As Old As Time: A Twisted Tale (Twisted Tale, A) Read online

  “What happened?” Maurice asked, trying to remember his manners. Frédéric, he noted, had a tiny glass of something expensive. He must have come from some learned, professional background.

  “My parents sent me away before I could complete my studies. They sent me to this…lovely little place. They paid me off to come here.”

  “Frédéric here has a talent,” Alaric said meaningfully, tugging on the end of his cap. “He can see the future.”

  “Oh, aye?” Maurice asked, impressed.

  “Not really, not always, only a little,” Frédéric protested, shaking his head. “Just enough for my family to exile me here…to be with ‘people like myself’ who would ‘understand it.’ Or, possibly, remove it with more magic. I was in university. I was going to apprentice to a great surgeon. I was going to be a doctor.”

  Alaric caught Maurice’s eye above Frédéric’s head and made a face.

  “I’ve been trying to get him to move in with us,” the groomsman declared, taking a swig of beer and then wiping the foam off in one easy, well-practiced motion.

  “I don’t need to,” Frédéric said, but not meanly. “I have money and I don’t wish to live with animals, thank you very much. Also, I already have a bit of an additional income. The king and queen summoned me to attend to their royal infant. A cold,” he added quickly. “Nothing else wrong with him, and nothing I—or a real doctor—could fix. Ignoramuses! Anyway, they have hired me as their occasional consulting physician, and I do not require your charity, thank you.”

  “C’mon, don’t you want to bunk with a couple of lads your age who can show you around? Rather than rent a room all by yourself at the top of some widow’s drafty attic?”

  “Thank you for your concern,” Frédéric said, again, not unkindly. It was more like he didn’t know any way to be other than per-fect-ly polite. But it left a strange hole in the conversation.

  “Alaric, that girl…” Maurice began. “Outside the tavern before…there was a beautiful girl with golden hair…she turned a man’s nose into a pig’s snout…”

  “Oh, you must mean Rosalind! That one’s a card!” Alaric said, laughing.

  “It’s a bit excessive,” Frédéric said, making a sour face. “That’s the problem with witches.”

  “He was being very insulting,” Maurice said, finding himself rising to the defense of a girl whose name he hadn’t known a moment before. “He was accusing her of being unnatural, and saying that magic was impure.”

  Alaric clicked his tongue. “Ah, there’s a lot of that these days, I’m afraid. Before you came, there was a terrible row. Two boys, a charmante and a normal one—like us—fought over a girl. It came to blows and the charmante won and the other boy died. By magic. The palace guards were sent to break up everything and there was a bit of a riot, accusations being flung back and forth. Some of the guards got caught in the crossfire…with rather more permanent afflictions than pigs’ snouts…which, knowing Rosalind, she will remove the next time she sees him.”

  “You can hardly blame the normal ones, ‘like you,’” Frédéric said with bitterness. “Here these people are who have powers and can do things that you can’t. There’s no control over their behavior and nothing anyone—palace guards or people with muskets—can do about them. They…we, I suppose…need to be controlled. Or made less dangerous.”

  “It was two boys fighting over a girl,” Alaric pointed out patiently. “It happens all the time. Boys die over that sort of thing in normal duels. This one just happened to involve magic. You can’t get all worked up about it.”

  “At the very least, if there must be…unnatural things…people should hide it rather than flaunt it. Besides, magic always comes back on itself. Everyone knows that. She should know that. Rosalind, I mean.”

  “Rosalind,” Maurice said, trying the name out on his tongue.

  “Oh, no,” Alaric said with wide eyes. “Maurice! Say it isn’t so! Not so soon in our relationship!”

  “Her hair,” Maurice said thoughtfully, “is the exact color of the inside of my kiln, when it is hot enough to melt iron.”

  “Oh, good, we’re all safe then,” Alaric said with a sigh, shouldering Frédéric companionably. “With lines like that, we don’t need to worry about coming home to find a ribbon on the door and being forced to find another place to stay the night.”

  “I have said I am not rooming with you,” Frédéric repeated patiently.

  But Maurice was no longer listening.

  Belle always forgot to take the hidden path to Lévi’s bookstore. Either she was reading or dreaming or singing to herself, or just genuinely interested in what the world was like outside her house and the quiet life she and her father led. So she always wound up on the route directly through the village, and therefore talking to—and being talked about by—the villagers.

  And if she was honest, she might have done it a little on purpose. It was pleasant but lonely on their tiny farm. Belle was always eager to start conversations and always disappointed by how they ended the same way, every time.

  “That’s nice, Belle.”

  “Buy a roll, Belle?”

  “Think it’s going to rain, Belle?”

  “Why don’t you stop reading and…fix up your hair?”

  “Isn’t my baby beautiful, Belle? She’s just like the other six—”

  “Have you said yes to Gaston yet?”

  She wished, just once, someone would show an interest in the same things she did. But that just wasn’t possible in the tiny village with the same hundred or so people who had always lived there—and always would.

  Today at least everyone was a bit more subdued, and there seemed to be fewer villagers milling about, gossiping. Maybe someone’s batch of cidre was finally ready, or some cow had given birth to a calf with two tails.

  No, even that would be too exciting to happen in this place.

  She sighed and stepped into the bookstore, fixing a stray strand of hair behind her ear.

  “Good morning, Monsieur Lévi.”

  “Good morning, Belle!” the old man said brightly. He always had a kind smile for her, and was always glad to see her, no matter how many times she visited. “How is your father doing?”

  “Oh, he’s putting the last touches on a steam-powered log chopper for the fair,” she said, spinning daintily on her toes to look around the shelves. Her brown ponytail lifted behind her and for a moment she almost felt like a child.

  “Wonderful!” Lévi said, his mouth breaking into a big toothy grin. “He’s a man who deserves a prize. Or some recognition of his genius!”

  “You’re the only person here who thinks so,” Belle said with a sad smile. “Everyone else thinks he’s crazy, or wasting his time.”

  “Everyone thought I was crazy for opening a bookstore here, of all places,” Lévi said with a smile, pushing his spectacles up his nose and looking at her over them. “But it’s certainly quiet without so many customers. I can get quite a lot of reading done.”

  Belle gave him a smile back, the half-sarcastic one that she was famous—or infamous—for.

  “Speaking of reading—”

  “Nothing new this week, I’m afraid,” he said with a sigh. “Unless you’d like to read one of these religious pamphlets that Madame de Fanatique ordered.”

  “Are they philosophical?” she asked, desperate for anything. “Like, responses to Voltaire? Or Diderot? I wouldn’t mind reading opposing views.”

  “Ah, no. They’re the usual sort. Not even any songs or hymns. Really fairly boring. I also have some…rather morbid…treatises for Monsieur D’ Arque to pick up and take back to the, ah, asylum,” he said, mouth pinched in extreme distaste. “But I’m afraid I can’t let you even touch those. He’s very particular.”

  Belle sighed. “All right. I guess I’ll just borrow one of the old ones, maybe?”

  “Feel free,” Lévi said with a smile, indicating his whole shop. “Any book.”

  She would have to make it a goo
d one. Life would be even sleepier and quieter with her father gone. She saw nothing between now and his return other than bright, cold autumn days, feeding the livestock, and the occasional disappointing long walk to the village.

  Belle needed something fantastic, something exciting to last her until her papa got back—or until life finally began to happen.

  Whether by chance or not, Maurice began to see the pretty girl with the blond hair everywhere: attending to magical fixes of ordinary things for farmers and shopkeepers, distributing bespelled roses to cure this and that ailment, laughing with friends, spending time at the tavern chatting with Josepha or, more likely, reading a book by herself.

  He always managed to pick her out of the crowd, though she didn’t always have blond hair.

  Or green eyes.

  Or that height.

  Or that color skin.

  It was bewitching.

  But even more marvelous than that was the way she would chat with other boys—then turn away. Maurice was stunned that they didn’t run after her.

  His friends began to call him “moon-eyed.” Frédéric pestered him to find a nice normal girl instead. One without powers. Alaric, on the other hand, encouraged him to actually go up and talk to her. To introduce himself. To let her know that he existed.

  But as it turned out, Maurice didn’t have to.

  One day he went to the tavern early, by himself, bringing in little pieces of metal he had been working on to fiddle with as he sat there. At first glance they looked like a forged-nail bar puzzle a country gentleman might play with while having a drink, but the pieces were much stranger-looking: a tiny bit of tarnished copper pipe and a dull gray metal blob he was trying to fit into it.

  He was still staring owlishly at the smallest end of the blob when he was suddenly aware of someone sitting down in the chair next to him, adjusting her voluminous skirts to fit the space.

  “You know, you need to speak to the metal.”

  He looked up at the vision next to him and blinked.

  The girl with green eyes and blond hair regarded him calmly, a little smile on her face and a book half-closed in her hand.

  The normal thing to do at this point would have been to offer to buy her a drink, to tell her how he had seen her around town, or even to gibber nervously about how pretty she was and question why she was sitting next to him.

  But she was talking about the metal.

  “Speak to it?” he asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Ask it what it needs, to do what you want it to do. At least, that’s what a friend of mine who knows about such things says.”

  “Well, I’ve tried everything else,” he said with a sigh. He held up the little ugly bits of metal and cleared his throat. “HEL-LO. METAL. WHAT DO I NEED TO DO TO GET YOU TO WORK?”

  The woman laughed, a throaty, honey sound that wasn’t mean in the slightest. Maurice found himself chuckling as well, and even the grumpy bartender managed a smile.

  The girl pushed a stray golden lock of hair out of her face and closed her book all the way, setting it beside her.

  “Not like that, I don’t think. At least not in our language. You need to know the language of metal. I’m Rosalind, by the way.” She held out her hand.

  “Enchanté,” Maurice said frankly, not bothering to pretend he didn’t know it already—that he whispered it at night sometimes, just to see how it felt. He took her hand and kissed it. “Not my name, of course. Maurice is my name.”

  “I’ve seen you around,” she said, indicating the world outside the tavern with the tip of her alder wand. “No matter what you’re doing—pulling turnips, laying stones, digging—you’re always thinking about something else: your metal. You’re always carrying bits of it—and you’re always covered in the soot of a blacksmith. Whatever are you doing?”

  “I am trying to develop a use-ful steam en-gine,” Maurice said, clapping the metal bits down on the bar on each syllable for emphasis. “The problem is that thus far it’s all about someone opening valves and closing valves and drawing up water….They’re trying to use them to drain mines over in England and Scotland—a lot of water problems they have over there—but it could do so much more. Instead of pushing and pulling water, you could push and pull a piston, and then, of course, there you are.”

  “Of course,” the woman said with another smile. “There we are.”

  Maurice stared at her for a moment, trying to figure out if she was making fun of him. Then he laughed self-deprecatingly. “I don’t speak as well as the pictures in my head do. I can’t…fully…the possibilities….It’s too much to explain all at once. It would be world-changing.”

  “Ah,” the woman said. “Like gunpowder.”

  “No, not like gunpowder. This would be for building and making, not killing and conquering.”

  “Not all gunpowder is for killing. I have a friend who makes the most amazing fireworks. And who—a little like you—spends all her spare time trying to launch things higher and higher into the air, using gunpowder and a thing like a cannon aimed at the sky.”

  “You have a lot of interesting friends, it seems,” Maurice said, sighing. “I wish I could meet them.”

  “I’m not sure I would like that,” the girl said thoughtfully. “If I introduced you to my friends, you would spend all your time talking to them and not to me.”

  Maurice stared at her for a long moment, trying to decide if what he thought she meant by that was what she actually meant by that.

  And, with a smile, it became apparent that she did.

  With a feeling of unreality approaching straight-up wonder, Maurice began to court Rosalind. Or perhaps it was the other way around. It didn’t matter—and he certainly didn’t care.

  He took her to a festival dance and offered her a rose he had painstakingly hammered out of metal. She graciously pinned it to the bodice of her dress—which, honestly, was pulled down almost indecently by its weight.

  Then Rosalind took him to see her roses, a delightful garden hidden by magic inside a little park, filled with perfectly healthy, perfectly formed roses in every shade of pink and red, and a few colors Maurice wasn’t sure he had seen before on any flower.

  She often grew bored with her own appearance, he discovered, which was why her looks and outfits seemed to change of their own accord so frequently. So if she was helping Maurice with something dangerous, hot and sticky in his kiln yard, when they emerged to take a stroll around town her apron and old skirts would disappear and she would appear attired in the robes of a fashionable lady wearing the latest style from Paris—but one with purple skin.

  Maurice never caught the transformation as it happened; it was always done by the time he noticed.

  Her powers weren’t limited to roses and fashion and pigs’ snouts, however. When the freshwater spring on the western side of town went sour in late summer, a delegation from the town came to her for a solution.

  Just like Maurice spent weeks on end with his kiln and metals and tools, she pored over ancient texts day and night, mumbling to herself and waving her wand in what looked like the same pattern again and again. And in the same way Maurice wrote to great scientists and inventors around the world, she spoke with timid creatures who looked like water themselves, and sought out ancient, powerful crones for advice.

  It all culminated with what looked like a simple, quick enchantment that made the water sweet once again. Everyone cheered, but few understood the amount of time and effort that had gone into those few minutes of chanting.

  But it wasn’t all work and inventing. Some nights Maurice spent carousing with Alaric and Frédéric, and Rosalind with Adelise and Bernard, when science and magic were forgotten and drinking and laughing were the subjects of the night.

  So the two lovers spent long afternoons in each other’s company or tending to their own pursuits, and long evenings in each other’s arms, surrounded by the heady perfume of roses.

  And then came the day that Maurice witnessed two young
men dragging a teenaged boy into an alley. It was in a quiet part of town and they were trying to do it furtively, but not having much success as he kicked and screamed.

  “Stop! Right where you are! Put him down!” the inventor shouted. “What is all this now?”

  “None of your business,” one of the men snapped. “Do yourself a favor and pretend you never saw this.”

  “He’s one of those charmantes,” the other one said heavily, as if everyone would understand what was going on just by hearing the word.

  “So? Since when is that a crime?” Maurice asked, both angry and mystified.

  “It has always been a crime against nature, as you should know already if you’re…naturel…uncorrupted by evil.”

  Maurice put down the shaft of the cart he was pulling, making it clear he was ready to fight. His clothes, though dirty, did a nice job of highlighting his thick upper arms and solid legs.

  Plus there was the long knife he kept on his belt, as all laborers did. He twitched his thumb at it.

  The thugs tried to look defiant. It didn’t really work.

  “I suggest you run along,” Maurice growled. “NOW! Before I call the guards—or teach you a lesson myself.”

  “Friends of those who consort with the devil are as cursed as the devil himself!” one spat. “You will get yours, too!”

  They stalked off and Maurice sighed deeply. He turned to the now-freed prisoner. “You all right, boy?”

  “I am for now.” He didn’t say it with ingratitude; it was more like wry irony. Maurice could see, as the teen stretched and shook out his bruised body, the high cheekbones, pearly skin, and delicate jaw that made him look different. “They will come after me again, when no one is around to save me. I suppose I will have to…run away…for good.”

  The inventor ground his teeth, frustrated. “And the palace guards are just letting this sort of thing happen? To citizens?”

  In answer, the boy tossed his chin, pointing across the way. There, lolling in the shadows like they were unemployed, stood a pair of castle guards who had been watching the whole thing. They gave Maurice twin looks of distrust and disgust.