“My parents sent me away before I could complete my studies. They sent me to this…lovely little place. They paid me off to come here.”
“Frédéric here has a talent,” Alaric said meaningfully, tugging on the end of his cap. “He can see the future.”
“Oh, aye?” Maurice asked, impressed.
“Not really, not always, only a little,” Frédéric protested, shaking his head. “Just enough for my family to exile me here…to be with ‘people like myself’ who would ‘understand it.’ Or, possibly, remove it with more magic. I was in university. I was going to apprentice to a great surgeon. I was going to be a doctor.”
Alaric caught Maurice’s eye above Frédéric’s head and made a face.
“I’ve been trying to get him to move in with us,” the groomsman declared, taking a swig of beer and then wiping the foam off in one easy, well-practiced motion.
“I don’t need to,” Frédéric said, but not meanly. “I have money and I don’t wish to live with animals, thank you very much. Also, I already have a bit of an additional income. The king and queen summoned me to attend to their royal infant. A cold,” he added quickly. “Nothing else wrong with him, and nothing I—or a real doctor—could fix. Ignoramuses! Anyway, they have hired me as their occasional consulting physician, and I do not require your charity, thank you.”
“C’mon, don’t you want to bunk with a couple of lads your age who can show you around? Rather than rent a room all by yourself at the top of some widow’s drafty attic?”
“Thank you for your concern,” Frédéric said, again, not unkindly. It was more like he didn’t know any way to be other than per-fect-ly polite. But it left a strange hole in the conversation.
“Alaric, that girl…” Maurice began. “Outside the tavern before…there was a beautiful girl with golden hair…she turned a man’s nose into a pig’s snout…”
“Oh, you must mean Rosalind! That one’s a card!” Alaric said, laughing.
“It’s a bit excessive,” Frédéric said, making a sour face. “That’s the problem with witches.”
“He was being very insulting,” Maurice said, finding himself rising to the defense of a girl whose name he hadn’t known a moment before. “He was accusing her of being unnatural, and saying that magic was impure.”
Alaric clicked his tongue. “Ah, there’s a lot of that these days, I’m afraid. Before you came, there was a terrible row. Two boys, a charmante and a normal one—like us—fought over a girl. It came to blows and the charmante won and the other boy died. By magic. The palace guards were sent to break up everything and there was a bit of a riot, accusations being flung back and forth. Some of the guards got caught in the crossfire…with rather more permanent afflictions than pigs’ snouts…which, knowing Rosalind, she will remove the next time she sees him.”
“You can hardly blame the normal ones, ‘like you,’” Frédéric said with bitterness. “Here these people are who have powers and can do things that you can’t. There’s no control over their behavior and nothing anyone—palace guards or people with muskets—can do about them. They…we, I suppose…need to be controlled. Or made less dangerous.”
“It was two boys fighting over a girl,” Alaric pointed out patiently. “It happens all the time. Boys die over that sort of thing in normal duels. This one just happened to involve magic. You can’t get all worked up about it.”
“At the very least, if there must be…unnatural things…people should hide it rather than flaunt it. Besides, magic always comes back on itself. Everyone knows that. She should know that. Rosalind, I mean.”
“Rosalind,” Maurice said, trying the name out on his tongue.
“Oh, no,” Alaric said with wide eyes. “Maurice! Say it isn’t so! Not so soon in our relationship!”
“Her hair,” Maurice said thoughtfully, “is the exact color of the inside of my kiln, when it is hot enough to melt iron.”
“Oh, good, we’re all safe then,” Alaric said with a sigh, shouldering Frédéric companionably. “With lines like that, we don’t need to worry about coming home to find a ribbon on the door and being forced to find another place to stay the night.”
“I have said I am not rooming with you,” Frédéric repeated patiently.
But Maurice was no longer listening.
Belle always forgot to take the hidden path to Lévi’s bookstore. Either she was reading or dreaming or singing to herself, or just genuinely interested in what the world was like outside her house and the quiet life she and her father led. So she always wound up on the route directly through the village, and therefore talking to—and being talked about by—the villagers.
And if she was honest, she might have done it a little on purpose. It was pleasant but lonely on their tiny farm. Belle was always eager to start conversations and always disappointed by how they ended the same way, every time.
“That’s nice, Belle.”
“Buy a roll, Belle?”
“Think it’s going to rain, Belle?”
“Why don’t you stop reading and…fix up your hair?”
“Isn’t my baby beautiful, Belle? She’s just like the other six—”
“Have you said yes to Gaston yet?”
She wished, just once, someone would show an interest in the same things she did. But that just wasn’t possible in the tiny village with the same hundred or so people who had always lived there—and always would.
Today at least everyone was a bit more subdued, and there seemed to be fewer villagers milling about, gossiping. Maybe someone’s batch of cidre was finally ready, or some cow had given birth to a calf with two tails.
No, even that would be too exciting to happen in this place.
She sighed and stepped into the bookstore, fixing a stray strand of hair behind her ear.
“Good morning, Monsieur Lévi.”
“Good morning, Belle!” the old man said brightly. He always had a kind smile for her, and was always glad to see her, no matter how many times she visited. “How is your father doing?”
“Oh, he’s putting the last touches on a steam-powered log chopper for the fair,” she said, spinning daintily on her toes to look around the shelves. Her brown ponytail lifted behind her and for a moment she almost felt like a child.
“Wonderful!” Lévi said, his mouth breaking into a big toothy grin. “He’s a man who deserves a prize. Or some recognition of his genius!”
“You’re the only person here who thinks so,” Belle said with a sad smile. “Everyone else thinks he’s crazy, or wasting his time.”
“Everyone thought I was crazy for opening a bookstore here, of all places,” Lévi said with a smile, pushing his spectacles up his nose and looking at her over them. “But it’s certainly quiet without so many customers. I can get quite a lot of reading done.”
Belle gave him a smile back, the half-sarcastic one that she was famous—or infamous—for.