Authors: Robin McKinley
She was now standing in a huge room with windows on opposite
walls. She had been mindful heretofore of the Beast’s advice not to look
directly out any windows, and the wearier she became, the more careful she had
been not to look round her unless she was standing still. She thought now that
she would risk looking out a window—because she could think of nothing else to
try. At least she could discover on which side lay the courtyard, after the palace’s
maze of corridors and smaller rooms which threw windows at her from unexpected
directions. The courtyard had to be on one side or the other, whether the outer
wall faced garden, orchard, or wild wood, and perhaps, at least before the
palace confused her utterly again, she could concentrate on that courtyard
wall. Perhaps the door to it now lay hidden behind some drapery or arras, like
the door to the earth corridor in her rooms, invisible behind the summer
tapestry. Perhaps, before the palace lost her again, she would be able to turn
round, and cling to that courtyard wait, and search every finger’s-breadth till
she found what she was looking for.
She stood still, and spread her feet a little, and put her
hand on a torchere to steady herself, and looked towards a window. But her eyes
shied away from looking out and paused on the curtain instead. Her gaze traced
the sweep of drapery, which led back towards the wall, away from the dangerous
window. There was a small square table tucked against the curtain’s outer edge.
Hadn’t she just seen—in the room before this one, or the
room before that, or perhaps even the room before that one, which had been,
hadn’t it, tucked in what should have been a niche between the angled walls of
two other rooms, except that there was not space enough for it to have existed
at all—hadn’t she just seen that little end table, that very table, with its
checkerboard of marble squares of different colours inlaid in its ebony
surface? And hadn’t it, in that room that could not have been where it was,
stood next to just that same painting of that handsome, haughty young man? He
was wearing a deep blue robe and a large soft hat. that hung down towards his
shoulder, with a feather that curved from its crown elegantly beneath his chin,
and over his other shoulder a bird face stared with angry, intelligent eyes
above its great curved beak. She did not like the young man’s face. It was not
the face of a man who would help you if you were in trouble.
She turned her eyes with a jerk and looked directly out the
window next to him and saw the wild wood just beyond the panes, a wind blew,
and the branches nodded to her like bony flapping hands.
She let go her torchere and walked across the room to be
nearer the windows on the other side. She found another torchere and planted
herself beside it, holding on its stem rather too tightly with one hand. There
was another familiar painting near this window, of a lady who held a pug dog in
one hand and a fan in the other, and her discarded needlework lay on the arm of
her chair.
She was smiling. It was not at all a nice smile.
The wild wood pressed against this window too.
Beauty closed her eyes. She thrust her tongue against the
roof of her mouth, but the rose-petal had dissolved long ago. She opened her
eyes again and gave a brief glance to the torchere she still clung to. It had
been brass, with six curving arms when she had first touched it; the upright
where her hand rested was smooth, but the six arms each held three candles, and
each candle rose from a waterlily, and each arm was made as of three waterlily
stems wound together, and its base, below the upright, was wide and shallow,
like waterlily leaves floating in a small pond. The smooth brass upright remained,
but she now clutched a torchere whose crown held eight plain upright
candlesticks bound in silver, and whose base was a solid conic pedestal of
brass laid round with silver bands.
She let go of it as if it had produced teeth and bitten her.
She took a step away from it, and turned, and looked behind her, towards the
portrait of the young man in blue. He looked older now, and his posture, proud
and haughty before, was now magisterial, the supple pose of known and proven
power. His fingers were slightly curled, and the palms shimmered, as if he held
sorcery there. His eyes were staring into hers, and for a moment she felt a
thrum in the floor beneath her feet, felt her memory beginning to grow dark,
like a landscape under a storm cloud. She jerked her eyes free of his and saw
that the bird that stood behind his shoulder had half spread its wings and that
it was as tall as a man.
Beauty walked to the nearest window, which lay beside the
lady with the pug dog, threw up its sash, climbed through the narrow gap, and
slid down the outside wall. Even the palace’s ground floor, where she had been,
was built up high above the real ground, and she had to hang by her fingers and
finally let go without knowing where her feet would strike. She landed heavily,
her injured knee buckled, and because she was so tired, she fell.
She lay still for a moment, almost tempted not to move. But
the ground was cold and hard, and her urgency was still on her. She stirred,
with an effort came to her elbows, and looked round. A great tangle of wild
wood rose all round her. She looked up, at the building she had just fled; she
had no way back. The white stone gleamed vaguely in the light of the rising
moon, scattered by leaf shadow. She could not feel the wind from where she lay
upon the ground, but she could hear it singing through the trees. She refused
to hear if it sang words; she was sure she would not like them.
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 die root which had
thrown her, she looked in that direction. She just saw the unicorn turning away
from the heap on die 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 giade. 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 was.” 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, 1 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.