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.
(She's been unofficially serving as the public enchantress for the general region around Les Fourches, and breaks up the sameyness of studying by flying here and there and curing sickness, repairing buildings, and the like.)
She gets up and heads for the door.
It's a young man, maybe sixteen years old, and he takes a step back when the door swings open (of its own accord) to reveal the enchantress.
"H-hello," he stammers. "Are you the - of course you are."
"I'm the enchantress," says Belle. "Do you need something?"
"I - not exactly."
"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.
"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.
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."
Beast himself is out of books to translate for her. He may be a little bored.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unseeable, she draws closer and listens.
Her aura can adjust the world around her but not enough to let her walk through walls. She needs to invent something, for this.
She can't focus, not when her Beast is screaming in his mind and in the world -
She drops the read with a silent apology and forces herself to concentrate.
The wall parts with a hiss of pain from L'Enchanteresse.
The man whirls, and hisses. He flings a hand back toward the Beast.
The stone of the cellar wall grows clawed hands that reach for Belle.
Wincing, she casts. She doesn't counter the stone hands - those, she can dodge - but she counterattacks. She calls fire and sends it shooting at the other enchanter. She keeps her eyes open. She can cast through Beast without dropping into a meditation that would kill her if she did it now.
"He does not," hisses Belle. She thinks up a variant on her wall-walking spell. She can go right through the hands, now, though she continues to dodge them so he'll waste his concentration. "Mine to have and to hold till life leaves us -" Cold will be harder to redirect than fire, mightn't it? She calls it up, sends a wall of it at the enchanter from behind. "Not yours."
"Speak to me?" she murmurs, when she can find no other out-of-place piece in his mental castle that will yield to her healing. "Can you? Oh, mon coeur."
She strengthens herself in stages, first one arm, then the other, then the first, then the second, channeling small bursts through herself, until she can pick up her husband and hold him close to her and lift off into the night sky to bring him home.