She raised the tapestry a little farther, so that she could duck under it, as she was unwilling to leave any creature somewhere she had made no attempt to investigate herself first, and found that she was standing in what appeared to be an underground chamber.
If she turned to look behind her, she could see the daylight shining across the rosy carpet of her rooms, could see it winking off the corners of furniture and strips of hangings visible to her through the half-open door: hut if she turned inwards again, she saw only rough shadows, dimming quickly to blackness, the shapes of earth and stone only varied by what looked very much like the roots of plants.
She raised her hand to feel over her head, having the sense of little trailing things touching her softly, and tearing spiders, as even she was a little hesitant about spiders; and found instead a great net of what fell like tree roots, if she could imagine what tree roots might feel like from underneath. The trailing things were root hairs. Could anything but root hairs look so like root hairs?
“But we are two storeys above the ground,” she said, bewildered, and turned again to look at the sunlight lying on her carpet. She lifted her gaze to the hinges of the door; it seemed to be pegged straight into the rock, and the frame to be made of some impossible mix of stone fragments and woven roots, impossible, but strangely beautiful, as the vein-ing of marble is beautiful.
“Well,” she said to the bat, “I guess I do not have to worry about protecting the floor here—wherever here is. And there are lovely, er, tree roots for you to hang from, should you wish to hang, and—and bat droppings are excellent fertilizer. I will need fertilizer for my roses as soon as I finish pruning them. I should wish to find a whole colony of you here, I suppose, but—I don’t quite think I do. The results might be a bit... complex. Good-bye, then, till this evening.”
She laid her tiny parcel down in a little hollow in the earth between two roots, loosened the pillow slip so that it could crawl out when it chose, and stepped back, under the summer tapestry, and onto a carpet covered with roses. She closed the door, which from this side was panelled with plain wood, to match the panelling of the wall (plain but for the occasional carving of a rose), and went, very thoughtfully, to eat her breakfast.
She found her gloves with the pruning-knife and the saw on the water-butt in the glasshouse this morning. “Today we will be bold,” she announced, and she was. She cut and lopped and hacked and sawed, and then she stopped long enough to water her cuttings and check her seedbed, and then her stomach told her it was lunchtime, and she went back to her bedroom balcony, and lunch was waiting for her.
When she returned to the glasshouse after lunch, she looked at the scatter of rubbish she had produced and said, “I need somewhere to build a bonfire.”
She left the glasshouse again and stood in front of its door, looking down the side of the palace away from her balcony. The bulk of the glasshouse prevented her from seeing very far, but she knew there was nothing, between the door to the glasshouse and the door (if it was the same door) she used to enter the palace and return to her rooms, that would do for a bonfire.
This area of the inner courtyard was covered with gravel, gravel just coarse enough not to take footprints, but fine enough that it was smooth and easy to walk on. It was also the same eye-confusing glittery grey-white as the palace and the front drive. Studying it now. Beauty teased herself with the notion that if she narrowed her eyes to take in none of the details of where pebbles became walls, she might walk straight to the end of the courtyard and up the wall without noticing, like an ant or beetle. .. . She looked up, blinking, at the bright sky. The scale was about right, she thought. If Rose Cottage is the right size for human beings, then here I am an ant or a beetle. A small beetle. Probably an ant. Even if my feet cannot carry me up walls. How confusing, when one came to walk on the ceiling, to be abruptly blinded by one’s skirts....
In any event, there was nowhere here to light a bonfire: it would make a dreadful mess of the whiteness, and even magical invisible rakers and polishers might resent the effort to remove the ashes and the heat-sealed stains and the bits that wouldn’t burn no matter how often you poked them back into the hottest heart of the fire. And she didn’t want to annoy—any more than she could help—whoever was responsible here... the Beast? She was beginning to wonder. She remembered his words lasl night: When I was first here . . . I had forgotten ... I was very glad when Fourpaws came.
She had never seen any sorcerer who had chosen not to appear human, though she had heard tales of them; her friend the salamander had met one who looked like a centaur. His familiar pretended to be a lion, and while J knew he was not, still, he kept me busy enough with his great paws and his sense of humour that I could never look long enough at cither him or his master to see who—or what—he really was, the salamander had said, laughing his rustling laugh. My master was vexed with me, but I told him he should have made me appear to be a panther.
Beauty thought of the salamander’s gift to her—and of her first sight of the Beast, Can you not hear to look at me? he had said. Most sorcerers enjoyed making the sort of first impression that would give them the upper hand in any dealings to come; but that first sight had almost... and the Beast had taken no advantage as he certainly .. . And then Beauty remembered the story of a sorcerer who looked like the Phoenix, and who had married a human princess because her hair, he said, was the colour of the fire of his birth.
I am no princess, she said to herself.
She turned away from the familiar end of the palace courtyard and began to walk towards the end she could not see. She went on a long way, a very long way, and the way disconcertingly seemed to adjust itself somehow as she walked, like the corridor from the chamber of the star to the door into the courtyard. The sense of mortar and stone flu-idly running into and out of each other, like a cat standing up and stretching or curling up into a cat cushion, was much more unsettling out of doors in sunlight.
She glanced to her right; if the palace was adjusting, then so must be her darling glasshouse. She was sure it was not this big from the inside—unless the other end of the palace was horseshoe-shaped, and she was going dear round it and would eventually find herself at the opposite corner of the one square-ended wall that held her balcony. Bui the glasshouse itself had comers—at least, from the inside—and she had not passed any, and she was not willing to suppose that her glasshouse was anything other than what she saw—that it would pretend to be a panther when it was a salamander.