The Eye of the Beholder (21 page)

"Then why can you not meet my eyes when you claim that it is? Why are you so eager to distract me whenever we are engaged in civil conversation?"

Her persistence provoked my anger and I raised my gaze back to hers. There must have been something of a feral glint in my eyes, for she recoiled from me and some of the strength seemed to leave her. Her shoulder slumped as she fell a step back from me, and I knew I had succeeded in frightening her. Why did the knowledge leave me with such a hollow sensation?

We stood for some time in silence. "Shall we continue?" I finally asked, gesturing toward the corridor that lay ahead of us.

"Lysander," she said, ignoring the question, "you know very well that you frighten me. You have resorted to frightening me whenever I have managed to touch upon something you would rather not discuss. You have proved you are cruel and heartless many times over. But if you think this makes you superior to me, you are dead wrong; in fact, it makes you nothing more than a rogue who is clearly unworthy of my time. I was a fool to have given you the benefit of the doubt. I see now that you are indeed incapable of any sort of decency." With those words, Mira turned and walked away from me.

I stared in disbelief at her retreating back. No one other than the enchantress had ever dared speak such words to me. I have no doubt that everyone who ever knew me thought them, but only Mira and the enchantress had been brave enough to speak the words to my face.

Almost against my will, I found myself walking after her. I could see from the way her spine stiffened that she heard my step, but she continued walking, pretending that she could not hear me.

"Mira, wait," I said. She stopped, turning and looking at me expectantly. "I have told you that I make no apologies for who and what I am, have I not?"

"Yes, you have."

"Then why should my behavior surprise you?"

"It does not surprise me. It makes me pity you," she said, looking at me with some disdain.

My temper flared once again. "I am not here to please you. I will not change who I am for your sake."

"You are mistaken. I do not expect you to change for my sake."

"What then? Have you come to save my soul?" I scoffed at her.

Her eyes were fiery as they met mine. "I came because you wanted a prisoner and I wanted to spare my father. I did not come here for you. I have tried to make the most of it, but you have shown me that you have no interest in living harmoniously, though I cannot for the life of me imagine why. Look around you, Lysander. You are master of a castle that is collapsing in upon itself. Your cruelty has won you the fear and dislike of your servants. What an impressive kingdom for you. I can see why you are so proud of it."

"I suppose I should be like you, then, should I? I should be kind and generous like you so that everyone will love me as they love you? Well, I care nothing for winning the love of others," I sneered at her.

She shook her head, her eyes never leaving mine. "That is where you are mistaken. Everyone does not love me." This was not the response I was expecting and, for a moment, I was struck dumb. Though her gaze was defiant, I could also see a flicker of pain before she looked away from me. "You can try all you like to make me lose hope, to give in to despair, but you will not succeed."

"Hope is for fools," I said, turning my back on her.

"Is it, or is that what you tell yourself because you lack the courage to fight for something better?"

"Are you quite finished?" I growled, turning back to her once more. I could feel my ire rising.

"No," she said, and to my astonishment she smiled. "No, I assure you that I am far from finished."

"Go," I said, pointing down the corridor in the direction she had been walking. "Go back to your chambers as you intended."

"Go?" she asked, stepping in front of me and forcing me to look at her. "I have no intention of locking myself in my chambers simply because of you. You can either try to find a way to live civilly with me, or you can retreat to your own chambers. Which will it be?"

The constant push and pull of my own emotions, of my own whims was beginning to wear on me. I wished to be with her and then did my best to push her away. I told myself that I did not care if I never broke the curse, but I clung to the hope that it could be broken. All I wanted was control of my life, the sort of control I had possessed before the enchantress had arrived and cursed me. For nearly three hundred years, I had tried my best to convince myself that I did still have control of my life, but that was a lie. The enchantress had taken that control from me and her curse had placed it directly in Mira's hands.

The only question that remained was what path I would follow. Would I, in my stubbornness and arrogance, continue to fight with Mira, to provoke her until all hope of anything other than animosity between us was lost? Or would I choose to rein my stubbornness and arrogance in and see where this path with Mira led? Was I truly so weak and craven that I could fear a mere maiden like Mira and what meaning her presence in my life might prove to hold?

"I believe we were in the middle of a tour," I said gruffly, my decision made.

Chapter 20: Another Battle Won

Winter became late spring. The days grew longer, the dark hours shorter, though if I were to step in any chamber other than my own, such change was scarcely noticeable. I was enormously grateful that I could stand in my chamber looking through the glass doors at the glory of the sun as it rose each morning. I knew Lysander did not see this, and it made me sorry for him. What was a life without sunshine, without light, without laughter?

Gradually, he and I had begun to spend more time together. Initially, the thought of being with him more often was distasteful, but I also knew he was trying to force me into avoiding his company, and I was not giving up the fight so easily. As terrible as he frequently was, he was my only possible companion within the castle, and it made my life simpler and more tranquil to try to get along with him. The more I pursued this course, the more his sharp edges seemed to dull, and I began to enjoy our time together. He was erudite, dry and witty, his personality unlike that of anyone else I knew, and he engaged my mind in a way that few ever had.

My spending more time with Lysander meant that I had less time to spend cleaning the castle, but this did not disturb me as much as I had thought it might. While there was a deep sense of satisfaction to be derived from seeing to it that years upon years of grime was wiped from a stunning marble floor, the castle renovations did not provide me with the sort of intellectual stimulation and satisfaction that my encounters with Lysander did. I had begun to realize just how much I had missed exercising my mind as well as my body.

The hurts of my past softened and dimmed, and they no longer held the same power to wound me that they had once possessed. There was a time when an unkind word from my sisters was enough to leave me dispirited for days, and I had come to wonder why I had ever given them the power to hurt me. What did it matter what my sisters thought of me? It did not matter what they said, what mattered was that I had chosen to let their words affect me. Lysander taught me this; but not directly, and not through kindness.

Now that I had come to understand his conduct, it could no longer hurt me as it once could. I know this displeased him, but I was glad of it for I felt that he could do with a bit of displeasure in his life. He needed to know that he did not exercise ultimate power over every being with whom he came in contact. Where I had once paled under his threats and unkind words, I learned to smile. I knew he resorted to them only when I came close to touching something below the careful façade he had erected. He had sought to distract me by doing what he could to provoke me and, once I learned to refuse to allow myself to be provoked, he was without weapon. Had I learned to ignore the taunts of my sisters, to let their insults fall upon deaf ears, they would have been rendered powerless as well. Inadvertent though his help was, I felt I owed Lysander a debt of gratitude for helping me to learn how to assert my own power.

Throughout all this, my father was never far from my thoughts. I missed him terribly and wished with all my heart that I could be with him again. At times, I had monstrous dreams in which I saw him wasting away, blaming himself for my imprisonment. I feared that he hated himself, that he would never forgive himself for my having come to the beast in his stead. I wished there was something I could do to reach out to him, to let him know that I was safe and well, though not exactly happy. Before I fell asleep every night, I would think of him and hope that perhaps, through some sort of supernatural link between father and daughter, he might somehow hear something of what I said to him.

During these times, the miniature of my mother was of great comfort to me. I would clutch it tightly in my palm and whisper to her. Though she could not hear me, it comforted me to feel as though I was linked to her. She could not be with me in body, but she was with me in spirit. Somehow, thinking of her in this manner made her loss less painful to me. I felt her presence much more strongly in the castle than I had ever felt it in the small cottage in Everforest.

As for my sisters, though they had never been kind to me, I could not help but think of them as well. I wondered if they continued in their pursuit of rich husbands, if they were as frivolous and self-centered as they had been when I had been at home. Perhaps my absence had forced them to become more responsible, to take greater care of the cottage, though I doubted this was the case. It is possible for anyone to change, in this I firmly believed, but it was necessary for anyone who was to change to have a sincere desire to do so, a desire that I was certain my sisters lacked. They had always seemed to be content with who and what they were, much as Lysander claimed of himself.

But Lysander was not content with who and what he was. There was a restlessness about him that I observed during the rare occasions upon which he lowered his guard around me. I had the sense that he was grappling with something, though he never spoke to me of it. Still, the signs were there. I do not think that this was entirely owing to my presence, for I had a feeling that he had begun to evaluate his life some time before I came to the castle. There was no way of knowing how things would end for him, but some small part of me could not help but feel that he was not an entirely lost cause.

Over time, I also came to see just how repulsed Lysander was by his own appearance. I had begun to see something of his sense of self-revulsion on the day he showed me the glass-strewn ballroom. Since then, I had observed the pain in his eyes as he looked at his paw, the grimace that bared his frightful teeth whenever he chanced to fail at some task that would have been simple for human fingers. The more time I spent with him, the more accustomed I grew to the sight of him, yet it one day occurred to me that he continued to keep to the shadows whenever he could. I could not help but pity him deeply. Though he could and should control his own behavior, he could not control his appearance, and he suffered because of it. It was a suffering made all the more pitiful by the fact that he inflicted the suffering upon himself.

I cannot say when it happened, but one day it occurred to me that I had lost some of my old self-consciousness since coming to the castle. This was strange, for I had always felt awkward with my surroundings. In the past, I had always had the sense that I did not belong where I was but, somehow, now that I was in the castle, I no longer experienced that sensation. The thought startled me, but the more I pondered it, the more I saw why this was. At home, I had chafed under the restraints of the expectations of others. When my mother died, I had been forced to give up many of the things I loved and shoulder more responsibility than someone as young as I was should have had to shoulder. Though I had never resented it, I had been forced to take on a role for which I was not prepared. Despite being a prisoner in the castle, I had a freedom I had never before known.

When such thoughts threatened to overwhelm me, I turned to my restoration projects for solace, for my mind became blessedly blank whenever I labored. My efforts did not go unrewarded, though at times the work was so painstakingly slow that I felt as though I had accomplished nothing. Gradually, windows became cleaner. Walls were washed and their dull gray pallor was removed, revealing a pure whiteness that stood out as something of a beacon in the gloom. I scrubbed floors and discovered the beauty of the intricate marble veining of their surface. Cleaning the castle lifted my spirits and helped me to feel as if the castle were becoming mine. Once I had hated and scorned it, but I had come to care for it, to love it for its potential.

My enthusiasm was contagious. One day as I worked, I became suddenly aware that I was not alone, and I turned to see two maids standing next to the door of my chamber, watching me. I smiled at them and they nodded at me, their heads bobbing slowly, the haunting orbs of their eyes shining in the dim light.

A few days after that, I was on my hands and knees scrubbing the floor. When the water became too dirty for further use, I carried it to my chamber to empty and refill with clean water. As soon as I stepped through the door, the maids halted their work and turned their heads toward one another. To my astonishment, one of them stepped forward and took the bucket from me. She carried it to the balcony, emptied it, and carried it off. A few moments later, she returned with a bucket of clean, soapy water and a scrub brush. She gestured to me to follow her, and led me to the spot where I had halted my work. My mouth fell open as she knelt upon the floor, dunked her brush in the water, and began to scrub. I stood staring for several minutes until she finally raised her head and gestured an invitation for me to join her. I smiled and knelt on the floor. The silence was broken by the sound of our brushes moving over the marble together.