mon mari

[beheld_beauty]

Belle settles very happily into her married life. There is no clear way for Beast to prove himself the missing marquis, so he doesn't bother; instead she studies and he translates foreign texts on magic for her and as the years go by she teaches herself enough Caelish and Suomish to read some of the non-Callian books without help and they eventually work through the entire library section on enchanting. By the time Belle is twenty-two she can invent spells on the fly, and can use mindreading to channel relatively simple spells through Beast while maintaining awareness of her own senses at the same time instead of dropping fully into meditation whenever she casts, and also to communicate subtly and nonverbally and silently in both directions with gentle tweaks to the castle that is her husband's mind. She has learned to read the writing on her rosepetals so all of her memories are forever preserved in their original clarity for her inspection, if she cares to look at them.

Using enough enchantment has wound up giving Belle a persistent aura. People stand aside for her if she walks down the street without deliberately suppressing it, sensing power without understanding it. She doesn't trip anymore; she's honestly not sure if she's incidentally cured her clumsiness or if the ground just adjusts to meet her steps and then ripples back into place after she's steady. Her hair and her skirts are continually stirred in a beautifully eerie way by a breeze that isn't there. Her voice carries as far as she likes, or as little as she prefers; she can whisper to one person across an oblivious crowded room. Sometimes she appears to be lit by an interior glow, when she's casting or using inlaid enchantments or just strongly emotional about something. Small injuries - she has tested no large ones - seal themselves with a faint hissing noise and a shine of sky-blue light, and she doesn't get ill anymore. Objects she reaches for move to meet her; plants bend to get out of her way if she strides through the forest, and some of them spontaneously bloom.

She is less likely to stride than to fly, though.

The books mention enchanter's auras, but not to quite the extent she's developed. It does, however, say that the aura is helped most by casting large spells through a willing vessel. Perhaps hers is just - more, because of her beloved Beast, because if she comes up with a way to fly or to cease to need sleep he's so eager to help.

She is just coming to the end of her last unread book on magic, wondering what is next, when there is a knock at the castle door.

Comments

[deslandes]

True. But there's still the little things, are there not?

[beheld_beauty]

That there are.

"Well, Luc, what do you know about how enchanting works?" Belle asks.

"A-almost nothing, madame l'enchanteresse."

"You may call me Belle." She pauses at the look on his face. "Or not, if that's too informal. Why don't you come in? Perhaps I will decide to take a student."

Luc steps beyond the threshold tentatively.

[deslandes]

Beast laughs again.

[beheld_beauty]

"Luc, this is my husband, whom you may call Jean," Belle says, "or M. Cygne, if that's too informal. Here, come into the parlor and let's see if you can find your dreamworld."

"My dreamworld, Mme. L'Enchanteresse?" Luc asks, sitting where she indicates.

"The first step to casting," says Belle, "is to find your own mind, to look at it from the inside; if you can't do that then I can teach you nothing."

Luc nods, and Belle walks him through the steps that first led her into her sphere of rosevines.

[deslandes]

Beast decides that the lesson will probably not be improved by him putting his head in his wife's lap. He gives her a kiss and then wanders away.

[beheld_beauty]

Belle comes and finds Beast some hours later. "I've put Luc in a room in the north wing," she says. "He's managed to find his dreamworld - it looks like a network of caves, he says - and to cast a simple spell, and he says that he can take the pain if he can use it to relieve more, which I think is a fine sentiment."

[deslandes]

"That is sweet," he declares, and hugs her. "I love you." With a giggle, "Madame l'enchanteresse."

[beheld_beauty]

She giggles and kisses him. "It does have a certain ring to it, even if it's terribly long."

[deslandes]

"Dear Belle, darling Belle," he says, between kisses. "I love you. I love you. I love you."

[beheld_beauty]

"I love you. And now I have something to do even though I've been through every last one of those books."

[deslandes]

"Good," says the Beast, and he wraps her up in a hug.

[beheld_beauty]

Belle's days begin to be occupied more with teaching Luc, an eager pupil, and she even begins idly talking of assembling more students - with enough of them she could distribute magical services over a much wider area, even if another channel as suitable as Beast were never to be found. Even small spells, used cleverly, can accomplish a great deal.

Beast himself is out of books to translate for her. He may be a little bored.

[deslandes]

He is rather bored, yes. But that's just fine. The crucial difference between their castle and the one he lived in for so many years is that he can leave this one.

So he does, and goes off wandering, with no particular destination in mind.

[beheld_beauty]

Belle checks in with him by mindreading once every morning and evening, and otherwise leaves him to wander as he likes. She knows he'll come back.

[deslandes]

He loves her. He loves her, he loves her, he loves her.



And then one evening, his mindscape is... wrong. The castle (which has begun looking more and more like the one they live in, gradually, piece by piece) has cracks in the walls and scorch marks around the edges of the windows.

[beheld_beauty]

Mon coeur. What happened?

[deslandes]

Pain. Pain happened.

That was well enough, but the rest...

He is lying in chains on a rough stone floor with a hood over his head. Even his beast-strength will not get him free.

Someone found him, found him in the forest. At the forest's edge. He doesn't remember - their face, he can't think -

They burned his mind, this person, voiceless faceless pain trapping burning person. It hurt, and it was good-but-not-good, the way things sometimes are when they hurt and you like the hurt but you don't want what brings it.

Belle will fix it. Belle fixes things.

He loves her.

[beheld_beauty]

Oh mon coeur. I - I don't know how. I'll try.

She can write on his walls, gentle little marks that stay long enough to speak to him and then disappear into the cellars of memories. Perhaps with a firmer hand she can reach out and heal the scorching, the cracking...?

And then she will tell Luc to teach himself some Suomish and she will set out and she will find her husband.

[deslandes]

It works, somewhat. His memories become clearer, his thoughts less scattered.

He loves her still.

[beheld_beauty]

She patches everything she can, feeling woefully inadequate, and then she finds Luc, and tells him to take this textbook on Suomish and go home and study it until she comes to fetch him, and he goes.

She seals up the castle behind her.

And she takes to the air.

My love, my love, tell me which way you were going, can you remember? She's scanning the ground for a trail, but her own presence changes so much about the way the plants lie and the light falls.

[deslandes]

He doesn't remember; it's burned, it's—



Glowing fog the colour of moonlight slams through the castle of his mind, boiling out of the cracks, leaving new burns in its wake. It doesn't touch Belle's presence at all.

When it's done, Beast is shaking and whimpering. Someone is speaking to him, but he doesn't hear words, only a voice, a cruel taunting laughing voice.

[beheld_beauty]

Oh mon coeur. I'm coming. I'll find you.

She flies faster. She does what she can to heal the damage as she goes.

[deslandes]

(he tries to want it, tries to be willing, to let the magic through, but he can't - he hates it too much - so his mind keeps burning, and he keeps screaming, and there's nothing he can do about either)

[beheld_beauty]

Oh mon coeur. I love you and I will find you.

And then she stops writing and all she does is try to heal the burns, smooth the cracks.

She will find him and she will find who has him and they will not greet another day with their magic intact. Perhaps not even their life.

He's been gone for days, but he was walking and she is flying, but he was going nowhere in particular and she does not know where to go - she could channel through him at this distance, but she doesn't know if he's in a state to welcome her while he rejects the other, and she cannot bear to damage him further. She prunes the half-formed spell notion until it's something she can do herself.

She calls down starlight, for it's dark now, and she channels it through her own rosevines, and she knows which direction to go - though nothing else, given how much she had to simplify the spell - and she corrects her course and she flies.

[deslandes]

Eventually, after flying all the way over the former Witchwood and then some, she comes upon a palace.

It doesn't look like the home of an evil sorcerer, and the howling of the Beast is not audible from within, but it is directly in her flight path.