The Princess Wars: Belle

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Another howl.

 

When the moon is exactly half full, what do you see? If the sky is clear, the disc shines like a nibbled wafer resting upon a porcelain platter. If apparitions veil the sky, the moon sits diffused and demurred in a bowl of translucent jelly. This night the moon was neither immaculate nor opaque. She was gone. Vanished. Not even the dark circular shape of her hung in the sky.

 

 The duke grips my arm. The captain draws his sword. “Get to the tunnels. Now.”

 

Or this is how I dreamt it as I lay in bed, the down blankets piled like layered cake atop my too-thin frame and my silk negligee catching uncomfortably between my legs. I dreamt that the moon was a sweet, white cookie, and I’d bit her cleanly in half. I dreamt that she fell from my fingers, and I could but watch as she sank into the murky water below me. And when I looked up, she was gone altogether. I threw off the covers. They sunk to the floor like a wallop of heavy cream. The ground was cold. Marble. I swung aside the curtains. She was indeed there. Full and ripe as a blueberry.

Luc laughs. “The Fae daren’t enter the Realm so freely. You were right about one thing, duke. We Liorians are weak. Afraid of a couple wild animals.”

My throat tightens. Luc is a fool.

The presence of the full moon did not ease my racing heart. A chill shot up through the soles of my feet, to my ankles, spiking my hipbones and along my spine. My arms were ghostly blue the in pale light. I turned and there - my reflection caught in my vanity mirror. My heart shuttered. My nightmare inclined me to search for monsters in the shadows. I rubbed my arms. A sudden revelation. Monsters in the shadows. I snatched my robe from where it hung on the bedpost. If tonight were the night for monsters, then I would seek them out before they sought me. 

The doors crack and groan. A massive weight pounds against it. Luc stumbles away from the window. The captain pushes me toward the eastern corner of the hall, where, behind a great mantle, hides the entrance to the escape tunnels.

My mother told stories. These days, little else spun from her lips. They were cloudy, curious tales that preferred magic and mystery over a clean, crisp ending.  She seemed to wear a special pair of glasses that granted her vision into another world, a world layered atop the one we moved in. Tonight, with the moon shining full, my limbs trembling from the so-soon-ago nightmare, and the peculiar feeling of cold snaking up my legs, I though perhaps I could don her glasses. 

The guard beside the door turns and draws his sword. The door bursts open with the sound of a great oak in winter, exploding from its own frozen sap. The guard’s legs and torso are crushed beneath it. Two beasts, hounds larger than any dog bound onto the prostrate door. The guard screams. The beasts howl. Their eyes glint yellow, their teeth grey. One curls its black lips and growls, its eyes trained on us across the room. The other leaps forward and tears out the guard’s throat.

Bile rises to my mouth. I touch my neck, as if it were my own esophagus mangled and streaming blood across the marble floor.

There was no beast, Belle.

From each of the great windows leaps a hound. There are five. Five from the windows, two from the door. There are seven hounds in total. They are not dogs. They are not wolves. They must be creatures of magic, which means they must be creatures of the Fae.