Page 7 of Cinder House
The night before the festival, it rained hard.
The rain continued into the morning, the air densely gloomy and the sky hanging low.
Tempers inside Ella’s house frayed.
Danica had planned to go riding; now she could not.
Greta, who’d always hated rain, was in such a foul mood that Ella stayed well out of her way and busied herself placing saucers beneath every drip.
No point in trying to do repairs until this was over.
She thought about the poor market stallholders trying to set up in this wind-whipped downpour.
Hours passed.
The rain’s drumming fingertips on Ella’s roof grew lighter, and then stopped.
A patch of blue sky appeared.
And by early evening the only signs of the previous showers were the droop of wet trees under their burden of caught drops, the gleaming damp pavements, and the way Ella’s outdoor surfaces all felt exhilarated and flushed clean.
Perhaps someone had done a rain-banishing charm after all.
The king and queen wouldn’t allow uncooperative weather to spoil this festival when they had a stable of royal sorcerers on hand.
“Where are those curling tongs, Ella?”
asked Patrice.
“You haven’t let them cool?”
She tugged critically at one of the curls hanging down beside Danica’s neck.
“This one needs doing again.”
Danica inspected herself in a mirror.
It took a lot to make Danica look excited about anything that didn’t come in a leather-bound volume or consume oats, but this evening her eyes sparkled like the pins of topaz and gold which adorned her carefully curled hair.
They were all crowded into Patrice’s dressing room, where there were plenty of mirrors, and the huge standing dresser was a battleground of powder puffs and pins and gloves and ribbons and perfume bottles and the best jewellery of the house.
Ella fetched the tongs from the fireside and judged they were cool enough to use before holding them out to her stepmother.
Danica’s gown was wine-red, cut low across the shoulders to display a sprinkling of freckles and the tumble of curls alongside her topaz-girt neck.
She was not beautiful, but she had been presented as well as her mother’s considerable taste and wealth allowed.
Greta wore a wafting confection in shades of pale blue and lilac, trimmed with pearls and the sort of lace that cost an eyewatering amount per foot, and her golden hair was braided in a daring crown style with a tiara of sapphires.
When she moved, the gauziest layer of her skirts took some time to come dreamily to a halt.
And these were only the daughters of a prosperous trading woman.
Ella couldn’t imagine what sort of finery might adorn the courtiers and the royal daughters of other nations, come flocking to be chosen as a future queen.
The fire gave a flare of excitement which went unnoticed in the hot, perfumed room of distracted women.
Ella stood outside the front door when they finally left, watching until the carriage disappeared entirely around the corner.
It was the bruising time of mid-dusk, the streetlamps not long lit.
In the middle distance Ella saw an arc of red sparks against the sky: perhaps some sorcerer showing off for their friends, playing with lights in the park.
The city felt very alive.
Ella, dead, went back inside and hurried to clean up the strewn chaos of the dressing room.
The tidying urge was more of a compulsion tonight, as if the house knew her plans and was determined to drag against them.
Or perhaps this dragging nervousness was her own.
It was harder to tell than usual.
She had longed and bargained for this and now that it was upon her, the size of the adventure was … daunting.
She hadn’t thought she’d let herself become this small or scared.
By the time she was done cleaning, it was past sunset.
The first ball had begun and time was already ticking away.
Ella went to the kitchen and pulled the bag, now smut-smudged, from inside the stove.
She laid the shoes down upon the kitchen hearth and felt them there, heavier than they should be.
She stepped into the shoes, one and then the other.
It was not slow.
It happened in the time it would have taken her to gasp with lungs.
Ella felt the shoes grip on to feet—on to flesh, on to skin—and felt that odd heaviness snake upward, like lightning running backward, to enclose all of her.
And then Ella was a girl and not a ghost.
Or—shaking, trying to make sense of senses awakened and bombarded anew—not only a ghost, not only a house, but a girl as well.
Girl mostly.
Oh, the kitchen was warm and smelled of drying rosemary and bacon and smoke.
Her feet were snug within the wood and the wool.
The heavy layers of a gown and a cloak hung from her shoulders, her waist, and when she moved her head she could feel the nostalgic tug of hair pinned in place.
Ella caressed the cloak as she’d want a lover to caress her new skin.
Slow.
Wondering.
It was thick, soft wool in a brown like the open mouth of a tree, quilt-sewn in leaf patterns of gold thread.
Slowly she pushed the cloak open to explore the textures of the gown beneath, and saw the pale flash of her hands reflected in the mirror-shards of the shoes.
Reflected.
Without any further thought, Ella ran.
She had to learn anew how to catch up long skirts in her hands so she didn’t trip on them as she dashed up the servants’ stairs and then into Patrice’s dressing room, where she stood in front of the largest mirror and stayed, staring, transfixed, for several precious minutes.
She had not seen her face in anything clearer than polished silver platters since it was sixteen.
Now the looking glass took nothing at all but gave her fully back to herself: a woman of twenty-two, with a curious face sharpened by old grief but still brimming with the glow of youth.
Her hair was not red any longer.
It was a middling, glossy brown; part of it twisted intricately back from her temples into a knot, the lower half hanging loose in waves only barely tamed, curving upon themselves like the trunk of a tree bending over to glimpse itself in a river.
Her eyes were the green of new willow leaves.
Beneath the cloak there was the gown.
It too was green—until Ella moved, when it flashed the gold of rice touched expensively with saffron.
A two-toned butterfly of a gown.
And it hung willow-like as well, spilling down all delicate tendrils and strands of twisted silk as if Ella had stood within a huge gilded cobweb and spun around, letting it all catch and overlap until it held, only just, the shape of a dress.
The apparition in the mirror bit her lip.
Ella felt the sting; and felt it only with her mouth.
She relished the pain enough to do it again.
And then those willow eyes brightened and brimmed and spilled over, and then Ella was crying, with her own eyes and her own throat and not with any part of the house.
She pressed her hands to her cheeks, which were hot and pink, and felt the tears.
Tasted them.
She’d spent so long trapped in the colours of her father’s house and in her father’s favourite dress.
And now this: something more wondrous than she’d ever have thought of or chosen for herself.
She had become small.
Now she was an explosion.
And she had somewhere to be.
* * *
Money dropped into a deep dress pocket remained there when she left the house, and she paid for the first coach-for-hire that stopped for her raised hand.
The driver asked, knowingly, if the young lady was perchance heading for the palace?
“Yes, that’s right,”
said Ella.
Her voice seemed to break and catch like early birdsong, and she nearly tumbled right back off the step as she climbed aboard.
But it was easier second by second.
She’d been a body once. She was simply out of practice.
Traffic thickened with the festivities near the palace, but Ella’s coach veered away from the worst of the crowds to a closed gate across a side drive, which was opened for them once the coachman had exchanged a few words with a guard in blue livery who stepped up to peer inside.
Ella gave him a smile and got one in return—he was young, and didn’t look at all displeased that his duties included an early look at the women coming to compete for the prince’s attention.
She wondered if he’d given Greta that smile.
He wouldn’t have had one back. Greta didn’t spend her coin without gain.
“Best of luck, miss,”
the coachman said as he dropped her off.
There was no queue, nor even any fellow after-dark stragglers, but another guard waved Ella through a torchlit gatehouse arch, after which she stopped to be inspected at a huge, reinforced set of wooden doors.
The part of Ella that had read a great many adventures and romances wondered if she would be searched for weapons.
There seemed an alarming lack of security attached to this business of letting in any young woman who turned up at the door, and allowing her a chance to dance with the heir to the throne.
Nobody searched her, though a glimpse of sorcerer-purple was visible on another man who stood half shadowed near the entrance, so perhaps there were magical precautions being taken.
Ella glanced around for the glow of wards, holding her breath against a half-formed fear that despite Quaint’s spell she did not count enough as a young woman of the kingdom to fall under the general invitation.
But no.
She was through the door.
Up a staircase.
Down a hall and through another door, where Ella’s cloak was taken by a servant and she was given a wooden token to exchange for it later, and now this place was recognisably palatial. Ella was having to work hard not to dawdle and simply drink in her surroundings: the paintings on the walls, the illuminated marble underfoot. A pang of envy went through her. She was still ghost enough to wonder what it would be like to haunt a place like this.
She paused outright to look at a painting of the royal family done as large as life, but only for long enough to take in the child prince’s rather sullen expression and the way the queen’s ringed hand caged his shoulder.
She could hear music and laughter coming from up ahead.
Her heart—her heart!—was fluttering in greedy excitement.
“Lady Ember,”
said Ella, when asked for her name by someone in fancier livery than any she’d seen yet.
This someone gave her a very superior stare that told her silently how late she was and how much they disapproved.
Ella kept her chin high.
Somehow the false title helped.
She was not herself, for these three nights—she was something new.
And the door to the ballroom was flung open, and she was announced.
This was less dramatic than Ella had half hoped and half feared.
Only the people closest to the door would have heard the herald over the music and noise, and so only a handful turned to look as she entered.
A handful was still enough.
Ella was not quite ready to be so abruptly seen.
Her cheeks heated and she rose from a directionless curtsey, turned toward the most promising piece of empty wall, and headed for it with all speed and no grace.
She tripped almost at once on the trailing fabric of someone’s gown, and blurted a word she’d picked up outside a sailors’ bar on one of her nighttime walks, and which was very satisfying to hurl around the laundry when she was scrubbing out particularly stubborn stains.
A few seconds later, she remembered that she was no longer an unheard ghost.
The someone who owned the gown turned around.
Ella, whose cheeks were small hearths of embarrassment, also experienced a hot squeeze in her core which she took at first for anger, and then for fear.
And then recognised all at once as the hunger of polished floors—no, of skin—for skin itself.
Skin in eager exchange.
The gown’s owner wasn’t beautiful like flowers were beautiful, but she had a firm handsomeness that would endure like the ruins of castles and the ribs of ships.
Strong bones and dark velvety eyes.
Her hair was done in an unusual style, caught back and almost entirely covered by a black lace veil sewn with tiny red jewels, and her gown was a simple sweep of dark fabric that spilled down over wide hips and shimmered a thousand thin colours like sunlight split through crystal onto sticky black tar.
Ella had never seen fabric like that.
The young woman did not say, I beg your pardon? Those dark eyes passed over Ella’s willow gown and returned to her face freshly narrowed with a frown.
Ella’s feet prickled in their wooden shoes.
Now it was fear and it was desire and it was something that felt uneasily like magic.
This was not a butterfly-pinning look, but it was a cousin to it, and Ella wanted wildly both to run and to stay and beg to be incinerated.
Only one of those options seemed at all sensible.
Ella gave a nod of apology and scurried away.
Whispers feathered out behind her and were swallowed by the general noise.
Thus escaped, Ella made her way slowly around the edge of the room.
It was almost too warm; the centre of one wall held an enormous fireplace that could have hosted two oxen turning on spits, firmly shielded from the crowd by imposing firescreens.
The looks from the other girls and women in the ballroom varied between nakedly assessing and envious, with a few admiring sidelong flicks.
Ella nearly tripped over her own feet at the most blatant of these, her cheeks heating all over again.
She didn’t see her stepsisters.
Once she caught a glimpse of red that might have been Danica, and once heard a laugh that sounded like Greta’s.
Both times she hastily changed direction.
Even in a disguise she didn’t want to be near them.
Unsurprisingly, she got nowhere near the Crown Prince.
To Ella he was only a richly dressed figure, glimpsed from afar due to the chandelier light gleaming in his coronet—or the fact that everyone else was looking at him.
One only had to follow the currents of attention in the room.
He was dancing already, and barely seemed to stop, exchanging woman for woman as the music changed. A minute’s furtive staring was enough to diagnose him as a stiff, difficult dancing partner, unable to relax into the rhythm of the music. If he’d ever had a gift for it, it had assuredly worn off long ago.
Though Ella would not be relaxed either, if every eye were on her and everyone scrambling for a chance to impress, and the rest of her life depended on the choice she made.
And if there were another two long nights of it yet to come.
Luckily, Ella was not at this ball to become betrothed.
She was, she decided before long, mostly there for the food.
There were platters of morsels to be hastily downed between dancing, along with piles of napkins to wipe fingers.
Quaint had said frankly that Ella shouldn’t push the magic by eating too much, but … just a taste.
Of everything.
Halved quail eggs, their gold centres darkened with spice and draped with pickled onion.
A savoury paste on small square toasts.
Buttery shortbreads shaped like flowers.
Skewers of cubed fruit sprinkled with coarse salt. Grilled vegetables rolled up around soft cheese and pepper. It was all Ella could do to remember to swallow; she needed to hold all the tastes in her mouth and compare them to house-tastes like beeswax rubbed into wooden chairs or the drift of steam above unfurling tea leaves.
You can’t keep this, Ella told herself, as a white jelly coated in sugar and nutmeg slowly dissolved in her mouth.
This will all go away again.
Which sounded a lot like: So take it all, now.
She finished by ladling a cup from the enormous centrepiece of a punch bowl, which bobbed with grapes and edible flowers.
Ella tasted carefully and made a face.
It was almost too sweet for her overwhelmed tastebuds, and if this was alcohol, something she’d never been allowed in life, she wasn’t sure she cared for it.
Still.
Hovering near the table, sipping primly, was an easy way to play ghost and eavesdrop.
Ella would build up her nerve and enter the dancing when she was more at ease with the crowd and the smells and the fact that people could actually trip over her feet in their mirror-gleaming shoes.
Perhaps she’d dance tomorrow night.
Two gossipy and expensively dressed women standing nearby were making playful bets about the chances of this girl or that walking off with the prize.
They must have been courtiers; they seemed completely at ease in this unbelievable splendour, and they were merciless in their sweet undertones.
In another forty years they’d be the old women at the ballet.
They ignored Ella herself past the first noncommittal pair of nods—they didn’t recognise her, but clearly weren’t going to insult a possible foreign princess.
As well as the local courtiers, they had their eyes out for the countesses and heiresses who’d come from far and wide, greedy for the worm on the hook at the centre: the Crown Prince, and the future queen’s crown that he represented.
“And there’s our frontrunner—oh, blast, she’s headed this way.
Skirts in hand,”
one of them muttered, and they both somehow hid their cups in a fold of fabric and sank into impeccable curtseys.
Ella did the same.
The woman in question passed within a few yards of them, drawing an awkward halo of space along with her as the crowd stepped out of her way.
Ella’s downcast gaze recognised the slick rainbow-black of fabric, and rose with shock.
The dark-eyed woman was already passing her by.
She was flanked on either side now by men wearing gold-trimmed swords at their waists.
“Do you think we’ll all be drinking that insipid Cajarac tea when she’s queen?”
said one of the gossipers.
“Surely it’s not as certain as all that,”
said her companion.
“There are plenty who don’t think we should swallow this alliance.
Papa had it from the Minister—”
What kind of royal, then, was Prince Jule? Was he the sort of dutiful heir who would dance for three nights for the show of it, and then choose the foreign princess of his parents’ and government’s choosing? Or was this ball a sign that he wanted more—wanted a choice?
Not that he’d invited any muscular farmers’ sons.
If that was the real issue.
There was a break in the music after that dance, and a sudden alarming wave of humanity moving toward the food and the punch bowl.
Panic took hold of Ella’s senses.
It was too much, all that breath and flesh and noise crowding her at once.
She kept up a murmured litany of Excuse me, excuse me, and finally squirmed her way back to the main ballroom doors through which she’d entered.
The herald was long gone and the guards were uninterested in a girl who preferred to be out rather than in.
The long hallway of paintings was deserted.
A row of high leaded windows on one side admitted a sudden burst of green lights, which dusted and sparkled over a portrait of a man atop a horse.
Along with it came the muffled thud of fireworks.
The celebrations outside were in full swing.
To her right was an unremarkable solid door leading into what Ella, after pressing her nose against the pane of glass at face height, determined was a sort of narrow courtyard which must run alongside the ballroom.
Night air and relative quiet.
Those were what she needed.
She would scold herself for wasting even minutes of her chance—she had wanted this, she had bargained for this—and then she would gather herself up and go inside again, and she would dance. Yes.
Ella bounced painfully off the door.
She was flustered enough that she’d tried to pass through it instead of reaching for the handle.
Only after she’d fumbled for it did she think the door might be locked; but it wasn’t.
Leftover panic and the anxious awareness of being inside a huge, labyrinthine building, which she could not learn from the foundations up, kept her from going more than a few yards from the door.
It was enough.
The air was clean on her face—yet another sensation she’d not appreciated enough in life.
A row of lamps lining the path at ankle height and a larger globe hanging from a tree branch made the shadows inviting rather than creepy. The music of the ballroom leaked through the wall.
The courtyard was impeccably kept, Ella noted with automatic approval: a little loveseat of pale stone, flowers well behaved in their beds.
There was only one proper tree, whose trunk rose cleanly from a circle of grass and erupted above Ella’s head into branches and leaves.
Ella reached up and let the leaves play between her fingers.
She even tugged one free so she could have the pleasure of tracing its veins, crushing it and lifting it to her nose to smell the faint, grassy herbaceousness of a living thing with its guts suddenly exposed.
The scent gave Ella courage.
She stood there breathing it for a while, and was almost ready to head back inside when a small sound of human surprise came from behind her.
Ella spun, the leaf falling from her fingers.
She had not heard the door open.
Of course; it had been silent for her too, the hinges as well kept as everything else in this place.
Out of pure instinct she tried to fade into the tree.
This did not work.
“I—do beg your pardon,”
said the intruder.
“I didn’t realise anyone else would be here.”
It was a slim young man, beautifully dressed, with blue ribbons laced at the throat of his shirt and trousers in a darker blue that swallowed the night.
His air was expectant and he stood as stiffly as he’d danced.
In the pale brown of his hair shone a golden coronet.
What he was waiting for was for Ella to curtsey, and stammer an apology of her own, and probably say something like, I’ll leave you in peace, Your Highness.
Do excuse me.
And she might well have.
Except in that moment his narrow face came properly into the light of the globe and instead Ella blurted.
“You’re—from the ballet.”
Now Prince Jule was the one who looked like he wanted to vanish.
His eyes widened and his mouth froze, and his hands—those long, seeking fingers—clenched by his sides just as they clutched the seats at the theatre.
Oh no.
No matter what kind of secret Ella had stumbled over, she’d made royalty look nervous, and that seemed like a recipe for dungeons.
Or at least being unceremoniously thrown out of the palace and barred from coming back the next two nights.
She added hastily.
“You don’t need to worry! I promise I won’t tell anyone, if I’m not supposed to.
I’m very good at keeping secrets.”
The prince didn’t move.
He stood there, teetering like one of those wooden soldiers boys bought cheap from the market, roughly painted and prone to wobbling on even the flattest stones.
His gaze took Ella in slowly.
It felt like the first gulp of punch had felt.
“I’ve never seen you at the theatre,” he said.
“I’m good at hiding,”
said Ella, weak with relief.
“So I see,”
said the Crown Prince, with a nod around the courtyard.
Ella giggled.
Then put her fingertips to her mouth, flushing with horror.
It had been the giggle of a bashful sixteen-year-old, and in front of the prince.
But it seemed to have put him at ease.
He smiled a small and polite smile, then walked over to the loveseat and lowered himself to it.
That stiffness was very obvious up close, and he rubbed at one thigh as he stretched his legs out in front of him.
An injury? And he had been dancing steadily all night.
Nobody else came into the courtyard.
It was just Ella, alone with the Crown Prince and a secret and an unhelpful tree, and the seal temptingly broken on the sheer joy of conversation.
Words gushed out unwisely.
“Do you run away from your guards, to go to the ballet? Have you run away from them now? Is that safe? I could be a wicked sorcerer wanting to cast a spell on you.
I could have a poisoned knife in my bodice.”
Prince Jule looked interestedly at the bodice in question. “Do you?”
“No!”
“My guards are on the other side of the door,”
he said.
“And I promise to scream if you pull a knife.
Does that help?”
“Yes,”
said Ella.
“Er.
Thank you.”
He looked her up and down again.
Like the punch, it was smoother and warmer the second time.
“I haven’t danced with you yet, have I? I hope I remember, but—I’m sorry, there have been so many dances.”
So many women.
Ella snorted a little.
“You did invite us all,”
she pointed out.
“I can’t see why.
In the space of a single dance, I wouldn’t think you’d have a chance to decide if you want to join an embroidery circle with someone, let alone marry them.”
He looked nonplussed. Then.
“You said you can keep a secret.”
A thrill went through Ella.
“Yes, I can.
Very well.”
He gestured open-handed to the loveseat and Ella came and sat next to him.
Her skirts touched his leg, but she couldn’t feel any part of his body with hers.
It was enough to be aware of the heat of him.
To see up close the texture of his skin, his mouth, that pale hair. The ribbons at his throat were wilting and loosened.
“It’s all a show,”
he said.
“A story.
Like a ballet.
I’m not actually allowed to choose a bride from among all the young women of the kingdom.
It’s going to be the Princess Nadya of Cajar.”
Rainbows and tar, and ladies talking of tea.
Ella’s heart thumped.
“For the alliance?”
“Yes.
And nobody will be surprised when a prince chooses a princess.
The courtiers have guessed already, and for the commoners it’s about the fun of getting to dance with the prince.”
He sounded as if he were reciting something that had been explained to him.
“Besides, all the other young men at court are pleased about the sea of fresh faces we’ve invited in.”
So that answered the question of what kind of prince he was.
The dutiful kind.
Ella didn’t know yet if she liked him better or worse for it.
She did like how little ceremony there was to him, beyond the gestures and the speech, which were like a well-fitting costume. He hadn’t once told her to add a Your Highness to her sentences, or talked as if she were in any way lesser. He’d said commoners as one might say architects or blondes: a description, not a judgement.
“It’s good of you,”
Ella ventured.
“to dance with us all for three nights in a row.
It doesn’t really look like you enjoy it.”
In fact he didn’t look like he was any good at it, but that wouldn’t have been polite to say.
Prince Jule’s head jerked and his mouth firmed.
Had she managed to insult him anyway? Princes were probably supposed to look like they enjoyed themselves while interacting with their subjects.
Ella’s hands found one another atop her full skirts and sought comfort, her fingers twining tight.
She didn’t want him to remember that he should go back to his dutiful dancing. She didn’t want this to end. She was sitting next to the boy from the ballet, and they were talking, and it was better than jellies or jewels.
But Prince Jule just inspected her for the time it took her to become awkwardly aware of her breathing.
Then he said.
“May I ask your name?”
“Ella.”
“Jule,”
he said, and extended his hand.
Just Jule.
Ella shook.
He wore only one ring, heavy and golden with an engraved seal, which murmured to the part of Ella able to sense magic.
His hand was larger than hers, those slim fingers strong and sure.
A shivery hot sensation that was not magical at all ran up Ella’s arm to where the willow dress’s tendrils were stroking her shoulder. This time she recognised it at once for what it was.
He released her.
“What do you like about the ballet, Ella?”
Ella opened her mouth, and it was as if someone had turned all of her taps at once.
This was all she’d wanted: someone who would warmly squeeze her hand and could see her, could hear her, listening to her talk about something she loved.
She told him what she thought of all her favourite ballets and her favourite dancers, and Jule agreed on some and disagreed spiritedly on others, and then looked delighted as if at some kind of illicit treat; Ella supposed that you weren’t really supposed to express negative public opinions of anything, when you were a prince.
The talk spun out from there to include the other regulars in the back rows of the ballet—the short-haired young woman had brought along one date in particular, a redhead with freckles like a spill of lentils on her cheeks, three times now, which seemed a promising sign for the girl in question—
Ella broke off.
Jule was looking at her with a smile that was less polite, but much better.
Another giggle tried to climb out of Ella and she squashed it.
He kept on looking and she wanted to say, What? but she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer.
His looks had that drunken, giddy weight to them when they landed on her.
It struck her all over again that one day this person would be a king.
Jule replied as if she’d said it anyway.
“You notice so much,”
he said.
“It’s impressive.”
“I always noticed you,”
Ella said.
“You’re so—involved.
The first night I saw you I thought, he’s going to leap out of his seat and join them.”
The smile twisted.
“I do get engrossed.
Maybe that’s why I’ve never seen you.
And I make an effort not to look around too much, not to draw attention, in case someone recognises me.
To answer your question,”
he added.
“I’ve never snuck away from my guards.
Half of them have known me since I was born; they’d never forgive me for it.
They’re terrible bullies really.”
Terrible bullies, thought Ella, might have interrupted by now and pointed out that His Highness was expected back in the ballroom.
“Now you’ll tell me that the old man who sleeps until intermission is actually your personal bodyguard, and he’s only pretending.”
Jule laughed.
“No.
My guards come along, but they agree to loiter in the foyer.
Mostly because…”
A hand went to his clothing, and suddenly there was a knife.
“I can actually protect myself.”
“I have been asking the wrong questions,”
said Ella.
“So if I were an assassin and pulled a knife of my own, you’d be fine.”
“Probably, yes.
I’m very well trained,”
Jule said apologetically.
The knife disappeared again.
“My ring wards against harmful magic, as well.
And I’m sorry, but I don’t think you’re a sorcerer.
Though I thought you might be a dryad, at first.
Standing under the tree looking like a lovely tree yourself.”
Ella had no idea what to say to that.
You look like the swan who dies for love? And not in a way that was particularly complimentary either: thin and a bit worried and beaky, but with an elegant neck and those fingers like—what were they called? The longest feathers that tipped a wing.
Instead she asked.
“Why is it a secret in the first place? Why don’t you go as yourself? I’m sure the dancers would be thrilled.”
Jule thought for a while before speaking.
He had a comfort with silence that Ella wanted to relax into.
If he were a house, he too might be a haunted one.
“I like to have a secret escape that is a secret.
Or at least private.”
“I understand that,”
said Ella wholeheartedly.
“And…”
Now Jule’s expression changed again.
He glanced at the door as if reassuring himself that nobody else would come out to the courtyard.
“This one is a real secret,”
he said.
“Some people know, but it’s been … watered down.”
Or perhaps the glance had been reassuring himself that he could easily have Ella killed, after telling her this secret.
Ella imagined a guard snapping her neck, or Jule’s sly knife shoved between her ribs.
She’d only die.
She’d done that already.
“I haven’t really got anyone to tell who’d believe me,”
Ella said.
“even if I wanted to.”
Jule said.
“Did you ever hear about the fairy gift at my naming ceremony?”
“That you’d be irresistibly charming, or something like that?”
Jule gave a grim smile.
“Or something.”
* * *