Free Roses & Thorns by Chris Anne Wolfe

my own flesh and
blood with your perverted touch?!"
    Drew
cowered, jerkin and tunic clutched in awkward desperation as she tried to hide
her nakedness. Helpless and confused, she shook her head. Her disheveled tangle
of ebony hair shimmered in the lantern light. She burned with shame.
    "What
have you to say for yourself?" The Count's words were flat with judgment.
How could she explain to him that he encouraged what she was? Allowed her to
think of herself as his mirror image, his son, his heir? He had never told her
that women were only for men’s beds and she had not assumed such a narrow view.
But now his voice was full of rage. Where were the tender words meant just for
her? The nicknames, the shared laughter? Where was her father? The man who
stood before her, demanding and inflexible, was not the Count she knew. This
man’s words were judgmental and harsh. As if she should have known, somehow,
all that was expected of her but never said. "Speak!" he commanded.
    "I
meant no crime, Papa! I love her," she cried, the truth of her words
apparent to any who would listen. "As she loves me. I thought to marry
—"
    "No!"
the shriek came as one from daughter and mother.
    "I
never loved you," screamed the girl as her mother moved to shield her more
completely. "How could you imagine something so horrible? So untrue?"
    "But
you said—"
    "Don’t
listen to the lies—" the daughter broke in. But the mother needed no
convincing to prove the innocence of her child.
    "Filth
— liar! Marry my own to one of Nature's most warped abominations?" She
spit on the ground in disgust. "If you were not my husband's child
—!"
    "I
have no child but yours, wife," he said. Drew whirled on him in stunned
surprise. "Papa!" He would not hear, but instead turned away.
"Father!"
    At
the doorway, he paused, but did not look back. "Father, please —" The
plea became a cry, a wail of despair that drove the girl to her knees as her
father took one step away from her, and then another.
    The
witch stepped near, and from her lips fell the words of an incantation already
begun, "...my daughter to protect and for all the daughters of those you
have sworn to protect...." Words tumbled over each other like pebbles in a
rockslide, erasing all in their path. Smoke rose. The witch circled the sobbing
young woman on the floor. "...Hear me now and mark my words!"
    The
wind shrieked; the witch's cry rose to guide the gale. "Then find you a
prisoner for your precious love! You shall be bound by spells and time in a
place befitting such noble dreams. You shall be, oh swine of humankind, bound
to a mockery of love which will play with you. Marry you say? Then marry you
will. Love you say, then love she must! A maid as plain or fair as you
choose. But choose she must! Freely and knowingly must she choose to
marry you and consecrate those sacred vows in your monstrous bed!"
    The
gale reached its final fury, whirling around the crumpled form of the
once-cherished child. The witch's final curse screamed over the howling wind:
    "Cast
thee gone! Beyond thy Death!
    Cast
thee out! Doomed in Quest! Beyond mere Time!
    Eternity
Now... is... Thine!"
    "My
father," Drew said at last, "roused by my stepmother's shrieks, found
me in the barn with my stepsister. I tried to explain to him — to them all —
that I loved her and she ... she denied my love. My father, saying I was no
longer his child, turned his back on me. And my stepmother... Her words were
the most devastating of all. The witch-woman cursed me." Drew looked up at
Angelique and repeated her stepmother's words, ending with the curse.
    Silence
hung over the dark parlor. The fire had ebbed to mere coals. Angelique
shuddered. Her hands pressed to her chest. She felt faint. What had Drew just
told her?
    "And
now, my Lady thinks there must be some error — some noble oversight. But there
was none, I assure you. I wish only that my appetites reflected gentler
passions!"
    "But
each of us may be only what we are," Angelique