Beguiled
Beguiled
My shivering was no longer just the cold. This creature’s grave-earth breath stuck in my nose. Her dark mouth stretched open again and I couldn’t see the back of her throat. There as a void inside her—was that why people heard her scream when their loved ones died? Did she open wide to swallow their souls?
I stumbled back into the water, my boots filling through the hole at my heel. Cold and fear numbed me. I rubbed my hands together, trying to feel them, tying to remind myself that I was still here, in the world feet safely on this side of the veil.
The Bean-Nighe’s tongue darted around two broken teeth. The old woman nodded and wrung out the shirt in her hands.
“I want something too.”
The price. I was about to see if I could afford my wishes
“What?”
The old woman grinned, and her wrinkles multiplied. “Just a little blood. The prick of a finger before you use your loom.”
A drop of my blood? A drop wouldn’t cost me anything, so how could it be enough?
“What will you do with it? My blood?”
The grin faded. “Blood is life, isn’t it? I want you to give me something important, valuable.”
Beguiled begins with a very fairy-tale like premise. Ella, a orphaned and destitute young weaver with a broken loom, makes a bargain with the Bean-Nighe, a cursed fae washerwoman, who grants Ella’s wish to fix her loom. Soon Ella is making such beautiful fabrics that she catches the attention of Callum, one of the powerful and influential Players who have the ear of the Chieftain of the city. Callum becomes Ella’s patron, and soon everything Ella has ever wanted seems within her grasp. Before long, Ella begins to realize that something is amiss with Callum. He is powerful and manipulative and, at times, a bit frightening. He appeared in the city from nowhere and has no family, his house seems empty, and Ella never sees any of his servants. Worse, she realizes that the Bean-Nighe’s gift is beginning to take a toll on her health. As Ella gets deeper into Callum’s schemes, she begins to understand that the stakes are much higher than she has imagined. Ella realizes that she and her weaving talent are just pawns in a much bigger game and her very life is at stake.
Cyla Panin does an excellent job of immersing the reader in the world in which Ella lives, both the ugly and the beautiful parts. The descriptions of Ella’s magical weavings and the opulent parties of the rich are particularly evocative. When Ella begins to see the trap she is caught in, the descriptions of some of the more horrifying things she encounters are equally haunting.
Ella is overly naïve, sometimes annoyingly so, but she redeems herself with a ruthless plan to save her own life. While the beginning of the novel may be reminiscent of a fairy tale, the conclusion is anything but. No dashing rescuer comes to Ella’s aid; instead, she rescues herself, devising and executing her own plan to escape those who have trapped her with the curse of the Bean-Nighe. Beguiled is a fantasy novel that upends expectations. It has many elements of traditional fantasy, but it manages to twist them in unexpected ways resulting in a story that is full of surprises. While the ending is not happy in a fairy tale sense, it is satisfying.
Tara Stieglitz is a librarian at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta.