Belle forced her head up, though she could not look the thing in the eye.
“I give you my word.”
She said it slowly…doling out each syllable with weight.
“No, Belle!” her father cried. “I won’t let you do this!”
“DONE!” the Beast roared.
Moving faster than something of that size should have been able to—and in utter silence—the Beast flowed forward and opened the cell door with a single swipe of his massive paw.
Maurice ran forward to his daughter.
“No, Belle, listen to me—I’m old, I’ve lived my life!”
But the Beast grabbed him and began to bound down the stairs, pulling the old man with him.
And Belle sank to the floor and began to weep.
Maurice dutifully told Rosalind everything about the growing violence toward les charmantes and how he couldn’t find the midwife—despite knowing what would come of it. From the widening of her eyes upon hearing about Vashti’s disappearance to a cool narrowing of their mossy green pupils at the news of Josepha and her tavern, Maurice could have easily predicted each facial tic and where it would all lead.
“I must find her,” Rosalind announced, standing up with the awkward slowness her rounding belly and strange joint pains gave her. Her eyes darted seriously around the room, searching for things: a cloak, a walking stick, maybe…“There are too many of these ‘disappearances’ lately. I will get to the bottom of this now…”
“Rosalind—” her husband said firmly.
“You cannot stop me!” she cried, eyes flaring and cheeks flushing pink. Some women grew calm and peaceful during pregnancy; Rosalind seemed to become more of what she already was: fiercely happy, fiercely angry, fiercely productive. “Vashti was godmother to my cousin! She is like family!”
“I’m not going to try and stop you,” Maurice said. “I am merely urging caution. You are…well known…for what you do. This doesn’t seem like the safest place for people who wield magic anymore. Going around knocking on doors and demanding information out of people might not be a good idea. It would draw too much attention to yourself.”
“I was not going to knock on doors and demand information,” Rosalind said, with such hauteur it was obvious that had been precisely her plan. “We…who do what we do have much more subtle means of procuring information.”
Maurice waited patiently.
“I…shall go to Monsieur Lévi,” she said after a moment of quick thinking. “With his books and scrying glasses, he should make short work of this.”
“That is an excellent plan. Just be…discreet.”
“Of course, it’s an excellent plan. And yes, I shall be discreet!” she snapped, magicking a cloak around her shoulders in exasperation.
Slapping her swollen feet on the uneven, hard cobbles of the kingdom’s best-kept roads was more tiring and strenuous than she had imagined. Still, thousands upon thousands of mothers and grandmothers before her had labored in the fields and gardens and hunted in the woods and still had perfectly healthy children. She would not complain.
Monsieur Lévi’s shop did not need to be in the center of town. Those who wanted to visit him managed to find him. Even if his shop was never in the same location twice.
“I don’t have time for this,” Rosalind said, blowing quickly out her puckered lips, trying to calm her heart. She closed her eyes, shook her head to clear the universe of silliness, then strode forward to the closest shop door.
Whatever the sign had advertised outside, the interior was filled with paper and glass. Piles of books and clusters of scrolls competed for space with polished silver hand mirrors, tiny square windows sized for a doll’s house, and bowls like small stone ponds with perfectly still water—water that stayed still, despite the door-slamming and bell-jingling at Rosalind’s dramatic entrance.
None of it was ordered; all of it looked like it had been pulled from the empty shelves around the room quite recently.
“Rosalind!” the shopkeeper said with a twinkle in his eye as he turned to greet her. He had been polishing a lens and continued to do so, breathing on it to fog the surface. The man was thin, and probably ancient, but didn’t look a day over seventy. Scruffy hair grew around his pate and off the end of his pointy chin. “How are things?”
Despite the urgency of her quest, Rosalind was distracted by the state of the place.
“Monsieur Lévi, what is going on here? Are you closing?”
“Well, the way things are headed…I’d rather disappear myself before someone else disappears me. It’s time for me and the old girl”—he looked around the shop lovingly—“to pick up and move on.”
“No, no,” Rosalind said. “Things aren’t so bad!
“…are they?” she added, less sure.
“Bad enough,” Lévi said bleakly. “They just shut down the Midnight Market…everyone is worried about safety and pogroms. Florent was found on a doorstep, black-and-blue and beaten to within an inch of his life. And I believe the only reason my shop has escaped the rocks and arson other places have endured is because of our tendency…to move….”
Rosalind let this news sink in and churn through her recently sluggish mind. “Stay and fight, then. We can change it before it gets worse.”
Lévi gave a dry chuckle. “Spoken like a beautiful, spirited young lady who will change the world one way or another. My dear, I am old.” He leaned forward on his counter for emphasis. “And…I have seen this sort of thing before. And I have seen it happen again. I do not know if I shall survive the times after next. But while there is life, there is hope. And with life, and hope, go I…and the books they will no doubt be trying to burn soon. Hopefully we’ll find someplace where that nasty fever everyone is talking about hasn’t reached yet. I don’t know if I could survive an illness like that at this age.”
“Oh, you’ll live forever,” Rosalind said with a dismissive wave and a smile. “But where else in Europe have you experienced this sort of thing before? Are there other places where magic is still strong?”
“You don’t need to be a witch to have them hate you,” he said lightly. “Now, how may I help you? I just got in an absolutely delicious stack of not-strictly-accurate historical fictions about the late Republic. Er, Roman, that is…far from serious, but good for a cozy evening in front of the fire. What do you say?”
“I’m afraid I’m not here for books this time,” Rosalind said sadly, looking around at the luscious stacks. “I’m here for a reading. I mean, the other kind of reading.”
Lévi’s face seemed to tighten away from her, toward the back of his head, as if all his features were trying to escape. He turned pale.
“Things must be dire indeed, if the great Rosalind comes to me for such a thing.”
“Vashti is missing,” Rosalind said, unconsciously putting a hand on her belly. “I wanted her for a midwife. Maurice found her apartment empty, her dinner still on the table. I suspect the worst.”
“Very well,” Lévi said with a sigh. He carefully put down the moon-shaped lens he was working on.