Page 4 of Cinder House
This newfound ability to leave was a secret that Ella would never, ever tell her family.
It helped that they were used to not seeing her during the nighttime hours between dinner and midnight.
Mostly they took themselves to bed, and Ella made sure the sheets were warmed and the water glasses full, so that she would not be needed before sunrise.
Her days became easier to bear because she knew the nights awaited.
With the roof in her pocket she went walking, and was returned to the house at midnight.
Ella didn’t know why it was midnight, only that there was a palpable finality to that last strike of the clock, as constricting and possessive and immutable as the physical boundaries of Ella’s haunting.
The house might doze and allow Ella to roam, but it did not want her gone.
Knowing her time limit, Ella didn’t venture outside the city again.
She wandered through parks deep in shadow and busy with the piercing sounds of night-birds, and discovered ponds symphonic with frogs.
She returned to places she remembered, and sought out corners of the city she’d never been allowed to visit as a girl.
She stood on the bridges watching the purple mage-lights of the royal sorcerers hanging at the sterns of the official skiffs on the water, as their night patrol cleared the river of drowning-sprites and encouraged other watery fae to move along.
Her father had once told her they were stringing up nets to catch mermaids.
She still didn’t know if he had been mocking her or in earnest.
For the most part Ella was able to avoid having to touch or not-touch the living.
No matter how dark the alleyway or unsavoury the neighbourhood, she was safe and unseen.
One bold night she followed some gilded carriages beneath the archway of a house so large it was almost a palace, and found herself at a masquerade in a private garden.
Lanterns illuminated gowns sewn with seed-pearls and glass beads, and men whose coats sang with metallic braid, and mask after mask after mask: leather and brocade and silk, feathers and shells, monkeys and peacocks and sea-queens and cats and twisted, compelling imps.
It would have taken Ella’s breath if she had any.
Instead, after a few minutes of amazed staring, she found it too busy to stay.
Too many people were walking unpleasantly through her, and an old fear of being lost and stifled in a crowd of impatient adults was dredged up from her childhood.
Ella clutched the roof tile and fled back through the archway to a place where she could watch the arrivals descending from their carriages and lifting their masked faces, painted lips parting with anticipation, to the party.
She didn’t even consider entering the house itself.
It wasn’t hers.
She’d tried that once: slipping through a wide-open door behind a man burdened with bags.
But it had felt vastly impolite, and the piece-of-house in her pocket went hot and strange before she’d had a chance to do more than glance curiously around the entrance hall.
It seemed she was allowed to haunt her own house and also to exist in public spaces intended for all citizens, but not the spaces between other people’s walls.
An ideal place to linger was the night market.
This was sprawled across the square before the old town hall, and its stalls opened at sunset.
It was never too crowded for comfort, and on busy nights she would slip into a space between stalls and sit on the ground, and simply enjoy watching and listening to people.
If a good conversation walked by she could always spring to her feet and shadow it.
“—even more expensive! But what choice do we have? That fool Mikeyla muttered about reporting the stallholder for smuggled goods, but I told her to keep her mouth shut if she wanted any spices in her food this winter.”
“It’s all about the Turnish Pass,”
another woman said knowledgeably.
“Some traders won’t risk it if they might get stuck in a skirmish.
My Kurt’s brother in the army says they’re being squeezed up there on both sides.
They’re expecting a bad late-winter freeze and it’s the only trade route that stands a chance of being kept clear before the thaw.
If one side makes a grab to control the Pass…”
Ella dodged a group of young people walking inconsiderately three abreast in order to keep up with the women.
She was happy to learn about anything, but chatter like this made her world feel large again.
Even if she would never see them herself, there were other cities than this, and trade routes which cut through moors and forests and snow-capped mountains, and people whose lives depended on the weather and the decisions of kings and the grit of armies.
“Oh, Leife,”
said Kurt’s wife, as her friend slowed to a halt.
“You promised me.
No more pennies tossed away on this fanciful stuff.”
“Just a look,”
said Leife.
The squat woman behind the stall tucked away a bundle of what looked like complicated mossy crochet.
She flashed a wide, crooked smile of surprisingly sharp white teeth and surprisingly green eyes, both of which shone in the light from the huge twin candles that bracketed her stall.
Ella thought again of mermaid nets.
“Fanciful they may be, but my humble wares will guarantee results,”
said the stallholder.
Her voice purred with a faint, unfamiliar accent.
“What are you seeking, milady? Cantrip, charm, or potion?”
That caught Ella, who was on the verge of drifting off in search of other conversations.
She stood at the opposite corner of the table and peered over the wares as Leife hastily denied looking for anything in particular—well perhaps if she had anything for good fortune on a journey—yes, and how much was it, did she say? Ah, thank you kindly, but not today, they’re really just looking.
“Nobody wants to pay for good work these days,”
the stallholder sighed as the two women took their leave.
“And I suppose you’re just looking as well?”
Ella admired the gleam of river-polished rocks in a bag made of that same mossy crochet, and wished she could nudge the items on the messily arranged stall into a neater pattern.
She drew back her hand before it passed through a spiky bundle of twigs and shells held together with silver thread and—was that hair?
“I said, are you just looking? Little ghost,”
said the woman.
“I asked you a question.”
Ella jerked her head up.
The woman’s gaze met Ella’s own with precision.
Her eyes sat like green spiders in a cobweb of fine lines, sharp and curious, and in the candlelight there was an eerie seeking quality to them which made the roof tile shiver in the same way that Ella’s wallpaper had shivered as the butterflies died.
“I,”
said Ella.
And was promptly silenced by the importance of these, the first words since her death that might be heard by someone other than her family.
Nothing profound came to mind.
She resorted to.
“How is it you can see me?”
The cobweb tightened with a smile.
“What’s your name, my dear? Your full name.
You seem in need of someone to give it to.”
The muddle of possibility was still crowding Ella’s tongue.
It was the only reason she didn’t blurt her name out eagerly in the sheer pleasure of being asked a friendly question with an easy answer.
But … those eyes were very seeking, and Ella had not lost all her instincts in death.
In fact, she had acquired some.
She looked again at the stall full of magic and let the wording of the question play through her mind.
“My name’s Ella, and that’s as much of it as I can afford to give away to a fairy, I think,” she said.
That got her a laugh, rich and hoarse.
Ella didn’t look to see if anyone was glancing at this woman laughing to herself and talking to the air.
She was afraid that if she turned away, the fairy and her stall would vanish in the instant before she turned back.
“Business is slow, you can’t blame me for trying.”
The fairy’s hand lifted ruefully from a small blue-glazed pot, and Ella thought about the stories she’d read of sprites trapped in jugs and oil lamps.
“We can stick to fair exchange.
You can call me Quaint.
How did you know?”
“You feel magical,”
said Ella.
On her guard now, she didn’t say she’d only met one sorcerer that she knew of, and Quaint’s magic felt different to Greta’s: more diffuse and more ingrained.
“And it’s fairies rather than sorcerers who want your name to do things with.”
She dared a smile, as Quaint looked more amused than annoyed.
“I’ve read enough books to know that.”
“You’d be surprised how many people don’t learn the lessons they should,”
said Quaint.
“And those who forget their lessons when they’re surprised.
You certainly surprised me.”
“Do you see others like me, around in the city?”
Ella asked.
“Other ghosts?”
“You’re the first I’ve seen untethered in thirty years,”
said Quaint.
The sudden leap of eagerness in Ella was quenched before it had time to rise.
It hadn’t been much, anyway.
She was still too delighted at having anyone to talk to for an extra dollop of hope to make a difference at that moment.
“Could you—”
No; that was too close to a request.
“Do you know of any that haunt public buildings?”
“None as sociable as you, Miss Ella,”
said Quaint.
“You mustn’t have been dead long.”
“It’ll be four years, this spring.”
Long belated, Ella remembered her manners.
Even if you couldn’t trust a fairy, it was worth being polite to them.
She spread her lavender skirts and dropped a curtsey.
“A pleasure to meet you, Mistress Quaint.
Even if you would like to trap me in a pot.”
“Ah, none of that, my dear.”
Quaint grinned.
“It was habit.
Fairy magic is mostly harmless to ghosts anyway.”
Mostly wasn’t the same as completely, Ella noted.
But she still grinned back.
* * *
Fairy magic was different to sorcery, and ghost-lore was different again.
“Why can’t I stay out past midnight?”
Ella asked Quaint one evening, but the fairy only shrugged.
“Though if your real question is whether you can untether yourself entirely,”
Quaint said.
“I’d say I doubt it.
Ghosts are spirits of physical space.
You need your house, Miss Ella.
Or something like it.”
Still—Ella, with a house’s stubbornness, wasn’t going to accept one fairy’s word.
Could she push the limit past midnight? Could a human sorcerer manage it for her? And—thinking uneasily of Greta’s butterflies—what else could a sorcerer do that might affect a ghost, if that sorcerer had a nimble mind and a malicious spindle in place of a heart?
It took all her nerve to approach the largest of the city’s magical academies, and she fell back with mingled relief and disappointment when she first attempted to enter the main building and was repelled by a pulse of magic.
Above the doors a sigil appeared and shone, warning red, for a brief moment.
Ella had no idea if the university’s wards were against ghosts specifically, any whiff of uninvited magic, or simply anyone not a student or staff member.
The effect was the same.
So she went instead to the city university, where night classes were held in a brick building at the river edge of campus.
It was easy for a ghost to sit in the back corner of lecture theatres and lap up learning.
The only outright mention of magic was in a history course called An Overview of Magical Geopolitics, which sounded … dull.
It wasn’t.
Ella returned week after week, even when it became obvious that she wasn’t going to learn much relevant to herself.
She was startled to realise how enjoyable it could be to be taught by experts with interest in the subject matter and an assumption that their audience could keep up.
It was stretching further the muscle that had awakened with her eavesdropping in the market.
She learned more about the two nations—ancient Drogow and empire-hungry Cajar—whose borders squeezed Ella’s small kingdom perilously thin on the map.
They’d been at war with both of these nations at various times; most recently, with their western Cajarac neighbours.
It wasn’t all to do with trade routes.
Last century the Cajar had banished all their fairies and magical beings, after a bloody feud between two houses warring for control of the imperium got even bloodier with the use of magic.
Even now, their mistrust of magic continued.
It was a great awkwardness that one of the Cajarac princesses was known to be a sorcerer, and she was lucky that it was only awkward.
Some factions still believed it was their duty to wipe out magical beings everywhere; though others claimed these parties only wanted an excuse to declare war on their more tolerant neighbours.
Think back to last semester, everyone—what might some other reasons be? No, the Turnish Pass is too obvious.
What else?
Ella leaned forward to listen.
Near the front of the room a few hands went up and had answers wrangled out of them.
Dispute over who had the best claim to a port on the northwestern coast.
Retribution for atrocities committed by mercenaries unfortunately attached to their own army in the last war, yes—and no, they weren’t going to debate the morality of war today.
In Cajar, the lecturer said, magic was considered something that would never be practised by civilised folk.
It could be studied only academically, as one studied a venomous beast trapped safely in a cage.
* * *
The other place which Ella allowed herself to rediscover, with the sort of joy she was used to feeling only about summer-sparkling windows or a perfectly regular table setting, was the royal theatre.
She remembered being taken by her father, once: laced into a white dress and tiny silver slippers, anxious that she’d dirty them and be punished for it.
And then the ballet had started, and all her anxiety had fled for two magical hours.
In the few years before she died she’d hardly gone at all.
Her father claimed it now reminded him too painfully of her mother, and Patrice called it a waste of money.
So to be able to go whenever she wanted—that was a rare thing Ella could point to and say this, this is a reason I’m glad to have died.
If she went midweek and stuck to the back of the highest balcony, there were always empty seats.
Ella still flinched when strangers passed close to or through her invisible self, and relaxed in the shadowed corners of otherwise deserted rows.
She found the plays interesting and the operas impressive, but it was the ballet she returned to again and again.
There was something about the way the dancers inhabited their bodies and the music and the stage all at once, as if they too had a skin of constraint which began at the backdrop and ended at the footlights, and they wanted nothing more than to be a frenzied and beautiful haunting of the space between.
It hurt exquisitely to witness this without a body of her own.
It hurt and it was perfect.
Ella went often enough to grow opinions.
She learned the names of her favourite dancers, learned the stories, learned the music, and learned to recognise the other regular inhabitants of the cheap seats.
She had favourites there, too.
There was a blunt-featured young woman with short hair who sat sprawled in her seat and brought along a constant rotation of sweethearts, around whose shoulders her arm lay with equal sprawling comfort.
There was the elderly man who snored through every first act, startled awake to the intermission applause, and spent the second act alert and pleased, cheering as loud as anyone at the end.
There were the two even older women who might have been sisters or friends or lovers; they sat with heads huddled and talked quietly and ceaselessly through the ballet, detailed and well-informed criticism of the dancers’ technique.
And there was the thin young man who must have felt the cold easily, as he wore an oversized old coat and a knitted grey cap no matter how mild the weather.
He watched every ballet with a yearning, ravenous expression, and tapped his feet or swayed to the music.
His long, pale fingers would creep out from his coat cuffs, like the questing noses of underground creatures, to clutch the chair in front of him whenever a dancer haunted the stage with particular grace.
Of all the people she’d seen, more than errand girls or beautiful masked strangers or clever lecturers, Ella wished she could speak to this one and be heard.
What is it that you’re seeing in the dance? she would ask.
Does it hurt you the same way it hurts me?
And does that hurt feel so sublime that it keeps drawing you back, like the opposite of a warding?
Sometimes he cried when the curtain fell, and Ella, who hadn’t cried since she first discovered how to leave her house behind, would find herself touching her own cheeks and swimming with an emotion difficult to name.
* * *
Ella and Quaint became friends.
It was inevitable.
Ella would have befriended a hostile ogre or a wicked sorcerer if they would see her, and hear her, and speak to her.
She spent her days obeying the instructions of her murderer.
Her standards for company were not high.
“I can’t have you shying away every time someone steps up to the stall,”
said Quaint.
“It’s distracting.
Come and sit here with me.”
She indicated a new stool placed beside her own.
Ella leaned over a velvet cloth, spread with bone pendants and dried herbs trapped in glass, to get a better look.
Then she stepped to the side of the stall and inspected the ground as well.
The market square was paved in flat grey stones.
“Very kind of you,”
Ella said.
“But I’m comfortable where I am.”
Quaint sent her a long look.
“Been doing some more reading?”
When annoyed, the fairy’s voice gained notes of the wind in trees.
Ella smiled.
She hadn’t been able to see her own reflection in detail since she died, but she’d had this particular smile since she was tiny.
She assumed it still pulled dimples into her cheeks.
Grumbling, Quaint kicked to break the stalks and caps of the moon-pale mushrooms which had grown up between the stones, forming a circle around the new stool.
There was only one trick, usually.
Ella didn’t begrudge Quaint for trying, and Quaint had a great capacity to laugh at herself.
Last week she had tried to get Ella to promise her a favour; the week before that, it had been a bauble made of hair and amber, with an unfamiliar symbol carved into it.
It probably irritated her that ghosts couldn’t be tempted with steaming syrups or fantastical foods.
Ella still made sure to examine the stool itself before she sat down, pulling the lavender folds of her dress neatly close.
She envied Quaint’s buttercup-yellow skirt with flowers and bees embroidered around the hem, in keeping with the folksy air that Quaint donned for herself and her stall.
“Meeting expectations,”
Quaint explained, of this.
“City people want to buy their magic from an old woman who looks like she climbed off the back of a cow-cart just that morning.
They expect a bit of odd, but not too much odd.”
“Is that why your teeth…?”
“Most people don’t see those.”
Quaint grinned wide, showing them off.
The more of her teeth you saw the less human she looked.
“I keep a few illusions on, in case of fairy hunters.
But illusions are like curses and wards.
Fairy magic with a specific object but a nonspecific subject doesn’t work on ghosts.
Slides off somehow.”
Ella puzzled that one out: the object was what the magic was cast on—in this case, Quaint’s teeth—and the subject was simpl.
“anyone who looked.”
But a mushroom trap set specifically for Ella-the-ghost was clearly a different story, or Quaint wouldn’t have bothered to try it at all.
Ella sat thinking about this as Quaint served a harried-looking man trailed by three excitable children.
He looked as though he dearly wanted to beg for a trio of magical leashes, but instead asked Quaint about the merits of different woods for charms against disease, as he’d heard talk about pestilence breaking out in the poor quarters.
Quaint spun a fanciful tale about the far-off Cajarac forest of her home village, and the various magical trees tended there in secret by dryads, keeping potent power in their heartwoods.
Quaint herself had fled the country years ago, preferring self-imposed banishment to that enforced by mobs or the military, but had managed to bring a modest supply of precious magical wood with her.
This impressive story sold the man a pinewood knocker carved in the shape of slender hands, and some screws to attach it to the door, and three bluish riverstones which the youngest girl was fondling in boredom—the bowl was placed strategically to tempt small fingers.
He then rounded up his children and told them firmly that there’d be no hot apple pastries unless they behaved while he finished his errands.
“See?”
Quaint murmured.
“Just enough foreign, just enough odd.”
“Magical trees?”
said Ella.
“Oh, that part’s true.
But he wouldn’t have been able to afford anything truly made of fairy heartwood.
I bought that knocker and dressed it with one of my own oils.
It’ll work well enough that they’ll have fewer fevers than the house next door.”
Ella watched as the inquisitive young girl escaped her father’s hand and ran to hurl herself at a nearby stall of knives and sharp tools.
Not motivated enough by hot pastries, that one.
“Are you really Cajarac?”
Ella asked.
Quaint looked tempted to wriggle away from the question, but she shrugged.
“Yes. Once.”
Was it really as dangerous for magic users as they say? Ella wanted to know, but Quaint had the hardiness of stubborn trees, and someone like that wouldn’t leave their home behind if they had any choice.
Traps were one thing, but Ella didn’t mind a fair exchange.
Truth for truth.
She said.
“I was an odd little girl.
My father always told me so.
And I’d been looking forward to being an odd young woman, except now I’m a haunting.
I’m a ghost and a house and there’s no room for anything else. Of all the things I lost when I died, perhaps it’s silly I mourn that, but … I do. I hate that my oddness got chosen for me.”
She kept back the worst of it, which was: I feel flattened.
On some days I would commit outright murder for the ability to touch your velvet cloth and know what it feels like, or remember how apple pastries taste.
I can look older but I can’t change.
Something’s always going to be missing and I’ll never, ever get it back.
Quaint’s laugh crackled.
“Don’t worry, my dear.
There’s always room to choose more odd.”
* * *
If Quaint did know about the rules—midnight-based or otherwise—that governed ghosts, she was keeping it to herself in case it became useful later.
What Ella needed was an expert.
A polite letter sent to the Professor of Political and Magical History, posing as an undergraduate looking for input on a thesis topic, quickly won her a letter in reply with an initial book list, but also suggesting she try the Lecturer in Intangibility at Ruby Hall, the newest magical academy in the city.
Ella did some more purloining of Patrice’s stationery, and waited for the push-and-slide of the mail slot every day so she could be sure of picking up the mail from the mat herself.
Letters addressed to Ella by name would surely invite not only comment but punishment.
The next letter took longer to arrive.
When it did, it came folded in a slim monograph of case studies on local hauntings.
The Lecturer in Intangibility expressed delight at a nonmagical student’s interest in his unpopular field of study.
He’d ventured to include the address of a true expert in the field, a brilliant scholar living in Cajar, who had published extensively on the known mechanics of haunted objects and locales, but who’d never appeared at any convocations.
Not that one could blame them, what with the woeful Cajarac attitudes to magic.
Sorcerers living in that nation were forced to hide their experience under a heavy veil of theory, and Scholar Mazamire was widely suspected to be such a one.
By now Ella was used to mixing truth with caution when asking favours from powerful beings.
Scholar Mazamire might be a fairy-in-hiding themself, if they were so reclusive and careful.
She wrote, My interest in this topic isn’t only academic.
A house belonging to my family is known to be haunted by a ghost.
With a mixture of true things drawn from her own experience, and those based on the readings she’d dutifully been doing in between letters, Ella asked questions.
Which of the usual tricks that fairies might use on a human might also apply to ghosts? What could the scholar tell her about the subject and object distinction of a fairy curse?
And, thinking again of Greta: What could a human sorcerer do to a ghost, if they wanted?
This time the reply took nearly two months; long enough that Ella had persuaded herself the mail had been lost, or that the scholar had been affronted at being pestered from a distance.
And then it arrived, a battered but heavy envelope, adorned with a row of yellow stamps and ink-marked with the symbols of an unfamiliar place.
The letter inside was in a beautiful hand, the words arranged with the care of someone writing with academic fluency in a language not their first.
It began, Greetings in knowledge, Ella.
Never in her life or her death had anyone considered Ella worth valuing for her mind, her knowledge, or her seeking after knowledge.
She wanted more of this feeling at once.
Scholar Mazamire outlined an impressive array of uses a fairy might have for a ghost, once it had trapped one to its will.
A hot-cold feeling buzzed in Ella’s grates and the empty spaces beneath her floorboards as she read.
And for certain, the scholar wrote, human sorcerers had a greater range of power here because a ghost was once human, too.
But it was a fertile field for study, and equally fertile for disagreements.
Scholar Mazamire was very interested to hear more about this house and ghost belonging to Ella’s family, and of any personal experience that Ella had with fairies.
As you are doubtless aware, Cajar revoked the habitation rights of all fairies some time ago.
My personal experience there is thus sorely limited—an unfortunate hindrance in the pursuit of true scholarship.
The letter finished, In anticipation of the pleasure of your reply.
Ella, on the roof, stretched out with the letter clutched to her chest.
A flock of swallows passed across the sky and all of her red roof tiles longed to swoop joyously with them.
Anticipation became a feeling Ella had with the mail slot of her front door.
The brass learned to ache.
There was pleasure in the slide of letters through it.
There was even pleasure in the acute pain of leaving another task interrupted so that Ella could be first, always, to pick up and sort through the letters, famished for the sight of those yellow stamps.
Ella wrote, Why would a ghost, once able to roam outside its haunting, be bound to return at midnight? Could such a limitation be changed?
The scholar replied with characteristic precision.
They had consulted the rare written records of such cases, and found two: one in Cajar where the ghost’s time limit appeared to be noon, and one from Ella’s own kingdom where it was, indeed, midnight.
A previous scholar had put forward a theory which Mazamire themself found plausible, because it explained the variance.
In Cajar a house’s main kitchen hearth was traditionally kept alight all night, for warmth in their freezing nights, and quenched at noon before the household slept through the hottest part of the day.
Any long-standing human custom could become a law that bent human magic around itself.
So house-magic, ghostly or otherwise, had a tendency to end or reset itself at these transitional hours: noon, or midnight, depending on where one found oneself.
And now Ella had another friend.
Perhaps Scholar Mazamire wouldn’t have thought in such terms.
Then again, perhaps they did.
With time and a steady exchange of letters, they began to include anecdotes about their spoiled elderly dog, and their family pestering them to go out and develop healthy hobbies like riding or archery instead of spending all their time locked away with old papers, and the books they read for pure entertainment.
Their tone was always polite, sometimes dryly funny, but loneliness shone through like a candle glimpsed behind a moth-holed curtain.
Ella filled nearly two sheets of paper recommending romances in return.
She wrote about the ballet.
She included a newspaper column describing the ill-fated demonstration of a flying machine, supposedly powered half by a willing air-sprite and half by the winching power of two men’s legs, which had ended with the inventors and their contraption all being fished out of the river.
She even put in a few daring complaints about her dreadful sisters, before hastily bringing the letter back to the exchange they’d been having on the nature of ghosts and the various theories put forward over the years—none substantially proven— as to why a ghost might arise in a specific place.
Scholar Mazamire’s own theory was that a ghost was how a building held a grudge, because it was not human enough to do it on its own.
Ella read that sitting on the roof, and felt a throb of harsh contentment that went all the way down the main chimney and glowed in the ashes of the hearth like anger—her own anger, the house’s anger, yes, which remembered her death and her father’s, and would never be quenched.
She wished she dared to tell this far-off lonely friend the truth of herself, just as she wished that one day the boy at the ballet would look up and see on Ella’s face the same excitement and hunger that dwelled on his own.