25. Elle

ELLE

H as the magic driven me mad?

I stare at the ceiling in my bedroom, my body exhausted and my bones seeming to ache with constant sadness.

Maybe I have gone mad, and now this is all my mind can do. Stare at the ceiling and wonder how it all went wrong.

"It was wrong from the beginning," I whisper to the ceiling. "I should have known it would always be wrong."

No matter how many times I ask the questions, the ceiling never answers and neither do the roses.

The roses are what might convince me that I am out of my mind.

"It was ruined from the beginning," I tell the ceiling and the roses again.

But in my heart, I cannot believe that.

Is it the magic that makes me think it's not true? That there was something I had with the beast before he became brutal and merciless? The only thing that spares my heart is that my father was not among the men. But the very thought that he might come…my bottom lip wobbles and I have to find a way to beg the beast.

"The beast," I whisper. It's harder to stop talking to myself and to the roses. It's harder because I'm so tired, and I'm so sad, and sometimes it feels as though the better idea would be to pretend it never happened. Sometimes my mind tries to convince me it didn't happen. That it could have been a terrible dream, and now I am wide awake with the visions haunting me and my questions and prayers going unanswered.

I am so terrified and shaken I cannot even roll to my side. I can only stare at the ceiling of my bedroom. A tear drips down my face to my pillow, but I do not move.

I keep telling myself Crawe was a bad man. He needed to die. They would have killed the beast and for what? For me? It's hard to swallow with the guilt and shame.

And then I see his beastly face. An image of something I'd never imagined.

He is a beast, but when he touches me he is a human. I know it is so. The magic did not deceive me every time I felt his hands on my body or his body over mine or his lips on my skin. I know he is human when we touch.

But the beast I saw when Crawe came to the castle…

What was I seeing? I have no explanation for the things I remember. Perhaps the two are not the same. My mind plays tricks on me. So many of the beast's orders don't make sense, and I cannot tell if it's him or me who is mistaken.

I squeeze my eyes closed, trying to forget. I have tried to forget so many times, but it does not work. If for no other reason than to give sleep to my burning eyes and rid my mind of the sight of tonight. The memories are a permanent thing, unless the magic can offer me something to forget them.

I shake my head as if the magic had floated me some sort of potion to take away the memories. It hasn't. I think if the castle did have such a thing, I would have been offered it by now. But I do not want to forget, and neither does the castle.

I think, though I cannot be sure, that the castle does not know what to do, and so it is repeating the last thing it knew to bring me comfort and joy. It is filling my room with roses.

So many roses.

The wreath of roses above my vanity is no longer visible. It has been completely covered by more plants that have shoved themselves in through the opening that the first climbing rose peeped from. They grow along the walls of my bedroom in masses, their scent filling the room with a suffocating sweetness. It is harder to breathe in here almost every minute, but I don't have another choice, because finding another place to go would mean getting out of the bed, and I cannot do it.

By the time I get out of bed, with sleep evading me, I do not know what the magic will have done. Perhaps the roses will have filled the entire castle. If they keep growing at this rate, their thorns will cut into me as I lie here in the bed.

"Don't do that," I manage to say, louder. "Don't fill up the bedroom. I have to be able to breathe." The words come out numbly as more tears slip down my cheeks.

Somewhere in the castle, the beast is breathing too.

Thinking about tonight like I am, most likely. I was already outside when the first two villagers, who I recognized from my work at Ara's bakery, reached the top of the iron gate and jumped down. They were the first to die, because they were closest to the beast when he attacked.

The men's screams from that night fill my ears as if they are still happening. Their shrill shrieks send shivers down my spine. For so long, I listened to the tales of the beast and the castle and the magic. I listened to what happened to the villagers who tried to capture and crucify him. I heard stories of those screams, and I thought I had imagined them vividly. I used to have dreams about those stories when I was a girl and would wake up with tears in my eyes from imagining the howls of pain.

What I imagined was not like the reality. The screams of the dying men were more like wounded animals. Some of them didn't have time to scream. Some of them made worse sounds. It was as if it was all happening mere steps in front of me, though most of the killing was done when I stood at the front entrance, watching with horror and shock as the beast tore into those men.

The stories hadn't prepared me.

Either that, or I didn't listen carefully enough, because I told myself I was drawn to the beast. I told myself he couldn't be that kind of person from the lore. I told myself that the stories couldn't be true, because if they were, he would not treat me as he has…I could not feel for him as I do.

And yet I saw with my own eyes.

More roses bloom, the stems growing across the ceiling. Buds pop out of the vines and open until they are the size of two of my fists put together. I have never seen blooms so large. It's as if the magic is determined to impress me and thinks if it can only make the roses large enough, I will recover.

Does it not know that in my mind, my father and friends could have been massacred just the same? And I could do nothing but watch?

The roses that bloom above my head in brilliant shades of red only remind me of the blood that was spilled at the gate. There was so much of it. There seemed to be too much. I didn't know there could be that much blood in one man, let alone the group at the gates.

I can't stop seeing it. "Make it stop." I plead to the magic. "Please," I whisper.

My chest aches. I miss my father now more than ever. While I lie in bed, desperate to think of anything else, I think of all the ways he had not been the perfect man. He had struggled to feed us. He had struggled to do anything after my mother died. We worried about keeping the cottage warm in the winter and about going hungry. We had many worries, but I never worried that he would run through the front door of the cottage and slaughter the people of the village. He would never harm a soul.

The pain grows until I'm crying at the thought of never seeing him again and if I do, it would be his death. It takes a great deal of energy, but I push myself upright on the pillows so I can breathe more easily. There is so much pain. There is only pain, and I cannot think of a way to ease it.

I did not see his face, but there was quite a distance between the front doors of the castle and the gate. It was dark, without much moon, and the torchlight flickered, making it hard to make out anyone's features clearly. I knew Crawe because I had thought about him often in the days when I thought I would have to marry him. I knew the men who climbed the gate because I saw them most days in the village, and one of them would come in to buy bread every three days, always on the same schedule.

As time goes on, my memory fades and I do not know anything for certain anymore.

There are times when I search my memories and think I caught a glimpse of my father when the gates flew open, and then I spend hours trying to decide one way or the other.

I cannot decide.

Is he safe now?

Or did he die at the hands of the beast? Am I forced to mourn him because I wished to send word that I was unharmed, and somehow he guessed where I was? It is the only place I truly could be isn't it? What a foolish girl I was.

At the front of the gate, where I stare for hours, nothing remains. There is no evidence of the horrors and that only makes it worse.

More guilt stabs into my chest. Is this all my fault? I did not think one note could possibly lead to this, otherwise I would never have sent it. I would have been heartbroken for my father, alone in the village and wondering where I had gone, but wouldn't it be better for him to be sad rather than dead?

The question that riddles most frequently in the lonely hours is what can I do to fix this now?

I slump down on the pillows, unable to stop crying and unable to think of any way out of this grief. It might not be necessary if my father is alive, but how will I ever find out?

I cannot leave. The beast will not let me.

And the feelings I have about this are strange and growing stranger. They are growing too strong to deny, and I cannot reconcile what happened that night with the emotions that grip me at all hours of the day and night.

More flowers bloom over my head, turning the gilded cage into a prison of red.

The Prince and The Beast

I pace the halls as I've done the past three days. This is not what I wanted when I ran to the gate to defend my home and the woman inside.

I did not want her choking on the perfume of roses filling her room. I did not want her too disturbed to rise from her bed. I did not want her to loathe or fear me.

The beast growls, feeling her despair even as he watches her through the mirror, through my eyes.

I have not gone to her room since the night the villagers attacked. The beast does not like this. He wants to intervene, to bring her back out into the castle, which is already feeling her absence. The dust is not yet collecting in the places it once was, but on the rare occasion I leave the mirror and walk the halls, they are growing more shadowed.

The magic echoes her agony, and I do not know how to stop it.

I only know how to share in her hate for what I've become and what I've done.