Belle studies. She really doesn't get as lonely as Beast - and maybe he and Chelise can fall in love if she stays out of their way, and then the curse will break and Belle can ransack the library and go home, that would be fine. She works.
"...Maybe I should keep the magic books written in Albish in my room and lock them up during the day. The Callian books don't have anything useful on that front, but she's got a heavy enough accent I bet she can read Albish and I haven't got those catalogued fully."
After two hours of fitful, wincing sleep with occasional muttered words - that last feature not having been present when she was knocked out - she opens her eyes again. She looks like she's in less pain, although her arm is still clearly broken and the swelling in her knee has gone down only a little.
"You're okay?" she murmurs.
She finds the book, and looks through it. There's that looking into the past spell she first used to find what Beast looked like as a human, but it doesn't aim specifically enough to let her see Chelise pushing - or not pushing - her down the stairs. She pages through the rest of the book.
"Here's one," she murmurs. "A memory spell. I could just restore my memory."
She remembers going up to her room for a look at one of the books in Albish; she wanted to check for a cognate she'd half-recalled -
And she was startled, and did stumble, and Chelise had reached out, and -
"She pushed me," Belle murmurs.
Chelise continues trying to leave, and she can be heard sobbing every time she fails, if one is close enough to the part of the gardens that the forest has directed her back to.
Then this activity stops.
She notices when Chelise stops trying to leave, too, though it takes her longer.
"...Do you suppose she's given up," she asks one day, "or that something's happened to her?"
There's no ambiguity about who "she" is.
She turns up a few half-promising spells that require casting each time, and one that is much more comprehensive, that will turn his mindscape into a metaphorical open book whenever she happens to look at it.
"I found something," she murmurs. "It's permanent. I don't have to use it if I don't mean to, but I'll have to separately disenchant us if you ever want me to not be able to anymore."
She makes sure she has the steps memorized, and falls into her rosevine-sphere, and casts.
It's powered by Will, which she sends through his mindscape as usual, and then she directs the flow of refined energy until her rosevines are sprouting new tendrils and reaching for his castle-mindscape, growing into it, wrapping around it -
And the castle snaps into legibility.
The spell hurts him, and he loves that, too.
All the scratches from the rosebushes hurt, but not as much as the spell, and not as nicely.
He loves her.
He is still so, so terribly sad over Chelise, and he understands exactly why she killed herself - he knows what it's like to hurt that much, even though he hasn't ever felt that way for the same reasons.
Belle's lap is a very comfortable place to rest his head.
He loves her.
It's not exactly seeing. Or rather, the best metaphor for the sense-impressions that carry the information is sight - but it feels like touching regardless. It feels like she's reaching out her hand and combing it through his thoughts the way her hands are combing through his mane.
"It's beautiful."
She goes on looking. She's enthralled.
...And it's definitely helping.
"I love yooooooou," he croons. "You're my favourite person. Let's get married. Let's take all the magic books and walk across the country because we can. Let's go tell your father you didn't die in the forest. Let's go see if breaking the curse means you don't have a bed anymore, because if you do I want to kiss you in it."
"It's mostly not like that. It's a little like that."
But it's like losing a layer of skin in a nice way. Fur was nice, being fluffy was nice, but it meant he couldn't feel things the same way he does as a human, and he missed that even more than he knew.
And there was always the worry he might hurt her, as a Beast. To hurt her as a man he'd have to try, and he won't.
"Silly," she pronounces, "but not indecent." And then she fetches her original traveling bag, rolls up two of the dresses she likes best, and heads to evaluate the state of the kitchen.
It turns out that she can make a bag bottomless. This will not be ideal for including everything in the same bag, as the spell comes with nothing to let her retrieve a specific item first but she can pack the entirety of her intelligently refined wardrobe selection, and also the whole library.
Packing up the library takes a long time. There is a break for eating some of the fruit preserves in the middle.
She fills another bottomless bag with assorted nonperishable food. They may not have control over their exact diets over the next few days, but they will not starve.
"Is there anything else we should take?" Belle asks when the pantry has been raided.
Off they go into the woods!
"And this time it won't turn us around," Belle murmurs, pulling out her original notebook with the mapping in it and directing them west while there's still a sun to go by.
"I can probably remember that healing spell, even if there's no hope of finding the book without unpacking half the library," Belle says. "It was only a few days ago I cast it. I have no idea about the transformation part, but we can manage that later - ready?"
They don't find Les Fourches, but when they're out of the woods Belle does know where they are. "Oh, this is Rianne," she says. "I know how to get home from here. I wonder if we can barter for a proper outfit before going on, though, with some of the food maybe. Unless you're likely to change again?"
Belle doesn't care as much as she would if this were her own village. She manages to extract directions to a vendor of clothing, and trades the first six things to hand in the food bag (a jar of preserves, a loaf of bread, a pecan pie, a round of cheese, a salted leg of lamb, and a bottle of honey) for two pairs of trousers that look likely to fit the Beast.
She is recognized as soon as they walk into town; her father isn't among the crowd, but the bookseller and the baker both are, and they call her name.
"Hello!" Belle calls back, waving and smiling.
"I couldn't get away, or I would've," Belle apologizes. "Is he home, do you suppose?"
"Most likely. You'll want to go straight there. Who's this?"
"My fiancé," Belle says placidly. She doesn't really wish to explain his name thing right now.
"Pleased to meet you," the bookseller says to Beast, "Monsieur...?"
"No, but he doesn't appear to wish to introduce himself," Belle says.
"...What is he called, then?"
"If he wished you to call him something, I assure you he'd be quite capable of telling you what that might be."
The bookseller looks perturbed.
"At any rate," says Belle, "I've come with a lot of books, and some of them will probably interest you more than me. Perhaps in a few days when I've had time to settle back in and unpack we can discuss trades."
"Perhaps," the bookseller agrees.
"I do want to go home and see my father. Till later."
"Till later, Belle."
Charlie then releases her marginally to get a good look at her face, and, over her shoulder, he notices Beast.
"Belle, who's this?"
"He was enchanted along with the castle," Belle says, "and now we're engaged." She pauses to evaluate her father's facial expression. "He's technically a marquis," she offers.
"Is he."
"Yes."
"His father was a marquis, he's the only child, but then an enchantress cursed him and this all happened quite some time ago," Belle said.
"...Belle, how old is this man?"
"...Older than me. But he wasn't aging normally during the curse."
"What is his name?"
"He's forgotten it," Belle says. "I've been calling him Beast. For other purposes where that would take too long to explain, it may as well be 'Jean'."
"You're an enchantress," Charlie says blankly to his daughter.
"Yes," says Belle, all asmile. "Here, look." She takes the book bag from Beast and starts piling books on the hall table. Charlie watches the stack grow, becoming steadily more stunned.
"Yes," Charlie acknowledges. "How are you going to go about retrieving your title? Can you prove your identity if you can't remember your name?" he asks Beast.
"And I suppose casting spells at the problem won't help, since I've an obvious motivation to wish you declared a marquis," Belle muses. "Oh well. The forest is largely unclaimed anyway. We can live in a castle and not be marquis and marquise, or at least not acknowledged as such by the Crown."
"...I suppose you may."
The wedding is fairly summary, with Beast's name given as Jean of no last name who'll be taking 'Cygne' as his surname, and Charlie and the priest are the only witnesses. Charlie cries and pretends not to. Belle looks fondly at her father, and then properly beams at Beast, and kisses him when the time is correct.
Eventually she has her supply of magic books extracted. Including those that are in foreign languages. "You can read again without hurting your eyes, I assume," she observes.
It is a large spell, and it also takes a while start to finish, unlike the setup-and-done magic she's performed before.