***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof*** 



Ch a pt e r I  
 
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Enchantments and dreams: I suspect they are made of the same stuff. They each beguile the mind and confuse the senses with wonder and strangeness so all that was familiar becomes
freakish, and the most bizarre of things intimate and natural. For the longest time after the curse fell, I did not know if I was a beast who dreamed of being a man, or a man who dreamed he was a beast.
There are moments I recall with clarity from that dark stretch of years in which I lost myself. In remembering them, though, the real is indistinguishable from the phantasm. My initial flight in abject terror from my home is as sharp and shape- less as a shard of glass. I know it happened. Everything since has unfolded from it. The details, though, are the stuff of night- mares.
I have tried to string my memories together to make some sense of those years. But living under such an enchantment is akin to being trapped in the grip of a restless slumber, fighting toward wakefulness and finding only dreams locked within dreams.




 
 
2
 



The first moment I felt as though I were awake, in all those years, was the first time I saw Isabeau, standing in a fall of golden light, hesitating on my doorstep in her poor, patched gown. The sun flooded in, spilling across the flagstones and lighting up the very air around her. It was too bright for me. Her radiance daz- zled my sleep-blighted eyes and I crept away to hide.
Everything before that has faded into shadow, or taken on the livid shimmer of a half-remembered delusion. The decades I spent haunting the wild, wild forests my fair lands had become, terrifying people and savaging any livestock foolish enough to stray within its bounds; the starvation years that inevitably fol- lowed, as the forest emptied of all living creatures save vermin and the occasional watchful raven; the shatteringly lonely term of my imprisonment in the home I eventually returned to when my misery finally crushed my rage and I remembered what I once had been.
If it was a living nightmare that took me into the forest, it was most certainly a dream that brought me out of it, and back to my ancestral home.
Since I had forgotten myself, my dreams had been wild, primal things, a reflection of the savagery that filled my days. But, as the skin sunk deeper into the hollows between my ribs and my empty belly cleaved to my spine, I lost even the strength to run and hunt in my imagination. Now, each night found me limping through the endless, empty forest in my mind, search- ing and searching. I had no clear idea of what it was I searched for, except that, unlike during my waking hours, it was not food. My memories of those bitter dreams are of hunting through dark, shadowy trees for something hidden in the heart of the forest; something I feared to discover, but I feared more I would never find, and would be lost to me forever.

 
 
3
 


One grim night, as I was nearing the end of my strength, I fell asleep upon a bed of pine needles, curled against the rain soaking through the branches above. At once my mind found itself slinking between the measureless ranks of phantom trees. As I dragged my paws forward, I saw ahead a glimmer of moon- light. I lifted my weary head. The moon never pierced the can- opy of this unending nightmare.
As I looked, the pale gleam began to move. I followed. I was so...