When he woke in the morning, the monster was gone, and he held a beautiful woman in his arms, with the whiff of elder days about her.
The song is true, more or less. He wasn’t the king, but a younger prince, and no one ever comes up with a suitable rhyme for “goshawks.” And I would deny categorically that I was “the fairest lady that ever was seen,” then or ever. But most of the other details are right.
I did not want him to kill the hounds or the horse or even the mad-eyed goshawks, which made such pitifully small mouthfuls of feathers. But I was given no choice in the matter. These things were, you might say, the conditions of my parole.
I was enchanted two or three hundred years ago, as near as I can determine. The reasons don’t matter now. Everyone involved is dead, except for me. I have not been able to find records of my father’s house, or of the sorcerer that enchanted him, and my sense of time passing was blunted by the years. Acorns turned into worm-ridden oaks and came crashing down, tearing holes in the forest canopy around my hall, and I endured.
I should have started marking the seasons, I suppose, but I was not thinking clearly. Being turned into a monster will do that to you. I was sunk into despair, curled up in the back of the ruined hall. Hunger was the only thing that drove me outside. It may have been several seasons before I travelled more than a hundred yards from the hall, and ate more than lichen clawed from the stones.
I was — well, I suppose I was a sort of bear-like creature, but a bear crossed with something else, and larger than any mortal bear had ever been. I had shaggy fur and horns like a cow, and enormous claws. My eyes were very large, and the edges of my tongue turned up against my fangs.
It was a long time before I could look at myself in a still bit of water without screaming. Screaming only made it worse, because they weren’t proper screams at all, but the bellows of a monster. It was too exhausting. I stopped looking.
My claws bothered me the most, because they were always in front of me, and I couldn’t ignore them. But they were useful for tearing into rotten logs to turn up grubs, sometimes even honey, and I learned to flip fish up onto the banks with them. The magic would not have let me die of starvation, but it did not much care if I felt hungry, so I learned to fish and eat grubs and mushrooms and anything else I could find.
The first knight came to the hole a year or two after the enchantment took hold. I tried to hide from him. I was ashamed. I had been beautiful, and now I was a great shaggy monster reduced to eating insects and gnawing strips of lichen off the stones with my teeth. I did not want to see him. I was afraid that he would try to kill me, or worse, that he would recognize me.
It was the magic that dragged me out of the ditch where I was cowering. It walked me up the pathway like a marionette and forced me through the open doorway. The knight started up, looking shocked, and I dug my claws into the floor until the nails split and tried to beg for mercy.
The magic pried my jaws open, and in a voice like stones grinding together, I demanded meat.
He attacked me. The magic used my claws to kill him.
I think I went a little mad after that.
I did not eat him. I want to be very clear on that. Sometimes the songs say that I did, but the bodies vanished into the magic without any help from me. But I went blundering out of the hall, bellowing. I rolled in mud and wiped my claws endlessly in the grass, trying to get the blood off. I tore at tree trunks, trying to scrape it off in the clean heartwood, tearing down great swaths of ivy that fell across my face and back until I could hardly move.
Eventually my claws came clean again, but I could smell his blood for days afterwards, a coppery stink that clung to my fur and stuck in the back of my throat.
It was a long time before I could go back to the hall. I don’t know that I would have, but the magic poked and pinched at me, the murderer returning to the scene of the crime.
And yet, when I did return, I was glad. The twin saplings growing on either side of the door, one a little closer to the wall than the other, were like friends. The tumbledown wing with the shattered beams and the nests of wood-doves were familiar. It was an unexpected sweetness, like tearing open a ruined tree and finding wild honey inside.
The body was gone. The bloodstains seemed old and faded. I allowed myself to hope that it would not happen again.
The second knight came in winter, and he had such frightened eyes. I would have let him go — I swear I would have — but when the magic took me by the throat and I growled “Give me meat!” he fell down and begged for mercy.
Mercy is not the same as meat. I killed him, still on his knees.
I tried to commit suicide several times after that, but the magic would not let me. Monsters do not drown easily, and I tore the hide around my throat to shreds without ever getting near the vein. When I ate poisonous mushrooms, I shook and sweated and lay in a puddle of my own vomit for three days, but I did not die. It was a cruel immortality.
There
