The Beast's flight path took her soaring around the edge of the East Wing, the cold night air providing an extra shock to her system. She was silent as she flew, still trying to fully comprehend what had just happened. That girl just – she gave up her freedom, just like that. How could she? The thought was incomprehensible to the Beast. She couldn't imagine surrendering her liberty to, or for, anybody; certainly not for either of her parents, had a similar situation ever occurred; and most certainly not with the firmness and speed which the girl had done so.
The Beast couldn't stop herself conjuring the girl herself before her eyes. Tall, but not as tall as the Beast remembered being when she was human; long, loose hanks of brown hair spilling out of a tangled blue ribbon; small dark eyes, with a strong nose and telltale (albeit faded) smallpox scars across her cheeks; stronger still than her physical characteristics were the anger and desperation carved into the lines of her face and the melodic quality of her voice, even when raised in anger or screamed.
The Beast clenched her jaw. Her opinion on the girl's physical appearance didn't matter. Her very presence in the castle was a complication the Beast hadn't foreseen; despite how things may have appeared to the girl, the Beast had planned to set her mother free with a warning to never return. Now she was stuck with a prisoner she hadn't asked for, and who was bound to have uncomfortable questions about what kind of place the castle was.
With a twist of her joints, the Beast batted her wings as she began to slowly drop to the ground, mindful of the other woman currently encased in her claws. She was sobbing dryly between hacking coughs, and the Beast couldn't help shrinking away from her. The Beast whistled for a coach, and with jerky spider-like movements it alighted on the castle steps, the door unfolding like an accordion. The Beast swung the woman into the coach, perching her on the cushioned seats with her short arms; as she did so, the Beast tried to find some lame words of reassurance that her daughter would not be mistreated. The woman shot a disgusted look at the Beast, too weak to fight back against such manhandling. "If you so much as touch a hair on her head –"
The Beast felt her temper spark. "She's no longer your concern," she snapped, pulling the door flush. With two sharp raps on the side of the coach, it began the journey to the woman's home, wherever it was; another gift from an enchanter to the Beast's family, it had sometimes been used on hunting trips when the party was hopelessly lost. The Beast didn't know how its magic worked, and she had long ago given up any desire to find out. She stood and watched as it scuttered across the long bridge in front of the castle, before spinning around abruptly and walking through the main doors.
She could see various members of her staff whispering animatedly in the corner, but as soon as they noticed the Beast they all fled in different directions; the feather duster took to the air, Mrs Potts and her son trundled away on the old tea trolley, while Cogsworth, in a moment of uncharacteristic bravery, headed towards the Beast.
"Mistress," he said hesitantly, "is it true?"
"Is what true?" she asked.
Flummoxed, he stared at his hands for a moment (or what stood for them, anyway) before glancing back up at her. "Elisabeth says that the girl who arrived is . . . staying with us."
The Beast stared. "What is it to you if she stays or not?"
"We – we just wanted to know if we needed to prepare a room or not," he stammered.
Her wings stiffened against her back, the shoulder blades rising slowly. "Why should a room be prepared for a prisoner?" she asked, her voice slow and deliberate.
"If – if she could – well, circumstances being what they are – we thought that, perhaps –"
"You thought wrong," she snapped. "'Someone who will love me under my curse, and whom I love in return', I believe were the terms. You know as well as I do that a girl could never break my curse."
Without waiting for a reply, she leapt straight up to the first floor, using her wings to give herself an extra boost. Cogsworth continued to splutter incoherently beneath her, but the Beast ignored him. She stalked through the corridors, taking a sharp left turn to another large window and swinging it open, before taking off once more and flying back up to the dungeons. However, the Beast didn't alight back on the window at the top level; she instead landed near where the stairs opened onto the main castle building and climbed up them once inside. Her talons clinked lightly against the worn stone steps, and above her the Beast could hear the girl sobbing.
"Mistress?"
The Beast lifted her head. Lumière was poking his head around a corner of the staircase; he had evidently begun leaving the room shortly after the Beast and the woman. He seemed apprehensive, and she couldn't blame him. After seven years of monotony, they were all suddenly floundering without a script.
The girl's sobs were dying down. The Beast continued to march up the stairs, grabbing Lumière almost as an afterthought and keeping his flames sheltered under the curve of one wing. She reached the dungeon proper, prepared to deal with a prisoner past the first effects of shock and distress. This whole ordeal had been more trouble than it was worth.
The girl twisted around when the Beast entered, but stayed kneeling by the window. Her jaw clenched, as if she was trying not to cry. "You didn't let me say goodbye," she said. Her voice broke on the last word, and more tears poured down her face as she furiously rubbed at her eyes. "I'll never see her again, and you didn't even let me say goodbye." There was none of her earlier anger now; just despair. A lock of brown hair tumbled out of her hair ribbon and spilled over her shoulder, which began to shake as her sobs started up again.
The Beast shifted her feet from side to side, looking carefully at the floor and not the prisoner. Anger, she was prepared to deal with; fear, she dealt with every day. The resignation in the girl's voice, and the tears that must have fallen for close to ten minutes, the Beast recognised.
"I'll . . . I'll show you to your room, then," she rasped awkwardly.
"My room?" The girl stopped crying and turned back to face the Beast, although her dark eyes still glistened in Lumière's light. The Beast's statement seemed to have surprised her almost as much as it had the Beast.
The Beast extended one wing to its full length, causing leaves and other detritus that had gathered over the years to be swept into the corners with the breeze the movement generated. "You want to stay in the tower?"
"No!"
"Then follow me," she said, folding her wing back and beginning the trek down the stairs once again. She heard the girl scramble to get up, although she could also hear several seconds of silence before the girl followed her into the castle. They descended the stairs in silence, and the Beast waited in the corridor a suitable distance from the door while the girl made the rest of the way down. When she did reach the bottom, her pale face stood out sharply against the sea of her dark hair and navy cloak. The girl gave a little start at seeing the Beast, as if she hadn't expected her strange new circumstances to continue once she was out of the dungeon.
With a small nod, the Beast set off down the corridor, unsure of where precisely she was going. She hadn't anticipated the need to prepare a room; indeed, she hadn't anticipated that the dungeons themselves would be occupied after tomorrow at the latest. Now she had to find a place to put the girl. Not one of the servants' chambers; for one thing, the Beast herself wasn't entirely sure where they were in the castle; and for another, she knew that there was no way she could fit her massive bulk in the narrow corridors behind the walls. The chambers which had belonged to her father she instinctively recoiled from; her mother's chambers were similarly off-limits. One of the third-floor bedrooms, perhaps, she thought. She remembered that members of her father's hunting parties would stay there, when they sometimes visited; not her uncles, of course, but the men of lower rank than her father.
"Lumière," she hissed.
"Oui, Mistress?" he asked quietly, still clutched in her hand.
"Go and prepare one of the third-floor bedrooms," she said. "The blue one."
"Oui, Mistress," he repeated. "But –"
"What?" she whispered.
"Please, say something to her," Lumière hissed. "Maybe invite her to dinner?"
The Beast set him down on a side table a little harder than she usually would, choosing to ignore his impertinence in favour of avoiding an argument and getting the girl's room ready. Nevertheless, he hopped away chirpily enough, making a quick gesture to the lamps that lined the corridor. As the Beast walked, the lamps nearest to her struck up in a small blaze, lighting her immediate surroundings. She veered off to the left side of a branching path; the right side led back to the main hall, and she wanted to avoid the other servants as much as possible at the moment.
Behind her, she heard a small gasp, and then the patter of the girl's feet as she ran to catch up with the Beast. She didn't need to turn around to see what the matter was; evidently Lumière's lamplight only extended to the Beast's position, not the girl's. She could hear the girl's breathing, coming directly behind and to the Beast's left. It was a little ragged, and the Beast turned her head, curious; surely such a short distance couldn't have winded her already?
The girl wasn't out of breath because of physical exertion, but because she was crying again; soft, silent tears, different from the pained sobs in the dungeon. The Beast whipped her head back around, unexpectedly shamed for the second time in less than ten minutes. She racked her brains for a way to stop this situation from getting any more uncomfortable than it was already. What was it Lumière had said – strike up a conversation? Invite her to dinner?
"I . . . hope you like it here," she said. The Beast was glad for the shadows that came from her relative height to the girl – it meant that she couldn't see the instinctive grimace that had come from the utter stupidity of the Beast's words. "The castle is your home now, so you can go anywhere you like," she hurriedly continued. "Except the West Wing!" she added. This strange girl was unsettling enough in rooms which didn't hold great meaning to the Beast. She didn't want to guess at the effect the girl would have in the Beast's own private rooms.
"What's in the West –?" the girl started.
"It's forbidden!" The Beast spun around, her wings arching so that she appeared even larger than she already was. The girl drew back, her arms crossing defensively across her torso. As if she thought the Beast might strike her, with her deadly talons. They stood for a moment, frozen, before the Beast turned back around and started walking again. The girl kept close out of necessity, but the silence was just as thick as it was before the Beast had opened her foolish mouth.
Finally, they reached the blue guest room on the third floor. The Beast held the door as the girl ducked under her arm, looking around with a sort of detached calm at the contents of the room. Unlit by lamplight as it was, the girl's cloak and dress melted into the deep blues which decorated the room. She seemed awfully small, and almost lost.
"If you need anything, my servants will attend you," the Beast said out of half-remembered politeness. She was struck by Lumière's parting words, and she steeled her courage as the girl remained statue-like in the centre of the room. "And . . . and you will join me for dinner. That's not a request!"
At those words the girl spun around, a spark of something on her face once more, but the Beast had already slammed the door shut. She hurried to the nearest large window at the end of the corridor and leapt into the cold night air once more, trusting her wings to carry her up to the West Wing. When she alighted on the balcony her legs seemed to give way, and the Beast staggered towards her bed in a rush of nervous energy. She would have been surprised, and perhaps even a little amused, to know that her position kneeling at the side of her bed like a little child was echoed by the girl halfway across the castle; but she would have been struck once more by shame, and that same sense of familiarity, had she known that the girl had been reduced to tears by her for the third time that night.