The reflection in my mirror showed a woman, not just the girl I had been when Father and I had left the hunting lodge together three months ago. I didn't know exactly what the changes were: some roundness lost from my cheeks, perhaps, and a hollowness in my throat that hadn't been there before. Mostly, though, I thought it was my eyes. In the moonlight, their hazel tint took on a greener shade, though by daylight, with the mirror's amber frame, I thought they looked uncomfortably yellow. Like a beast's eyes, though not like the Beast's, whose beady gaze was as brown as any boar's. I preferred the green, even if there seemed to be a new understanding of sorrow in my reflection. I rose and found a robe, drawing it around myself as I went to the room's balcony.
Two days' worth of rain had stopped sometime while I slept, and though clouds had come to obscure Pearl's moon, here the night was bright. The forest had a malevolent, creeping sense to it beneath the blue night, though I doubted our grounds had diminished any.
Our. A moment's defense of the Beast to my father, and suddenly the palace was ours, not his. But then, we were its only two denizens, and unless Pearl's magic worked some rare witchery indeed, I didn't expect to be going anywhere any time soon. So ours it would be, if only in my thoughts. I brushed water from a balcony seat and settled into it, drawing my feet up off the cold floor.
Pearl was not the person in my family I would have imagined as the savior of a captive in a castle. Jasper, of all of us, seemed most suited to the role: I could see him, even at seven years old, brandishing a blade and fighting his way through brambles to rescue a lost soul. But the lot had fallen to Pearl, whose arrogance was at least matched by her intelligence; if we had to depend on someone to rescue us, there were worse choices. Particularly since Pearl would take failure as a personal affront, and the last time she'd been thwarted, with Solindra Nare, it had wakened in her a witchery none of us had dreamed slumbered within. If she was stymied in her first attempt at freeing me, I half expected her to take on the guise of a faery queen, and wreak havoc on the forest and palace alike.
Comforted by the thought, I drifted, half asleep beneath the moon, until my legs relaxed enough that my feet fell down and hit the cold floor, and I yelped and ran for bed.
True sunrise wakened me a few hours later. I felt lighter than I had in weeks, buoyed by having spoken with Pearl and Father. I wasn't sure, if I reflected on it, that I believed rescue was at hand, though certainly Pearl would orchestrate it if she could. My exile simply seemed less onerous, with the prospect of talking to and even seeing my family every month. It wasn't the same as feeling their warm embraces, but neither was I so alone anymore.
Strangely enough, that fact made me feel more sociable, even if the only soul I had to socialize with was the Beast. I ate a breakfast of toast and jam, foregoing the bacon as an act of willpower that I immediately questioned. The servants appeared to question it as well, as a small plate of bacon waited for me on a windowsill outside my room when I left it. I said, "Well, if you insist," and took the plate with me as I went in search of the Beast.
He haunted none of the spots I might expect him to: the dining hall, its parlor, the library, even the garden, which still squelched with standing water and mud, were abandoned. I knew where his rooms were, but was reluctant to go to them, not because I thought I would be unwelcome. No, I was afraid if I went beyond the main hall, the palace would guide me away from my intended destination and pull me into one of its stories, and I was not quite prepared to face another intimate history lesson.
The Beast was Irindala's son, the prince of our realm. I knew his name. I shied away from that knowledge, hardly even letting myself remember it. I'd asked him his name once, and he had accepted Beast in its stead. It seemed a trespass to go beyond that, even if he had since confessed—in effect if not in actuality—to what his name was. To pull myself away from those thoughts, I let myself into the other round-faced hall, the ballroom whose basic form echoed the library's. I hardly expected to find the Beast there, but it was the only other place in the palace that I was willing to go that I hadn't yet looked in.
Sunlight poured in through the enormous windows and reflected off the golden parquet floors, brightening the room far more than the library with its carpets and shelves could ever manage. A crystal chandelier hung far above me, singing gently as the door's opening and closing pushed a faint breeze through the hall. I stood beneath it, smiling upward at the rainbows it cast, and tried to imagine this room full of music and flirtation and laughter.
I should not have: I knew it almost as soon as the fancy touched me. Memory snatched at me, memory that was not my own. The room filled with indistinct figures, beautifully dressed; music played as if from a distance, a ghostly remove that made its tune lighter and sweeter than any I'd ever heard. I was swept into the steps of a dance, moving with comfortable confidence as I smiled at my partners. I was hardly anyone, a courtier with a pretty dress and an excellent bosom, and no one could tell me any different. But I could charm, and I could flirt, and I wasn't surprised when, between dances, a slim and handsome young man crossed the floor toward me.
Other men might have to work their way through the crowd. For this youth, the crowd parted just a little, just enough, and did it without conscious effort or awareness: the prerogative of royalty. He stopped before me, offering a hand and unleashing a devastating smile that begot a breathless laugh from me as I took his hand. He drew me close, pulling me into the dance, and I could hardly do more than gaze up at him in half-stunned admiration. He favored his mother in beauty, though he had the broad nose I'd seen in paintings of the long-dead king, and he wore his tightly curling black hair cropped close to his scalp the way his father had. But he had Irindala's wide bright smile, played up against sepia skin darker than hers, and a jaw meant for sculpting. His hands were soft and, I saw, stained with ink: a scholar prince rather than a warrior. But then, he was young, and Irindala hadn't gone to war until she was in her twenties. He smiled again, and I smiled in return, lost in his dark eyes.
The music changed, gaining in tempo, until it became something I had never heard before. The prince's smile faded as his concentration increased: trying not to step on my skirt or my feet, trying not to crush me as he kept pace with the dance. Then even concentration faltered, becoming alarm, though it seemed only he shared that concern: my heart flew with excitement, my breath coming in laughs and joy filling me as we tangled more tightly together. He tried to break away and couldn't, though my grip hardly seemed strong enough to keep him. Faster and faster we whirled, until the part of me that didn't belong in that story spun loose and I began to fear, though the pretty girl I embodied still laughed and thrilled with delight. Nor could I loosen my hold on the prince: we spun together, increasingly out of control, our breath burning in our bodies and sickness rising from the relentless twirling, the impossible pace. My feet began to hurt and tears started to leak from my eyes, but the woman who had started the dance loved every moment of it.