For all those who dream of adventure in the great wide somewhere.
Vincit qui se vincit.
He conquers who conquers himself.
Orella had come to the castle cloaked in the skin of an old beggar woman.
She had cast a pitiable figure by design—hooded, wrapped in rags, and soaked to the bone by the sleet that fell like daggers from the blackened sky. Blessed with foresight as she was, Orella had never been so haunted by a vision. A bloody revolution was coming for France, as it had come for America and would one day come for the Russian Empire. Death was marching for many thousands of people. She had no choice but to try to spare the people of Aveyon.
In the castle, the prince behaved just as she had foreseen he would. He rejected her request for simple shelter in exchange for a bloodred rose. She recognized the pain in him—the sharp loss of his mother’s love and the aching absence of his father’s, the sudden orphaning that left him unmoored in a world he barely understood, the weight of a kingdom on his untested shoulders. His cruelty was a shield, one that had grown around his heart, turning it to stone. Others might believe the prince would grow out of the unkindness that festered in him like a disease, but she knew better.
Without her interference, armies of men would march on charred ground, fighting over whatever scraps and rot remained of a ruined world. She had done what she could in Versailles to no avail. If she similarly failed in Aveyon, the kingdom would be a dark catalyst for the rest of Europe and beyond. This time she could not falter.
She knew it was coming, but still her heart cleaved when he rejected her a second time, sealing his own fate. She shed the skin of her disguise and let her true form fill the room. Orella was a flame in the dark, all at once as ancient as the earth and as young as the first blossom of spring. She read fear in his eyes and the word he whispered on his lips. Enchantress.
She was not an enchantress, but it suited her to allow him to believe she was. In truth, she was both more and less than one. Her powers were greater, but her purpose was more narrowly defined. Appearing as she was to a prince was not something she ever thought she would have to do, but Orella’s gift would not let her sit idly by.
The prince begged for forgiveness, swearing he could change, and it was only then that she saw a glimmer of the goodness he kept hidden, and of the king he could become. But promises born out of fear do not carry the same weight as those born out of love. A twist of her fingers transformed the prince, confining him to a monstrous form that would force him to change his heart. Another twist placed a powerful spell on the castle and all those who lived within it, erasing them from the minds of those outside it. She didn’t relish it. She wanted to tell him the curse had a purpose, to warn him of the fire she had seen burning through France and the reign of terror that came after it. But she had already meddled too much.
Instead, Orella left him with the only gifts she could conceive of: a magic mirror to anchor him to the world he was leaving behind, and the rose she had offered him, now enchanted to ensure he did not tarry.
As she left the castle, Orella was besieged by a flickering vision of a girl in a blue dress with a white muslin apron wearing a crown on her head—sometimes the girl’s body was burned, sometimes it was whole. It was too tenuous a thing for her to read clearly; too much could change before it came to be. But the crown on the girl’s head told Orella that she had at least achieved what she had come to the castle to do.
She had set them on a path; Belle and the prince would have to do the rest.
Once upon a time, a cursed prince fell in love with a headstrong girl, and together they saved a kingdom. But that was in the past, and all Belle could think about as her carriage rumbled over the cobbles of Pont Neuf was the future.
Paris was just as she remembered it—so frenetic, chaotic, and choked by smoke that it threatened to overwhelm a girl more used to rolling fields and worn-down markets.
She leaned out the window to take in the city after days of monotonous countryside. Lumière continued to sleep hunched over in the corner—the same position he had spent most of the journey in. Behind her, her husband’s hand clasped her skirts as if to anchor her to him, but she could not tear herself from the view. Outside, the city was so viscerally alive. The bridge teemed with people of all sorts—bouquinistes with their stalls of old books and pamphlets; mountebanks on raised platforms, hawking their vials of curatives; jugglers doing their best to impress the grisettes on their way home after a hard day’s work. Belle watched with grisly fascination as a barber yanked a tooth from a poor soul’s jaw, gaining purchase by placing his foot on the wall of the bridge behind them. And under it all, the murky Seine still glittered in the afternoon light as Parisians littered the embankment, seeking respite from the summer heat by its cool waters.
Belle reveled in it now just as she had long ago, when she first saw it all from the back of her father’s wagon, wedged between his inventions. She had tried and failed for so many years to convince herself that it hadn’t been so grand, and that life in Aveyon hadn’t been so comatose in comparison. She had strived to remember only the filth and stench of Paris, and those remained, but beneath them was a city of people and industry and enlightenment, of poets and philosophers, and of scientists and scholars. It was a city that valued knowledge, no matter where it came from, unlike her own sleepy village of Plesance, where Belle was taunted for being different. In her mind, Paris became the kind of place Belle dreamed of running to, before she met Lio and the course of her life changed forever.
She drank the city in, scarcely able to contend with everything happening outside the carriage. “You know, they say the police know a man has left Paris if they haven’t seen him cross Pont Neuf in three days.”
“Oh?” Lio was absentminded and still, preferring to sit back and let Paris pass him by.
She glanced over at him. “You weren’t lying when you said it has no hold over you.”
He gave her a quizzical grin. “What?”
“Paris,” she said, leaning toward him. “I feel as though I might burst out of my skin, but you’re—” The words died on her lips as her ears rang in the sudden muffled quiet of the carriage.
He looked out to the busy bridge and sighed. “Paris is host to a lot of my unhappy memories.” He watched her smile fade and reached out for her hand, thumbing her palm. “I am happy that you’re happy, Belle. Perhaps we can make new memories here.”
Belle hadn’t ever thought herself to be the marrying type, but after she broke the curse that bound the man she loved and set a kingdom free, marriage hardly seemed a challenge at all. Her time in the enchanted castle had changed her. When Lio proposed in the library he had gifted her, surrounded by her father and the family she had made for herself, saying yes had been the most natural thing in the world.
Now the curse was far behind them, and while Belle did not regret choosing Lio, she hadn’t entirely realized the consequences of that choice. She had never imagined a life spent in a castle, or the duties that came with marrying a prince. But she and Lio needed to build a life together, and Paris was to be the first stop on the grand tour of Europe that Belle had always dreamed of. Cogsworth had, of course, bemoaned the time wasted and the unseemliness of a prince touring the Continent, but Belle was adamant that she see everything she could before the walls of Lio’s castle closed around her for good. She needed one last bit of adventure she could cling to. Lumière had chosen to accompany them for the beginning of their journey, eager to visit the kitchens of Paris’s most celebrated restaurants. Cogsworth had made him promise to behave, but everyone knew that was asking a lot of Lumière, who was as dedicated to mischief and revelry as he was to his duties as maître d’hôtel, or master of the house.