As Old As Time: A Twisted Tale (Twisted Tale, A)

by Liz Braswell

  “Something must be done about this,” the inventor began to say, turning back to the boy.

  He had disappeared.

  But Rosalind was there, suddenly, running forward and throwing her arms around him.

  “I saw the whole thing. Marry me,” she said.

  “What? Yes. What?” Maurice said.

  “You are the best, kindest, bravest, nicest man I have ever met. I want to make sure you can’t ever leave me—by oath.”

  “Well, of course. I mean, I was planning to ask you mys—”

  But his words were cut off by a passionate kiss.

  He only pulled back once, to ask the one thing that bothered him.

  “You weren’t the boy there, being beaten up, were you? You weren’t testing me, were you?”

  “Don’t be absurd! I came looking for you, using a ‘find friend’ spell. I need you and the cart to haul back some rather big packages for me.”

  “Oh.”

  “Besides, those two hooligans would have been blind, finless fish if they had tried to attack me. Now shut up and kiss me!” she added, planting her lips firmly on his again.

  And so they were married. The wedding might have been hidden, both by its secret location and protective spells. The attendees might have been a trifle strange: tiny men who had advice for Maurice on the workings of metal; long-eared girls with hooves for feet who stamped impatiently for the priest to finish; bespectacled librarians and students; and the heavy-drinking young men Maurice still hung out with. But the party afterwards was as enthusiastic as any the kingdom had ever seen.

  Except, perhaps, for Frédéric, who was not enthusiastic and spent the whole night looking uncomfortable and sour about the presence of so many charmantes.

  But besides his general grumpiness, there was only one real mishap the whole night: a wild boar, enticed by the smell of the food, managed to work its way in from the woods and root through quite a bit of the magical rose garden before the drunken guests could contain it.

  “That’s an odd thing to happen,” Maurice commented.

  “Magic,” a tipsy faun said, pushing her finger up on her nose to make a snout, “always comes back on itself.”

  Maurice then remembered the man whose nose Rosalind had changed. His new wife was swearing roundly at the pig in her garden now—but not using any magic to shoo it away, he noticed.

  “Wait—that’s not him, is it?” Maurice asked, alarmed.

  “No!” the girl giggled. “Issa pig! But’s all the same. Everything comes back on itself again. Love, hate, magic, pig noses. S’how it works.”

  “That seems reasonable,” said Maurice thoughtfully, who might have also been a little more in his cups than he appeared at first.

  What a wonderful place this is, and what an amazing woman I’ve married, he thought. And what a magnificent wedding. Pigs and all.

  Belle stomped off over the hill, wanting to run, wanting to maintain her dignity, not managing either. She kept up a strange fast-march in too precise a straight line that neither got her away from everything fast enough nor let her appear to be unaffected by it.

  Behind her, on the lawn by the side of the house, was a wedding party.

  Her wedding party.

  It was beautiful; she had to admit that.

  There was a very tasteful canopy woven with sweet-smelling flowers. Paper bells and pink ribbons festooned a high arch. Tables were draped with shining white cloths and pink bunting, and spread with an array of savory delicacies. Silver buckets held bottles of chilled champagne; perfect little beads of moisture covered their gleaming sides like pearls. Like a painting.

  There was a band, which was actually kind of terrible but enthusiastic.

  There was an absolutely amazing-looking cake—the only thing Belle was really sad to leave behind. It had three tiers and its white and pink fondant perfectly matched everything else. Crowning the top was a tiny wedding couple, which she would have tossed aside, unexamined, in her haste to get to the cake underneath. Monsieur Boulanger might have been irksome in person but his skills as a baker were definitely in top form that day.

  There was also a disappointed would-be groom sitting splay-legged in the pig wallow.

  She hadn’t meant to push him that hard. But having done so, she wasn’t precisely displeased with the results.

  The noise behind her was terrific: the squeaking of the blond triplets; the squonkings of the tuba and accordion, which now had no purpose; the not-quite sotto voce assurances of LeFou to Gaston; the apologetic titterings of the priest.

  The priest.

  For some reason his presence upset Belle the most.

  She could almost dismiss the ridiculous band, the cake, the table, and everything else as all the accoutrements of a love-smitten madman—but a priest meant Gaston was deadly serious. He had every intention of “’til-death-do-they-part” marrying her.

  “Amor does not vincit omnia, you ignorant man,” Belle muttered, “…when the woman doesn’t amat you back!”

  She took a quick, undignified step aside to hide behind a scrub oak, then peeped out from behind it. Her heart sank. Besides the main characters in the wedding party, it looked like all the rest of town had shown up to bear witness to Gaston’s triumphant day. There was the silversmith, Monsieur LeClerc; Monsieur Hebert, the wigmaker and haberdasher; Madame Baudette, the couturier…the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker—everyone was there.

  Everyone except for Monsieur Lévi.

  His absence was extremely notable. He knew the kind of boy she would eventually marry, if she married.

  And it certainly wasn’t Gaston.

  Absent, also, was her father, of course, who was on his way to the fair. And her mother—but Belle hadn’t seen her since she was a baby, so that part wasn’t really so surprising.

  Drifts of conversation came to her as the breeze shifted.

  “Terrible, but is it really surprising? That girl isn’t right in the head….”

  “Turning down Gaston? The most handsome, eligible bachelor in town?”

  “Stupid hussy. I’d give my right pinky to wear his ring.”

  “Who does she think she is?”

  “Does she think she can do better?”

  “Maybe she’ll try Dupuis’s son instead—you know, the simple one who counts pebbles all day. More to her taste.”

  Belle balled up her fists and threw herself against the tree trunk in rage. None of them thought she was good enough for Gaston, the town’s favorite son…the most handsome boy, with the bluest eyes and best physique, the best shot with a gun…

  No one ever asked if he was good enough for her.

  That was just the way the townspeople were.

  On the one hand, they did nothing—had done nothing—but gossip endlessly about Belle and her father. How odd they were. How odd she was. Always reading. No friends. No suitors.

  How Maurice rarely came to the pub for a drink. How he didn’t have a respectable trade. How his wife had disappeared.

  How, some whispered, he consorted with the devil down in his basement.

  Her father had finally put an end to that rumor by inviting a select few to come by and inspect his house for evidence of demonic shenanigans. They had been carefully chosen: Monsieur LeClerc, who knew a bit about technology and metal, and Madame Bussard, the town gossip, sure to spread the news of what she had seen. What they saw were the half-built contraptions and engines of someone they immediately assumed was a madman. Later, Belle wasn’t sure if she preferred the fear the villagers exhibited before this experiment, or the pity and ridicule after.

  But on the other hand, there was Gaston, who, despite Belle’s strangeness, came after her with the relentlessness of a crazed hunting dog after a boar. It wasn’t that he overlooked the oddity of the father and daughter; it was more like it was irrelevant compared to Belle’s status as prettiest girl in town.

  Plus he felt he could fix her. Make her normal. His overwhelming masculinity and prese
nce would exorcise her desire to read and think and be alone.

  Was there a tiny part of Belle just a little bit tickled to be the center of attention of such a handsome boy, the town favorite?

  Of course. Yes.

  That cake looked like Boulanger had spent a lot of time on it.

  But she would trade it all in immediately for being left alone…for being treated by Gaston the same way the rest of the town treated her.

  The crowd looked so tiny from up where she was. Belle backed away from the tree, watching the wedding party grow even smaller. In the strange, honey-like softening of the afternoon sunlight, the scene looked both more brilliant and less real—like a miniature painting. She held up her thumb and managed to block out everything with its tip, erasing everyone from the landscape.

  It was like what she did when she read.

  As soon as she opened a book, this little town disappeared into a vast map of countries both real and imagined.

  The people down below, cleaning up from the non-wedding and erased by her thumb tip, didn’t think anything interesting or important lay beyond the next bend in the river. They had no curiosity about the new lands beyond the sea or the ancient lands to the east. They had no regard for the recent discovery that other planets had moons just like the one that smiled down at them.

  Belle wanted more. She wanted to see more. She wanted to travel to the lands she had read about, where people ate with delicate sticks, not forks.

  At the very least, she wanted to be carried there in her imagination.

  Belle lowered her thumb, and the townspeople reappeared.

  She plopped herself down on the grass, defeated.

  The truth was…reading wasn’t enough anymore.

  It wasn’t enough to catch a glimpse of these lands and ideas through the small window of the pages she turned. She wanted to step through and feel the yellow waters of the Yangtze herself, to hear the celestial music of foreign pipes, to taste the foods described by adventurers who traveled purposefully into the areas on maps labeled Here there be tygres.

  Looking to the west, where the late afternoon was drawing to a dark close, she didn’t see the endless landscape that often set her dreaming.

  Instead she saw thick black clouds that stretched to the heights of the sky, roiling and boiling with wind and winking with lightning. Fine. It suited her mood. She clenched her fists unconsciously, wishing she could bring the storm faster, like a wizard or enchantress in one of her books. She wished she could stand on top of the hill in the midst of the winds and the thunder, untouched, alone, as all the would-be wedding guests fled for the safety of their homes.

  And then she remembered her father, who was somewhere out on the road, heading to the fair.

  Guiltily, she unclenched her fists and forced her shoulders to relax—as if she really did have some control over the weather.

  She rolled over onto her stomach and scanned the road as best she could, but either he was already too far into the forest or the dust in the air had obscured him and Phillipe and the cart.

  She sighed and desultorily picked a dandelion. Under a protective tarp on that cart was her father’s masterpiece, his finest invention. When fueled up and working properly, it could split a pile of logs in half the time it took two men. An amazing achievement, sure to win a prize.

  Belle puckered her lips and blew on the dandelion.

  Either you could see how many feathery seedpods were left stuck to the head and pretend it was that o’clock, or you could make a wish.

  She chose the latter.

  If Maurice won the prize, and if it were a big one, then maybe she could convince him to move to a bigger city. Maybe even the one that he sometimes talked about, where they had lived when she was a baby. There her father could spend all his time inventing—not trying to eke out a living for himself and his daughter among countryfolk who thought he was mad.

  And then Belle could have all the books she wanted. And no one would look at her as being odd; not in a city full of odd people.

  Or maybe some rich member of nobility would see his invention for the genius it truly was and sponsor him…take him and Belle away like a fairy godmother and whisk them into a world of academics, science, and people just like them. They would be part of all the exciting things this century promised, far away from this provincial town and its stupid ambush weddings.

  (She was glad her papa wasn’t around to see that. He wouldn’t have gotten angry, the way she had; he would have been merely very, very confused. It wouldn’t have helped things.)

  She rested her head on her hands, watching the wedding party quickly disperse as the winds picked up. LeFou tried to grab a bunting as it whipped around branches and chairs like an eel. The villagers would all be gone in a few minutes, but she wished she could head down sooner, somehow sneak around them, to be inside when the storm finally hit. Maybe she could try going down to the east side of the house, through the rose garden….

  She sighed, turning to look at the pretty pink-and-white dots that mottled the scenery just out of view of the wedding party. They were the main reason her father was reluctant to leave their little house in the country. Part of him still believed there was a chance that someday his wife would come back, to her roses and her husband and her daughter. If only he just kept tending the bushes and keeping the flowers pretty and healthy, maybe she would be tempted to return.

  If they left, how would she find them?

  But despite the automatic watering contraption Maurice had built for the garden, the roses that were usually so healthy—blooming even in deepest winter—were beginning to look a little brown and peaked.

  Belle grumpily got up. She barely remembered her mother. She had the best father in the world. That was all she needed.

  She took one last look at the horizon, bidding the storm and the lands beyond farewell—when she saw a strange commotion on the road.

  It was Phillipe, galloping out of control toward the house, still attached to the cart.

  And her father wasn’t on it.

  Maurice and Rosalind immediately began their happily-ever-afters. They moved to a snug little third-floor apartment in the castle district, right in the middle of the most fashionable and bustling neighborhood. A tiny garden out back sufficed for most of Rosalind’s immediate magical needs, and Maurice worked out a deal with Alaric to continue using the kiln yard despite his no longer living there.

  For the first year the apartment was crammed with work and parties, late-night academic discussions with friends and loud drinking songs, days and nights of research, roses, and metal. Then, when the newlyweds’ lives calmed down a little, their place became a serene and peaceful retreat from the world.

  It was just high and removed enough to be unnoticeable from the street, and surprisingly quiet for the part of town it was in. Rarely did a random person follow the narrow, shaded alley to the back of the building and clamber up the old wooden steps to the third floor—and friends knew how to step around or otherwise disengage Maurice’s clever, and loud, alarm system.

  Which was why he was surprised and unprepared the day the alarms went off.

  Pots clashed, broken bits of ceramic broke further, and a horn powered by an old accordion-like bellow blasted away the sleepy late afternoon hush in the garden and sent creatures and moths flying.

  “See? Told you it would come in handy,” Maurice called over his shoulder to Rosalind as he went to see who it was. He had ideas about the door, too—installing a sort of periscope or monocular that would allow the inhabitant to see who was outside without, say, letting the cold winter air in.

  Yes…something with a reflector inside a tube, maybe….

  He opened the door and was surprised to see a young boy standing there, shocked and startled, his hand hovering in the air.

  “Hello,” Maurice said amiably. “Did my alarm system frighten you?”

  The boy said nothing.

  “Because I am trying to decide whether it sh
ould be silent to those who approach, so I may better surprise them, or if it should be loud to frighten them off before any mischief can be achieved. What do you think? Can you—oh!”

  Maurice suddenly noticed what was in the boy’s hand. It was a piece of charcoal. He followed the direction of the hand to the lintel and saw the beginnings of a poorly written, rather rude word scratched out there.

  “What,” the inventor asked, at first more confused than angry, “is the meaning of this?”

  “It’s said that a great and terrible witch lives here!” the boy shouted, scared and defiant. There was a nasty look in his little piggy eyes.

  “Oh.” Maurice was by nature a generous and charitable person—travelers and dreamers and tinkerers by needs must be. But he remembered the man who had tried to threaten Rosalind the day he first saw her. And the bruised, beaten-up boy the day she had asked him to marry her. “Ah…so…So what?”

  “SHE TURNED A MAN INTO A PIG!” the boy cried.

  “No, she just turned his nose into a pig’s nose. And he was very rude. And she turned it back, by the way. He’s just fine.”

  “DEVIL WORSHIPPER!” the boy spat, and turned and ran away.

  With a sigh Maurice went back inside and closed the door, locking it, something he rarely did.

  His lovely wife was reclined in a rocker, glowing but tired, using the end of her pinky to make a stirring motion and thereby encourage the spoon across the room to put honey in her tea and mix it in.

  “Darling,” he said, sitting down on the stool next to her, “I think we’re in for some trouble….Some strange young lad was making a mess above our door…swearing all up and down about magic, it seems—”

  “Oh, those ignorant peasants,” Rosalind growled tiredly, putting a hand to her head. “I grow so tired of them. They’re everywhere now. Some are vicious brutes, too. I thought it would just simmer down after that whole incident with the girl….”

  “That happened long before I came here and it still doesn’t seem like it’s simmering down. I don’t think that boy knew how to write. I think someone made him learn that one rather nasty phrase.”