Page 12 of Cinder House

The only other people who could see Ella were, logically enough, the king and queen.

Ella curtseyed to them as well and introduced herself as the ghost of their palace and all its grounds—oh, so many grounds! The boundaries of Ella’s new haunting were the largest skin she could imagine.

Royalty dealt with fairy courtiers and high sorcerers on a daily basis.

The queen gave a grandly unfazed nod in return.

“You saved our son’s life,”

she said.

“You must stay as long as you wish.”

Ella explained about the urge to keep things neat.

Jule said that if Ella really wanted to, she could produce a maintenance list for the senior housekeepers and groundskeepers, who might be offended at the suggestion that the palace was not already being kept in perfect condition.

“Of course,”

said Ella.

“But I could point out that, say, a pot of lip paint has rolled under the dresser in one of the eastern wing’s guest chambers.

There are two maids in there at the moment, stripping the beds and airing the curtains.

And talking about, ah, me,”

she added.

She was showing off.

Well—she couldn’t shake overnight the urgent desire to be useful to her house’s owners.

And it came stitched alongside the mundane desire that Jule’s parents should like her.

“Wait a moment,”

said the queen.

She had the long nose and long fingers that Jule had inherited.

“You can hear what’s being said in every room?”

“Not all at once,”

said Ella.

“I have to concentrate on one place at a time.

Like choosing which window to look through, or which book to pull off a shelf.”

At that, the king and queen summoned a plump man with soft speech and the general manner of an anxious under-cook, who turned out to in fact be the royal spymaster.

There was an excited discussion about the implications of Ella being able to hear anything said by foreign ambassadors, or sense anyone lying in wait somewhere they shouldn’t be—and she could really overhear any conversation being held on the grounds?

“We can pay you an intelligence officer’s salary,”

said the king.

He eyed Ella dubiously, as if remembering all over again that she was a ghost.

Ella’s hair was now the sleek greyish white of well-scrubbed marble.

Her eyes had stayed green.

“If that’s something you … desire?”

“Language lessons,”

put in the spymaster, who couldn’t see or hear Ella herself but was not letting that stop him.

“As soon as possible.”

“And history and politics, for the context?”

said Ella.

She’d been preparing a fumbled assurance that she would not eavesdrop on the rulers of the realm in their private bedchamber, and was a little bewildered at this change of direction, but would take advantage of it.

“And probably, um, economics?”

“Ella is good at keeping secrets,”

said Jule, smiling at her.

“Ah—my apologies again, Nadya, I’ll explain everything once we’re done.”

Nadya, who also could not see or hear Ella, had been sitting patiently throughout this session.

She was clever enough to have picked up Ella’s half of it from context.

But she inclined her head and said.

“It’ll be rather awkward for you and me to be playing whispers, Jule, when there’s an easier alternative.

If it suits you, Your Majesties, I’d like to marry into this family as soon as possible.”

As soon as possible was still a good month, given the logistics and the status of everyone involved.

By the time the day rolled around, Ella wore the Royal Palace as comfortably as she’d ever worn her father’s house.

And in the moment the ring slid onto her finger and the ceremony was pronounced complete, Nadya looked sideways from Jule’s face and found Ella precisely where she was standing, and they smiled at one another.

* * *

Prince Jule did not dance with his bride at their wedding festival.

Nadya had confirmed that a naming-day fairy gift was beyond her power to either break or resist.

“Well,”

said Ella.

“I have an idea.”

She had a salary now.

Instead of bargaining she purchased outright from Quaint, who cackled when Ella explained what she wanted.

There was already demand for ropes guaranteed to keep even the most powerful sorcerer contained, though they were not usually designed to be comfortable.

These ones were made of silk and spiderweb, treated with one of Quaint’s special oils—“My hands smell of rosemary,”

said Jule, when he was done tying the knots.

He had fallen into the habit of telling Ella how things smelled, or tasted, or felt against the fingertips.

Nadya tugged at one knotted loop and then the other.

They held her wrists fast to the bedposts at the foot of the enormous bridal-chamber bed, where she sat with one ankle hooked casually around the other.

Her hair was unbound and fell around her like ink, and she’d undressed down to a simple black shift sewn with grey pearls.

She looked like a shadow-sprite, summoned and caught.

Ella ached to touch her, but instead focused on what she could feel: Nadya’s pulse, faster than her demeanour suggested, where her wrists pressed against the silk.

Jule’s feet, bare—he too was down to loose linen trousers and shirt—on the richness of the rug.

These two things wound together into their own hot, ecstatic knot when Jule began to dance.

There was no music.

There didn’t need to be.

As in the garden, Jule was a piece of heartbreaking perfection with no more than the motions of his body.

As in the garden, Ella leaned against one of the bedposts and linked her hands behind it.

As a ghost, the curse barely breathed on her.

But this way, pressed up against the knotted rope, she could feel every change in Nadya’s heart rate, every impatient and then desperate drag of Nadya’s skin within the silk.

She could see up close the pupils devouring Nadya’s eyes, a mirror to the darkness of Jule’s as he threw himself into the dance. As Nadya let the curse take her; let herself fall deliberately in love with the man she’d married.

Nadya pulled and strained and her magic boiled within her, her whole body heaving in hunger, but she could do nothing.

Jule danced in safety.

And when he stopped, he came at once to sit on his heels in front of the bed, and he and Nadya breathed themselves calm.

Nadya’s snarl settled, but her hunger did not.

Her thighs rubbed restlessly together.

She stared at Jule as if she would devour him.

“Are you all right?”

Ella asked.

Ella was not all right.

Ella’s rooftops were crying out for the rough scrape of boots and the caress of the wind.

She wanted a thunderstorm. She wondered wildly if Nadya would make her one.

“Shall I undo the ropes now?”

Nadya laughed.

Ella had not heard her laugh before.

It was a flock of sharp-clawed birds taking flight.

It was honey and it was smoke.

“Yes.

No.

Leave them,”

Nadya said, and then something imperious in Cajarac which Ella didn’t yet have the vocabulary to understand.

Jule clearly did.

He went scarlet and rose to his feet, with the look he’d had when Ella complimented him in the courtyard garden, right before she got shoved against a tree.

So she wasn’t surprised when Jule’s next action was to lift Nadya’s pearl-studded shift until it was bunched at her waist, or when Nadya’s thick legs lifted to drag him close by the hips, demanding, the sweat-slick line of her neck and the eager rise of her chest shouting their own clear order.

Which Jule, once he’d loosened the tie at his waist enough to shove his trousers down, obeyed.

Both of them groaned at once when Jule sank into her.

Ella, who was the floor and the bed and the ropes and the very air that waited to crowd into their lungs, groaned as well.

“Tell her—tell her what it feels like,”

said Nadya.

And Jule did, until he didn’t have the breath to manage it.

* * *

It was impossible for a palace to be lonely.

A palace was always full of people.

Certain visitors—fairies from the various courts, come to do diplomatic business with the king and queen—could even see Ella and talk to her.

It improved the royal family’s standing with the fairies that they now had a secret ghost—as well as a future queen who was a great sorcerer.

Patrice was not invited to visit.

Ella found she didn’t much care what her stepmother chose to do now: with her life, with her money, with the charred ruin which had once been a house.

Perhaps she and Danica visited Greta in the sorcerers’ prison.

Perhaps not. Ella never had to waste her worries on them again.

The fairy merchant Quaint, however, became comfortable sauntering through the doors of the palace, sending winks at the guards and pausing to sell them charmed trinkets from her pockets, to visit her friend Ella.

“And how am I supposed to tempt you now?”

Quaint demanded.

She was relaxing like a queen herself in the rose garden, letting the fountain spray catch like diamonds in her hair and eating her way through a tiered cake stand.

There was nothing but pleasure in the way she inspected Ella’s new domain.

She added.

“You’ve got everything a ghost could want.”

Not everything, but enough.

Ella eyed the sandwiches and cakes and laughed.

“Give me a decade to start missing the taste of food again, and perhaps I’ll make another bargain then.”

Perhaps.

She would never have her life or her body back the way they were.

She would never grow up the way she’d thought.

She was, finally, coming to terms with it, another slow grief that would never end but would become as inextricable a part of her as her name and the existence of some old bones, elsewhere, now gone to restful ashes.

For now she improved the gardens and directed renovations on the palace, which was old enough to be full of secrets and delightfully forgotten places, and sleepy enough not to itch Ella badly if the improvements took weeks.

It was Ella who gave the orders now.

And Ella read, and learned—anything she wanted.

She was lectured by tutors who soon grew used to speaking to empty rooms.

Sometimes Ella proofread Nadya’s academic papers and talked long into the night with her, teasing out theories and testing ghost-magics.

Sometimes she and Jule left Nadya in a pile of books and went to the ballet, each of them invisible in their own way, and argued about the choreography all the way home.

Sometimes Nadya took her husband to bed and Ella watched, and Jule—who loved above all things to be watched—turned his head and met Ella’s eyes as he bit down on Nadya’s smooth shoulder.

And sometimes they locked the door and brought out the silk ropes and Jule danced, his bare feet flirting with the floor of the palace, and it didn’t matter that this wasn’t quite the life any of them had expected, and it didn’t matter how much fire rose in the prince as he danced and in his wife and their ghost at the sight of him.

They’d only burn in the best of ways.