By the time the lunch hour arrived, I’d given myself a thorough headache by concentration and unrelenting sound, but I smiled all the same, and it was not the stiff smile that held something behind my teeth.
This was not what I had imagined coming to the castle would hold.
After I finished lunch in my room, I sat at the writing desk and penned a new “letter.” This one said,My name is Beauty.Once it had fluttered off, I sat on the staircase outside my room, picking at the cold, smooth marble of the stairs. Thin veins of gold traced through the white stone, like tiny rivulets of water forging paths in a white beach. I’d never seen a white beach, but I thought they were the most beautiful landscape I’d ever read about.
“Don’t turn,” he said, once more behind me.
With effort, I didn’t, but I scooted to the edge of the stair and angled slightly to press my shoulder to the banister posts. It was a compromise; I didn’t face him, but I also didn’t keep him directly at my back.
“What does it say?”
There was definitely more growl in his voice. Perhaps it increased with volume, and if he shouted, it would only be a wordless, bestial roar.
“It says, ‘My name is Beauty.’”
“I knew that already.” I heard a whisper of parchment, like he’d turned it in his hands. Did he have hands?
The silence stretched, but I was too full of music not to chatter. I kept my eyes focused on the steps below me as I spoke. “My mother, Rose, was a vain woman who valued handsome appearance above all other virtues. My eldest sister is named Astra, after the goddess. Next is Callista, after the queen. Isabella was stillborn, and when my turn came, I suppose all Mother’s subtlety had been spent. So Beauty it is.”
Again, silence. The castle’s favorite occupant.
Perhaps he had gone.
I went on anyway.
“My poor brother.” I forced a light laugh. “He was almost Narcissus, but Father wanted to have a son named after him, so Rob was spared Mother’s terrible naming conventions. Luckily there was only the one boy.”
This time, it was not silence that answered me. It was the most incredible sound I’d yet heard in the castle, a kind of quiet, rasping rumble.
It might have been a laugh. It must have been a laugh.
My smile blossomed, and my tongue ran away with every word that came to mind. “Beauty is a ridiculous name, of course. Mother would have been better to name me after a color. No matter how much there may be to admire about me in my mirrors, no one can live up to the bluntness ofBeauty. At every introduction, no matter to whom, all that will be seen are my uneven ears or the point of my nose. If my name were Orange instead, perhaps someone would notice my eyes. Though were my eyes orange, rather than my name, they would certainly be noticed regardless of all else. So the true tragedy must be in my disappointingly un-orange eyes.”
“You suit your name, Beauty,” he said, quiet again.
I shivered, and not just at the rumbling pitch. I felt Stephan at my back.
“I have no name for you,” I said quickly.
Another of his long pauses, then: “Beast will do.”
“Very well, then. We shall both carry absurd names. If you wished to make the game more interesting, we could trade. I could be Beast and you Beauty.”
That whispery laugh returned, and I forgot myself enough to look over my shoulder.
He vanished at my attention. I caught only the briefest glimpse—a snatch of black and purple, a flash of white. He was tall.
And then he was gone.
Stephan was charming at first, wealthy and mannered and possessing a sharp wit to match my own. We exchanged conversation with such ferocity, Callista mistook my feelings for hate and attempted to comfort Astra with the information. But I did not hate Stephan; indeed, I searched for him at every event, looked forward to the gleam that would enter his eyes when he spotted me.
“Well, my Beauty”—that was always how he greeted me. From there, we would dance through whatever topics we pleased, realistic or philosophical.
The first time he took dinner with our family, Astra tried desperately to catch his attention, starting a conversation in any way she knew how. Stephan turned each topic on its head, inviting debate that only I could answer, and before I knew it, it was a game, like we were throwing a ball back and forth over Astra’s head as she jumped uselessly to catch it.
Both my father and Rob gave me stern glares at different points during the evening, but they could do nothing to wilt me. Not in Stephan’s presence. We were an unstoppable force, one that could talk even my father into a corner.
Father was a man of God, a firm believer in monotheism, but together, Stephan and I looped the vines of pagan evidence around his legs until he had no more steps to take and admitted defeat with a troubled frown and a “We will all know the truth after death.”
