I sat up straighter. "Father, is this our forest?"
He gave me a look somewhere between amusement and the suspicion the snow had made me simple. "I suppose it is, but how do you tell the difference between the end of one forest and the beginning of another? If you mean, are we close to home, I have no idea. I don't know how long I slept, save for it still being dark when I'd last opened my eyes. It could be nine or noon, now, though, for all I know." He gestured at the indistinct sky's inability to hint at the hour. "I don't think we'll find our way home through the forest, if that's what you're asking."
"No. It's just that the villagers wouldn't hunt in our forest."
"Oh. Oh. The beast protecting it. An enchantment itself. I see." Father looked around more carefully, as if, now that he understood me, he might see a landmark to orient us with. I looked, too, and although we were neither of us talking as we searched, a different kind of silence came over us as we began to understand what we saw.
Beyond our peculiar little rectangle of safety, where the snow still fell constantly and swiftly, a ferocious storm raged. Had clearly been raging all along, but until we began to look hard, we had been as protected from knowledge of it as we were from its ravages. The more I watched, the more I realized that the trees just beyond us danced and rattled with wind, and the harder I listened, the more clearly I could hear that wind howling and shrieking, as if enraged it couldn't reach us. The snow outside of our enchantment didn't merely fall, but whipped and lashed and spun, creating a whiteout that we would never have been able to pass through safely.
I remembered Pearl's reading of the cards, and wondered, with a shudder, what would have happened if I had not been with Father. I said nothing, though, and rather than guess at our location, we rode on in silence, letting the enchantment guide us through the storm.
I looked up when Beauty stopped again as darkness fell, then stood, shaking snow off my blanket and quilt, to gape at iron gates twenty feet tall set into stone walls their equal in height. Father had gone back into the wagon to rest; I tried to say his name and produced only a squeak.
Beauty stood not two lengths from the gates, which, like our enchanted rectangle, were enveloped in a hard, steady snowfall nothing like the howling maelstrom surrounding them. I hadn't seen them before she stopped, either more magic or the storm itself blocking them until their enchantment melded with ours.
The gates were laden with a copper design that took every advantage of the metal's natural properties: golden-red roses 'grew' all over them, stems and leaves blueish-green with patina. The girl I had been a year ago admired the artistry, and the one I was now felt sorry for the servants who had to polish the roses while leaving the stems rough and green. Then again, the gates were clearly protected by charms, anyway, so perhaps the roses stayed polished of their own volition.
As if I'd guessed a secret and earned passage, the gates swung open—inward, silent, brushing snow into arches as they passed over it—to invite us down a long straight avenue lined with massive oak trees. The length of the road and the whiteness of oncoming night hid what lay at the road's end, but I remained on my feet, swaying with the wagon's motion, to await what would be revealed.
Even expecting it, it made me laugh. A manor house—a palace—with wings unfolding from a central edifice, rounded facades that spoke of ballrooms, ground level arched doors in the straighter sections, no doubt leading to storage, stables, kitchens; towers at corners, wide shallow—and currently frozen, but cleared to skate on—ponds carefully kept in beautifully sculpted basins; gardens that backed onto forest, and all of it unheard of, a hidden castle in the woods. The gates could lead to nothing else; the enchantment that had saved us could hardly lead to anything else, and I laughed again at the astonishing absurdity of it.
Father, hearing my laugh, opened the front of the wagon cover, and breathed, "Sweet mother of the stars," in genuine reverence.
Beauty ambled around the ponds, stopping, as if a stablehand came to stand at her head, directly in front of the sweeping stairs that climbed to the castle's main doors. Father and I sat there like lumps, and after a minute or so, the doors—themselves easily ten feet in height, and carved with the same rose relief as the gates—opened.
"You go," Father finally said. "I'll…bring Beauty to the stables."
"You want me to go into an enchanted castle alone?"
"Ah," Father said. "Well. When you put it that way—"
Beauty stomped a foot impatiently, drawing our attention to her. The reins slipped, causing me to lurch for them, but a pecularity in how they slipped made me look again, and then swallow. "Father, is someone…holding…that rein?"
It looked for all the world like someone was: a firm but fair hand, like Flint's, just below Beauty's dribbling chin. As we watched, the rein tugged a little, not quite enough to coax Beauty into action, but more than enough to jolt Father and myself out of the wagon to see what was going on.
No sooner than we were on the ground than the reins' tension increased, and Beauty walked placidly away in the wake of an invisible guide, leaving us alone in the snow with an inviting door already opened to us.
"It's an impossible castle in an enchanted snowstorm in a haunted forest," I said in a voice slightly more shrill than I had hoped for. "Naturally there are invisible servants to care for the horses."
"Naturally." Father sounded as rattled as I, which made me feel a little better. Together we mounted the stairs, I, at least, having already given up on an expectation of a footman or butler standing at the door to greet us.
Nor was I disappointed: the door had, by all appearances, opened on its own, just as it then gracefully closed behind us. I caught a glimpse, as it closed, of the storm closing in: the magnitude of the enchantment, it seemed, had been for our benefit, and not simply the magical manner of the place keeping its personal weather mild for the season. I tugged my cloak around me, aware, as I had not been before, that it was wet and cold, and turned to examine our shelter.