Page 1 of Beauty Reborn
Prologue
It’s true what the folktale says: I did choose to live with the beast. But not for the reason you think. Not to save my father. Not even to save myself.
In truth, I was hoping I’d be eaten.
Everything began with Stephan Galliford, who had a gleam in his gaze from the first moment he saw me, who bent low and kissed my hand and lingered.
Stephan asked me three times to marry him. Three times, I said no.
After that, he didn’t ask.
When the news came that Father was bankrupt and we had to sell all we possessed to pay our debts, my eldest sister, Astra, wailed in such a way it might have been the death of everyone she loved—if she loved anyone besides herself, that is. Callista and Rob were more reserved in their responses, though they also grieved the loss of the home and life they’d known. Father was silently broken, the echo of a man who went through every required motion though he no longer lifted his eyes from the ground.
I alone was ungrieved. Astra hated me the more for it, but Callista said, “It’s wonderful, Beauty, that even in all this darkness, you can still find hope.”
It was not hope; it was escape, albeit temporarily. But I did not correct her.
While Astra wept over the loss of every embroidered gown and jeweled brooch, I assisted Father with the auction. I smiled at potential buyers and urgently chattered about why this painting was a necessity for a regal sitting room or how that riding habit was in most excellent fashion and taste. As a lady of society had once told me, chatter was my only true skill, and I employed it relentlessly while Father did all he could to recoup the debt incurred by the loss of his silk and his ships.
Only one item at the auction gave me pause. I cradled it gently, ran my thumb along the curve of the base. I would have plucked one of the strings if not for my father’s glance just then. In his eyes, I saw the longing to allow me one relic, one testament to all that was gone. But relics could not be afforded—not when I’d already seen Astra tuck a necklace away—and my violin would sell for more than my wardrobe, so it was the only contribution I could make.
Catching the attention of a lady I recognized, I said, “You’ve wanted your daughter to engage in a fine hobby. There is nothing so fine as music.”
And the deed was done. She lifted the instrument out of my hands, leaving my fingers cold and exposed. I curled them into my palms, hugged my arms to my body, and resumed my chattering with more devotion than ever until the day was worn out, the auction done, and our once-warm house empty of soul.
When I chattered in the same way during dinner that evening, Astra screamed at me to be silent. If not for Rob’s quick hand of restraint, she would have doused me with the wine from her cup.
Father scolded her sharply. “Without Beauty, I’d have accomplished little these past days. What have your tears accomplished, Astra?”
There was silence after that.
I had managed to restrain my flinch, but still I trembled. Even though I had no desire to be alone, I excused myself before they could notice my weakness.
Stephan did not come to the auction. I imagined the lord baron had not wanted his nephew and heir near a penniless, ruined girl, no matter how Stephan argued. The daughter of a wealthy merchant was one thing, but no future baron could leash himself to a peasant who would soon have to dig her fingernails in the dirt and grow calluses to survive.
I prayed for a thousand calluses and twice that many nights without a glimpse of Stephan’s gleaming eyes.
But I could not pray away the haunting memory.
My father’s connection to another merchant secured us a new house on the far west side of town. It was barely a hut and so close to the wild forest’s border that no one had been able to use it. The land was untamable for trees, but tame it we would have to.
“Easy to make a choice when there’s only one option on the table,” I joked. “Perhaps we shall be fortunate enough to be offered asecondrickety hut, this one near a wicked fairy’s tower. Then our heads would truly spin.”
Rob put a gentle hand on my shoulder, as he had done several times since the bankruptcy, his voice growing wearier with each reminder. “Now is not the time for jest.”
But now more than ever, I could not bridle my tongue—not even when I noticed Rob swipe at his eyes while loading our few belongings into a battered wagon. My older brother cried over nothing except severe injury, and I knew it was not the loss of the house that upset him, nor even the loss of Orpheus, his purebred riding stallion. His tears were for Eva, who would not be permitted to wed a man with no fortune and no inheritance.
I opened my mouth to offer comfort, but my tongue offered only amusement, until at last, Rob sent me to find Callista, even though he had no use of her and she stood plainly with Astra.
I’m sorry,I meant to say, yet apologies remained as unavailable to my tongue as comfort. If I began apologizing, I would never stop, because there was a fire inside me, scorching my stomach, blistering my heart, and it couldn’t be smothered by even a thousand regrets; it would only turn the words to fuel and burn my lungs to smoke until I could never breathe again.
So I laughed about rickety huts, even while the fire and I watched each other through narrowed eyes. I held it down through sheer force, locked beneath a tightened throat. Though the bile of my stomach boiled, none of it emerged past my teeth. Meanwhile, the chasm between me and my family that had started with my ridiculous name and grown with my ridiculous ideas only widened by the day.
As it turned out, I had been unkind to call our new home a rickety hut. It was more a cramped cottage—small, certainly, but more stable on its foundations than I was on mine.
“Oneroom?” Astra cried. “For three grown girls?”
“We’re fortunate,” Father said, though there was no heart in his words. “One room for Rob and me. One for you girls. It might have been all of us together.”
