His hand touched mine. The light brush startled me, and I did drop the book, but it was already in his hand. He had fingers, that was certain, though they were soft in the way of fur rather than skin. And something cold. A claw, or a claw-like nail.
I curled my arm into my sanctum once more. I could not run my finger across the page to show him the order; he would have to manage on his own.
“Left to right,” I said.
And then I opened to the first story and read aloud to him of the man who mistreated his mule. The man would beat the poor animal whenever it reared its head against his command.
“I am master here,” he reminded it with each strike.
While in the field one day, a bird dropped a golden seed on the man’s hat. He planted it with his wheat, and come harvest, the wheat in that row all produced grains of purest gold.
“I am rich!” the man cried, sprinting to town to shout his news. In his absence, his poor abused mule trampled the entire row, and as each grain pinched between hoof and soil, it turned ordinary and useless, good neither as gold nor wheat.
“I am master here,” the mule said.
When the man returned with a crowd of townsfolk eager to see his new fortune, they found only a trampled harvest and the mule missing. The mule found a new home with a family that never mistreated it, and the man wasted his life in drinking until he died, desolate.
“Not a happy story,” the beast commented at the end, apparently too disgruntled to offer his usual pause.
If I tilted around the edge of the chair, would I see him sitting behind me, back pressed straight in a chair of his own? I resisted the urge.
“Happy for the mule,” I said. “Folktales are almost always cautionary. Should I read something else?”
“No,” he said, also immediate.
I smiled, and I turned to the next story, this one of the woodcutter who met a fairy. The fairy promised him three wishes, and with the first, he wished for great wealth. A storm of gold coins rained against his house, collapsing a corner of the roof and leaving him swimming in riches.
“I will buy a new house!” he cried.
For his second wish, he asked the fairy to make his wife the most beautiful woman in the world. Her thin, coarse hair turned luscious. Her skin gleamed more than porcelain. But his wife did not praise him for the change. She scolded him for using two wishes so thoughtlessly and for changing her appearance.
“She is an ungrateful crone,” the man said, “and I wish her away.”
It was his third wish. His wife vanished from existence, and the man hit his knees in regret. He begged the fairy for another chance, but she would not grant a fourth wish. He hounded her day and night, followed her through the woods in unbearable snows, and at last, in response to his wearying tears, the fairy offered a deal—to rescind all three wishes and for him to never again benefit from magic.
The woodcutter took the fairy’s deal, and together, he and his wife shored up the broken roof of their tottering shack, living happily thereafter even if they were impoverished and ugly.
Or so the story insisted.
I gave a quiet, dry laugh after I finished.
“You dislike that one.” There was a question in the beast’s observation.
“They couldn’t possibly live happily after that,” I said. “And I doubt they lived happily before.”
After a pause, he said, “It would be hard to forgive.”
Impossible. By wishing his wife beautiful, the man had admitted he thought her ugly. Intolerable too, so much so that he wished her out of existence. Such a thing was impossible to forgive and certainly impossible to live with.
I felt Stephan looming at my shoulder, so I pressed back into the chair with all my strength, trying to press out the memory like oil from an olive.
“Do you think the woodcutter’s regret was false?” Beast asked.
I’d been about to turn the page, to put physical distance between myself and the avaricious woodcutter, but the beast’s question made me pause. I traced the words again in my mind, followed the woodcutter through the snowdrifts as tall as a man, watched the tears freeze to his cheeks.
In my experience, men didn’t regret their greed, only the failure of it to procure what they desired.
But if the regret wasn’t genuine, it was wildly foolish to sacrifice great wealth and magic only to share a run-down cabin with a plain woman the woodcutter despised.
