Page 6 of Beauty Reborn
The lock disappeared.
I left the room.
For hours, I wandered the castle. At one point, a rolling cart with a silver lunch tray chased me down and aggressively waved a fork until the combination of its insistence and my extended hunger broke my resolve and I broke the crust of a pie. Perhaps the meal was poisoned. Perhaps the beast practiced human methods of death as it practiced the enforcement of human laws. Yet I finished half a meat pie with no death rattle, though the pork fat and spices were increasingly heavy on my tongue.
My stomach tilted, threatening overturn. I dropped the pie and pressed a fist to my mouth until the nausea passed. The teapot rocked back and forth like an anxious governess, and the teacup butted twice against my free hand, ignoring my swat to keep it away. On its third approach, I struck back with more force than intended, shattering the little porcelain cup against the leg of the cart.
I stared at the collection of shards, but they only trembled a moment before knitting themselves seamlessly back together. The teacup settled on the tray.
Seeing the cup whole again was worse than seeing it broken.
In one swift movement, I overturned the whole tray. The shattering might have woken a village, yet every fragment and spill swept itself up and wrung itself out until lunch was replaced in full splendor. Even my pie was whole once more, without a bite taken.
It was a farce. The whole castle. In nature, there was always a scar to betray the shattered, and that was if they managed to heal at all.
“Enough games, beast,” I said, breathing heavy. “Either administer your punishment or see me leave.”
I stood still for several minutes. Then, leaving the cheese knife on the tray, I walked down two flights of stairs and out the front door.
The afternoon sunlight slanted into my eyes, dazzling. I took a moment to adjust, eyes shaded, blinking down at the gray stone path. I debated plucking my own rose; that would certainly earn me a response. But then there would be two debts, and I could pay only one.
I made for the gate. It shuddered at my approach. Just as I lifted a hand—
“Don’t go.”
I whirled around.
But no one was there. Only a sea of flowers, trembling in the breeze. Only a towering white castle, sunlight glazing the windows.
It had been a soft voice. Perhaps even ...
Broken.
I turned back to the gate, stared out at the forest beyond. The shadows were long and oppressive. I looked at the shining castle.
And I stayed.
I couldn’t bear the silence. It was the worst part of that big, echoey castle. There was plenty of movement as enchantments ran with and without my interference, but it was all silent—the candles lit silently, the brooms swept silently, the tea poured silently and without a drop of spill. If I strained my ears, the most I got for my trouble was a whisper of sound like a light breeze through leafless trees.
I had never lived in a silent home before. Though I was the worst culprit of noise, I was never the only one. Between Astra’s boisterous laughter, Callista’s talent for song, and Rob’s clumsiness in small spaces, there was always chatter and clatter, be it our home in the city or our new cottage.
Now I was alone in an empty castle, and my bootheels on the marble staircase bellowed like a mountain goat in all the silence. Even if I held my tongue, I was the loudest thing this castle hosted. Perhaps that was why I mortified it so.
The rolling tray brought meals to my room whenever I hungered, and for the two days following my arrival, I saw and heard no other sign of the beast. On the third day, I thought of quill and parchment, and they were mine, along with a writing desk that somehow fit itself along the wall without shrinking the room’s space.
What do you want with me?I wrote. I lifted my paper in the air and released it. It fluttered away gently, slipping beneath my door with all the silence of any other enchantment.
The beast sent no response, not even another rough drawing, and the longer I studied the first two, which I’d gathered into my room, the more I became convinced he couldn’t hold a quill, much less write. The strokes were too wide for any quill I’d seen and smudged at every edge. Perhaps he’d scribbled it with a claw dipped in ink.
He could certainly speak. Yet he chose not to.
On the third day, a bar of soap began to hover obnoxiously about me like a massive fly. Though I was due for a bath—my filth must have mortified the pristine castle as much as my noise—I was not about to disrobe in a stranger’s house.
The soap drove me from my room, but no matter where I wandered, I could not find a room which might belong to the beast. There were many bedrooms, of course, all grand, with tapestries of great hunts and conquering kings. One had a purple rug, the likes of which might have purchased my father’s entire lost fortune twenty times over. But none had personalization. If the beast occupied a room, he did so without disturbing it and without so much as a trinket or a door plaque to mark it his. What a lonely idea.
At last, I stopped to rest in a ballroom. I lay on the polished hardwood and studied the chandelier above, attempting to count the candles but losing track each time. Did palaces such as this exist without enchantments? Did they contain a thousand servants to light a thousand candles? I hummed the old melody of an early music lesson as my mind wandered.
Without warning, a harpsichord in the corner struck up the same relaxing tune.
