The Beast, playing the role of pedant perfectly, said, "Ah," with only the gravest hint of humor, as if my explanation had been entirely necessary. I giggled beneath his continued, "I haven't had apple pie in…a very long time. My tastes run more toward the carnivorous. And I haven't had dinner."
"I might submit, Master Beast, that you are quite old enough to decide that once in a while, dessert might come before dinner." He cast a glance at me, and I, following with uncomfortably great precision where his thoughts ran, threw my palm off to stave off his words. "No. I am not dessert, and I won't sleep with you."
That time there was no doubt that the curl of his lip indicated humor, as a low rumble of laughter rolled from his chest. "Then I suppose I'll have to try some apple pie."
Unexpectedly delighted, I clapped my hands together and said, "May we please have some apple pie?" to the room, which developed a sense of bustling off to do a job. "Can you feel it when they talk to each other? That buzz that settles under the skin?"
The Beast quirked an eyebrow and shook his head. "You do?"
"Obviously, or I wouldn't have asked. I wonder if you've gotten used to it, or if you're too magical yourself to notice."
"Perhaps," the Beast suggested dryly, "they don't talk to each other around me."
"Do you talk to them?"
His startled look was sufficient answer to the question. I said, "Well then," as if the problem was obvious, and by then an exceptionally large apple pie, easily two feet across, had arrived as the centerpiece on the table. A plate of ordinary proportions sat at my place, and a considerably bigger one had been placed where the Beast usually sat. "I don't think I can eat even one slice of that. Perhaps I could take a…dollop, and the rest can be yours to do with as you see fit."
"Thrust my face into, and slobber, perhaps," the Beast said, still dryly.
I looked up at him, genuinely curious. "Is that the best you can do?"
"It's not unlike what I usually do," he admitted. "I haven't tried eating like a civilized being for a long time."
"Since the last time you had apple pie, perhaps. Well, would you like to give it a try?"
"…not with an audience."
That seemed eminently fair. I nodded. "Maybe I'll just have a bit of pie, then, and leave you to your own devices."
The Beast turned his head away from me a little, as though I'd landed a blow I hadn't even meant to throw. "Why," he said again, "would you be kind to me?"
"I don't know," I also said again, and got myself some pie. It was delicious, full of cinnamon and cloves, and there was a custard to pour over the top. I ate my piece, thinking about his question, and finally said, "I suppose behaving nicely is as much for my own benefit as yours. Probably more. I could be angry and afraid," and even saying those words lit their fire inside of me, so I took a breath, trying to ease their burn. "But there's clearly very little I could do to harm you, which means feeding my anger is more likely to make me miserable than you. So I suppose I'm trying to let it go by being nice. It helps that aside from our first meeting, and the fact that you coerced me into staying…" I had to breathe again, trying to shake off the memory of fear and the still-vivid fury that those admissions acknowledged before I continued. "Aside from that, you've been…quite pleasant yourself."
"Aside from that," the Beast echoed. "As if those things could be pushed aside."
"Did you come here of your own volition?"
The Beast cast me a startled glance. "No."
"Would you leave if you could?"
"I would."
"Then you and I aren't so different, except I see my captor every day and I think you don't. I don't even know which is worse. As long as I see you every day, there might be a chance I could talk you into letting me go. If whomever put you here is long gone, you don't even have that chance. So if I'm kind, maybe it's because I hope it'll awaken a sympathetic kindness in you, and you'll release me."
"Rather than be angry, and hope your rudeness will drive me to send you away?"
"You're a Beast," I said with a degree of scathing that would do Pearl proud. "If I fight, your nature will make mastering me your prize, and no master ever wants to release his prize. Prizes are things, and things don't have feelings that matter. If I have any hope of getting out of here, it's in making you see me as a person. An equal. Someone worthy of respect. Maybe you won't. Maybe you can't. But making myself into a monster to earn that respect means you win anyway, so I'll be kind where I can be."
The Beast watched me through all of that speech, and when it ended, said, "It's possible I've never respected anyone as much as I do you, in this moment. You're very wise, for one so young."
"But you're still not going to let me go."
"No."
"Fine. Enjoy your pie, Beast." I stalked from the dining hall, and managed not to cry until I was safely in my own rooms.
I only saw the Beast at the evening meal for the next several days. All he did, each evening, was ask me if I would sleep with him, and once denied, disappeared again. I told myself it was less offensive to be left alone than to be visited by a captor who had no intention of letting me go. That was true, but it was also lonelier. I worked on my perfumes—the khemet one took a month to brew, so I found other recipes and mixed them until my room was overwhelmed with scent—and I went out to glare at the gardens, and I talked to servants whom I could neither see nor understand, assuming the hair-raising subliminal muttering was indeed them.
As such, the days were difficult to track. I had been there a week before I thought to begin a calendar, and even that only came to mind because my blood began to flow. It made a way to mark the days, though, so I used it as the beginning of my calendar, and noted the phase of the moon—new, the sky hanging empty—to help remember the details of time's passage. It helped keep track of the perfume brews, too, so those three things became my points of reference: the moon, the blood, and the perfume.
The khemet was almost done when I arose one morning to go on my daily tromp around the gardens, and found a steady, drenching rain falling. All the snow was gone, and the earth, between blades of dead, yellow grass, looked saturated unto mud.