To that, she gave no answer.
My throat seized. I pulled myself even closer. I could have slipped through the bars, but I only gripped them.
“Can you ...” My voice broke. “Can you change the past?”
She tilted her head. “Do you wish to know?”
Everything appeared so easily in the castle. Barely a thought had caused a priceless library of books to take shape, and there seemed to be no cost, unless I had already unwittingly signed my soul away.
But a spoken wish to a fairy was different.
I thought of the woodcutter and his wife.
“No.” I swallowed. “I make no wishes.”
“Then you,” she said, “are more stubborn than Wolf.”
She disappeared as quickly as the beast did, though she left a set of shimmering footprints that followed her into nothing.
Slowly, I walked the mare back to the stables.More stubborn than Wolf,she’d said. The lack of an article pointed to a name, but I knew no one surnamed Wolf. In the end, it didn’t matter if I was more stubborn than stone; I was still lost.
Was I wrong?I wondered, but there was no one to tell me. I thought of afternoons in my home, copying the writings of Archelaus as he taught balance in the world and “To everything, a cost.” Some people believed he’d made a fairy wish to gain his wisdom. If so, his death may not have been the cost, but it was nevertheless the outcome.
Magic was an unruly thing. It could remake shattered porcelain without a scratch. It bent truth and reality to whatever obscene angles suited it. What if I wished to undo Stephan’s attack on me only to find myself in a new future where events had veered in such a way that he’d convinced me to marry him after all and I was now his wife, chained to him body and soul, living out a nightmare for the rest of my days? I had to hold what meager ground I possessed, even if that ground was smoldering beneath my feet.
But just as I couldn’t go back, neither could I go forward. At home, a reckoning was inevitable—whether brought by Stephan’s reappearance or the observation of my family or the breaking of my own will, there would come a confrontation. And I couldn’t face it.
What roared inside me could roar here with no one to mark it, and I had the space to ignore it. And maybe the same magic that held the castle flowers in eternal spring could hold me in place too, suspended between past and future, allowing me to curl in an unmoving corner and never be forced to walk the path forward again.
I looked up at the white towers piercing the sky, and the castle seemed more welcoming than ever.
It was another day before I encountered the beast again. I’d returned to the stables, and upon finding the same chestnut mare waiting for me, I’d named her Honey and claimed her as I’d claimed the violin.
Just as I reentered the castle after my ride and took the first stair toward my room, his voice came from around the corner.
“You don’t have to stay.”
Had I retreated a few steps, I could have perhaps seen him, pressed into the shadows against the wall. But I let the shadows be.
For a moment, I considered returning to the cottage, riding out of the trees on Honey. I saw Rob’s shock, Astra’s scowl. What would I say? In their eyes, I would be rising from a grave, and even the thought of telling them I was playing violin, eating fine food, and wasting my days in comfort while they worked their hands to the bone made me unable to lift my eyes.
And that wasn’t even the worst part.
“Who would teach you to read?” I whispered. I cleared my throat, trying for an amused smile that simply wouldn’t come. “I couldn’t possibly leave a prince in such dire, uneducated straits.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
He didn’t need to.
I climbed the next step, but his voice stopped me again. “I promised no harm to you. Do you trust that?”
This time I managed the wry, airy smile. “I trust no man’s word. But a beast’s may have a chance.”
Then I took the staircase to my room and played my violin until I was certain the grooves in my fingertips would never fill again.
A throne room. That was what I realized was missing. All the kitchens, ballrooms, and even a library, but a palace without a throne room was no palace at all, and though I searched every room in the massive structure and walked staircases until my calves ached, I found no throne.
I did find a set of ornate double doors, arched to the ceiling and carved with the finest scrollwork. Beast’s name was not engraved on either door, but it may as well have been.
