The Eye of the Beholder (39 page)

"Well, I am thankful you acknowledge that much at least," I said, in a mocking tone. I knew that I aimed to wound him, but I could not stop myself. "I should have known better than to trust you. I knew what you were from the moment I first saw you."

"That I was a beast?" He sounded as if he struggled to push the words from his throat. "I never claimed to be anything else, did I?"

"You did not, I shall grant you that. You acted a beast from the very first moment. You abused my father cruelly and then you robbed me of my freedom. How I despise you for that."

"You have every right, every reason to despise me."

"You are a tyrant, and you have seen me as nothing more than a pawn. I do not know how I have borne staying here with you all this time. I do not know how I have endured your tirades and your rage. There is nothing admirable about you."

I was shocked by my own cruel tirade. My eyes burned with a combination of anger and tears, and I found my gaze inexorably drawn to Lysander. He was staring at me and, should I live a thousand years, I shall never forget the look in his eyes.

"Do you derive pleasure from saying these things to me?" he asked, his voice filled with despair.

All of my anger hastily left me. I felt sick to my very soul with the realization of what I had said to Lysander. Though there had been truth to my words, I had wielded them as weapons. Lysander had truly changed, I knew that. He had shown me great kindness of late. I had coaxed him into baring his soul to me and now, now I did my best to drive a knife straight into his heart.

"You must go," he said, not allowing me to respond to his question. His voice was as heavy as my heart. "I should not have forced you to stay. I am sorry that my company has been so repulsive to you, but I understand. Were I in your position, I do not doubt but that I would have felt as you do."

"Lysander," I said, reaching tentatively toward him. I could hardly see for the tears streaming from my eyes. "Please, I…I do not wish to cause you pain. Truly, I do not."

"You have not caused me any pain that I did not merit. And I beg you, do not call me that anymore. I ask that you call me by my proper name. I ask that you call me Beast."

At that, my entire body was wracked by sobs. I could not bear to hear him speak of himself in this manner, and I wanted to tell him so, but I was simply crying too forcefully to speak. I wished he would come to me, wished he would envelope me in his arms, that he would hold me close and allow me to sob upon his fur. I wished that I could sit in the library with him again, that I could talk to him through the night, that I could take back every single one of the hurtful words I had spoken to him.

"No," I managed to choke out. "No, I cannot…"

"Please, Mira, go. Please, just leave me."

It was so difficult to speak, but I knew that I must. My words came out between loud sobs. "I cannot go like this. Please, I was so furious with you and I…I said things I should not have said. Oh, please, please, do not hate me."

"Hate you?" he asked, plainly bewildered by my words. "I could never hate you. Do you not know? Do you not understand? Mira, I love you with all my soul."

I froze, still as a statue. His every word seemed to ring in my ear, and I could have sworn that they reverberated throughout the chamber. I wished the floor would open and swallow me. I wished I had not heard the words he had just spoken. My mind was as blank as a slate and all I could feel was a horrible, horrible sensation, as if I had been treading water and now found myself being sucked down, down into the center of a whirlpool.

The silence stretched on and on. I cannot say if I looked at Lysander or if he looked at me, for I was instantly struck blind. After an eternity, I became aware of a voice gradually increasing in volume, a voice that was screaming at me to flee. For a moment, I could do nothing more than remain frozen as I was, wishing I could simply disappear. Then I was seized as if by a fit, running from the chamber as fast as my legs could carry me. I ran and ran and ran.

I did not return to my senses. The forest flashed around me, branches reaching out and tearing at me, but I did not feel the sting of their tearing the flesh from my bones. I felt nothing, nothing at all. It was as if I were as insubstantial as air. My feet moved without my telling them to do so, and my mind was entirely blank of thought. I continued like this for hours, days, an eternity, before my body simply could not continue any longer and I collapsed upon the forest floor. I believe my eyes may have been closed long before I fell upon the carpet of decaying leaves.

Chapter 37: Emptiness

She fled.

As soon as I uttered them, I knew they were precisely the wrong words to say. I hardly knew why I spoke them. I knew only that I felt as though I would burst if I did not speak them. The words seemed large, bright, sharp-edged and I simply had to release them from me. Perhaps I had some mad thought that my saying them would make her stay. Perhaps there had been some part of me that had lived under the illusion that I simply needed to tell her that I loved her and she would realize that she loved me in return. She disabused me of these notions.

I remembered little of what immediately followed. When she left my chamber, there was utter stillness, as if the world had stopped. My sense of hearing, already heightened due to my beastly form, seemed to become so sensitive that the beating of my own heart was a roar in my ears. The silence was unbearably loud, so full in its nothingness that I felt it would drive me mad. Though my heart continued to beat, though I continued to draw breath, I seemed incapable of motion. I was stone, incapable of feeling. All thoughts fled from my mind. I simply existed. I stared into the nothingness, and I existed.

Perhaps I should have immediately gone to the pool, to ensure that wherever Mira went, she made it there safely. I did not need to look to know she had left. It was as if all life, all color, all sound and scent and sensation had drained from the castle. I realized that this was, in fact, the case. The lifelessness of the castle was not something new; it had been lifeless all along. It had simply been made vibrant by her presence, and bled of all wonder the moment she left it.

My ceasing to exist seemed the only logical ending to her going, and so I sat, expecting it to happen. It did not. When I did regain some sensibility, I had no idea of how much time had passed. It was night, but that meant nothing. It could have been mere hours after she had left. It could have been days. I was not much longer for this world, but I was not granted the mercy of it ending when she left. Or had I experienced it? I felt no hunger, no thirst, no cold, and no sorrow. I felt nothing at all. Surely, I had ceased to exist.

However, this reprieve did not last for long. Sensation returned. Basic needs had to be fulfilled--or had to be ignored. Ignoring them caused pain, discomfort, but, as there seemed to be no reason to do anything else, I ignored them. Hunger clawed at me and my throat was as dry as dust, but it was not worth the effort to sate either my hunger or my thirst.

As my mind began to work again, these pains become secondary. The deep, dark, piercing pain of Mira's rejection began to suffuse every fiber of my body, making my thirst and hunger seem like scratches to a man who had been slashed open with a sword, minor annoyances that were hardly worth thought to one in such excruciating pain. I had thought her harsh words had cut me to the bone, but they had been nothing compared with her flight at my confession.

Oh, the unkindness of those words! I did not believe I had elevated Mira upon a pillar so lofty as to make her appear without flaws. They were an essential part of her character, and I loved her for them just as much as I loved her for her many perfections, but I had never imagined she could be so cruel. She had always seemed such a kind, loving person. It was not that I felt that I did not deserve for her to say them to me. Rather, what had truly shocked me was that she had said them because she had wished to wound me. I had seen the intent in her eyes, had heard it in her voice. I was intimately acquainted with that intent, having experienced its allure countless times myself. Mira had wanted to cause me pain, and she had succeeded most spectacularly.

This truly gave me pause. So that was what it was like to be on the receiving end of another's cruelty. I hated the sensation. It made me feel small, insignificant, dirty. I thought of all the people I had treated thus, thought of all the occasions upon which I had turned my nose up at someone in need of my assistance, and I was mortified, more ashamed than I had ever before been.

But what good were these lessons? I had learned them, but learned them in vain. The enchantress had wished me to see my own cruelty, and I had seen it. She had wished me to learn to love someone, to feel something unselfish, and I had. There had been no deception on her part; she had told me that I would need to earn love in return in order to break the spell, but this did not lessen the pain of the futility of my efforts.

I had deceived myself. Even the hundreds of years I had spent in my beastly form had not been enough to help me see that I could not break the spell as easily as I had thought. All my life, I had been given every trivial thing I had ever wanted. But now, now when I wanted something infinitely more precious, I could not have it.

Suddenly, through the fog of time, through my own determination to forget, I remembered something that had happened to me as a small boy. It was a rare occasion upon which I was alone with my father and had decided to indulge my curiosity about my mother.

"Father, what was mother like?" I asked. Gingerly, I edged closer to him.

Father was not a man for caresses or praise but, stupidly, I always hoped that each time I spoke to him would prove to be the exception. I was very good at hiding myself, and whenever I could slip away from my nursemaids, I would watch the knights training. It was always fascinating to me to see how they interacted with their sons, boys only slightly older than me who served as squires. Their fathers were exacting task masters, but whenever a boy did something well, he was sure to earn a smile and a word of praise from his father. Looking at the boy's face as he lapped up his father's encouragement, I felt transported, as if I was experiencing the pleasure along with him.

This was as close to actually experiencing this pleasure as I ever came. When I was older, I came to understand that my father was the sort of man who believed that praise was for the weak. He believed that if you wished to get the best out of someone, you did so by belittling them and criticizing their every move, so that they would be determined to do better. Father was not truly a despot, but no one dared cross him for they knew his punishment was even harsher and swifter than his criticism.

"Your mother was born of a very old, very distinguished bloodline," Father began. I could feel my eyes glaze over as he droned on. He sounded as if he were describing his prized destrier.

"Aye, but what was she like?" I asked, once he had finally ceased rattling off the merits of mother's ancestry.

"Like?" he asked, in a tone that suggested he thought me perhaps a bit slow.

"Aye. Did she like music? Was she fond of plays?" I was eager for his answer, hungrily awaiting the small details that might help me color in the blank in my mind that was my mother.

"I hardly know," my father said in a severe tone. "She was high born, obedient, and she did her duty by her lord. That is all that is worth knowing about her." With those words, he called out for my nursemaids and I was hustled away from him.

His words had made me go cold and I must have looked quite pale indeed, for I heard one of the nursemaids whisper to the other, "His Highness looks peaked. Mayhap we ought to ask for Doctor Barnes. If we do not and His Highness should fall ill…"

The other nursemaid shot her a quelling glance, aware that I could hear what had been said. She need not have bothered, for I was aware of the words only as most people are aware of the sounds of insects singing in the night. My mind was far too occupied with other thoughts for me to pay them any mind. I kept hearing my father's words ringing in my head, over and over. It was as if my mother had been little more than a figure made of straw.

I knew my father was not entirely indifferent about her. Indeed, he had spoken his approval of her when he had droned on and on about her bloodlines and her obedience. What disturbed me was how he had summed her up. She could have been a faithful hound, for all the depth he had given her. I could not help but wonder if, perhaps, he was more distraught whenever one of his purebred bitches died than he was when my mother died. The dogs at least gave him pleasure, as they accompanied him on one of his favorite pursuits: hunting. My mother, on the other hand, seemed to have given him little pleasure at all.

Now, centuries later, I sat in my chamber and remembered this encounter with my father. I remembered it so vividly because I had wondered what it would be like to die and have my existence summed up that succinctly. It made my mother's life insignificant. The farmers continued to work their fields, our enemies continued to make war, and my father continued to slay as many deer as he could. She had not even left behind a son who could honor her memory, for I had never had the chance to know her. The only evidence of her ever having existed was the fact that I existed.