“Speaking of reading—”
“Nothing new this week, I’m afraid,” he said with a sigh. “Unless you’d like to read one of these religious pamphlets that Madame de Fanatique ordered.”
“Are they philosophical?” she asked, desperate for anything. “Like, responses to Voltaire? Or Diderot? I wouldn’t mind reading opposing views.”
“Ah, no. They’re the usual sort. Not even any songs or hymns. Really fairly boring. I also have some…rather morbid…treatises for Monsieur D’ Arque to pick up and take back to the, ah, asylum,” he said, mouth pinched in extreme distaste. “But I’m afraid I can’t let you even touch those. He’s very particular.”
Belle sighed. “All right. I guess I’ll just borrow one of the old ones, maybe?”
“Feel free,” Lévi said with a smile, indicating his whole shop. “Any book.”
She would have to make it a good one. Life would be even sleepier and quieter with her father gone. She saw nothing between now and his return other than bright, cold autumn days, feeding the livestock, and the occasional disappointing long walk to the village.
Belle needed something fantastic, something exciting to last her until her papa got back—or until life finally began to happen.
Whether by chance or not, Maurice began to see the pretty girl with the blond hair everywhere: attending to magical fixes of ordinary things for farmers and shopkeepers, distributing bespelled roses to cure this and that ailment, laughing with friends, spending time at the tavern chatting with Josepha or, more likely, reading a book by herself.
He always managed to pick her out of the crowd, though she didn’t always have blond hair.
Or green eyes.
Or that height.
Or that color skin.
It was bewitching.
But even more marvelous than that was the way she would chat with other boys—then turn away. Maurice was stunned that they didn’t run after her.
His friends began to call him “moon-eyed.” Frédéric pestered him to find a nice normal girl instead. One without powers. Alaric, on the other hand, encouraged him to actually go up and talk to her. To introduce himself. To let her know that he existed.
But as it turned out, Maurice didn’t have to.
One day he went to the tavern early, by himself, bringing in little pieces of metal he had been working on to fiddle with as he sat there. At first glance they looked like a forged-nail bar puzzle a country gentleman might play with while having a drink, but the pieces were much stranger-looking: a tiny bit of tarnished copper pipe and a dull gray metal blob he was trying to fit into it.
He was still staring owlishly at the smallest end of the blob when he was suddenly aware of someone sitting down in the chair next to him, adjusting her voluminous skirts to fit the space.
“You know, you need to speak to the metal.”
He looked up at the vision next to him and blinked.
The girl with green eyes and blond hair regarded him calmly, a little smile on her face and a book half-closed in her hand.
The normal thing to do at this point would have been to offer to buy her a drink, to tell her how he had seen her around town, or even to gibber nervously about how pretty she was and question why she was sitting next to him.
But she was talking about the metal.
“Speak to it?” he asked. “What do you mean?”
“Ask it what it needs, to do what you want it to do. At least, that’s what a friend of mine who knows about such things says.”
“Well, I’ve tried everything else,” he said with a sigh. He held up the little ugly bits of metal and cleared his throat. “HEL-LO. METAL. WHAT DO I NEED TO DO TO GET YOU TO WORK?”
The woman laughed, a throaty, honey sound that wasn’t mean in the slightest. Maurice found himself chuckling as well, and even the grumpy bartender managed a smile.
The girl pushed a stray golden lock of hair out of her face and closed her book all the way, setting it beside her.
“Not like that, I don’t think. At least not in our language. You need to know the language of metal. I’m Rosalind, by the way.” She held out her hand.
“Enchanté,” Maurice said frankly, not bothering to pretend he didn’t know it already—that he whispered it at night sometimes, just to see how it felt. He took her hand and kissed it. “Not my name, of course. Maurice is my name.”
“I’ve seen you around,” she said, indicating the world outside the tavern with the tip of her alder wand. “No matter what you’re doing—pulling turnips, laying stones, digging—you’re always thinking about something else: your metal. You’re always carrying bits of it—and you’re always covered in the soot of a blacksmith. Whatever are you doing?”
“I am trying to develop a use-ful steam en-gine,” Maurice said, clapping the metal bits down on the bar on each syllable for emphasis. “The problem is that thus far it’s all about someone opening valves and closing valves and drawing up water….They’re trying to use them to drain mines over in England and Scotland—a lot of water problems they have over there—but it could do so much more. Instead of pushing and pulling water, you could push and pull a piston, and then, of course, there you are.”
“Of course,” the woman said with another smile. “There we are.”
Maurice stared at her for a moment, trying to figure out if she was making fun of him. Then he laughed self-deprecatingly. “I don’t speak as well as the pictures in my head do. I can’t…fully…the possibilities….It’s too much to explain all at once. It would be world-changing.”
“Ah,” the woman said. “Like gunpowder.”
“No, not like gunpowder. This would be for building and making, not killing and conquering.”
“Not all gunpowder is for killing. I have a friend who makes the most amazing fireworks. And who—a little like you—spends all her spare time trying to launch things higher and higher into the air, using gunpowder and a thing like a cannon aimed at the sky.”
“You have a lot of interesting friends, it seems,” Maurice said, sighing. “I wish I could meet them.”
“I’m not sure I would like that,” the girl said thoughtfully. “If I introduced you to my friends, you would spend all your time talking to them and not to me.”
Maurice stared at her for a long moment, trying to decide if what he thought she meant by that was what she actually meant by that.
And, with a smile, it became apparent that she did.
With a feeling of unreality approaching straight-up wonder, Maurice began to court Rosalind. Or perhaps it was the other way around. It didn’t matter—and he certainly didn’t care.
He took her to a festival dance and offered her a rose he had painstakingly hammered out of metal. She graciously pinned it to the bodice of her dress—which, honestly, was pulled down almost indecently by its weight.
Then Rosalind took him to see her roses, a delightful garden hidden by magic inside a little park, filled with perfectly healthy, perfectly formed roses in every shade of pink and red, and a few colors Maurice wasn’t sure he had seen before on any flower.
She often grew bored with her own appearance, he discovered, which was why her looks and outfits seemed to change of their own accord so frequently. So if she was helping Maurice with something dangerous, hot and sticky in his kiln yard, when they emerged to take a stroll around town her apron and old skirts would disappear and she would appear attired in the robes of a fashionable lady wearing the latest style from Paris—but one with purple skin.