The Library
340 Words
Two days after the wolf attack, the Beast found Belle sitting in the corridor outside her room, reading the same three books she had borrowed from the servants' quarters for the fourth time. She had not complained — she would not have — but her expression as she turned pages she had already memorized was one he recognized. It was the look of someone starving.
"Come with me," he said gruffly.
He led her up two staircases she hadn't discovered, down a long hallway lined with covered paintings, to a pair of double doors he opened with a key from his coat pocket. He pushed them open and stood aside.
Belle stepped in and stopped breathing.
The library was cathedral-sized. Bookshelves rose from floor to ceiling, two full stories high, with rolling ladders on brass tracks along every wall. Books filled every shelf — thousands of them, tens of thousands, organized with meticulous care across every genre, language, and era that human civilization had ever managed to write down and bind. Morning light fell through tall windows onto reading tables with brass lamps and velvet chairs. The smell alone — leather and old paper and possibility — was enough to make Belle's eyes fill with tears.
"It's yours," the Beast said, from the doorway. "If you want it. While you're here."
Belle turned to him with an expression he had never seen directed at him before. Pure, uncomplicated joy.
She spent the rest of the day pulling books from shelves, reading first pages, laughing at discoveries, gasping at illustrations. Late in the afternoon she called out across the room: "You should read more. It's the finest thing there is."
"I don't read well," he admitted, from the chair where he'd been watching her.
"Then I'll read to you," she said, as simply as if it were obvious. She pulled a thick adventure novel from the shelf, settled into the chair across from him, and began.
It was, the servants agreed afterward, the best afternoon the castle had known in years.
- Writer
