Page 8 of Cinder House

Here then was the something.

The real story of Prince Jule and his fairy gift.

Everyone expected the king and queen’s firstborn to be a princess.

A sorcerer in another land had made a prophecy about it, though afterward it was agreed she’d been pulling tales out of brambles and only said it because it was what her employers, also royal, had wanted to hear; the Drogowe had a toddling prince about the right age for a future alliance.

Nobody knew where the evil fairy came from.

Maybe nobody had employed her at all.

Maybe she was ancient enough for her name to have passed out of memory, and it was a fit of ego and pique at being excluded.

Maybe she just wanted to cause trouble. Not that anyone was thinking in terms of evil and trouble at the time.

At the naming ceremony, she came forth and declared she had a magical gift for the newborn … child.

A dubious glance down at the infant Jule, as if checking that his parents weren’t mistaken.

There wasn’t a lot of difference between princes and princesses at that age, and he’d have been trussed up in the same ancient naming-gown regardless.

The gift was this: that he would dance so beautifully that everyone who saw it would fall in love with him.

Well, that’s nice, isn’t it? was the general response.

A very proper kind of fairy gift.

And it was nice, for a long time.

Prince Jule’s crying could always be soothed by music, and he was dancing as soon as he could walk.

The best dancing instructors were engaged, and fought for the privilege, as he was a blissfully easy student.

No style seemed beyond him, no step too difficult for him to master after the least amount of practice. The problem became keeping instruction only to what was safe for the body of someone still developing; to let him grow up sturdy and strong, able to dance for as long as he wanted. Which was, he said, forever.

And to watch the child dance was, indeed, to love him.

To be brought to happy weeping by the beauty of what he could do.

The trouble started gradually, when he was fourteen.

He’d always performed at court whenever asked to.

It was considered a treat for visiting ambassadors, and the highlight of the festival weeks: the time when Prince Jule would step out with his head high, a look of uncomplicated delight on his face, and begin to dance.

But with time the talk of how lovely he was took on a sharper, hungrier edge.

Courtiers of all ages began vying for his attention.

There were several nasty wagers regarding who would manage to seduce him first.

Everything rose to fever pitches in the wake of a performance and simmered down, with an air of vague confusion, when he hadn’t danced for a while. When he did dance all eyes in the room were on him, and when he danced with someone their eyes glazed and their hands wandered, compelled to adore and then to possess.

At sixteen the prince entirely stopped dancing in public.

Jule himself, desperate, insisted on his private lessons continuing.

Until the day his ballet tutor, a retired master from the royal theatre’s own company, was found dead slumped over a table next to an empty wine cup, the dregs shimmering with purchased poison, and a short despairing note.

Everything was hushed up after that.

The royal sorcerers were instructed to do whatever it took to remove what was clearly not a gift, but a curse.

They tried many things, some of them painful.

They tried for a long time.

Renowned fairies were coaxed and bribed to visit from the wild courts, and they tried as well, but in the end they all admitted there was little chance of removing a fairy gift laid at such a symbolic moment, which had—and this was the root of the problem—grown as Jule had grown.

Will it keep getting worse? the queen asked.

The sorcerers and the fairies exchanged looks.

There was no reason to think it wouldn’t.

So Jule no longer danced where anyone could lay eyes on him.

He danced in private to music played by a pianist who wore a blindfold, and the windows were blacked out and the door kept guarded.

One day a young guard new to the palace opened the door mid-session, sent to bring an urgent message to the Crown Prince, and caught the briefest glimpse only of Jule dancing.

The noise that followed scared the pianist, but she’d been ordered not to remove her blindfold for any reason, and it took her some time to fumble her way to the door and go for help.

The guard had to be dragged off Jule by two other men.

That incident was kept very quiet.

The guard had to be sedated at first, and Jule himself—once he’d stopped shaking and they’d powdered over the bruises—went in and talked to the man gently for an hour.

He was released back to his village with a pension.

It wasn’t his fault; by keeping secrets they’d obscured the danger, and in many people’s minds the prince’s obsession with privacy was no more than a quirk.

Some of the bullies in the guardroom had dared him into it.

They had no pension when they were turned off.

No, it wasn’t the guard’s fault.

He still killed himself out of guilt and self-disgust a few months later, just as the ballet master had.

Jule wasn’t supposed to hear about it.

But he did.

After that Jule carried a knife always and was taught how to use it.

And he only danced on his own, to no music, in rooms with doors locked from the inside and where nobody, nobody, stood the slightest chance of seeing.

Rumours spread and mutated with time.

The king and queen let them.

The most official story was that the fairy gift had soured and faded with age, and the prince had lost his magnificent ability, and so lost his fondness and spirit for dancing.

This was not true.

Jule still loved dance more than anything.

He went to the ballet in disguise because he loved it, and because he could never leap onto the stage and join them.

Only this love remained, frustrated and stifled, and the knowledge that he couldn’t perform anymore, and every year the battle between these carved itself more painfully into his bones.

For the three nights of the betrothal balls, Jule was doing something which careful experimenting had shown to be safe.

He was wearing stiffening braces on his legs.

They severely restricted both the speed and range with which he could move; and so what he was doing out there on the floor with partner after partner was not, truly, dancing.

Jule lifted the fabric of one trouser leg to just below the knee.

Ella caught a glimpse of leather and metal, and winced.

Jule let it drop again.

“That’s one reason it has to be Princess Nadya,”

Jule added.

“She’s a sorcerer, and apparently a very powerful one.

Political reasons aside, it helps that it’s someone who might have enough magic of her own to resist the curse.”

Ah, yes.

If Cajar had an inconvenient sorcerer for an imperial princess, being married away into a more magically tolerant country was probably the best possible result for her, too.

Ella had sensed magic when she stumbled over the woman’s skirts.

Jule said.

“I thought … if there’s even a chance that she might just be able to watch me when I dance, without it ruining everything.”

His gaze rose from the ground and returned to Ella’s eyes: the first tentative look he’d worn yet, half shame and half hope.

It was a look that belonged to the boy at the ballet, as if the aloofness and the coronet were as much a disguise as that old coat and woollen cap.

Someone who usually wanted to be seen less, to pass unnoticed, but who in his most secret heart wanted exactly what Ella wanted after her years of invisibility: to be looked on, and seen truly, by someone kind who would stay.

Ella’s heart swelled with painful sympathy.

She said, “I—”

Above their heads, distant, a clock began to strike the hour.

Ella’s feet went warm and strange.

She pulled her skirts up and looked at her shoes.

In the pieces of mirror she could see writhing, shadowy movement, as if her feet were clad in shards of crystal suddenly seeking glimpses of other worlds.

It was a warning.

She’d lost track of time. Midnight.

“Ella?”

said Jule.

The resignation in his voice was a knife held to her swelling heart, but Ella couldn’t stay.

She couldn’t.

On that twelfth strike she would vanish in front of his eyes.

She picked up her skirts and ran to the door.

Jule didn’t call after her, or to the pair of guards who came to sudden attention when the door opened.

Ella’s shoes rang out on the floor in between the clock strikes—she’d lost count now, quick, run—and she was at the other end of the painting gallery, wrenching open the door there, when suddenly all her senses vanished and were replaced with the larger, more familiar sense of her own house.

Ella sank through the stair at first.

Her dark, unlit halls were dizzy with the shift.

The shoes sat neatly beside her, their mirrors reflecting only what was around them, and not Ella at all.

Ella who was once again in her lavender dress, and once again the ghost of patiently waiting empty rooms.

She was not patient.

She was exhilarated and grieving and her emotions flung themselves through a house which felt, for the first time, wholly inadequate to feel those things, even though there was so much substance to feel them with.

Some feelings really were for flesh alone.

She gave herself most of an hour to sit there, curled up and sorry for herself and thinking about Jule, and then she shook all her curtains and bed drapes and went to the kitchen, where she made three mugs of cocoa with brandy and kept them warm.

She mourned all over again the loss of smell and taste—and how glorious it had been when Jule’s fingers closed over hers—

and oh, there was a familiar one, despair, thudding down all her drains and copper pipes, at how bad it would be to sink back to her familiar existence after these three nights.

She glimpsed the beginning of a slope even more dangerous than that between ghost and haunting: that having tasted the life that came with the shoes, she would do anything for more.

Ella wondered what the next bargain held out to her would be.

She wondered how much of herself she’d be prepared to give away.

But her first bargain was still in play; she had two more nights yet to enjoy.

Thinking of them was like curling one’s cold flesh hands around a pottery mug and inhaling the steam of alcohol-laced chocolate.

Which was exactly what her family did on their return, while they chewed pleasurably over all the details of the ball.

Neither Danica nor Greta had danced with Prince Jule.

The inconsiderate prick (“Greta!”) had danced for a while and then vanished for a large part of the night.

From his own ball, where he was meant to be choosing a bride! Still, Greta had not lacked for partners.

She had the brimming glow of someone glutted with attention.

Danica had spent most of the night talking with a man who sold and trained horses; he even trained them for the king’s sister, who was a great rider.

“That old boring man with the beard?”

said Greta.

“Mr.

Keffrank is only just forty,”

said Danica.

“And he asked me to dance thrice and said it was a great relief to finally meet someone who could talk sensibly about horseflesh.

And I agree.”

She paused, gaze softening.

“And I’ve no objection to his beard.”

“Will he be attending again tomorrow?”

Patrice asked.

She had a look to her as if she were about to put a contract in a folder and file it away, satisfied.

Danica nodded and smiled at her cocoa.

“I,”

announced Greta.

“met the Cajarac princess that everyone seemed so eager to talk about.”

Ella’s own confusing run-in with Princess Nadya could hardly be called meeting.

She managed to ask.

“A real princess? What was she like?”

Hoping for Jule’s sake that his future bride was full of good qualities.

But also feeling a worm of ugly, pining jealousy.

“I’m prettier than her by far,”

said Greta, with one of her head tosses.

“And she was so cold and unpleasant.

She gave me a stare as if I were a scrape of shit on her silly shoes.”

Oh, and that would sting—Greta with her high opinion of herself, snubbed by a princess.

Greta looked into the embers burning low in the parlour grate.

“Tomorrow night, we might see how Her Highness likes the sleeve of her dress catching in a candle.”

“Tomorrow night you will be on your best behaviour,”

said Patrice.

“and we will wrangle you into the prince’s path, and he will ask you to dance.

No betrothal has been announced yet.

We have time.”

“Yes,”

said Greta.

Her smile writhed delicately in the firelight.

“And I have other tricks waiting for him.

If they should prove necessary.”

* * *

The crowd in the ballroom was sparser and more elegant on the second night of the festival.

Those commoners who wanted only to gawk once, and probably those who’d heard about Princess Nadya and realised they didn’t stand a chance of becoming a princess themselves, had clearly decided that they’d rather join the rowdier entertainments on the palace fields and the river.

So at first it seemed to Ella that Greta would have a simple time winning the dance she wanted.

But Prince Jule, like Ella’s stepsister, must also have exited the previous night’s ball to a stern talking-to about what was expected of him.

He danced with nobody but Princess Nadya.

Or … not-danced.

It was obvious once you knew to look that he was barely moving his legs at all.

Ella lurked again.

The assault on her senses was milder tonight, but she was a confusion of longings: to spend more time with Jule, to tell him that she’d heard the pain in his story and she understood.

And to warn him to be on his guard if he danced with a beautiful blonde with a dress like the dawn and eyes like silver pins.

A hidden knife and a warded ring might not be enough against Greta at her most determined.

But Jule was once again that well-dressed, impossibly distant royal figure.

Tonight the courtiers had fewer wagers to make, but a new toy in the form of the alliance with Cajar to toss back and forth.

Some were pleased; some were displeased; most wanted to discuss how it would affect them, personally.

The Cajarac delegation spoke amongst themselves in their own tongue; as well as those men with the swords, there was a small woman who was the ambassador, and a handful of attendants to Princess Nadya.

One of these, a young man who cast longing looks at the punch bowl, had been stuck carrying around a small, fat dog covered in curls like slightly torched meringue.

Ella couldn’t resist going up and asking permission to pet it.

The dog sniffed her suspiciously.

Its jewel-encrusted collar glittered.

Ella liked dogs.

She had never been allowed one when she was alive, and hadn’t been able to pet one since she died. The only ones in the house at all had been the strays that Greta occasionally tempted home to … play with.

Ella wished she hadn’t thought about torching.

She petted the dog some more; it sighed, nestled farther into the attendant’s arms, and let out an odious fart.

The attendant gave Ella a profoundly resigned look.

It said, I hope you aren’t anyone important, but also, at least you get to walk away now.

Ella did.

She didn’t get very far before someone asked her to dance, and she stumbled through a no thank you out of sheer reflex.

She should have agreed.

She should be blending in.

No: she was distracting herself and hiding, again.

She had two more nights of being seen and heard.

Either she was brave enough to take advantage of this bargain, or she wasn’t.

She only wanted to dance with one person here.

Ella drew courage up from the mirrors on her feet and made her way, trying to suppress the fuzz of building nerves, through the press of people to where Jule and Princess Nadya were standing.

Not even swaying, at the present moment.

Just standing and talking while the ball happened around them.

Jule noticed Ella first, and broke off to turn and look at her.

It was not how he’d looked at her last night.

There was none of that punch-bowl warmth; not even a glimmer of interest.

He looked like a man bracing himself for a feeble blow that he expected to find, at most, annoying.

Ella dropped the lowest curtsey she’d managed so far.

The words she’d planned were tangled in her throat and she had to cough them out.

“Your Highness,”

she said to Jule, and.

“Your Highness,”

to Nadya.

“I’m so sorry for intruding like this, but His Highness and I left a conversation unfinished last night, and I was wondering if—if he would care to dance?”

Nadya looked at Ella with the superb neutrality of a politician, and with no hint of recognition.

Ella had a wild lurch of uncertainty, as if Quaint’s shoes had simply sent her into a dream realm where her mind had concocted the events of the previous night.

Her hands clenched in her skirts.

So many people were looking.

“Ah,”

said Jule, after that unbearable pause.

“Indeed.

I did speak last night with—”

“Lady Ember,”

said Ella hurriedly.

The Cajarac princess was not a fairy, but Ella wouldn’t use even part of her real name with someone who had any kind of power and any kind of reason to be unfriendly.

“Yes,”

said Jule, after a moment.

Nadya still said nothing, but she gave Jule a nod of graceful permission.

A path opened for her as she made her way across the dance floor away from them.

“We don’t actually have to dance,”

Ella said.

“We could—”

“I believe I told you,”

said Jule.

“This isn’t dancing.”

Ella flinched.

His cold tone was as actively hostile as the bite of a snake.

She might have stepped away entirely, except that Jule’s hands were already on her waist and clasping her own fingers.

“Jule—”

Ella’s voice withered with nerves.

The distance had redoubled in his look.

They were surrounded by people: all staring, all whispering, who was that girl, how dared she demand a dance, and how gracious of the Crown Prince to grant it.

“And besides,”

said Jule, with that soft venom.

“you know it isn’t dancing, or you wouldn’t be here, daring to touch me.”

The music washed over them.

Jule’s grip on her was stiff and they stood in a frame as rigid and ungraceful as the brace on his legs.

Ella felt sick with the yawning gap between what she’d wanted for so long, and what this was—and for Jule the potential for joy must be even greater, and the loss of it even more awful, and on top of that he’d trusted Ella with his secret, after knowing her for no time at all, and she’d said … nothing.

She’d done nothing except flee as if his very presence were a taint, a threat.

Daring to touch me.

They could have been the words of any prince to any commoner, but Ella knew exactly what he’d meant.

And she knew her hand in Jule’s was a lifeless fish.

“It’s not that I—”

she tried.

“Please, I didn’t run away because of you—”

“Of course not,”

said Jule.

“And you’re shaking like a leaf because you feel entirely at ease in the company of a monstrous, fairy-cursed incubus who’s already killed two men.”

Ella flinched again, and Jule’s cheeks tightened with satisfaction: he’d proved his point.

Ella’s mouth was full of stones.

It’s not that, she wanted to scream.

It’s that I’ve dreamed of dancing with someone for so long, and now it’s happening and everything about it is wrong.

It’s that last night I could have melted with happiness when you squeezed my hand, and now we’re making that wrong as well. I will have so little to cling to after this. What if I see you at the ballet for the next fifty years and remember only how this feels, here and now, and not how it felt when you smiled at me?

She couldn’t explain any of it without telling him what she was.

And she couldn’t force the words up while this hurt, haughty version of Jule held her as if she were a thorn-dense twig.

“Or perhaps,”

Jule went on, as they swayed in broken time.

“you believe you can leverage this, somehow, now you know so much about me.

Perhaps you asked me to dance in order to ask for money, or—”

“Oh, stop it,”

hissed Ella.

She wrenched her hand from his.

For a moment she missed being a house; this anger craved a larger skeleton.

“Stop assuming.

You’re still the boy from the ballet, and nothing you told me last night makes any difference to that, and I think we’re both being ridiculous now because it’s impossible to have a real conversation while being stared at by hundreds of people in a place like this.”

That made some space between the stones in her throat.

“I will tell you all my secrets, in return, but I can’t do it here.

If you can escape, like last night…”

She inclined her head toward the main doors.

Her heart was going like a pendulum possessed.

“Very … well,”

said Jule finally.

“You go on ahead.”

He gave a small bow, and Ella backed away.

Hopefully it looked like she’d taken her one aborted dance, and subsequent dismissal, with good grace.

* * *