to awareness not a moment longer.

  In the bright light of the midsummer moon, the clearing became a sudden patchwork of grey shadow, and then all turned black.

  A Strange and Wonderful Dream

  Cecille woke.

  She lay on a soft bed, over furs and under silks. A fire burned high in the chamber’s imposing hearth. The heavy damask curtains around the bed were half-drawn, a cocoon of warmth. Her sore hands had been cleaned and salved, her feet too, her torn wrists unbound and tended, her skin bathed.

  For one blissful moment, she wondered if she had simply awoken from a peculiar, enthralling dream. If her life in the village, her girlhood, her coming of age, her desperate race through the forest, if it had all been some fevered imagining, and now she was truly awake.

  But then something shifted in the deeper darkness in the corner of the room, a shimmer of golden eyes, and all at once, Cecille knew that she was wrong. That the dream she dreamed was no dream at all, unless she lived in it yet.

  “No!” she gasped.

  The Beast stalked out of shadow and into candlelight. Cecille scrabbled from her furs and her silks, scrabbled back, away, as far as the fine, dark wood of the bedstead would allow.

  But little did it matter. Still, the Beast came stalking towards her, his claws scratching a shivering rhythm on the heavy flagstones — until, that is, between one heartbeat and the next, with the faintest golden glimmer, beast became man.

  His face was sharp, still not quite as it should have been but far nearer than before, skin drawn tight over fierce-cut bone. When they did not shimmer with their bewitching golden light, his eyes were very dark.

  But as the Beast was the man: taller than he ought be, his shoulders broad, still, and well-muscled; dark hair, though sparser, still ran down the centre of him, drawing Cecille’s gaze helplessly downwards once more, to where she could see that everything of him was of proportion.

  Or no — not everything.

  In such matters, he was still beyond proportion, but the sight of him no longer sent a thrill of horror to her marrow.

&nbsp
; He appeared a man broad-built, of casual strength. He could easily overpower her. And he had come close enough to do so.

  The Beast plucked something from the floor by the bed and, crouching, held it out to her: a goblet, full, the water rippling molten in the half-light.

  “Drink, lass.”

  His voice was deep, a rumble that seemed to resonate within her. It made Cecille shiver, made her nipples pebble, cast gooseflesh across her skin, a confusion of sensation.

  And in that confusion, she allowed herself to sway closer to him. With a gasp, Cecille realised what she had done and cowered away from the Beast anew.

  “Do you fear me still, lass?” The Beast cocked his head, set his dark hair tumbling about his jaw. “You need not.”

  From the far corner of the bed, Cecille found her voice. It was a scrape, full of fear and stark disbelief. “You — you stalked me,” she said. “Through the forest, you stalked me. You caught me. You brought me here to your lair. You intend to ravish me.”

  The Beast’s eyebrow ticked. “Ravish you?” he echoed, a show of teeth. “The wolves were hunting you. They would have torn you to pieces, lass. I did nothing but snatch you from their jaws. Now, drink. Your thirst must be terrible.”

  It was.

  It was overwhelming, overcoming.

  Undeniable.

  Cecille reached out and took the goblet, careful that their fingers did not touch. She took a cautious sip. Then, satisfied that there was nothing save water in the cup, and that the water was sweet and cool and welcome beyond measure, Cecille drained her draught.

  The Beast’s mouth quirked, pleased, perhaps, at her infinitesimal show of trust. “More?” he asked.

  “More,” Cecille said. “Please.”

  The Beast poured another cupful from a flagon for that purpose, and Cecille drank it just the same. When she was done, she wiped a hand across her mouth, but she did not return the goblet. The shining metal was heavy, the stem thick. It would serve well to administer a bludgeoning, should a bludgeoning be required. “Where am I?” she asked.

  “In my castle,” the Beast said, “deep in the dark of the forest. You are safe.”

  And strangely, inexplicably, suddenly, safe she did now feel. Though Cecille did not know if such a feeling was a wise one.

  For she wore a shift of the finest, whitest linen. Her old shift, muddied and torn, was nowhere to be seen. She heard no sound from beyond the chamber’s heavy wooden door, no scrape of footsteps, no murmur of voices.

  No servants.

  Had he undressed her himself then? Had he been as the Beast to do so? Had he touched her bare skin, unbidden? Ran his roughened hands over her, trailed his sharp touch across her most secret places?

  Cecille shivered, fevered and chilled as one.

  Though the Beast mistook her shuddering for a flash of fright. “On my word, you need have no fear of me, lass. Unless you ask it of me, I will lay no hand upon you.”

  From somewhere deep within, an anger welled up in her — anger at the menfolk of the village, at all they had done to her and to the other women, anger at the strange half-man who crouched beside her. Cecille summoned the will and the courage to glare at him. “Then I will never ask it of you!” she exclaimed.

  The Beast smiled his strange smile again, though his teeth were not quite so sharp this time. “Perhaps,” he said.

  He straightened from his crouch then, sat on the bed beside her, unclothed still, and an armspan away, but he made no move to touch her, to grab at her. He watched her, though. His eyes, with their golden glimmer, watched her face, and only that. He took no liberties.

  Cecille watched him carefully in turn, watched the steady rise and fall of his breath, watched the entrancing play of warm amber light across his warmer skin.

  “Truly?” she said at last. “Truly, you will not tumble me? You will not ravish me?”

  “It is not in my nature to take what I am not freely given.”

  He spoke his words with bare truth, simple and seemingly plain, and so Cecille could understand them not at all. “But you are the Beast,” she said. “You killed those men. At the edge of the forest. You killed them, and left them there to be found. And they were but lowly woodcutters.”

  “Men?” the Beast echoed, and for the first time Cecille perceived something other than easy amusement in his voice. Distaste, it was. Faint loathing. “Is that what you would call those creatures?”

  “Creatures?”

  “Beasts worse than I, for certain.”

  “I— I do not understand.” The chamber was a haven of drowsy warmth, but a sudden chill overtook Cecille. She left the goblet in her lap so that she might reach for a puddled silk and pull it tight around her shoulders. “How could they be…”

  “I heard her screams,” the Beast said, and his eyes cut away, caught in their remembering. “I made that way. Came upon them. Saw that your woodcutters wished to take from the lass what she did not care to give. So I stopped them. They had sharp axes.” He ran a hand through his hair then, overtop where, in his beastly form, his horned antlers stemmed. “Was I allowed no weapon, lass?”

  “But why would you…?”

  “Save her?” The Beast’s unfathomable eyes looked back to Cecille. “What joy is there in tumbling a lass who does not wish to be tumbled?” he said.

  “But you are the Beast.” Cecille felt as some mimicking bird, so muddled in her confusion. “The Beast.”

  The Beast — who took the helpless girls the village sacrificed to his awful will, who took his foul payment and devoured what remained. All the stories said as such.

  All the stories always had.

  “You are the Beast…” Cecille said again, as though to hear the words would harken a return of her certainty, would reawaken her fear and her usual good sense. “You lie. You ravished her and now she is dead.”

  “I did not,” the Beast said. “And I do not lie. The girl lives yet, safe and well. Gone to an aunt who bides in a town to the north. I saw her there myself.”

  Cecille narrowed her eyes at him, for she knew men never spoke plain. They asked one thing but took another. “And what did you have from her in return?”

  “Nothing but the song she sang as we rode that way.”

  When the gold of his magic did not flicker and shimmer there, the Beast’s eyes were so dark as to be almost black — they may very well even have been black — but yet it seemed that they burned with a warmth that warmed Cecille in turn.

  Cecille did not know this man, nor the beast who lurked within him, but she knew one thing: he did not lie.

  The girl was safe. And so was she.

  Her grip on the silks went lax. She felt them fall about her shoulders, down to the bed again. She was overcome, too warm suddenly, but not from the fire. From the man beside her.

  From the Beast.

  He perceived, then, the turn in her thinking and reached out, slow enough that she might pull away.

  But Cecille did not. Could not. Wished not.

  And so the Beast raised one questioning brow. Might I touch you, he seemed to ask.

  Cecille nodded, a tight bob, timid, not like herself. And how she hated to be unlike herself. So she spoke, her voice clear and steady. “If it pleases you, Beast.”

  “It pleases me.” He circled her ankle. Finger and thumb touched with ease, but his grip was loose. Breakable. Escapable. “But does it please you?”

  It did. For his touch awoke no fear in her, only a lush and welling heat between her legs.

  “I think you are to be coaxed, lass,” the Beast said, his voice a quieting, maddening rumble, “coaxed like a wild mare down from the moor.”

  He trailed off as he trailed his fingertips, as the ghost of a touch, along the pale skin of her calf.

  “When the horsemen in the village go up to the moors,” Cecille said, and her own voice sounded strange to her ears, slow, thick as honey, “they bring the mares down to break them. To make them biddable.”

  The
Beast smiled his strange, captivating smile. “Ah,” he said, “but I would never break you, sweet lass.”

  Atop the Tallest Tower

  Just as Cecille had thought, the Beast employed no servants. No men of work. No men-at-arms. No serving girls.

  But each and every morning in the bright and airy chambers that were given to her, Cecille would wake to find a fire burning, fresh water for the washing, clothes laid out for her to wear — and such clothes they were. Cut from the finest of cloth in the finest of styles. Rich velvets and watered silks. Chemises in linens so white they hardly seemed real. Gowns of deepest emerald or richest blue. Pearls for her hair, gold for her wrists, and jewels for her neck.

  They were all such luxuries as those she would have picked for herself, had she the choice and coin was of no concern. They were the trappings of a rich merchant’s wife, and a sensible wife at that. Fine clothes, but plainly done. No silly fripperies.

  The castle was no place for silly fripperies either, but it was a singular place all the same. For though he had no servants, the magic that lived in the Beast lived, too, in the castle he called home.

  Doors opened of their own accord, fires banked and roared with not a hand to tend them, and tables laid themselves with meats so succulent and breads so warm, it was as though they had been freshly drawn from the spit or the oven.

  And when it came time for Cecille to dress in her new and beautiful clothes, with all their laces and stays and straps, such that she would never have managed without a maid to help, unseen hands shaped themselves from shadow to tighten laces and turn silk ribbon into pretty bows.

  Then, when the time came for her to undress, those same hands returned, drawing her from her gowns, tumbling her hair loose of its silken ties, of its jewelled nets and sparkling pins.

  Sometimes in their undressing, the castle’s hidden hands lingered just a little too long, soft against her skin, soft in places they should not have been, nor had hands other than her own ever been. But Cecille allowed them that. Their touch was hardly unpleasant, after all.