songbird

She looked at the rose in her slender white hands, then looked at the teeth that filled my monstrous jaw—each of them larger than her entire hand. “I can’t imagine why,” she said.

“Neither can I,” I replied. “Do you have fairy blood within you? Are you a siren, nixie, elf, enchantress, harpy or sprite who can take on some harmless shape and tear me to pieces with a wave of your hand?”

“If I were,” Beauty replied, “I don’t think I would tell you. So even if I tell you truly that I am not, I do not think you will believe me.”

Yet the strange thing was that I did. Whatever this unsettling something was inside her, it was no more magical than the salt cellar on the table, no less human than I once had been. Yet I could not taste, see, smell, hear, sense or otherwise define the smallest thing about it, so I—who thought I’d seen every kind of woman the world had to offer—was left utterly unsettled.

I tried to hide my uneasiness, in the weeks that followed. I spent every moment I could in her company, and every evening dutifully proposed marriage to her. Every evening, she kindly declined, and we’d begin the next morning all over again, I no closer to solving the mystery that was her. I never stopped fearing it, but I grew accustomed to it, and over time, began to hold it in a reverent sort of awe. This something kept her steady even when I felt ready to fall to pieces. This something made her gentle when she touched a beast that could crush her with one claw. This something kept her in the castle not just weeks, but months longer than any other girl had stayed before.

“Beauty,” I finally asked her, one evening six months after her arrival. “Why do you stay?”

She looked up from her dinner plate, now cleared of its dessert. “Because I am required to,” she said. “Was that not the condition you set upon me, to save my father’s life?”

“Even if that were so,” I said, for the wording of the conditions left that part intentionally vague, “there are many who would risk the consequences rather than stay so long in a castle with beast like me.”

“I will not risk my father,” she said. “I love him too much for that.”

There, at last, was the name of the something that had unsettled me for so long. The thing she had, that every other girl lacked, was love. The other girls had come by invitation, by accident, drawn by curiosity or by the magic surrounding this place. She, and only she, had come to this place because she loved another more than herself. It had given her strength, ennobled her soul, utterly baffled one who’d been monstrous as long as I had. This love was not the mere heart-fluttering that I thought was necessary to make a girl decide to bind herself to a man as wife. It was something that tore apart every scrap of the self in service of another.

I could not live with myself, keeping such a woman in a cage. I let her go home that very night.

Her eyes were luminous when I told her the news. “Do you mean it, Beast?” she asked me. “Am I free to go, with no harm done to him?”

“Nothing from this palace will harm a hair on his head,” I said. “You are free to return to your home. I only ask…” And here I looked down, bashful for the first time in my life, the words sticking in my monstrous throat. “I ask that you might return someday, to visit a beast with no one to share his palace with.”

“I will, Beast,” she said, placing one small hand on my enormous claw. “I promise I will.”

I didn’t believe her, of course, and when she left, I tried to plan for what I’d do the next time another beautiful girl came through my castle door. Yet I found that I could picture no face in these halls but hers, imagine no voice that I wanted to hear across the table at our nightly meals. I had sent away the only girl I’d ever loved in those long, long years—and doing so was the only time I’d ever shown that I knew what love was.

I think there may have been something in the magic of that place that knew she took my heart with her, because I began to weaken almost as soon as she left. I was strong enough the first day or two, but after I spent a week alone, I was barely able to hold my horned head upright. I collapsed in the garden sometime around sunset, and the sun had risen before I found the strength to open my eyes.

I was dying, then, I knew—dying for love of her. It seemed an excellent reason to die. If I had to leave this mortal realm, let me do it so that she—with her wild, wondrous, awe-inspiring soul—might live to share her love with a million people she might meet throughout her long and happy life. If my life was the price I had to pay to give her goodness to the world, I was more than glad to give it.

I fell into a fitful slumber, and when I next opened my eyes, I saw her face before me. I thought she was a vision, another wishful phantom conjured up as comfort in my final moments before death, but then I felt her fingers on my cold and clammy claws, and felt her hot tears dripping down the scales on my face.

“Beauty,” I breathed—for the name was hers now, and could belong to no other. “Why did you come back?”

“My foolish Beast,” she sighed, laughing and crying as she buried her face into my neck. “I came because I love you.”

There was that word again—given now to me. I think my heart returned with it, because I was able to breathe again, found the strength to raise my head and look into her beautiful face. “How can that be?” I asked. “How can a creature like you love a...thing like me? I am a monstrous, worthless wretch who has lived for countless years and only a scant few days ago even learned what love means.”

“It means we give,” Beauty said. “It means we choose. And I choose to give myself to you—in marriage if you wish it—because you’ve shown love more deeply in these few days than most men show in a lifetime. I am glad of your company, grateful for your goodness, and I think I’d like to live in love beside you, if you’ll have me to stay as your wife.”

“I wish it,” I told her. “I wish it with all my heart.”

The pain that tore through me then cannot be described. It tore apart my flesh and bone and seemed to turn my very spirit inside out before piecing it back together. When I came into myself again, I was whole in a way I’d never been before, even when I’d been a human untouched by fairy magic. The piece that I was missing had been made whole by her—my heart filled in because I’d given it away.

We were married afterward, of course, in the very garden where her father had first stolen a rose. We had her father to live with us, had countless children of our own, and constant visits from the children of her many brothers and sisters. I, who’d been loveless for so long, have love surrounding me every moment of the day.