Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper Read Free Book Online Page B

me.
    Maybe I've reminded Papa of the curse and he has nailed me into the tower to protect me!
    It would be nice to believe that, nicer than believing he has shut me up to starve out of pure pique. However, if Mama's Aunt Carabosse managed to get to my christening without an invitation; it is unlikely she would be forestalled by my being locked in a tower.
    I do not want to spend the next hundred years lying in this tower room, waiting for some prince to happen by, however charming he may be. The idea is intensely unpleasant and frightening!
    Now Papa is down in the stableyard, shouting at Martin. I can see him through a crack in the shutters, pointing up and yelling, while Martin holds up the lantern and shrugs his shoulders as though to say there hasn't been any rope there since I moved in. Good old Martin.
    I may as well get a night's sleep. There is nothing I can do until tomorrow.
     
    [We had foreseen all this, down to the details of dress and the menu served at dinner. We had looked deep into the Pool, Israfel and I, and we had foreseen it all]
    10
    ST. PALLADIUS DAY, JULY, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1347
    Early this morning, before light, I got dressed up in my stableboy's clothes (the latest of the several sets I've had since I was eight), put the firewood rope back on the pulley, and let myself down into the stableyard after first letting down all the things I thought I'd need, including Mama's box. I have always had a good head for heights, gained through climbing tall trees on a dare when I was very young, which is a good thing for the tower is extremely tall. Almost as though we'd planned it, Doll and Martin were waiting for me.
    "I thought that's what you were thinkin, missy," Martin said, wrinkling his nice face at me. "Clever girl. Just like your mama. She was clever. Nice, too." Then he handed me Grumpkin who settled down in my arms and began to purr.
    "Doll," I asked, "did my mama leave anything for me here in the castle? Did she leave money for me or anything. A map, maybe?"
    "I never heard of any such thing, dearie," she said. She sometimes called me "dearie," though no one else did.
    "In the letter, she said she'd left me the means to go find her, but I don't know what she meant."
    Doll looked at her feet and turned red in the face and squirmed her hands around in her apron. Martin said, "Tell her, Doll. Somebody's got to tell her."
    "You mean about Mama being a witch?" I asked, flushing. "Papa said that when he nailed my door shut."
    "She warn't no witch," said Doll, firmly.
    "What was she then?" I asked. Looking back on it, I was frightfully stupid, but I really hadn't figured it out. It's not the kind of thing that ordinarily occurs to one.
    "She was a fairy," Doll said. "And I heard the abbot talkin' to your aunts this mornin' about havin' your papa's marriage set aside because a fairy can't enter into holy matrimony, anyhow. I've never heard that was so, but you know who gave the abbot that idea."
    I did know who had given the abbot that idea. Sibylla or her mama, one or both. A fairy! I should have realized that myself! How could her aunts have been anything but fairies to go about making and changing curses. And how could she have escaped from the tower if she were not a fairy herself? It certainly explained the attitude of the herbal aunts. Fairies would be repugnant to my aunts, I suppose, totally concerned as they are with food or drink or religion. Mama's being a fairy also explained why Weasel-Rabbit wanted me shut up in a convent, and it helped explain Mama's letter. When she'd gotten involved with a mortal, she'd lost her memory of being a fairy. I suppose that's about the only way a fairy could survive married to someone like Papa, or married to any mortal. She could accept it only as long as she didn't remember anything else. Then when Papa had gone off and left her, she'd gradually regained her memory, that and the other thing.
    "Am I-am I half fairy?" I asked Doll and Martin. "Does that mean