Momentarily she put her head down on her forearms and felt despair waiting outside the weakening barrier of her resolve. She was tireder than she could ever remember being, tireder even than she had been during the first days of their father’s business ruin, before she found the paper telling them of Rose Cottage, and giving them something—whatever it would prove to be—to make their way towards.
She looked up again. She had fallen in a gap between trees; there was not so much of it even to be called a small clearing. Her dressing-gown had been wrenched open by her fall, and small sharp edges of forest floor clutter dug at her through her thin shift. She sat up and crept a little way to lean her back against a tree; she was curiously loth to touch the palace wall again. She did not sit long; she did not dare, for she was too tired—and she did not like the sound the wind made. It no longer sounded like singing; it sounded like the far-off baying of wolves. She pulled herself to her feet, hand over hand, up the bole of the tree, faced away from the palace, and began to force herself through the low prickly branches of the trees.
There was no path. She was lost again as soon as she had pushed her way through the first trees, as soon as she could no longer see the white wall of the Beast’s palace behind her.
She probably did not go very far. She was too tired to go very much farther, and even driving herself to expend her last strength was only barely keeping her moving through this harsh, intractable undergrowth. Slender, whippy twigs slashed at her face, hooked the collar of her dressing-gown, and snatched at the silk cord round her neck. She stumbled again and pitched forward into an unexpected clearing. As she turned her head, protecting her face from the ground that had struck up at her with such alarming speed, she caught a gleam of motion in the corner of her eye.
On all fours, her foot still trapped by the root which had thrown her, she looked in that direction. She just saw the unicorn turning away from the heap on the ground it had been guarding; she just saw the iridescent gleam of its long horn before it disappeared into the trees on the far side of the bonfire glade. She could see, now, beyond the heap on the ground, a glitter of moonlight telling her where the carriage-way was.
She worked her ankle loose but had no strength to rise. She crept forward towards the heap on the ground, half knowing what she would find. It was the Beast.
He lay quietly on his side, one arm flung straight out above his head, and his head rested on it. The fingers were softly curled; his face, as much as she could see of it, was peaceful. His other hand held something to his breast. His beautiful clothes were gone as if torn from him; he wore only some still-damp shreds of his shirt, the rags of his trunk-hose, and one shoe.
She crept slowly round him, came to a halt just by that hand against his breast; his knees were slightly drawn up, so his body was curved like the crescent moon overhead. She reached out to touch his hand, and a rose, so dark in moon-and starlight as to look black, fell to the ground, the flower head disintegrating into a scatter of petals flung across the little space between the Beast and Beauty; the outliers rode up the edge of Beauty’s dressing-gown skirts, like the crest of a breaking wave. She took his hand, and for a moment she thought he was already dead, for it lay heavy and motionless in hers, although it was still warm. And then, as she held and stroked it, she felt the fingers move and take hold of hers, and she heard him sigh.
“Oh, Beast,” she said, and her voice was rough and husky, as if her throat were sore from all the gasping breaths she had taken over all this long day and all the tears she had shed. “Oh, Beast, my Beast, don’t die. I have come back to you. I love you, and I want to marry you.”
There was a noise like a thunderclap, and the ground shook, as if the lightning bolt it heralded had struck within the glen where they lay. She shrank back against the Beast’s body, and his arm reached up and drew her down next to him, and they both pressed themselves against the earth as the storm broke over their heads, and yet an instant before the sky had been clear. There was a crying in Beauty’s ears as of wind and wolves and birds of prey.
But the Beast’s arms were round her, and they were both alive, and she would not be afraid. She thought, This is the baying of wicked magic, but we have won. I know we have won. It can do nothing to us now but howl. And she slid her arm under the Beast’s neck and held him close. It will be over soon, and I will tell the Beast again that I wish to marry him, for I am not sure that he heard.
A voice in her ear, or in her mind, for surely the wind-wolves’ howling was too loud for any real voice to be heard, said to her: “That is not quite the truth, my dear, that you—we—have won. I would that it were, but I—I have had my hands full, even keeping a few little doors open—I and my moon- and starlight friends—and that is as much as we have done, and it has grown harder, over the years, for the Beast’s poor heart was dying, till you came.… I have put a single red rose on every lost traveller’s breakfast table here, since your Beast’s exile began, but it was your father who was first moved to pity his great and terrible host. Ah! Strix would hate it if he knew how his cleverness—and his hatred—had worked out at last! But I am afraid that enough of him remains in the sorceries that still hold and hobble us that it is your very words now of victory, and, more dangerous yet, of love, that bring the final cataclysm towards us.
“Beauty, you must choose for the both of you, you and the Beast, and he cannot help you, and I can only help you a very little. I am only an old woman with dirt on my hands, and I will tell you, my dear, I am glad to be laying this responsibility down at last, for it has been a long and weary one, though it is much of my own doing that has made it so.
“So, my dear, listen to me now. You may return your Beast to what he was before, if you wish. He was a good and a wise man then, and he will have you with him, and you will keep him mindful of the world outside his studies. He had great wealth and influence, you know, and you will have that wealth and influence again, and you will be able to do great good with it, and your names will be spoken in many lands, and you may raise your sisters and your father to greatness with you. And—have I told you that your Beast was beautiful? He was the most beautiful man I have ever seen, and I have seen many men.
“Or … you may take him back to Longchance, and be the sister of the baker and the squire’s horse-coper son, and daughter of the man who tots up sums for anyone who hires him, and make your Beast the same.
“You choose.”
Beauty was silent, her face pressed against the Beast’s shaggy throat, and the wind pouring over them like a river in flood. “I think you are not telling me all of this story,” she said at last, tentatively, and the voice laughed.
“You are right, but I am constrained by the … the strength of Strix’s ancient malice, that entangles us all here. My dear, you may ask me questions, and I will answer what I may, but you have … released some great energies when you turned and walked the wrong way down that corridor, and even my moon- and starlight friends will not be able to maze the wind-wolves for long, and you must be gone from here before they come.
“Ask, then.”
Beauty struggled with her weariness for questions to ask; but her thoughts and suspicions were as vague as smoke, and as inarticulate. She grasped at her memories of Mrs Oldhouse’s tale, and Jack Trueword’s; but they wove themselves together like reed straw in a caner’s hands, and she could no longer tell one from the other, nor what of either she believed. “How—how is it that we are all held by this magic?”
The voice seemed to sigh. “It is your right that you know what I can tell you, and yet little of what I can tell you is what you would wish to know, and what I can tell you most of I wish not to speak of at all.…” The voice laughed again, but it was a sad laugh. “That sounds like a spell itself, does it not?
“There is some truth in both the stories you heard about the three sorcerers. Young Jack was right, by the way: The woman was only a greenwitch, and no sorcerer, but she never called herself anything other than what she w
as.” The voice went on more slowly, the words shaping themselves reluctantly, hazy as images in a low grey bank of cloud; Beauty had to listen with all her attention, half afraid the voice might become merely something she imagined. “I have earned, as I say, my place in this magic, and that I have found more peace in it than has our Beast is perhaps only that … well, I was old long ago, when he was still young, and I have my moon-and starlight friends, and he—he had sought perfection. He knew he would not attain it, but the striving towards it was exhilarating, and he thought he might view it and know it existed. He did not know that the viewing itself would bring him such trouble, and he has not been able to forgive himself that he was not wise enough to handle mere mortal trouble.
“There were three of us—that is true. And the man who became your Beast was my very good friend.
“He was a great sorcerer. But he was not interested in the usual sorts of power, and he called himself a philosopher. But it is not for any human to learn the first and last secrets of the universe, as other men have discovered before your Beast—before he was a Beast—did. You have heard the legends, I imagine. But your Beast was a different sort of man, and the Guardians of those first and last secrets whom he awoke were confused by him. They, who were set there when the world began, had come to believe that any man who came near enough to disturb their solitude can have got so far only through greed and pride, and they therefore are free to eat him up, hair, toenails, and all. But your Beast was not only greedy and prideful; he was also kind and painstaking and responsible, and he knew that his weaknesses were mortal and never pretended they were not.
“The Guardians did not know what to do, and when they reached out merely to block his way into the fortress they protected, and not knowing that anything would come of it but that he could come no farther into their domain, they touched him with their paws. And he, who had been a man, became a Beast—though his heart remained a man’s heart. And there, I guess, is where all the trouble came.
“I believe the transformation was very painful. I did not see him till after it was done. He knew what he had become, and he was, as I said, a great sorcerer. He it was who hurled himself into this exile, before any ordinary human saw him, and I fear he was right to believe that the sight of him … would be very difficult to bear. But when there is too much going on at once, it is impossible to get one’s spells exactly right. His exile from the human world was not absolute. Other sorcerers could still visit him. As, I admit, could one greenwitch, though this had less to do with my magical skill than with my friendship for him.
“The story of the philosopher-sorcerer who had become a Beast was soon told among all the magical practitioners at this end of the great world, and perhaps at all the other ends too. And I … grew alarmed at the series of sorcerers who found ways to have speech with him, for it was not merely speech they desired. They saw his transformation as a useful step on the road—their road—to power, an alternative to being eaten up, hair, toenails, and all. To be made into a Beast in exchange for power, power greater than any sorcerer had yet possessed—it was a price they were eager to pay. I think some of them felt that to be a Beast the sight of whom drove other men mad might not be a price at all.
“He would not tell them anything they wished to know, of course. And the change had … changed him, for he studied his philosophy no more, and what he knows, or does not know, or knows no longer, he has said to no one, not even me. And his life became a burden to him, for philosophy had filled his heart. When the sorcerers grew angry and began to plot among themselves, he could not be made to care; he would not listen to me when I told him that they believed him to have won more, in that meeting with the Guardians, than he had told, and was working some great magic in secret to ensnare them all.”
Again the voice broke off. “And then … one sorcerer came to the Beast who was different from the others. The Beast was polite to him, as he had been polite to them all, but this one was clever enough not to ask what he wished to know, but to wait, and to watch, and … I knew what he was. I knew well enough. But I fell in love with him anyway. I was old even then, and I have always been plain.
“The story from this point is much like what you have heard. There was a simulacrum, except I took my own heart to beat in her breast, for I am only a greenwitch and could not do what I had done, and besides, I loved him. And it is not true that the dying sorcerer struck at the Beast for his betrayal; he struck at the Beast in fury, for vengeance; he had forgotten the simulacrum entirely, had forgotten me.…
“The Beast had not used his sorcery, I believe, for many years, and sorcery, like any other skill, must be often used, if a skill it is to remain. That too may help to explain why certain things came about as they did. Well, he had little enough warning, but he wished to save Longchance, if he could, and he threw his own strength into the destruction Strix had brought down upon him. Longchance survived, in the shape you know, where the earth and air and water are too restless for any magic to take root. And the weather vane—and Mrs Oldhouse’s ghost—are what is left of my poor simulacrum, for she had lived too long with a human heart to return herself completely to rose-petals. And yet I think it may be she, with her half connections to both worlds and to neither, who is the heart of the magic that let you enter here.
“And the Beast himself survived. But he survived in what had become a dungeon of solitude, where no living creature could come. The simulacrum is a wisp and a weather vane and a breath of rose scent where there are no roses, and I, now, could not visit him as I had done.”
“Not solitude,” whispered Beauty. “For you are here, and so is Fourpaws.”
“He does not know about me,” the voice said, and there was great sorrow in it. “He does not know, for he would have tried to stop me, and in the beginning he would still have been strong enough to do so, like a man blocking up mouse-holes. His strength has waned—it was only the last rose, was it not?—for no human being can thrive in such solitude, not even with a cat such as Fourpaws, and I have told you his heart is still a man’s. It is only because he is what he is that he has lived so long—the man he was who became the Beast he is.”
“But my father—the other travellers—the butter and milk from your cows, and from—and—and the orchard that chooses to bear its fruit all year—”
The voice tried to laugh. “His dungeon is not perfect, for it is still mortal. There have always been gaps. He does not know I have widened them, pegged them open, thrust stones in their frames so they cannot blow shut.… I am an enterprising mouse.
“And the orchard … Trees feel kindness just as animals do, but they live slowly, and it takes longer than most humans live for a tree to feel human kindness and respond to it. Trees think we humans are mostly little, flashy creatures, rather the way we think of butterflies. But the Beast has lived here long enough for the trees to learn to know him.”
The voice paused and then went on, sadly, reluctantly. “Your Beast also does not know that I … for a second time, nearly I—”
The voice stopped, and began again: “I had once hoped for a child, but I was not pretty enough, and my simulacrum could make love like a woman, but she could not bear a child. Your mother looked as if she could have been Strix’s daughter—or his great-granddaughter—I do not know. Perhaps she was. It would explain why she was so interested in … but I would not tell her; it was then she reminded me too much of the man who had never been my lover.
“When she ran away from me, I never imagined she would marry and have children, and I almost learnt of you too late. The dream you have had since you were very small … I am sorry, my dear. I would have spared you it if I could have done.”
“It was you, not my mother, the first night of my dream,” said Beauty, with a sudden, grieving certainty, and the voice in answer sounded sad and weary: “Yes—it was I, and not your mother.”
“It was you who gave us Rose Cottage,” said Beauty.
“Yes—yes—that was I also. But lis
ten to me, my dear. Listen. It was none of my doing that a blizzard brought your father to this palace; I am no weathercaster. That is sorcerer’s work, and I am only a greenwitch. And still less was it I who stirred your father’s heart to pity, nor was it I who gave him words to speak to the Beast which would bring you here. Nor have I anything to do with your own decision to come and then to stay. Nor, indeed, could I have saved you from your first look into the Beast’s face, that first, ordinary human glance since he had ceased to be an ordinary man. You had to withstand that yourself. Bless your friend the salamander! But you see, what little I could do, I have done, and I have told you all of it.
“Your Beast’s heart came to you, my dear, to you and no other, just as the animals have come to you, because you are what you are. Nor would I ever ask—nor tell—my moon-and starlight friends whom to greet. Do you not know what the breath of a unicorn is worth?”
In a gentler tone the voice continued: “I had been wandering a long time when I came back to Longchance; my old cottage was very nearly a ruin. But after your mother left—and especially when I discovered your dreaming—I began to feel that there were too many sorrows in this world that were by cause of my meddling and that I would be better off not in this world. And I have grown very old; the moon-and starlight shines through me now almost as it shines through my friends.”
The voice fell silent, and Beauty thought the howling was nearer. “And the curse?” she said, or thought, for she did not put the question into words, but only felt it lying painfully in her mind.
The voice laughed, and it was a grandmother’s laugh, amazed and indulgent at the antics of the young. “It is no curse! It has never been a curse! Children are more sensible than adults about many things; can you suppose that generations of children would have used it as a skipping-rhyme if it were a curse?”