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

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