Beauty (Tepper novel)

Beauty, the daughter of the Duke of Westfaire, finds a letter from her mother, who mysteriously disappeared when Beauty was an infant, and learns of a curse that will occur on her upcoming sixteenth birthday. Using magical items that she constructs with thread left to her by her mother, Beauty evades the curse, which instead falls on her half-sister. Beauty is abducted by a time-traveling crew that came to film the curse falling on the castle, and they take her to a dystopian future.

The film crew and Beauty steal a time-machine and travel back to 1991. The camera operator, Jaybee, kills Bill, the scriptwriter, when Bill tries to protect Beauty, then Jaybee rapes Beauty. Beauty uses the magic boots she had made to work her way back to her own time, only to find the Black Death has struck the area in her absence. Disguised as a boy, she is taken in at Wellingford House as a stableboy. Beauty soon realizes that she is pregnant. She returns to Westfaire to alter her appearance, then returns to Wellingford House to lure one of the sons to marry her. She marries Ned and gives birth to a girl, but Beauty sees Jaybee in the infant Elly's eyes and feels revulsion toward the baby.

Out riding one day, Beauty encounters Giles, who had been one of her father's men-at-arms and had been sent away by the family priest who had observed the growing affection between Beauty and Giles. Their romantic reunion goes awry when Beauty explains that she is married now. Distraught at losing Giles again and unhappy in her marriage, Beauty puts on her magic boots and tells the boots to take her to her mother.

The boots take her to a land that she learns is called Chinanga. Traveling on the boat that rescues her, Beauty encounters Carabosse, the fairy who had laid the curse. Carabosse explains that she is trying to protect Beauty from the Dark Lord, the evil power. They encounter Beauty's mother, Elladine, who had been trapped in Chinanga. When a ceremony dissolves the imaginary land of Chinanga, Beauty, Elladine, and Carabosse travel to Ylles, the fairy land, where Beauty learns how to use her fairy powers. While there, Beauty helps Thomas the Rhymer escape. Carabosse tells Beauty that she has seen in the future that magic disappears, and that to preserve it, a seed was planted in Beauty for safekeeping.

Beauty moves back and forth between her time, the future, Ylles, and the realm of the Dark Lord. She rediscovers Giles, meets her now-grown daughter, rescues her adolescent granddaughter, encounters her enchanted great-grandson, and takes vengeance on Jaybee. Horrified at how the future has destroyed magic and beauty and nature, she uses her fairy magic to save some of every type of bird and animal and fish and insect, every tree and flower and herb.