As Old As Time: A Twisted Tale (Twisted Tale, A) (16 page)

And yet…he had saved her from the wolves.

Snow began to fall.

Belle suddenly had no idea how long she had been sitting there, frozen.

Phillipe’s reins were caught up in strangler vines across the clearing. He chuffed unhappily, pacing back and forth. The lingering scent of wolves and death were making him crazy.

Belle blinked the snowflakes out of her eyes. Now that the shock of the battle was wearing off, she was beginning to feel things again—including how numb and aching her wet feet were. If she stayed out much longer, she wouldn’t be able to walk. She would freeze.

Slowly she rose, stomping her feet, trying to work feeling back into them. Then she stumbled across the clearing to Phillipe and worked the ropes out of their snarl with stiff, unhelpful fingers. Murmuring calming words, she managed to get the giant horse to back up and slowly turn around.

The bodies of the wolves—and the Beast—were lifeless mounds gradually whitening in the rapidly increasing snow. She turned to go.

The Beast would freeze if she left him there.

He had saved her life.

Cursing, she led the nervous Phillipe over the carcasses and piles of bloody innards. He did not shy away from the Beast as she was afraid he might; something about his body was less terrifying than those of the wolves.

With a lot of difficulty—Phillipe had no desire to kneel in the snowy, bloody muck—and a strained back, Belle managed to shove the Beast onto the horse so his head and hind limbs dangled off opposite sides. As loathe as she was to touch him, his fur didn’t smell as bad or as…animal-like as she expected. It had a faintly wild, barnlike whiff to it but was neither greasy nor dirty. She idly wondered if he licked himself clean like a cat or dove into ponds like a dog.

But now, where to?

As she looked around the woods through whirling drifts of snow, she realized she had no idea where she was. She had just made Phillipe run through woods, willy-nilly. Belle frowned and stared at the sky but, of course, there were no stars. Between the gloom and the snow there was no way to find any familiar landmarks.

She couldn’t stop shivering.

The toes of her shoes, she saw, had hardened with ice and were dusted with hoarfrost—echoing the webs that had crawled up outside the castle. She felt like one of the luckless peasant girls in some Russian hagiography, left to fend for her family in deep Siberian snows.

Ever a logical girl, she didn’t like where the hints all around were leading her.

Apparently, I’m the daughter of an enchantress,
she thought.
So…maybe I can enchant?

She closed her eyes and imagined
warm.
Sunny skies, still clouds and snow swept away.

Nothing.

She clenched her fists hard and imagined
fire
, even at the risk of it consuming the tree in front of her.
MAKE IT BURN!

She opened her eyes.

Nothing.

“I command you, winds!”
she shouted imperiously.
“Take me home!…”

“…please?” she added after a moment.

Nothing.

With aching slowness she turned Phillipe and his burden around and followed their tracks back to the castle.

It was very hard going. Belle tried not to panic about not being able to feel her feet anymore, tried to put away little fairy tale horror stories she had read about girls freezing in the wilderness.

I’m the daughter of an enchantress,
she told herself to bolster her courage. Also just to taste the feeling of it. That had been
her mother
in the visions, whose role in Belle’s broken memories was merely that of a pretty face and loving smile and soft lap. There was nothing magical about her, beyond the extra layers of warmth that nostalgia and loss applied to fond remembrances.

When they finally made it back to the castle, she saw with a shock that all the perimeter walls were now shrouded in white, thick ribby drifts. Strands were still growing up out of the ground—much more slowly now, but with a frightening relentlessness.

Where she had squeezed out through the gates there were now many more ropes of webbing. But when she reached out to try to push them, they broke off in her hand, shattering. Belle was shocked, before she realized the truth of it: they were there to keep the Beast
in
, not out.

A few deft swipes and they were gone. She threw the gates open and led Phillipe in. When the gates clanged shut behind her, the webbing had already begun to grow back.

A funny, sad little scene greeted her at the door to the castle: Cogsworth, Lumière, and—was that a
dust
mop?—drooped in despair, looking out into the night. Lumière had a carefully placed candle-hand on Cogsworth’s back in sympathy.

They all gawped and jumped as soon as they saw her.

“Get him inside. He needs a fire and bandages,” Belle ordered. “Right away.”

“Certainement,”
Lumière said briskly, marching off.

“First aid immediately, of course!” Cogsworth added, looking grim.

All sorts of little creatures and animated bric-a-brac came to life that Belle hadn’t seen earlier, whisking and scampering this way and that to help out. She caught sight of Mrs. Potts, steaming with purpose, ordering the lesser kitchenware to help out with boiling water and hot towels.

Once the Beast was inside and being tended to, Belle reluctantly returned to the courtyard.

“Thank you, old friend,” she said to Phillipe, patting his soft nose. “Now go home. Go to Papa.”

She led him to the gates, shuddering at the sight of the icy webbing that was slowly continuing to spread. After both of them carefully stepped through she gave his flanks a firm but friendly slap.

The horse neighed, then trotted off into the woods, toward home.

Belle felt a pang. But she had made her decision.

“I need some rope,” she said to Cogsworth as she entered the study, shaking herself into action.

“Yes, of course, right away,” the little clock said. “What?”

“I’m not letting him free until I get some answers,” Belle said, gritting her teeth. “Help me tie him up.”

“Tie up? The
master
?” Cogsworth stuttered.

“He threw my
father
into a cold prison cell, then took me in his place! I think tying him up in front of a warm roaring fire is plenty generous, considering!” she snapped.

The little clock started to protest, but Belle simply glared at him.

“Yes…I can see your point….” Cogsworth boggled. “All right…
PANTRY? Storage?
You’re needed….”

He waddled off, still gaping about the inappropriateness of the whole thing.

Belle watched the castle busy itself, a little surprised at her quick acceptance of the whole thing. From discovering the existence of an enchanted castle to ordering its occupants around like she had been doing it her entire life—it all had taken less than the span of a day. She wondered for a moment what would have happened if she had never gone up the stairs to the forbidden West Wing. Would she have remained a prisoner of the Beast? Or would she have become the queen of this place?

She never did see the library….

Belle didn’t trust the silverware and oversaw each of the knots as it was being tied and pulled. Sometimes when they ran out of money for metal, her father had to cobble his inventions together with leather thongs and rope. She was good at lacing things tightly.

Mrs. Potts had a cart of hot tea and brandy wheeled in—along with a dish of broth and a covered tureen of what, from the smell, Belle was pretty sure the Beast ate on a regular basis. Meat. Not cooked much.

Belle took it upon herself to help wash his wounds; except for an animated mop and broom, there wasn’t really anyone large enough or with strong prehensile digits to gently dab a wound and then ring out the cloth in boiling hot water.

Could my mother have just healed him, with a snap of her fingers?

Belle tried to remember some incident from her childhood where she was hurt, but it was always just Maurice bandaging her wounds or putting salves on them or giving her a kiss to make it feel better. She couldn’t remember her mother doing
anything.
Or being there at all, really.

Belle helped herself to some tea in between, putting in plenty of sugar. They never had enough of it at home; here there was a whole pyramid of shining brown lumps.

Do enchantresses drink tea? Or did my mother only have tisanes and wild concoctions made from forest things?
She hadn’t seemed like a woodsy sort in the vision. The dress she wore when she turned back into herself was a little showy but otherwise quite fashionable. As if a modern, well-to-do lady wanted to impress a snobby prince with her enchantress-ness.

Sorceresses with bustles, witches with frothy white wigs
…Belle drowsily tried to figure out what a modern wizard would look like.

Eventually, she must have dozed off, kneeling on the floor with her body resting against the giant chair the Beast was lying in and tied to. When she woke, the Beast’s eyelids were fluttering open.

Funny
, Belle thought.
He has eyelashes.

The moment of drowsy calm didn’t last.

As soon as he was fully awake, the Beast roared and strained to get up and then roared again when he realized he couldn’t.

“Hush!” Belle chastised. “The entire castle can hear you.”

“WHY AM I RESTRAINED? WHAT DO
—arrrgh!” He fell back into the chair, one of his wounds having pressed against the rope when he strained. He bit his lip and whimpered like a dog.

“Thank you for saving me from the wolves,” Belle said mildly. But she was a little leery; it wouldn’t take many more attempts like that for the Beast to break free. One of the ropes grew taut and frayed as he struggled.

“If you’re thanking me, why have you tied me up?” he grumbled.

This was the Beast she could reason with; it was a tone of voice she recognized from before. Human but grumpy.

“Let’s see.” She ticked off reasons on her fingers. “Because you made my father your prisoner. Because you then made
me
your personal prisoner. Because you are cursed, and I feel like maybe with reason. And also I have questions.”

“Doesn’t matter. Tie me up or not. I’m trapped here forever, in this,” the Beast mumbled.

He began to lick one of his wounds moodily.

“Stop that,” Belle said, lightly slapping his arm.

The Beast jumped. “Ow!”

“Please.” Belle rolled her eyes. “I saw what the wolves did to you.
That
hurt?”

He remained grouchily quiet. In the flickering light of the fire the Beast looked both more monstrous and more human. His head was massive—
massive
—and not, on second look, canine or wolfish as one would expect of a
loup garou.
It was more like a bull with longer fur; his horns went a long way toward completing that image. But his eyebrows were large and expressive, and if one didn’t look
too
closely one could mistake the lower part of his mane for a beard. His eyes remained intelligent and unreadable in the orange light.

“Wait,” he suddenly said. “How did you know I was cursed?”

“When I touched the rose…sorry!”

The Beast had immediately wilted, somehow becoming small in the giant chair. His brow furrowed in pain and something like a whimper might have escaped around his mighty tusks.

Now she understood his rage.

Not all the details, of course. But she had accidentally destroyed the only way he had of freeing himself from the monstrous form he was in.

“When I touched the rose I saw what happened. I saw you, as a boy, in the castle—being cursed by an enchantress. I’m…very sorry for what I did,” Belle said, much more gently. “But…it didn’t look like you were ever going to break the curse on your own. Most of the petals had already fallen, isn’t that right? We must be very close to your twenty-first birthday. So unless you were going to somehow make me fall in love with you in…I don’t know…a month or less—it was all over already.”

The Beast looked away. Possibly in embarrassment.

“And,” Belle added wryly, “I have already almost been the victim of
one
involuntary wedding today. So. I can tell you. I’m not that easy a catch.”

The Beast looked at her, surprised and interested for a moment—before grinding his teeth and looking down at the floor again.

“Why did she curse you?” Belle pressed.

The Beast didn’t answer.

“Come on…why?”

“Crazy enchantress, I don’t know.” The Beast shrugged angrily.

“Please,”
Belle said.

“I was eleven years old!” he roared. “What
could
I have done?”

Belle was silent for a moment. He had a point. The boy in the vision seemed, in truth, a terrible little human being. But he was still a boy.

And also a prince, apparently.

And what was it the Enchantress—her
mother
—had said?

There is no love in your heart at all, Prince—just like your parents…

“Did she…did the woman who cursed you know your parents?”

It looked like he was going to stay sulkily silent, but then he seemed to think about it—as if this were the first time he had considered the whole thing. “My parents ruled the kingdom. Of course she knew them.”

Belle rubbed her temples in frustration. “Was the Enchantress famous? Did she bear some sort of grudge against your parents, or the kingdom, for some reason?” She didn’t like to think the woman she had suddenly learned so much about was one of those irrational fairies or witches or sorceresses from legend who went around cursing people and their babies out of spite.

“What…does it matter now?” the Beast asked.

“It
matters
because I’m trapped here with you, because of whatever happened ten years ago, and, oh, yes, it turns out the Enchantress was my
mother
!”

The look of surprise on the Beast’s face was almost comical.

No,
actually comical,
Belle decided.

“Wh-what?”

“The Enchantress was my mother,” she repeated, a little more patiently.