Page 6 of Cinder House

Dear Scholar Mazamire,

I haven’t been entirely truthful—

Imagine missing something for years and giving up all hope you’d ever have it again—

If you were a ghost and a fairy offered you a deal that seemed precisely good enough to be true, how would you—

The final version of this letter, when Ella sent it, had only the barest scrape of hypothetical across her situation.

But she still wouldn’t risk the truth.

Quaint had a cheerfully acquisitive interest in Ella’s ghosthood—Mazamire’s interest would be academic, first and foremost.

If Mazamire suspected the truth then it would change the nature of their correspondence, and Ella couldn’t bear the thought of losing that friendship, for all that it only took place within paper and ink.

She was looking for excuses to agree to Quaint’s bargain.

She recognised that.

She was probably going to agree no matter what Mazamire advised.

And so she did, once she’d heard the terms.

Quaint wanted escorted entry into Ella’s house—she could walk in without invitation, fairies being different to ghosts, but there were limits on what she could walk out with.

That would be the heart of their bargain.

A three-night experience in exchange for solid, real things.

No, Quaint was not sending Ella to the ball out of the goodness of her heart.

The straightforward avarice of it was reassuring.

“Most of these are what I’ll need to do the transformation charm for you,”

Quaint said.

She tapped a long fingernail against the written list she’d laid out on her stall.

“The rest are part of the price.”

Ella read the list for the fourth time.

Part of the price.

Could this be its own kind of mushroom ring? Yes.

Ella hadn’t truly risked anything since her death; opportunities for risk had not been given to her. Nor opportunities for dancing with someone, or a whole host of someones, whose eyes would see her and whose hands would not pass through hers.

She let Quaint into the house two days later.

It was mid-morning, and Patrice and Greta and Danica were out at a fitting at the dressmaker’s.

Quaint gave a grand hop over the threshold.

She looked different in the daylight: shabbier, but more striking, like a sole pear in a barrel of apples.

“Hello there,”

Quaint murmured.

One hand clutched a cloth bag.

She laid the other flat on the nearest patch of wall.

“You are a magical one, aren’t you?”

The house knew what had been invited inside.

It had no particular feelings on the matter beyond Ella’s feelings.

It still gave a little judder when Quaint trod on the seventh step, and Ella sneezed.

First Quaint spent some time in Greta’s room.

Sorcerers were useful sources of ingredients, she explained.

And if they had been trained properly, they knew it, and should be careful.

Ella didn’t think of Greta as careful.

She felt a vengeful little thrill at helping someone steal from her stepsister.

“Would you know what she was?”

Ella asked.

“From how the room feels?”

“No,”

said Quaint.

“Perhaps if she lived in it another hundred years.”

A fuzzy ripple of denial ran through the rug on the floor at the very thought.

Quaint took some hair, carefully pulled from the brush.

The water-cup from beside Greta’s bed.

A ring, a pair of earrings.

If Greta missed these things, she would blame Danica; they were careless with one another’s belongings, though Danica had become less so as fear began to seep like mist into the way she treated her sister. Perhaps Greta would make a bonfire of Danica’s books in retaliation. She could do a great deal by now, but when angry she always threatened fire.

Ella couldn’t bring herself to care.

They could always buy more books.

It was time Ella had what she wanted, at someone else’s cost, instead of forever the opposite.

“All right,”

said Quaint then.

“Now for you, Miss Ella.”

There was a reason behind each object on the list.

Ella fetched another piece of roof tile, and Quaint insisted that Ella carry it through every room of the house before dropping it into Quaint’s bag.

“Mapping the bond.

It’ll remind the place that you still exist, even if you’ve changed and you’re someplace else.”

Then two peonies, plucked from a window box, and a few blades of grass—fresh and recent life, said Quaint, to remind the magic of what Ella had once had.

Then a generous sweeping of ashes from the kitchen hearth, poured into a small box.

“Why the hearth?”

Ella asked sharply.

Quaint gave her one of those looks that said she wasn’t sure if Ella had been doing some reading and was trying to catch Quaint in a trick.

“Ashes are the best link to death, and the hearth is any house’s core.

You can’t tell me you haven’t felt that yourself, good little haunt that you are.”

Ella swallowed something even sharper.

She nodded at the box of ash and said.

“Will this—will it let me stay out longer than midnight?”

Quaint made a face.

“Only some rules can be coaxed into bending.”

It’d never been much of a hope.

Ella tucked it away for her next letter to Mazamire.

Next they went to the attic, where there was a small box of Ella’s old belongings.

Patrice had done a good job of removing all proof of Ella’s presence, after Ella died; by the time Ella had formed herself into a proper ghost and was able to lay hands on the house and its contents, there was very little left.

“Ah,”

Quaint breathed, picking up the wooden comb with its few wheat-gold strands of hair.

She compared them to Ella’s current grey-touched red, and wound the hairs more securely around the comb before tucking that into her bag.

“This will do nicely as an anchor.”

The bodily remains of a person turned ghost had a range of uses for those who knew what to do with them.

Ella had not told Quaint where her bones lay, even though Quaint had what seemed to be a true and unshakable aversion to graveyards.

Ella had never gone there herself and did not intend to.

She was not her bones. She would never inhabit them again.

She also did not direct Quaint’s attention to the false, boarded-up wall.

That skeleton was a secret so long kept and so securely sewn into Ella’s fabric that it never occurred to her, and the house hummed in relief once they’d closed the attic’s trapdoor and were back in the upstairs hall.

Still Ella hesitated, feeling—tugged.

As if someone had snagged a fingernail on that fabric and threatened to make a hole.

She shook it off and followed Quaint downstairs.

The final thing on Quaint’s list was a piece of mirror.

“I don’t show up in mirrors,”

said Ella.

“That’s why,”

said Quaint, and her attempt at explanation was the most fairy thing Ella had ever heard: all maze-corners and assumptions, nothing as neat as subject and object.

Silver alone wasn’t fond of magic, and so would reflect a ghost.

A mirror would absorb something.

If allowed to do so, it might absorb everything.

“Which I won’t allow, obviously,”

said Quaint.

“The point of the spell is to give you back some of that solidity and stabilise it, for a while.

But for that I need the mirror, and the mirror has to be a piece of you.”

A gesture around at the house.

So Ella took a small wall mirror from its hook and dashed it hard against the kitchen tiles.

It didn’t hurt any more than she expected; it did hurt for longer, as if one of those shards had sprung up and lodged within her.

She and Quaint gathered and swept up the pieces between them, and Ella fumbled the brush.

It was harder to grip than usual, which was absurd.

It was a thing-of-the-house.

Ella looked at her own ghostly hand, which had a pale sheen to it that was neither flesh nor sweat, and that shard of pain within her pulsed hard before fading to a niggle.

“This is the cost,”

she said.

“Isn’t it? I have to lose some of the solidity I have.

Don’t dance around it, just tell me.”

“There’s always a cost,”

said Quaint, quite kindly.

“It may not last.”

“And it may.”

Agreement.

“And it may.”

Ella let the words echo within her one more time, making three.

That felt right, for a bargain.

* * *

The spell was ready two nights before the festival.

It was not a market-night; Ella and Quaint met close to the palace, so Ella could survey the ground of her adventure.

The city had been heaving with preparation for weeks.

Banners and bunting bearing the royal crest and colours, silver on blue, hung from poles and between rooftops everywhere.

The palace fields were being cleared of twigs and stones, and walking paths marked out in chalk, by the light of huge erected lanterns.

None of the workers cast a second glance at Quaint where she leaned against an enormous gnarled tree.

“Here it is,” she said.

From within a drawstring bag she drew out a pair of shoes.

“Is that … wood?”

said Ella, when she could gather words.

“Dryad-raised willow heartwood,”

said Quaint, with a craftsman’s pride.

The shoes were shaped for dancing, with a low heel.

A cloudy white lining to cushion the foot lay within what looked, indeed, like polished blond wood.

Covering the entirety of the outside were shards of mirror.

The pieces were irregular, none larger than a penny coin, lying in a densely fitted pattern that would have taken a master mosaic maker untold hours.

The gleam of the shoes was so alluring that Ella reached out to touch one despite knowing she would pass through it.

She didn’t.

Her finger … felt.

Something.

Ella gasped and snatched her hand back.

“There’s only three uses in them,”

Quaint warned.

“And as I said, they can’t sever you from the rules of your haunting entirely.

But while they’re on your feet, you’ll be as solid and alive as anyone else at that ball.

You won’t even need that tile of yours.

There’s enough of the house in them to make do.”

Rules. Midnight.

Well, plenty could happen before midnight.

“I’m pleased with the dress,”

Quaint added.

“Nobody else at this ball will have seen anything like it, unless they happen to have been ambassadors three centuries ago at a court a very, very long way from this one.”

“A dress?”

Ella blurted.

Not just a body, not just shoes, but new clothes.

“That’ll make it a lot less likely that my stepmother or stepsisters recognise me.”

“I guarantee they won’t,”

said Quaint.

“That’s part of the magic.

You could waltz right past their noses on the Crown Prince’s arm and they’d never know.”

Ella wanted to grin giddily.

She wanted to dance now.

She forced herself back to practicality.

“How do I know they work, if I can’t try them out before the night itself? You might intend to vanish today, and leave me with a useless pair of unmagical shoes.”

She didn’t really believe it.

The lining of the shoes was sewn impossibly into place with fine gold thread that gleamed the colour of her living hair, and this much dryad heartwood must have lightened significantly the stash Quaint had brought with her from Cajar.

The fairy wouldn’t have wasted such precious ingredients on a sham.

“Might I,”

said Quaint acidly, but with a quirk of her mouth.

“My dear, there are two parties bound by any bargain.

If I hadn’t fulfilled my part, the magic would unravel me eventually.

And in the meantime it would hurt like blazes.”

Like an unanswered command, Ella thought.

Like a spilled bag of beans.

Quaint accompanied Ella home and hung the bag from a spike of the wrought-iron fence, letting it fall within the barrier of the house’s land.

From there Ella carried it inside.

The shoes were remarkably heavy and solid in her hands.

Ella was not used to noticing the weight of objects; once something belonged to it, it was all the same to the house.

But she’d already begun to adjust to the fuzzy and bloodless sense of being less substantial, and she could feel how these shoes represented the missing part.

Something taken from her, with her consent—and now given back, altered, with a promise attached.

She took the bag to the kitchen and stuffed it into the cold black maw of the second stove, which she hardly used except when Patrice was entertaining.

Then she went to scrub the bathrooms.