Rebel Rose Read online

  Copyright © 2020 Disney Enterprises, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion, an imprint of Buena Vista Books, Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

  Designed by Jamie Alloy

  Cover art and design by Sammy Yuen

  ISBN 978-1-368-06498-9

  Visit www.DisneyBooks.com

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Ten Years Later—July 1789

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For all those who dream of adventure in the great wide somewhere.

  Vincit qui se vincit.

  He conquers who conquers himself.

  Orella had come to the castle cloaked in the skin of an old beggar woman.

  She had cast a pitiable figure by design—hooded, wrapped in rags, and soaked to the bone by the sleet that fell like daggers from the blackened sky. Blessed with foresight as she was, Orella had never been so haunted by a vision. A bloody revolution was coming for France, as it had come for America and would one day come for the Russian Empire. Death was marching for many thousands of people. She had no choice but to try to spare the people of Aveyon.

  In the castle, the prince behaved just as she had foreseen he would. He rejected her request for simple shelter in exchange for a bloodred rose. She recognized the pain in him—the sharp loss of his mother’s love and the aching absence of his father’s, the sudden orphaning that left him unmoored in a world he barely understood, the weight of a kingdom on his untested shoulders. His cruelty was a shield, one that had grown around his heart, turning it to stone. Others might believe the prince would grow out of the unkindness that festered in him like a disease, but she knew better.

  Without her interference, armies of men would march on charred ground, fighting over whatever scraps and rot remained of a ruined world. She had done what she could in Versailles to no avail. If she similarly failed in Aveyon, the kingdom would be a dark catalyst for the rest of Europe and beyond. This time she could not falter.

  She knew it was coming, but still her heart cleaved when he rejected her a second time, sealing his own fate. She shed the skin of her disguise and let her true form fill the room. Orella was a flame in the dark, all at once as ancient as the earth and as young as the first blossom of spring. She read fear in his eyes and the word he whispered on his lips. Enchantress.

  She was not an enchantress, but it suited her to allow him to believe she was. In truth, she was both more and less than one. Her powers were greater, but her purpose was more narrowly defined. Appearing as she was to a prince was not something she ever thought she would have to do, but Orella’s gift would not let her sit idly by.

  The prince begged for forgiveness, swearing he could change, and it was only then that she saw a glimmer of the goodness he kept hidden, and of the king he could become. But promises born out of fear do not carry the same weight as those born out of love. A twist of her fingers transformed the prince, confining him to a monstrous form that would force him to change his heart. Another twist placed a powerful spell on the castle and all those who lived within it, erasing them from the minds of those outside it. She didn’t relish it. She wanted to tell him the curse had a purpose, to warn him of the fire she had seen burning through France and the reign of terror that came after it. But she had already meddled too much.

  Instead, Orella left him with the only gifts she could conceive of: a magic mirror to anchor him to the world he was leaving behind, and the rose she had offered him, now enchanted to ensure he did not tarry.

  As she left the castle, Orella was besieged by a flickering vision of a girl in a blue dress with a white muslin apron wearing a crown on her head—sometimes the girl’s body was burned, sometimes it was whole. It was too tenuous a thing for her to read clearly; too much could change before it came to be. But the crown on the girl’s head told Orella that she had at least achieved what she had come to the castle to do.

  She had set them on a path; Belle and the prince would have to do the rest.

  Once upon a time, a cursed prince fell in love with a headstrong girl, and together they saved a kingdom. But that was in the past, and all Belle could think about as her carriage rumbled over the cobbles of Pont Neuf was the future.

  Paris was just as she remembered it—so frenetic, chaotic, and choked by smoke that it threatened to overwhelm a girl more used to rolling fields and worn-down markets.

  She leaned out the window to take in the city after days of monotonous countryside. Lumière continued to sleep hunched over in the corner—the same position he had spent most of the journey in. Behind her, her husband’s hand clasped her skirts as if to anchor her to him, but she could not tear herself from the view. Outside, the city was so viscerally alive. The bridge teemed with people of all sorts—bouquinistes with their stalls of old books and pamphlets; mountebanks on raised platforms, hawking their vials of curatives; jugglers doing their best to impress the grisettes on their way home after a hard day’s work. Belle watched with grisly fascination as a barber yanked a tooth from a poor soul’s jaw, gaining purchase by placing his foot on the wall of the bridge behind them. And under it all, the murky Seine still glittered in the afternoon light as Parisians littered the embankment, seeking respite from the summer heat by its cool waters.

  Belle reveled in it now just as she had long ago, when she first saw it all from the back of her father’s wagon, wedged between his inventions. She had tried and failed for so many years to convince herself that it hadn’t been so grand, and that life in Aveyon hadn’t been so comatose in comparison. She had strived to remember only the filth and stench of Paris, and those remained, but beneath them was a city of people and industry and enlightenment, of poets and philosophers, and of scientists and scholars. It was a city that valued knowledge, no matter where it came from, unlike her own sleepy village of Plesance, where Belle was taunted for being different. In her mind, Paris became the kind of place Belle dreamed of running to, before she met Lio and the course of her life changed forever.

  She drank the city in, scarcely able to contend with everything happening outside the carriage. “You know, they say the police know a man has left Paris if they haven’t seen him cross Pont Neuf in three days.”

  “Oh?” Lio was absentminded and still, preferring to sit back and let Paris pass him by.

  She glanced over at him. “You weren’t lying when you said it has no hold over you.”

  He gave her a quizzical grin. “What?”
>
  “Paris,” she said, leaning toward him. “I feel as though I might burst out of my skin, but you’re—” The words died on her lips as her ears rang in the sudden muffled quiet of the carriage.

  He looked out to the busy bridge and sighed. “Paris is host to a lot of my unhappy memories.” He watched her smile fade and reached out for her hand, thumbing her palm. “I am happy that you’re happy, Belle. Perhaps we can make new memories here.”

  Belle hadn’t ever thought herself to be the marrying type, but after she broke the curse that bound the man she loved and set a kingdom free, marriage hardly seemed a challenge at all. Her time in the enchanted castle had changed her. When Lio proposed in the library he had gifted her, surrounded by her father and the family she had made for herself, saying yes had been the most natural thing in the world.

  Now the curse was far behind them, and while Belle did not regret choosing Lio, she hadn’t entirely realized the consequences of that choice. She had never imagined a life spent in a castle, or the duties that came with marrying a prince. But she and Lio needed to build a life together, and Paris was to be the first stop on the grand tour of Europe that Belle had always dreamed of. Cogsworth had, of course, bemoaned the time wasted and the unseemliness of a prince touring the Continent, but Belle was adamant that she see everything she could before the walls of Lio’s castle closed around her for good. She needed one last bit of adventure she could cling to. Lumière had chosen to accompany them for the beginning of their journey, eager to visit the kitchens of Paris’s most celebrated restaurants. Cogsworth had made him promise to behave, but everyone knew that was asking a lot of Lumière, who was as dedicated to mischief and revelry as he was to his duties as maître d’hôtel, or master of the house.

  Lio shook off his melancholy mood. “Is it everything you remember it to be?”

  “Paris has not changed,” she concluded with a sigh. “I’m the one who’s different.”

  “A princess, you mean?”

  She pinched his arm lightly as the carriage turned onto rue Dauphine. “Not a princess.” Belle’s refusal to take the title marriage to Lio would have afforded her was a touchy subject between them.

  He mercifully let it go. “But certainly not the girl you were then.”

  She turned her attention to the wallpapered panel of the carriage, tracing the embossed flowers with the tip of her finger, unwilling to let him see her smile falter once more. She didn’t know how to explain that she would always be that girl, that no titles or fine clothing would change her. In her bones, she was a poor, provincial peasant who had risen far above her station. Sometimes she worried her life was made up of illusions—to Lio, she was a girl worthy of a prince and a kingdom, and to herself, she was a girl who could tame her restless spirit and be happy with stillness. She wondered which of their illusions would shatter first.

  She buried the unpleasant thought as Lio changed the subject. “Should we go over everything again?”

  Belle grimaced. Visiting the court of Versailles was not something either of them wished to do, but it was a necessary evil. Aveyon was a principality, and its rulers had sojourned at the French court for centuries at the will of the king of France. It was a mutually beneficial relationship that Lio wished to restore. But he had been absent from court for ten years, bound by a curse that erased him from the minds of those who once knew him. Neither of them knew where he stood with King Louis—he might be irreparably angry with Lio, or have forgotten him altogether. But ignoring the problem solved nothing. They would have to face the king of France eventually.

  She could tell her husband was nervous, so she tried for levity. “To begin with, we do not speak to someone of higher rank unless they have spoken to us first. Which reminds me, where does a prince étranger fall in terms of rank?”

  Lio shrugged. “Well below a prince légitimé or a prince du sang, but above most nobles.”

  “And what about the wife of a prince étranger?”

  Lio cocked a brow at her. “That would depend on whether she took the title of princess, which would have afforded her a great deal more respect than if she hadn’t.”

  She refused to take the bait. “So to be safe I just won’t speak to anyone.” Lio rolled his eyes, but Belle pressed on. “Are you sure your cousin can secure us an invitation?” The court of Versailles was a beast of protocol and etiquette, and Belle was certain she would never fully understand it.

  Lio waved a hand. “He’s a duc, Belle.”

  “And you’re a prince,” she replied flatly.

  He pressed his lips together. “He’s a duc who has ingratiated himself with the court of Versailles for many years. He knows the ins and outs, and if anyone can get us an audience with the king, he can.”

  A younger, more naive version of Belle would have assumed that the prince of Aveyon would have had no trouble securing an invitation to court. But the older version of Belle understood that the court of the king of France was mired in layers of complexity and convolution designed to control the very noblemen who made it up. There was a chance that even with Lio’s cousin’s intervention, they would be barred from it. The rules of Versailles had been laid down by King Louis’s grandfather and could not be discarded. They had to behave impeccably, lest they be turned away for good.

  She voiced their most pressing concern. “Are we prepared enough for your cousin’s questions?”

  When Lio at last shed the curse that had bound him, his kingdom awoke to a world that had forgotten its existence. Lio’s staff had returned to their true selves and found their families, who resided outside of the castle, had not even noticed they were gone. Mostly they wove back into their normal lives without having to explain where they had been for so long. It was as though the curse had covered Aveyon in a blanket of forgetting, and when it was gone, the blanket had simply been lifted. Mercifully, it seemed that the world outside of Lio’s castle was willing to accept them back into it without question.

  But despite how relatively easy it had been to craft a story believable enough to satisfy a kingdom, Belle and Lio worried his cousin—once as close as a brother to him—might prove to be an exception.

  Lio kissed the back of her hand in a show of confidence Belle wasn’t sure she believed. “Of course we are, and once this business with the king is sorted, we’ll be on our way, I promise you.”

  Belle looked at her husband, studying the face she had only known for a few months. She nestled her head against his chest and listened for the heartbeat she had known a great deal longer. “It shall be our first test.”

  If they could lie convincingly to Bastien, duc de Vincennes, perhaps it meant they stood a chance of doing the same to the king of France.

  The carriage rumbled into Paris’s richest enclave, and Belle’s breath caught in her throat. Nothing like it existed in Aveyon, where you’d expect to find the manors of Aveyon’s nobility dispersed throughout the countryside, small islands of opulence, isolated and surrounded by modest villages. France’s nobility resided mostly at Versailles. To try to live separately from the king’s court or even leave it briefly spelled disaster for lesser nobles. Only the richest and most powerful of France’s nobility maintained homes in the city, which they visited sparingly. Each one was larger than the last, squatting like miniature castles on the clogged streets of Paris.

  “You know, I thought the mansions in Saint-Germain would seem smaller now that I’m older, but somehow they’ve only grown in their intimidation.”

  Lio looked out to the row of hôtels particuliers that passed in a blur. “Yes, but to hear Bastien tell it, you’d think he was living in a hovel rather than a townhome.”

  Belle sat back and looked at Lio. “Was he always so—”

  “Spoiled? Arrogant?” Lio fidgeted in his seat. “Truth be told, we were a lot alike as boys. Growing up together made us rivals, and my uncle only encouraged that. I hope we’ve moved past it.” A darkness took over his features as he remembered the cruel boy he had been before
. No matter how many times Belle reminded him of his changed heart, Lio let years of guilt weigh down upon him, bearing it like Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders.

  Belle tried to reach through the shadows of his past. “How long were you fostered in your uncle’s home?”

  “Some five years, beginning when I was six.”

  Belle paused. “Six is young to be taken away from your family.” Belle couldn’t imagine ever having left her father’s care. After her mother died, they only had each other. She and Maurice had been forced to learn how to live without her, and their relationship was stronger because of it.

  Lio adjusted his collar, a finely embroidered thing. “My father insisted I be raised closer to Versailles. I think even then he was concerned about Aveyon’s relationship with France. He was trying to make me into someone who felt at home in King Louis’s court, instead of someone who felt at home in Aveyon. And then…” He trailed off, and Belle knew better than to push him. “And then my mother died. She was gone before I even knew she was sick. I returned for her funeral, and when my father tried to send me back, I refused. At least in Aveyon I could walk down corridors we had walked in together, I could go to her chambers and run my hands over her gowns. I abandoned the name my father had given me, refusing to be addressed as anything other than Lio. Did I ever tell you why she called me that?” Belle shook her head. “From birth my mother called me her petit lionceau, her little lion cub.” His expression was half a smile, half a grimace. “Only my father ever called me by my real name. Over time it was shortened to Lio. To go by anything else felt like I was dishonoring her memory. It seems insignificant now, but I was more connected to her after she died than when I was away in Paris. I knew I would lose that if I went back to my uncle’s home. My father was desperately angry with me, but I thought we’d have years to repair our relationship.” His gaze drifted back to the homes they passed. “I didn’t think I’d be made an orphan within the year.”