Beauty Read Online Free PDF Page B

away. I forced my eyes back to the parchment where it trembled in my hands.
No one heard this except your great aunt, Joyeause, who was standing beside the cradle at the time. She came to me after the guests had departed to tell me she had modified the curse as best she could. The curse now implements as follows: "When Duke Phillip's beautiful daughter reaches her sixteenth year, she shall prick her finger upon a spindle and fall into a sleep of one hundred years, from which she will be wakened by the kiss of a charming prince." Or perhaps it was Prince Charming. I have been much upset by all this and did not pay proper attention to what she was telling me. No one knows what Aunt Joyeause has done but me-and you, if you read this letter before your birthday, as I am confident you will do for I have set a timely discovery spell upon it.
     
    [Most of the above is nonsense. Joyeause did overhear what I said, since she was closest to me at the time. What I said was that the duke's daughter would be pricked by a spindle and fall into an enchanted sleep. All that bit about the hundred years and the prince is pure invention. I never said the child would die, and if Joyeause tried for a thousand years she couldn't change one of my spells. Joyeause has always been a dilettante.]
     
Your father, already offended by Carabosse's attendance at an event to which she was not invited, became outraged. He raved at me, and I had no time to remonstrate with him before he dragged me off to this tower! He says he has hidden you away and will hide all the spindles in the castle, perhaps all those in the dukedom. He castigates himself for marrying one of my race, and me for being what I am. Men are like that. They marry for reasons that have nothing to do with what they expect from matrimony and then damn their wives for not being what they want later. They marry for beauty and charm and sex, and then expect their wives to be sensible, parsimonious and efficient.
Now that memory and virginity are restored, I need not remain here to be insulted. I choose to return to my ancestral lands.
My powers at the moment have been considerably diminished by the time I have spent here, and I cannot find you to take you with me. You will find this letter when you are old enough. If you cannot come to me before the curse takes effect, come as soon thereafter as you can. I have left you the means to do so. Keep safe the box in which you find this.
    I put down the letter and wiped my face where the tears were running down, making an itchy mess of my eyes and nose. I did have a mama. And evidently I was not to die on my birthday, though the fate Grandaunt Joyeause had planned did not seem a thrilling alternative. I could not understand how Mama expected to see me after the curse, since even mothers did not, as a general rule, live more than one hundred years. The letter continued briefly on a separate page.
My dear daughter, too long separated from me, be assured of my affection. Come to me with all haste before you grow any older. I will await you with a joyous heart.
Your loving mama, Elladine of Ylles.
    You can imagine my amazement. I was struck by how clean the parchment looked upon which all this had been written. It could have been delivered that very afternoon. The more I looked at it, the more I thought that in a sense it had been delivered that very afternoon. After reading the letter several times, both pages of it, I replaced it in the box and the box in its hiding place, sliding the stone carefully into place. Set well in, it cast no protruding shadow. I could only believe she had left it sticking out so that I would see it. It had been put there for me, and me alone, to find. Mama.
    I climbed into my bed, pulled the bed curtains shut, propped myself upon my pillows, and pulled the coverlets up to my chin. This was something that required thinking about, though thoughts were slow and reluctant to come. The first one to emerge teasingly into the