Page 10 of Cinder House

The last strike of midnight found Ella stumbling her way home, too driven by fear and annoyance and incoherence to think of summoning a carriage.

She was much too far away to hear the palace clock.

She simply twanged and was back on the staircase, back as a ghost.

Back where she was supposed to be.

Patrice and Greta and Danica were full of news on their own return.

Greta had won her dance with the prince after all; he’d spent the last hours of the night dancing dutifully with a range of women.

A strange, bold girl in an otherworldly green dress had dared to interrupt him and ask, and that had opened the door for everyone else.

“Still, a sop,”

Greta said, slumped in an armchair and dangling her mug.

Despite the languid pose she had a crackling, dangerous air about her.

“He can afford to be perfectly charming, handing out consolation prizes now that everyone knows who he’s actually planning to marry.”

The gossips had taken note of Prince Jule disappearing for a long time along with the Princess Nadya.

A good sign for her, they agreed.

An official announcement from the king and queen was expected to be the crowning event of the final night’s ball.

“Greta’s just got her precious nose out of joint because she couldn’t charm him,”

said Danica.

A bolt of fear went through Ella’s floorboards.

She’d forgotten to warn Jule against Greta.

It had been swept clean out of her.

She’d never thought that after what had happened between them, he’d go back inside and dance—not-dance—with everyone else.

But he was, after all, dutiful.

“What did you … do?”

Ella couldn’t help asking.

Greta’s crackling look—thwarted, that was what it was—shifted to Ella.

“All the basics, and a few things I’ve had to bribe my feckless tutor to teach me,”

Greta snapped.

“All useless.

They slid off like grease.

He’s warded to the sky.”

“I did say you should expect a prince to have protection.

You’re lucky he lacked the wits to notice what you were doing.

And not even beauty can fight politics,”

said Patrice wearily.

“Tomorrow night you can do what your sister’s done and take advantage of the situation.

Hook someone else to court you.”

“A horse trader?”

Greta said scathingly.

Danica gave a mean little smile.

“Jealous? Maybe you’re less of a prize than you think.

Maybe you should resign yourself to being a comfort to Mama in her old age, while I run a rich household.”

The cocoa fell to the rug.

Ella felt it begin to soak in.

Greta was on her feet, ablaze with fury, moving toward her sister.

Patrice’s face was a well-contained curse; she sprang to stand between the two of them, surprisingly grand, her hand outstretched in warning to her youngest daughter.

“That’s enough,”

Patrice said.

“Greta, it’s time to grow up.

You tried, and you failed, and that’s—”

The magic, first, sizzling alive in Ella’s wallpaper; and then the fire, a startlingly bright flare, far larger than a few charred butterflies.

It consumed the space between Greta and her mother.

There was a shrill cry of surprise and pain and Ella couldn’t tell, at first, if it was a human noise or a kettle in her kitchen going off in sympathy.

Danica made a choked sound and fled the parlour.

Ella found herself curled up on the footstool, arms wrapped around her legs, trying to make herself small.

The flames vanished.

Patrice was gasping now and clutching her elbow.

Angry redness streaked her hand and down her wrist.

On Greta’s face was not the smallest flicker of fear or remorse.

Her lip curled back.

She looked even grander than her mother, standing there: beautiful and powerful and pitiless.

“If our precious Crown Prince wants a sorcerer queen,”

said Greta.

“he can have one without having to import her.”

She cast a final disdainful look at her mother, and none at all at Ella, and left the room.

Patrice’s next intake of breath was long and loud like someone surfacing.

It had wet, despairing edges.

She moved over to the settee and sat down.

She was trembling but straight-backed, staring at the burn. It would begin to blister very soon.

“She didn’t mean to hurt me,”

said Patrice.

“She … lost control.

That’s all.”

“I’ll get some water,”

said Ella, without having to be ordered.

She fetched a basin of water bobbing with ice.

While Patrice was soaking her hand Ella first mopped up Greta’s spilled cocoa and then fetched the foul yellow ointment from the medicine cupboard, and a dressing and bandage.

Ella could still only handle objects and not people, meaning that her fingers had a tendency to mist through Patrice’s solid arm, and since her deal with Quaint she was mistier than ever and clumsier because of it.

But between the two of them they managed to bandage her up.

“I’ll send for the doctor.

Tomorrow.”

Patrice let the hand fall to her lap.

Ella opened her mouth to offer more brandy.

Then closed it again.

She looked at the scared steel of Patrice’s expression and the faint liver-spotted signs of age on her stepmother’s hand.

She thought about how far Patrice would go for her daughters, and how easily love and fear and hurt could tangle themselves up inside a person.

She said.

“Why did you kill my father?”

She had never asked it before.

From the sudden jerk of Patrice’s body and the changed look on Patrice’s face, Patrice had not been entirely sure that Ella knew.

After a long while Patrice said.

“He was … not the kind of husband I’d hoped he would be.”

“Were you afraid? Of him?”

Patrice didn’t answer.

She also didn’t say, Were you? except with her look, but it was a very loud look.

Ella said.

“Why kill me?”

Patrice sighed.

There were long years in that sigh.

“For the house, of course.”

“Is that really all?”

“It wasn’t about you, Ella,”

said the stepmother to the girl she’d murdered.

“I couldn’t start over with nothing.

Not again.”

The house.

The house which Ella haunted as a grudge it was holding, for the death of a man whom Ella had mourned with stifling curtains and the tangle of dripping copper pipes behind walls, but could no longer tell if she’d have mourned with her own flesh, her own heart, her own tears.

She didn’t even know what she’d been fishing for, asking that question of Patrice.

Surely there was a deeper why to Ella’s death, surely this had happened to her because of something she’d done or had failed to do. Otherwise … what?

It wasn’t about you.

Patrice went to bed.

Ella went to the attic and slipped through the boarded-up wall into darkness.

She knelt before the skeleton and reached to unfasten and remove the golden chain.

Ancient heads of lavender, no longer the colour of Ella’s unchanging dress, crumbled as they fell away.

Around her the house felt ten things at once—and none of them were anger, even though they should have been.

Instead Ella felt the strong, familiar urge to let the skeleton be; to let even the uncomfortable knowledge of its existence slide away as if greased.

As if warded.

This time she fought it.

Ella had died for nothing—no, she’d died because her father had made this house unlivable for a pragmatic woman who’d recognised the danger and acted first.

And the house, which was Ella, which was not Ella but had consumed her and held her possessively part of itself—just as its owner had, in life—had kept her from feeling the betrayal.

It didn’t know any better.

It had been secret-keeping on its owner’s behalf, just as Ella had been grudge-keeping without ever being asked if it was what she wanted.

She knew what she wanted.

And she couldn’t have it.

Tonight she’d glimpsed what life might have contained: dancing, and pleasure, and someone who laughed with her and held her as if she were precious.

Ella pushed a strand of hair away from the skeleton’s face and concentrated on her anger.

She poured all the existence she had into it.

It was long past midnight, but a tiny cinder in the dead hearth, down in the kitchen, came to furious life and glowed.

What to say.

Were you afraid, too?

I danced tonight.

I wish you could have seen it.

In her grown-up ghost hand the heart pendant was such a small object.

It felt even smaller as she looked at it, trying to catch hold of more than a dream of a memory once held by malleable wet clay.

I wish I remembered you as you were.

“I’m sorry,”

she whispered.

It wasn’t enough.

It was something.

* * *

The third ball.

The final ball.

Ella had read many stories where young people hurled themselves into raging seas to rescue their drowning lover, or faced down scheming sorcerers armed with no more than wit and a penknife, or gave up riches and crowns and perfect futures in the name of love.

The bravery kicked in once love had arrived.

Only love allowed them to do such foolish things, and love was the reason they were allowed to survive.

What Ella was feeling was far more complicated than she’d hoped love would be.

It was more like desperation mingled with lust, a remarkable amount of sheer stubborn pettiness, and a determination to get her money’s worth.

So even though her heart fluttered as she entered the palace ballroom, half convinced that Princess Nadya would be waiting with a knot of fellow sorcerers to point her out and bind her and expose her as a dead thing and a fraud—

She would speak to Jule once more.

She would tell him he could dance for her any time he wanted; at least he would know she was watching, even if he couldn’t see her or touch her.

She could write him letters afterward.

Ella would have another friend, and Jule would have the closest thing to an audience that he could hope for, and it would be not-enough-but-something.

Neither Jule nor Nadya were in sight when she arrived.

The dancing flowed with no motionless royalty at the centre.

The punch table was less helpfully crowded with gossips too, so Ella had to resort to asking someone directly, and was told that the royal family and the Cajarac ambassador and the imperial princess were off putting pen and ink to a betrothal agreement, or the formal treaty negotiated that morning, or possibly both at once.

Ella’s heart dropped.

She told it not to be stupid.

Duty was never going to let a little thing like the Crown Prince being caught with his hand up a strange girl’s skirts interfere with a political marriage.

She had no idea what Nadya had been truly thinking, and feeling, behind that arched brow and amber voice; whether the princess was just as dutiful as Jule, whether Nadya had her own doubts and fears and secret hopes.

And she had no idea what Jule had said to Nadya after she fled.

Would he have admitted he knew Ella was a ghost? Would that mean he’d tell her why he’d removed his leg-braces, and what they were for?

Surely he would tell his future wife about the curse, before ink fell onto a contract. Surely.

“How exciting,”

said Ella.

She mustered a smile.

“A royal wedding will mean another festival, too.”

Less than a minute later there was a chiming sound, and the inhabitants of the ballroom turned as doors opened to admit a small procession of people, many of them wearing crowns.

Bows and curtseys spread outward in a ripple from the doors.

Somewhere behind Ella, magic flared.

She jerked around, heart hammering anew, searching the crowd.

She couldn’t see the purple of the royal sorcerers, and she didn’t know what else to look for.

Magic, outside of Ella’s house, had only been obvious when Ella was in direct contact with it.

The university wards. Jule’s curse. Nadya’s fingertips on her face. Quaint’s entire self.

Was that what she’d felt? The simple presence of a fairy? But the magic had been deliberate.

Ella was used to sensing things without her eyes, and it had felt like that: something heavy shoved until it tipped over, in a room of herself that she was only paying part-attention to.

Whatever it was, it had settled now.

Ella released her breath and turned back around.

The royal party stood speaking amongst themselves.

Tonight Jule wore a grand tunic in silvery grey over his laced shirt and Nadya wore blood-red beneath layers of black lace.

Ella was close enough to see clearly.

A man brushed past her, moving to get a better vantage point, and got a cuff-button caught in one of her skirt’s floating tendrils.

He didn’t even glance at Ella, just kept moving.

The dress might have been magical, but it was still a dress.

The fabric gave way with a small ripping sound, and dangled.

“Excuse me,”

said Ella.

The complaint got her a look.

Ella took an involuntary step back.

It was the young Cajarac attendant, now unencumbered by flatulent dog.

His expression was not long-suffering, or apologetic, or even unapologetic.

It was nothing.

An inhuman, sagging blank.

And it was accompanied by a faint pulse of that magic Ella had just felt.

She’d have taken another step back if she could, but she was hemmed in by the crowd.

The man didn’t frown, didn’t raise an outcry of Ghost! He turned away from Ella and kept going, stepping through small gaps between courtiers, toward where someone official-looking was now raising a hand and clearing his throat, and Jule and Nadya stood like a pair of salt and pepper shakers adorning a table.

All of Ella’s instincts, magic and otherwise, screamed at her.

She followed.

There was a new flash of gold.

The man’s hand.

He held—Ella couldn’t see—now she could, a knife, small and neat like a golden bird, and he was looking right at Jule, his body a tense shout that he was waiting for a clear shot—

Now Ella ran.

She pretended the people in front of her were no more than the walls of her house: they would give way and allow her to melt through.

And so they did, in response to Ella’s grabs and elbows, with cries of indignation that drew the attention of the official who’d been about to speak.

Strange, what years of knowing yourself unheard could do.

It was only when she’d stepped in front of Jule and Nadya and spun around to look breathlessly back that Ella thought—Maybe I should have screamed?

But it was too late for that.

The man’s hand was upraised and empty, the knife was already thrown; it flew strangely, like an arrow or a bird in truth, rather than end over end.

Somewhere in the noticing of that—almost before she’d finished noticing it—the knife slammed into Ella.

It felt more like a smashed window than the teeth of a saw.

Sudden.

Heavy.

Ella’s body stumbled and told her that something was very wrong, it’d find the source of the problem any time now, perhaps it was the cellar—

She crumpled to the floor and finally pain took up the call.

Screams from sensible living people rang out.

Ella’s heart thudded and whooshed and then a kind of muffling din descended.

Several people were rushing about in her periphery.

Moving was excruciating, but she managed to push herself to balance on hands and knees: four points, like a table. Keep contact with the house.

This is not my house.

This is not me.

Blood came out of her where the knife had gone in.

It was dripping down onto the wood of the ballroom floor.

Someone will have to scrub that out, Ella thought.

One of the noises was a voice that sounded familiar, and it might have been saying her name.

Fear wrenched Ella back into herself until she could focus on Jule: kneeling beside her, touching her shoulder then flinching back.

“What—”

He was staring at the dripping blood.

Only it wasn’t blood anymore.

The small red pool on the floor was dirtying with specks of grey-black, and what fell from around the gold knife was a trickle of the same specks.

Dust. Ashes. Despite Quaint’s spell, Ella was far more cinder and house than girl.

“Ella,”

Jule was saying now.

“Ella, can you hear me?”

“Magic,”

she gasped.

She touched the slippery hilt where it jutted obscenely out beneath her ribs, and nearly fainted with pain. “It was—”

“Right,”

said Jule, eyes narrowing.

“Sorry about this.”

His hand knocked hers aside and with no count, no warning, he gripped the hilt and pulled the knife out.

Ella made an undignified guttural sound and collapsed onto her side.

A stronger gush of ashes came from the wound now.

Jule said, “Here,”

and he was doing something to Ella’s hand.

It was his golden seal ring, pulled from his own finger, pushed onto the largest of her own.

Nothing happened.

Ella felt the warding of the ring like a faint bell rung in an upstairs room, but it didn’t know what to do with her, magic as she was.

It itched furiously.

Subject, object. Ward and ghost. Ella couldn’t think.

“No,”

she managed, clawing it off.

“No—all right—sorry—”

Jule took his ring back.

“It was worth a try,”

said a dark blur now also crouched nearby.

“Your Highnesses,”

said another new voice, urgently.

Highnesses? Oh.

The dark blur was Princess Nadya.

Both she and Jule looked up, and Ella managed to as well.

A man in livery said.

“We’ve barred the doors, but nobody seems to have gotten a good look—”

“I did,”

said Ella.

She struggled to sit, and Jule helped her at once.

She kept one hand pressed over the wound.

Dust still spilled out, as if Ella were crumbling around the damage, but slowly. Hearing and seeing snuck back in around all the magic. Better. She managed to stumble out a description of the attendant.

“I see,”

said Princess Nadya, her voice a hammer strike.

And she stood up.

What happened next was nearly indescribable.

If relying only on her eyes, Ella would have said: Nadya removed the jewelled band and veil from her hair, which uncoiled.

The uncoiling was like snakes.

Hair spilled down nearly to the floor, black and slithering and glinting with tiny specks of magic, and it moved in a way that hair should not be able to move.

To Ella’s ghost-senses, Nadya’s magic was a sunrise, staggeringly sharp and intense.

Ella couldn’t focus on her without flinching away in awe.

The hair slipped and tangled and the ends of it were shadows, even longer again, seeking, seeking, spreading mercilessly through the crowd and drawing cries of alarm—and then finding.

Ella felt the extension of Nadya’s magic as it struck, serpent-fast, across the ballroom.

The tenor of cries in the ballroom changed.

The crowd parted and through the new furrow the attendant was dragged; by an invisible string, it would look like.

The snakes of Nadya’s magic had him by both ankles.

“Guards!”

said Jule, though he didn’t move from Ella’s side.

“And where’s— Huntley, good.”

Huntley was one of the royal sorcerers, who stepped in along with a clot of anxious guards to do a quick piece of magic that felt like a complicated knot.

Two guards dragged the attendant up to his knees.

Something was wrong.

The young man trembling and collapsing in this triple grip, protesting in hoarse Cajarac, now had no magic to him at all.

It had gone from him as if rinsed off completely.

With the dregs of her strength Ella cast around frantically but felt no trace of the magic she’d sensed before.

“It wasn’t him.”

Ella raised her voice.

“It wasn’t him, the magic made him do it—”

“Now, now—”

began the sorcerer Huntley.

“She’s right,”

said Nadya abruptly.

Ella tried to push herself upright to see what would happen next, and failed.

Everything spun sickeningly and the pain was like being gnawed.

Jule’s arm behind her shoulder was the only real thing apart from the bright shadows of Nadya, her hair still cloaking her in glorious waves, who withdrew her magic from the captive and came to join them again.

“Well, don’t you have hidden depths for a ghost,”

Nadya said. “Ella.”

There was a new warmth to her voice, but Ella couldn’t smile her appreciation for it.

The beautiful willow dress had begun to disintegrate around her.

Ashes, ashes, the best link to death.

Ella grabbed Jule’s hand and wished she could grasp Nadya’s as well. She wanted to say something clever and memorable about how it had been nothing, really, she was only glad they were unharmed, and wasn’t this a dramatic end to her three nights of adventure? Worthy of the ballet!

She couldn’t speak.

The exhaustion was a dead weight plunging through air, desperately wrong and getting wronger.

Ella was falling to ashes and they were still hours from midnight.

“Something is keeping her solid,”

said Nadya, sharp again.

A tendril of her hair was curled around Ella like a caress.

“Keeping her here in a body, so she can’t return to her haunting.

Ella.

What is it?”

“It’s the shoes,”

said Jule.

He pulled his hand from Ella’s in order to yank the mirror-shoes off her feet, one and then the other.

The change was instant.

Ella was whole again, ghostly again; although desperately weak.

The urge to drift back to her house was a sluggish tug, like someone desultorily reeling in a fishing line.

She let it take her.

She hadn’t the strength for anything else.

Drifting upward, floating, she could see Jule and Nadya looking around.

Searching.

There were gasps and whispers from those who had been in eyesight, and demands from everyone else to know what had just happened.

As far as everyone in the ballroom was concerned, Ella had vanished into nothing at all.

No.

Not everyone.

Someone who’d been standing very close in the crowd—only a few yards away—was looking in the right direction, which was upward.

Someone who had always been able to see Ella in her ghost form.

And now Ella was no longer a polished stranger in a disguising gown, but her usual, unruly roof-red self.

Ella made eye contact with Greta, whose mouth was open in the start of something, and then the pull of the house turned to the snap of elastic and Ella was gone.