She understands his concerns. Really she does. If it weren't for the fact that he's the local lawman, she wouldn't even be allowed out into town on her own. She's beautiful (as no one can shut up about for thirty seconds at a stretch; is it any wonder she prefers books?) and while he can protect her in their tiny town, the Witchwood is another matter. People get lost there - sometimes the Wood spits out men and women and children from other villages entirely, near theirs instead, and they have to be given maps and sent the long way around to get home - and anything could happen and he has no jurisdiction over crimes committed there.
But the woods are beautiful, and she's going to bring a blank book to draw a map in, and her father has been missing for four days and even if Belle's only concern were her safety she'd need to find him. Because orphaned seventeen-year-old girls tend to find it in their own best interest to get married, and if she wanted to get married, it would not be to anyone in the village.
He chased in a highwayman (whose crime was not committed in the forest, so all is in its proper order).
The highwayman came out.
Charlie did not.
Charlie, apparently, has gotten lost.
And Belle is going to go in and get him.
---
Her map is wrong.
No - no, she was very careful. She knows people get lost here; she knows the woods are twisty, suspects the landmarks must include duplicates. She brought bits of ribbon to mark her way. She's been changing colors as she gets deeper into the forest, and she's been traveling for almost a day now, and that ribbon right there was tied in the first hour. She's not that turned around; it's broad daylight and she's been tracking the sun. Not even magic, if magic existed, would be able to move the sun.
That leaves her, and the tree. She has been picked up and put back where she started or she has been followed by this tree. Or the ribbon, perhaps, if it's magically untied itself and made exactly the same knot around a different branch. ...No, there is the bit of blood from where she tripped and scraped her hand against the bark of that tree, and blood and ribbon both following her is more of a stretch than her having been transported or the tree having walked on its very roots to heel like a dog.
Damnation.
Well. Most people who wander into the Witchwood are eventually heard from again. But it's getting dark, and she trips more than enough in daylight; she underestimated the treachery of the ground deep in among the trees.
She goes on. She keeps making her map - it's still possible it will be useful for something, and she has precious little else to do while she walks alone through the dimming woods - keeping an eye out for a place to sleep.
She finds one.
Well, that's true enough, but it is not the complete truth. Because from outside the clearing it's not apparent that in the middle of it there lies a proud old castle, circled by a crumbling outer wall that serves mostly as the framework for a riot of roses. One tall iron door stands out from the gate, listing to the side under the weight of ambitious vines; the other lies flat on the ground, its graceful bars bent and twisted and half-gone to rust, with a sapling oak sprouting out of the middle.
It's certainly more worth checking out than another mile of possibly-ambulatory trees.
She sidles around the sapling and past the wall.
As she approaches, the doors creak open.
Okay, weird. Maybe the doors just swing open sometimes, from air pressure - though she didn't feel a breeze. Maybe it's uninhabited and she can sleep in it overnight without having to convince anyone to shelter her. She picks her way through the overrun garden and peers through the door, not stepping in just yet. "Hello?" she calls, louder.
The interior of the castle is richly decorated, lit by a selection of tidy lanterns and a beautiful chandelier, and spotless. Someone obviously lives here - in fact, it should take multiple servants to keep the whole place this clean. But if anyone does, they're not visible from the doorway and they're not making much noise.
She uses the remaining light to case the area, looking for an inviting tree.
These trees are less inviting than their predecessors.
Okay. Something magical is going on, she has no idea how it works, and if it wants it bad enough, she has no powers with which to combat it.
Given the givens -
She may as well cooperate with it to the point of having a roof over her head in the night.
She goes back inside the castle.
She gets up to check out the rest of the castle.
She brings her map-book. Perhaps the building is more amenable to mapping than the surrounding forest.
She's worried about Charlie, but she doesn't seem to have any way to make progress at finding him, and it's possible that someone who can help her lives here.
It takes her until lunchtime to explore the whole thing less the single locked room.
It looks random to her.
Finally she lets herself be steered all the way back into the castle to mull over what she's noted down while not trying to take more data. She gets nowhere. She gives up and experiments with talking to the furniture.
Oookay.
Maybe this is the menagerie part of the castle and it has not kept all of the cages in good repair and this door is locked for her safety.
All right then.
She backs away, and processes her thoughts in her notebook - in the dining room, so she can see if dinner presents itself differently when she's there and not in a random other location.
She follows the dishes, when they clear themselves. She wants to see if she can figure out where the hell the duck came from.
The adjoining pantry is very well stocked with non-perishable items, but contains no more ducks.
It seems to be just plants out here. And not even an actual vegetable plot. She'll lurk in the kitchen before lunch the next day and see where the produce and meat comes from. (She doesn't expect to be up in time for breakfast.)
She goes back inside, and says to the kitchen experimentally, "Tomorrow morning for breakfast I would love crepes with strawberry and blackberry preserves."
This does in fact sound delicious, but it's also very specific; the kitchen will most likely only give her this if it can understand fairly complex language.
Belle settles into a routine of sorts: experiment with requesting things of the castle, experiment with trying to go into the forest, three tasty meals a day. She takes up singing while doing those of these activities that don't involve chewing. She's not good at it, but it fills the silence.
She makes no progress into the forest, but she keeps trying. It will not help Charlie to fret, it will only help Charlie to get out and find him, so she expends energy on the latter and not the former.
The roaring wakes Belle up from her half-doze and leaves her sitting up shivering in bed.
Has the something-in-the-menagerie-or-whatever gotten out? What is it? Has the castle not been feeding it? (How long has it been devoid of inhabitants, she can't gather any clues when it keeps itself so well-ordered and free of dust, the garden suggests a long time, surely the castle must have been feeding the animal or animals if they're still alive?)
She runs through her notes about the layout. She has not found a way to get to the roof yet, but maybe she can come up with one. Roaring-thing won't be able to get her there. Probably. (Certainly she has no chance of outrunning it, even discounting how the forest turns her around. The roof is dicey - she may topple from it and die - but not guaranteed to fail.)
Then quiet. But not the silence of the lonely castle. There is some kind of distant noise, too far away to be very clear.
Belle's door opens and in comes her breakfast tray, in more of a hurry than usual.
She eats her breakfast, subdued.
She inspects her window and the possibility of getting to the roof without having to go out into the hall with the released roaring thing. The prospects would not be good even for someone stronger and defter than she is.
She's wearing a dress the castle supplied - there's a dizzying array, everything fits her, things she doesn't like vanish when she's not looking so for a while she only tried things on over her original clothes in case the vanishing was haphazard but everything's been behaving so she's currently in a practical number of mid-calf blue cotton. It's not really practical for climbing, though. She's not practical for climbing.
She's stuck, but at least there's food that can tell whether the hallway has a creature in it or not and a self-operating ensuite bathroom.
She's running out of space in her notebook, is the only problem that staying in this room has which staying in the general castle environs as she has to anyway doesn't.
"If there's a blank notebook available, I'd like one, brought on the tray with lunch," she says aloud.
And she sits back on the bed.
And sings.
She finishes the notebook she brought with her and starts on the second one. (She is getting sick of the songs she knows. She tries her hand at making up her own. She's not very good at it, but it passes the time when she's out of escape-related creative juice and needs to think about something else.)
On close inspection, they look like they were not cut but ripped from their bushes; there is even blood on a few of the thorns, and oddly enough, golden-brown hairs stuck here and there.
The bouquet is tied up clumsily with a wrinkled blue ribbon, and there is a folded bit of paper stuck between the ribbon and the flowers.
Okay.
There is some manner of person here. Something that, unlike the furniture, can use language on his or her own.
Belle sets the roses aside and nibbles distractedly on her breakfast, contemplating the note.
After she's done eating, she says, "Just a minute," to her tray, and tears a page from her notebook and writes:
Who are you? Why does this castle keep me from leaving?
And she folds this note neatly and puts it among her dishes and says, "Please bring that note to whoever wrote it."
Well, if he or she isn't going to explain who he or she is, that's frustrating, but at least she has someone to talk to. Was it you who was roaring? I thought it was some kind of animal. Is it safe to leave the room? she writes back, and sends the tray away with a pat.
The door belongs to a library.
Amid ranks of tall shelves holding several fortunes' worth of books, there is a table; lounging in an enormous chair at the table, there is a... beast.
Its clawed, furred hands have visible fingers and thumbs; its arms and shoulders are human in structure, though likewise furred. Its head resembles some kind of cat, with a long luxurious mane several shades darker than its golden brown fur. The fur is patterned haphazardly, spots here and stripes there, neither symmetrical nor obviously reminiscent of a particular species.
It does not wear clothes - but then, with that thick coat of fur, clothes would be both redundant and uncomfortable.
It watches her steadily when she comes into view.
"...You mean to tell me that not only there are people in the world who can make magic, cooperative castles and entire forests' worth of responsive direction away or towards same, but there are people in the world who will do that over trivial things like that? If that's the case how did I get to be seventeen without knowing magic was real?"
Belle looks around at the library. "I was looking for my father, when I walked into the forest - he went missing - but if it weren't for that, I wouldn't mind being stuck here so much, especially now that I've seen this library... this is a nice castle. You say she was trying to punish you? With a nice cooperative magic castle and a prolonged lifespan and - well, I guess the entrapment and the cosmetic changes were probably unwelcome, but I dunno, I'd consider the tradeoff if I got to live to be a perfectly healthy hundred and seventeen." Pause. "The handwriting might be a problem if it was me. I write a lot."
He looks away, sighing again.
"True love. If I were to meet a person, and that person came to love me, and I to love them in return, the spell would be broken and I would be human again. And I could leave."
"Well," says Belle, giggling a little along with him and looking at the bookshelves. "I don't suppose there's any books on magic in here? Because if I were you I'd have tried to learn it and just directly disenchant the place, with a century and then some to do it in."
"So," she says, as she's halfway through the first section of shelf, "if you can't even handle the books, what have you been doing, out here all alone?"
Belle can make some progress on the archaic dialects. She is not, alas, a polyglot, but she notes insofar as she can what languages they are in and makes a note in her notebook to check for instructional texts on those languages. After all, if this doesn't pan out soon, she might be here a long time. "I don't suppose you know how to read -" She rattles off the languages she's found that aren't intelligible to her.
"Okay, if I'm desperate I can make hash of some pronunciations or copy everything into large print and we can decipher them, but I might be able to do with the material in the vernacular." She starts sorting through the books she's pulled, determining if they're introductory or advanced, theoretical or practical.
Or a lost person.
"I don't suppose," says Belle to Beast, "that you know anything about magic yourself? I think these books all assume I have a teacher. There's not a beginner's guide anywhere. Even this one thinks I know what a mindscape and a channel are, and how to tidy the one and fret appropriately about the willingness of the other."
"We don't have forever," he says reluctantly. "Even if the curse somehow makes you immortal too. I have... a few more years, I think. Maybe as much as ten. And then it all becomes permanent. I don't know what the spell will do with you, then. Keep you here, send you away - it could be either one."
Belle pulls out a thin volume in one of the languages she doesn't know and opens it to what looks like it's plausibly an introduction for him. "Stop when your eyes are tired, but I have no idea how long it normally takes to learn to do serious magic, let alone how long it will take working out of books I mostly can't read. If nothing else, we can narrow down which languages I need to learn to adequately read aloud for translations in case nothing in the vernacular has anything to let me make headway."
"'The Enchanter closes his eyes,'" he translates, "'and ceases all movement, and thinks only of the Dream-world - the place inside the mind,' I don't know this word, something about magic, and then, 'If he is a true Enchanter he will leave the world of the body and travel in his mind to the Dream-world.' I wonder how you get back."
She returns to the Toolkit, skimming and taking notes. Conveniently, it mentions four different styles of entering one's mindscape, twelve chapters in - it doesn't outright instruct the reader on any, but it draws contrasts between the four. Belle pauses there, contemplating.
"Four styles of entering the mindscape-or-dreamworld," says Belle. "It doesn't give instructions, just talks about how there's the ones who breathe their way there and the ones who follow their heartbeats and the ones who 'make as though to sleep' and the ones who can do it just by wanting. I'm not sure if these are things people are just stuck with based on who they are, or if you can pick one."
She peers at the four methods of mindscape visitation again, reads on until the topic changes, rereads that section, and says, "Well, if wanting a better look at my mind could hurt me, I'd be dead already. I really doubt that wanting it with my eyes closed is going to do me any harm."
She moves to a more comfortable chair, finds a pose she won't feel inclined to move from, and shuts her eyes.
The sustained wanting isn't particularly special.
To start.
And then she gets inklings of something, like the images that appear behind one's eyelids if one presses on them, but more - familiar.
And then it's harder to feel the chair under her.
And then she can't hear the Beast's breathing, or birdsong outside, or anything but her own heartbeat in her ears and her own breath through her throat.
And finally, as she wants her way forward through all this -
another place fades in, just as slowly as the real place faded out.
She floats, in the center of a sphere of rose-vines, if roses grew on prickly vines. The prickles all face out and the flowers all face in. And the roses are every color, and every petal is patterned intricately.
"Whoa," she says, but the instant she speaks the rosevine sphere is gone and the world is back, with no slow fade-out or fade-in, and she finds her eyes open without meaning to open them.
She's at it for much longer this time.
The rosepetals have patterns on them that seem to nest infinitely, fractally - and she can see them just as clearly as she needs to, each level of detail flooding into focus as soon as she needs it. The roses themselves open and close in response to what she's thinking about.
It is really fascinating. She's not sure what tidying she's supposed to do - there's nothing here but metaphorical thought-plants, all quite nicely arranged - but she sticks around for a few hours, anyway, re-meditating her way in when she accidentally moves or makes a sound and calls her mind back into the real world.