As Old As Time: A Twisted Tale (Twisted Tale, A) (27 page)

Suddenly, she noticed the Beast at the far end of the room, hunched over a book, frowning at it like he had been there for hours.

Belle tiptoed quietly down the main aisle toward him. He had a claw out and was moving it slowly across a line of text, frowning. Around him she saw some of the results of frustration: there were more than a few priceless, ancient record books shredded beyond recognition and little piles of what looked like future mouse nests.

“Beast…?” she asked in wonder.

“I’m…trying to make a time line. I went through one book already. Pretty thoroughly, I think. Noted all the references to someone who sounded like your mother.” He held up a piece of paper that had so many holes in it that Belle was reminded of the constellation maps you put in front of lanterns to make the little stars glow. There were one or two giant names scrawled at the top before the pen devolved into meaningless loops and scribbles.

“I haven’t written….in a while….” The look on his face was such a mix of desperation, eagerness, and
forlorness
that Belle felt her heart break a little. She took the paper from him and looked at it closely.

“That’s great,” she said. “That’s just what we need.”

The Beast took a deep breath. “I…My parents…”

“I am so sorry,” Belle said, putting the paper down and taking his paws in her hands. The Beast looked at them, and her, in surprise. “I didn’t know. I had no idea you lost your mother and father to the fever when you were a child. I was a cad and a lout for what I said.”

The Beast opened his mouth to say something.

“Thank you,” eventually came out.

“I’m…also sorry. I can’t always control my rage,” he continued haltingly, flexing his paws, trying to find the right words. “It was…
bad
last night. My mind went black. I don’t remember what happened after I ran from the dining room….It’s completely blank. I woke up in a corner of the basement with feathers on my muzzle.”

Belle tried not to withdraw her hands immediately in horror, but to do it slowly, like she was intending to anyway. What on earth had those claws touched? What had they
done
?

“That’s never happened before,” the Beast said, not even noticing.

He spoke through a mouth so large he could have opened it wide and scooped her up and bitten her in half or swallowed her whole. He could snap off her head with his tusks. But he was hunched over and the hump on his back was more pronounced. His eyes, light blue and out of place among the darker colors of his body, were wide and covered with a wet film.

“I’ll bet it’s the curse,” Belle said glumly. “You’re becoming even
more
of a beast. And it’s all my fault.”

The Beast gave her a very wan smile. “And your mother’s.”

“Right.” Belle slumped down next to him.
“Parents.”

The Beast, almost unthinkingly, put his paw on her hand and squeezed. Like he was comforting
her.
She leaned into him and he adjusted, putting his arm around her shoulders.

“They’re out there,” he said quietly after a moment.

Belle looked around the library before she could stop herself.

“I’m sorry…?”

“
My
parents are out there,” he jerked his chin gently toward the window. A strangely human gesture for such a giant chin. “I…visit them. Sometimes.”

“Show me,” Belle suggested gently.

Before they entered the bailey, they stopped at a cloakroom. The Beast was still wearing his fancy pants from dinner the night before but had divested himself of the shirt at some point. He swirled his old giant and ragged cape around his shoulders and fumbled at the golden clasp. But he didn’t lose his temper as immediately as Belle thought he would; apparently doing this one thing properly without destroying it was important to him for some reason.

Nevertheless, she reached up and firmly did it for him. He didn’t say anything, although there was a lopsided half-smile on his sad face.

She lightly swung an old cloak around own her shoulders and tied it under her neck in a movement so graceful the Beast couldn’t help staring.

Then he pushed the door and went out.

Belle followed, then stumbled over the threshold. Dizzy and confused, she looked to the Beast. He grimly pointed at little piles of dirt that had somehow gotten scuffed up around the door and the base of the walls.

At first Belle thought of moles or other pesty rodents, but it was winter—they would have been asleep or at least unable to dig through the frozen ground.

With a skipped heartbeat, she suddenly realized what the cause of the disturbance was.

The castle was sinking.

It was being pulled down into the ground by the webs that coated the castle like white fungus and now cut them off from the rest of the world. Earth would swallow the castle whole—like it had never been there at all. The curse would make certain that the kingdom would be entirely forgotten.

Belle shivered and met the Beast’s eyes, knowing that he had come to the same conclusion. Neither said a word.

She took a deep, cleansing breath, adjusted her cloak, and turned away from the castle to face the outside world instead.

Belle was dazzled.

It wasn’t sunny anymore but still very bright, with festoons of brilliant clouds arching overhead. A light snow covered everything—the kind that was so friable and delicately balanced that it would be gone with the first warm breeze. But for now the landscape was iced in white, and white flakes were still falling from a white sky. Compared to the eternal gloom of the castle, it was positively blinding.

Even the sickly, bone-white webbing that now cloaked statues and bushes in its strangling tendrils shone with an ugly pale radiance.

The Beast began to walk and Belle followed…stepping in giant claw-shaped tracks. Her feet barely made it up to the middle of his prints.

He turned left before he led her through what might, in some ancient year, have been a courtyard filled with defensive spikes during wartime or sheep and merchants during peace, but was now a slightly overgrown strolling garden, thin and tight under the coldness of the season.

It was extremely beautiful in a shabby, overgrown sort of way. Those who followed fads—and not the actual
philosophy
of thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau—would have approved wholeheartedly of the “return to natural state” the garden was taking. Belle couldn’t help smiling at the thought of either the Beast or the frustrated gardener being interested in the whims and trends of Parisian gardens.

Vines had begun to creep up everything. Birds had taken over in a way Belle was pretty sure they wouldn’t when more people were in the castle. Woodpeckers loudly attacked bugs in diseased trees and made their signature swooping flight paths over her head. Doves boldly congregated in twos and threes on the ground, looking for seed, unthreatened by cat or dog.

They passed under an arbor and into what at one time must have been an extremely elegant jewel box rose garden. Belle caught her breath. It wasn’t huge, as she imagined the ones at Versailles and Rome were, but what it lacked in width and depth it made up for in narrow, winding paths and bushes so cleverly interplanted it looked like a maze of roses that went on forever.

Climbing roses made thick walls above prim cutting roses, beach roses lapped at the bases of stone urns that held prize miniature roses. There were no other types of plants at all, except for a surprising number of weeds—and the ivy again, creeping along the stone walkways, taking over from below.

Belle looked around nervously for gaps in the topiary…for brown, bare strips from which the more ambulatory ivy had come. But everything seemed to be…normal.

Unlike in Belle’s mother’s garden, it looked like winter had killed most of the flowers. They certainly hadn’t been deadheaded properly and, to Belle’s experienced eye, it had been this way for a number of years, with canes not pruned and branches growing weak and heavy from their spent blooms and nutritionally costly rose hips.

Normally Belle would have reached over and casually broken off one of the unbelievably bright pink fruits and popped it in her mouth. Sour it might have been, but also a welcome burst of vitamins and memory of the summer sun. Hidden on a back shelf in their cottage Maurice still kept a stash of her mother’s rose hip tea. He never drank it, but once in a great while she caught him holding a silken bag to his nose and inhaling its aging perfume.

The whole place made Belle sad. Not
bad
sad. Just nostalgic and a little weepy for things that were lost or that she had never had.

Like a mother.

Would her mother have taken her into the rose garden and taught her all of the names, would she have plucked a blossom and placed it in her daughter’s hair? Would she have made rose hip tea for her daughter?

Would she have made raspberry leaf tea for Belle when she first began to have her monthly blood?
So that thirteen-year-old me wouldn’t have had to research the possible balms and soothing medicines for it
by myself?

She crunched some brittle snow under her heel extra angrily with that thought.

The Beast continued to quietly crunch his way forward through the snow. She couldn’t tell if he was affected by the rose garden; he didn’t seem any more or less melancholy than he normally did—when he wasn’t in one of his rages. He hunched over in that way that very strongly indicated that moving upright on two feet was not only uncomfortable and unnatural for him, but at times downright painful.

Belle hurried to catch up and then immediately stopped when she saw where they were: a tiny ancient cemetery.

It was one of the most beautiful ones she had ever seen. A modern wrought iron fence, whose sharp points were leafed with gold, surrounded the small patch of land. Only the kings and queens of the castle were buried here, along with the heartbreaking bodies of some royal babies and children who had never made it long enough to inherit the throne.

In front were the two most recent stones. They were beautifully carved marble, still fresh and icy-looking. Ornate designs of skulls and crosses and roses decorated the rounded tops of the stones and their inscriptions were carved in beautifully flowing script.

Here lie the king and queen of the castle, taken before their time.

The Beast had squatted down on his haunches to regard them more closely. He took his giant paw to brush off the little snow that had accumulated on the tops of the graves.

Belle knelt down next to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“I was ten when they died,” he said softly. “I didn’t understand. They had done all these things—quarantined the kingdom, sealed us up in the castle, made us drink all of these disgusting tonics…” He chuckled slightly at the last memory. “I hated them—they made me almost throw up. No one else in the castle died, but nothing worked for my parents. From fever to death in less than three days. I wasn’t allowed to touch them, I was barely allowed to see them. I never had a chance to say good-bye.”

Belle was suddenly reminded of the Beast’s change of heart when she was weeping, when he sent her father away.
I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye.
No wonder that had moved him.

“I was the last of the line…everyone wanted to keep me safe. Away from them and their sickness,” the Beast said mournfully. “But I would have traded my life for one more embrace from my mother, a final word from my father. Without them, I didn’t want to…live.”

Tears coursed down Belle’s cheeks. Was it better to never have had a mother—or to have one and lose one?

The Beast shook himself. “What remained of the court fled in droves after that…what good is an empty kingdom with no one to rule? What political use is a ten-year-old orphan prince in a backwards land?”

“Beast…” Belle said softly, squeezing his giant arm.

He sighed deeply.

“We mourned for a year, as was customary. And then it was time for my coronation. And the night before…”

“My mother showed up, and turned you into the Beast,” Belle finished softly.

“Turned me into?”
The Beast chuckled with despair. “You and your mother think I was well on my way to becoming one all on my own. As unfair as it was to do this to an eleven-year-old boy…why would she come the night before my coronation? She was
testing
me, to see if I would be as terrible a ruler as my parents. And I failed that test.”

Belle opened her mouth to say that it still wasn’t a fair thing to do to a child. But…seen from a different angle, the larger picture, it began to make sense. The previous king and queen had turned a prosperous, happy kingdom into an empty nightmare where people were dying in the streets of plague or were beaten and “disappeared” for being different.

Maybe her mother was just doing what she thought would protect the little that was left.

Still, it seemed a rather harsh burden for one so young.

“I
know
they were terrible rulers. Even as a child I sometimes felt like they weren’t doing the right things. They turned away petitioners…their own subjects, whose houses were taken from them or were being vandalized…poor folk who were repeatedly beaten by the same thugs who always went unpunished…Sometimes they acted like the tyrants in stories my nurse read to me.

“That’s why I lost my temper last night. I know you’re right about them, but…They’re
dead
.” His voice was beginning to degrade into a growl. “Their mistakes are
overrr
. Can’t everyone just leave them alone now?”

The growl turned into a roar. He opened his mouth and howled, his tusks and teeth bare, his eyes closed. It was angry and mournful and chilling all at once—like nothing Belle had ever heard before. Like something ancient and large and lonely that haunted the woods, forever looking for something it was missing.

It had begun to snow again, she noticed, and his hot breath melted the timid flakes all around his giant head like some magical beast who breathed fire.

Belle gazed at the haunted, unkempt gardens and the mournful ancient cemetery. The air suddenly felt bitterly cold: the flakes became larger and stranger-looking.
Ashes,
Belle suddenly realized as she touched one with her finger and it remained, unmelting. Ashes from some dreadful, world-ending fire, signs of a war that consumed the land, a vision of everything ending.