Page 117 of The Beast King's Bride

“No, I…” I’ve turned my ring into my hand, the stone pressing against my palm as I clench my fists. “I came to see the head cook.”

“The head cook?” The maid blinks wide eyes at me. “But…”

“Where is she?”

“In the kitchens, my lady. Let me show you the way.”

“I know the way,” I start but the maid is already flitting before me like a bird, her dirty, brown skirts flapping.

Something is bothering me and I realize what it is as I follow her. I don’t know her, or the maid I saw earlier. I didn’t recognize any of the maids I passed by today as I crossed the backyard.

“You’re new here,” I say.

“Oh no, my lady. I’ve been working here for the past year.”

“A year.” I frown. “That can’t be. I was here a few weeks ago and you weren’t—”

I stop so suddenly I almost fall over. The kitchen looks different. The counter is new, made from another wood, the cauldron over the fire bigger than the one we used to have. The cook used to complain day and night about its size and about how a bigger one was needed.

“Where is the head cook?” I whisper.

“That’d be me,” a woman says, an unknown woman, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’m the head cook. But my lady, who are you?”

The old cook has died. Perhaps more importantly—though not for me—the king himself has died, and the queen is now ruling the kingdom of Kyrene. He died two years ago. The cook died five years ago.

I’ve been gone for seven years.

Seven years.

The head cook is shooting me sideways glances where I’ve sat before the cauldron and the fire, trembling, thinking. Trying to wrap my head around this little fact.

I’d known, I’d always known that time flows differently in the land of Faerie, but then it slipped my mind as other facts about that world and its inhabitants proved to be false.

This one had been true all along.

At least, I think, hysterical laughter bubbling up my throat, at least it’s not like one of those tales where I was away for a hundred years and returned to find everyone I knew dead. At least—

“Pete.” I jump to my feet, turn to the cook. “Is Pete okay?”

“My lady,” she says, and I know now why they keep addressing me like this, staring at me. My clothes may have been the roughest in the closet of my room in Faerie, and yet they are as fine as any lady’s here. “I’m not sure I know who you speak of. Who this Pete is.”

My heart starts to sink. Seven years, I think. He wasn’t much older than me but disease takes even babes. What if something happened to him, what if—

“I know Pete,” the maid who led me here says with another curtsy. “If my lady means Peter Walstow, the poor man.”

“Poor? Why poor?”

“Well, he married the cobbler’s daughter, you see.”

A sting in my chest, though I’ve always known that Pete and I, we were like siblings. “Yes, I see,” I say, though I don’t.

“But she died before having the babe a few months ago. Some complication or other. And that after his sister died. He’s withdrawn into himself, they say, living in the cobbler’s house. The girl’s father died soon after her, following her to the grave, so he lives there all alone.”

“Some say he’s turned to the bottle,” the cook says, brushing gray hair out of her eyes. “Yeah, now I recall the boy.”

“I have to find him. And after that…” I approach the cook. “Do you need a kitchen hand?”

“You mean him?”

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