The Beast stared back at me, and, apparently recognizing the disaster about to erupt, said, "Let me show you to your rooms." He turned swiftly, dropping to all fours as he did so, and paced away.
He had a tail. I hadn't noticed when he'd left the garden earlies, but he had a tail. A bear's tail, short and waggily and not at all in keeping with the general size and ferocity of him. Except it was, because bears, after all, were large and ferocious. But they were also round through the waist and hip, whereas the Beast narrowed more like a lion. I might have expected a longer, lashing tail, but not the stubbly little thing that stuck out from the back of his trousers.
I wiped the back of my hand across my eyes, and followed the Beast and his ridiculous little tail back to the palace.
The palace doors swept open ahead of us, and closed again behind us with the dignity of enchantment. I remembered with a pang how I hadn't even seen Glover in the room as Father and I discussed what to do, the night we fled the city. Servants were already invisible to their masters; what real difference did it make if they were in fact invisible? "Are they real?"
The Beast understood my question, which was intriguing and uncomfortable all at once. "As real as you or I."
Given that he was an eight foot tall Beast in an enchanted castle, and I was the sister of a witch, I thought it wiser not to consider that definition of reality any farther. The Beast led me up the right side of the sweeping stairway, and only a small distance down the corridor before pausing at a door, and opening it. "Your rooms."
Considering what little I'd seen of the rest of the palace, I expected the space I entered to be sumptuous. Nor was I disappointed: the door opened on a sitting room with a fire already crackling in its hearth. Woven rugs lay beneath animal furs to keep the floor's chill well away from the feet, and there were all the accoutrements one might expect in a civilized sitting space: liquor sideboards, tables, comfortable chairs, all done in rosewoods and golden fabrics. Beyond that, through another doorway, I caught a glimpse of the bedroom, replete with a canopied bed and windows that let sunlight spill generously across the floor. All well and good; I would look to it in a moment. But something in the sitting room had caught my eye. I crossed to a six-shelf bookcase filled to overflowing, and said, under my breath, "Maybe this won't be so bad."
"You like to read," the Beast said as I took a familiar title down. I nodded, turning through the pages, and he said, "There is a library."
I turned, surprised, the book still in hand. "You mean, more than this?"
"Considerably more."
I put the book down. "Can I see?"
The Beast gave me a look that, had it come from Pearl, I would have called pedantic, and I muttered, "May I see," rather than wait to discover I had traded a beautiful literalist of a sister for a dreadful literalist of a Beast.
A sound emanated from his chest, and after a moment I judged it a chuckle. I felt my mouth pinch into sourness, and the Beast's chuckle became a laugh that reverberated in my bones. "This way," he said, and I followed him in a dudgeon warped with rueful amusement. He was a monster keeping me against my will, but, his initial rage at my picking the rose having passed, he seemed a rather reasonable captor. I was not, at the moment, either afraid or resentful: the prospect of a library and an enchanted castle were intriguing enough to allow me to pretend that this was nothing more than a temporary adventure to be embraced. The reality would settle in soon enough.
We went up another set of stairs, back across the corridor above the foyer, and a little more deeply into the hall than my room had been. The Beast opened a door on the opposite side of the hall from mine, and I stepped onto a balcony overlooking three open floors in one of the round-fronted rooms facing the front gardens.
Bookshelves and reading nooks lined the walls of each floor, heavily carpeted balconies, like the one I stood on, growing larger as they approached the distant ground floor. I glanced up at a glass domed roof, and smiled at the effect: from here, the architecture made it seem as though we were nestled in an enormous egg, its shell made of books. I drew my hand along the satin-smooth balcony rail as I walked around it, a foolish smile on my face. Almost halfway around, part of the floor dropped into a bannistered stairway that led down to the next level. I followed it down, and then the next one down again, making half-circles of the library until I reached the ground floor and walked to its middle to look up at the egg-shaped balconies. The Beast paced a little way behind me on all fours, not rising to his—hind feet, I supposed—until we reached the bottom floor. "The top balcony, just below the dome, is an iris. It can be closed, and the dome becomes an ideal spot for star-gazing."
"Doesn't your breath steam it up?"
The Beast chuckled again, that deep sound more like a growl. "I suppose it should, but no."
Magic, I thought, but didn't say. I did say, "I didn't know there were so many books in all the world."
"You are educated." That was a question, though he didn't phrase it as one. I dropped my chin in a scant nod, still gazing upward, and the Beast went on, "You know, perhaps, that over the centuries, much knowledge has been lost. Libraries have been deliberately burned or otherwise sacked."
My lip curled. "Yes."
"This library seems to have…saved…those books. Copied them, or stolen them before ruin took them, or…something of that nature. I've found books here that are referenced by other books, more modern books, as lost to time. I think it's possible that every piece of deliberately preserved writing is stored here, somewhere."
I turned to him, astonished. "Scholars from all over the world would die to come here."
"As it turns out," the Beast said, "people prefer to kill than to die for something, and I am a Beast."
I stood with that a moment, absorbing it and all of its implications, before turning away. The Beast stepped back. "If you're hungry, ask the servants. Otherwise, if you care to join me for dinner, they'll let you know when it's ready, and bring you to the dining hall."
He left, and I had to watch from the corner of my eye so I could judge the moment, just as he crossed the threshold, to call, "Do I have a choice?"
He hesitated, a massive paw on the door and his head turned a little toward me, although he made no effort to meet my eye. "You always have a choice."
I neither read nor ate, but spent a few hours wandering the library. Books tended to return to the shelves after lying fallow a few minutes, if I'd taken them down to examine. After several iterations of that, I cleared my throat. "You don't have to do that, you know. I'll clean up after myself. I mean, if you want to, go ahead, but don't feel obliged."