Beauty and the Werewolf

“He has the same sort of box. If either of you puts a letter in yours, it will turn up in the other one. You can only use it once a day. That’s how it works. I don’t know why it works. It might use Spirit or Air Elementals, or something else entirely. I didn’t go poking around at it.” He grimaced. “It’s not a good idea to pry too deeply into Godmotherly magic. It tends to bite. It doesn’t like being meddled with.”

“I can imagine. Has Father got his box yet?” she asked, excitement filling her. Finally! She had so much to ask him, to tell him —

“I’ve no idea, but I am sure that the mirror will show you,” Sebastian pointed out. And when she hesitated, he waved a hand at her. “Go on, you might as well go. You are just going to sit there quivering, wanting to see, if you don’t.”

She scarcely waited for him to finish speaking before she ran off with the box. Literally ran. The need to finally talk to her father was a terrible ache in her, a literal, physical ache.

She reached her suite and ran to the table, uncovering the mirror with trembling hands. The mirror seemed to respond to her urgency, clearing immediately and showing her father at his desk, a box identical to hers sitting in front of him. He was staring at it with a strained look, as if he was torn between hoping it was what he had been told, and afraid that it was some terrible hoax.

She tore open the drawer of the desk in a frenzy, getting out paper; she practically spilled the ink in her haste to dip her pen and start the letter, and she didn’t even think about what she was going to say. She just poured it all out onto the page, page after page, how sorry she was that she was causing him all this trouble and grief, how much she apologized for putting herself in this situation, how she missed him, how she was watching him in her mirror, what the Godmother had told her, what Sebastian had told her, that she was all right so far —

It wasn’t terribly coherent, and it was spotted with ink blotches and a few tears when she had finished everything that would fit into the box. She folded the pages — written on both sides — and put them inside, closing the lid and holding her breath.

In the mirror, her father’s box suddenly glowed, a soft yellow light.

He started, and wrenched it open.

He pulled out the pages — which, so far as she could tell, were hers! — and began reading them, racing through them the first time, then reading them more slowly a second time, and then going over them practically word by word the third time. His face was streaked with tears before he was through — as was hers — but he was smiling, as well.

He looked up — and the mirror view moved so that he was looking straight at her — and blew a kiss into the air, as he used to do when she was very small and he was going off to the warehouse for the day.

Only then did he take pen to paper himself, and slowly, carefully, as was so very typical of him, begin his reply.

She watched and waited, hands clenching a handkerchief that she had somehow gotten hold of, as he wrote. Like her, page after page; like her, on both sides. Finally, he finished, folded his missive carefully, kissed it and put it in the box.

Her box glowed. She snatched it open.

She went through three more handkerchiefs, crying, as she read it. Certain things stood out more than others.

How were you to know that the woods you had crossed a hundred times held that kind of danger? I certainly didn’t know, and supposedly I have the ear of the King. It is not your fault. If it is anyone’s fault it is the fault of those who thought that secrecy meant security. And whatever happens, I will stand by you, and I will not permit my daughter to vanish as Duke Sebastian has vanished. And nevertheless, I still have faith that all will be well.

There was, of course, more, much more. There was a great deal of reassurance that she had not done anything wrong. A wry reminder that things would be entirely different if she had disobeyed him, but she had had his express permission to visit Granny whenever she wished, and that she had made her way home after darkness had fallen several times that he knew of. That she did not need forgiveness, since she had done nothing wrong.

It was everything she had hoped to hear, and had feared she never would —

It was everything she needed to hear.

And finally, the admonition that he wanted to hear what her day was like, every day, no matter how trivial it seemed, and that he would tell her the same.

And then a final postscript, after the salutation Your loving father.

It is just as well that the Godmother limits us to a single missive a day. We would be able to keep up our chess games, otherwise, and without being distracted by your clever ploys, I would finally have the chance to trounce you as completely as you deserve!

She didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

So she did both.

Sapphire had insisted that she have a long hot bath before she went to sleep. The Elemental even snatched away her nightgown and pushed her toward the bathing room. When she woke in the morning, she realized why. Her legs hurt.

Of course they hurt, she scolded herself. You’ve never spent that long in a saddle before. An hour or two at most, nothing like that entire afternoon, and in the cold, as well!

She really didn’t want to move, but she knew that the only way to get her legs to stop hurting as much was