Page 9 of Cinder House

The courtyard seemed better lit tonight—it was moonlight, Ella realised.

Last night there’d been a few leftover clouds from the storm, but now an almost-full face glowed down and changed the hue of the air and the shape of the shadows.

It was colder, and fresher.

The music came through the wall more loudly. Ella sat on the loveseat, trying to enjoy the novelty of gooseflesh rising on her exposed arms.

It seemed a very long time before Jule came through the door.

“Luckily,”

he said.

“my guards are used to me requiring some time alone in the middle of a long event.

It’s why I came here last night, too.”

His casual air rang a little false, as if he’d had to work at it.

And he didn’t sit.

He stayed standing out of reach.

Ella wondered if he was as aware of the knife within his clothes as she was aware of the shoes on her feet.

“I haven’t told anyone about your curse, and I promise I won’t,”

Ella said.

“And I didn’t run away because of what you said.

I—I truly don’t think you’re…”

“A monstrous incubus?”

said Jule.

This time with a heartening hint of wryness that said: Yes.

Perhaps we were both being a little ridiculous.

“Yes. No.”

Here it went.

Fair exchange.

“I can’t judge anyone for what they were turned into by magic.”

And Ella, her hands clenched around the cold stone of the seat, told him her own secret.

She told him that she was a ghost—and a plain Ella of a ghost, not a Lady Anyone—which was why he’d never seen her at the ballet.

She told him about Quaint, and making a bargain for three nights’ worth of something close to life.

She lifted the cobweb layers of the dress to show him the mirror-shoes.

And she told him that everything ended at midnight.

“I panicked when I heard the clock—I didn’t want you to see me vanish.

I wanted to be sure I could come back again.

For the food, and the dancing.”

She winced.

“I’m sorry.

It must be unbearable for you to be in the midst of it, and not be able to dance yourself.”

“Don’t think anything of it,”

said Jule.

He’d absorbed her story and hadn’t once interrupted to accuse her of telling malicious lies, which immediately placed him above every man Ella had known when she was alive.

And he’d thawed during the telling.

He was nearly himself again.

“I’m resigned to the curse by now.

I was angry about it for a long time.

But my royal parents pointed out that in our position, there are certain things we have to accept are not for us.

Cannot be for us. This is only one more such thing.”

His voice was calm.

His long fingers twisted, unable to hide within overlarge cuffs the way they did at the ballet.

Ella watched the hateful dance of his hands.

“That’s such rubbish.

You’re still angry,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

That was the narrow-eyed, indignant look of someone not often contradicted, and for a moment all the stories about royalty that had ever embedded themselves in Ella tried to crawl out and strangle her into cringing.

But the idea of being scared of Jule was laughable.

Ella had spent her life and her death under the same roof as monsters.

She knew what was worth fearing and what wasn’t.

She refused to lean back a single inch.

“Some angers,”

she said, her sternum burning as she stared right back.

“you can never get rid of.”

A silence.

Then Jule gave a sudden, harsh laugh.

It made his face more real, as if he were coming into focus.

“You’re right,”

he said.

“I hate it.

I hate it.

And these balls—at least at the ballet it’s beautiful and they’re experts, and I can lose myself in it.

Really good dance forces you to exist perfectly in the present. No past to worry about, and no future either. But here all I can see are people dancing badly, or just dancing well enough, and some of them are bored. So many of the girls last night wanted to whisper to me how tedious it is, all this primping and dancing, and they would so much prefer to be out studying plants or riding their horse or reading a book, and they thought they were setting themselves apart from all the other silly girls, and I thought I would like to rip the jewels right out of their hair.”

He took an uneven breath.

He looked as if he had shocked himself off balance.

His nose had reddened in the cold, and that warmth behind Ella’s sternum was thickening into a dreadful fondness.

She said.

“My mother liked to dance.”

It wasn’t what she’d meant to say next.

It had been shocked out of her in turn.

“It was one of the things my father always told me about her.”

So Ella told her second story of the night, which was less secret but more personal.

The loveseat was giving her an unpleasant chill by then, so she got up and paced as she told it.

Her mother had left them when Ella was three: young enough that half of what Ella remembered was what she’d been told.

The memories her father had pressed into her, carefully, like a potter working with clay on the verge of drying.

She’d left.

She hadn’t said why, or said anything at all.

Ella and her father had waited until it was obvious she wasn’t coming back, and then left town themselves for a couple of months, to stay with family until the talk died down.

Ella’s father had been so shamed and proud and sad that it took him years before he tried to find out what had happened to her, and by the time his investigation turned up any real news, they discovered Ella’s mother had died in the meantime.

Plague.

Nothing extraordinary.

All of this tale came out smoothly.

It had been pressed into Ella and then glazed and fired with the passage of time.

She’d carried only a small handful of grief around with her by the time her father married Patrice, and she’d been genuinely pleased for him when he did; and hopeful, for herself, that a larger family would be the embrace her oddness needed.

In life, Ella’s father had said, her mother liked to dance.

He’d said it when pointing out the many ways in which Ella fell short of the example of perfection her mother had been before the unfortunate imperfection of deserting them.

“I’m sorry,”

Jule said, when she fell silent.

Ella said.

“I think you could dance for me.

If you wanted.”

This was what she’d meant to say, before she ended up talking about her mother instead.

It had been spinning within her since that morning, when she remembered Jule saying someone who might be magical enough to resist a curse.

She said.

“Because a fairy curse with a single object”—gesturing to Jule himself—“but a general subject doesn’t work on a ghost.

It wouldn’t have the same effect on me.”

One of Jule’s legs jerked.

Jule shoved it down and still with his own palm.

He swallowed twice and Ella watched the bob of his throat in the moonlight.

“I,”

he said.

“Even when you’re in a real body? In those shoes?”

But now his even-more-real body was a twanging rope, an urgent sway.

Like Ella when presented with Quaint’s bargain, he was looking for any reason to agree.

“If I’m wrong,”

said Ella, smiling.

“you can stab me.”

Jule hesitated only a moment longer before he fumbled to shove his trousers up his legs.

Ella looked away in case he needed to remove the garment entirely.

But it wasn’t long before there was a clink and Jule said, “There.”

Lying on the ground, the brace was like a pile of complicated horse harness.

Jule glanced at it with loathing.

“Stay there,”

he said to Ella. A plea.

“If you move, I’ll stop.

And I will have to stab you.”

Ella stepped onto the small circle of lawn and leaned back against the tree trunk, a silent promise and a solid reminder not to move.

She nodded.

Jule closed his eyes.

In the ballroom a new song began, as if the world had arranged it just so.

His fingers, sensitive to music, began to beat the time against the side of his leg.

His eyes opened again, fixed on Ella.

And then he began to dance.

It was nothing like the elegant, measured ballroom dances.

It was nothing like the folk dances that sprang up around bonfires during the harvest festival in rural towns like the one they’d stayed in after her mother left; except perhaps the dancing that Ella remembered only through sleep-blurred eyes, curled into her father’s coat, when the fires were burning low and the sound of the fiddle took on a wild, laughing edge and the shapes of couples grew closer and more sinuous.

Jule’s dance was only halfway like that.

And it was only halfway like ballet.

And altogether like nothing Ella had ever seen, like nothing she could have imagined, not even in her most feverish youthful nights or her most confused ghost-yearnings for the outsiders who’d trodden her floors.

After only a few moments Jule realised that Ella hadn’t moved.

An exhilarated, incredulous smile overcame him, and somehow the dancing became better.

Worse. More.

Jule’s limbs made achingly perfect shapes, held for the perfect amount of time; he was quick and precise or he was slow and boneless; he was dancing the way the thunderstorm had felt against Ella’s roof—he was thunder and lightning and the throat-closing beauty of charcoal clouds; he was the echoing din of water and the way the bottom fell out of the air.

He was something far too fine and hot to be touched and yet touching him was the only possible response.

Ella grasped her own fingers behind the tree.

She could feel the fairy’s curse: the pressing-close, the fiery heat of it, with a nose-prickling whiff of magic.

She could recognise it for what it was.

But despite Quaint’s bargain she was still a ghost and not a person, and so there was no real danger, only the awareness of lust, and love, washing over her without demand.

Wanting without compulsion.

And oh, she wanted.

Even without the curse she’d have wanted him.

But she did nothing but hold on to her fingers and watch.

The song came to an end.

Jule took a few moments longer to stop, accompanied by the scuff of his feet on the paving stones and the sound of his quickened breath.

He was very close to Ella; she could have reached out and touched with her fingertips the place peeking through the half-unlaced ribbons where his throat gleamed with sweat and his chest rose and fell.

His eyes glittered with the heartbreaking wildness of stars.

“Thank you,”

he gasped.

“I’ve not been able to, for so long—I’d forgotten—to dance without the fear! Doing it on my own is one thing, but being watched, having someone else here—that’s what makes it real, that’s what I love—”

“That was the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen,”

said Ella roughly.

Jule stepped even closer.

His gaze fell to her bodice and then dragged back up to her face.

Their eyes met and it hit low in Ella’s belly: an exquisite, audacious sting.

She forced herself not to move for the long, careful, unbearable moments it took for the realisation to fully settle in Jule’s face.

He was safe.

They were safe.

Ella was not going to touch him unless he touched her first. And Ella, who had wanted nothing more for years than to be touched and have someone to dance with, could accept this instead. Simply knowing she’d been able to give him a gift that nobody else could, and been able to see what nobody else could see—yes, there was a glorious, selfish pleasure in that.

But they were safe, and alone.

And it was not yet midnight.

“Dance with me,”

Ella said. “Please.”

This time, when Jule’s hands landed on her waist and closed around her own, it was perfect.

Ella could barely hear the music over her needy breath and even needier heart, but it didn’t matter: Jule was all the music her body needed to obey.

This was dancing.

It didn’t matter that Ella was dead or that somewhere a clock was ticking down the minutes.

They danced and so they existed perfectly in the present, sweeping the grass and the air aside like so much dust, in circles that both lasted forever and ended too soon; ended with Ella, breathless and burning, collapsing back against the tree where she’d begun.

She looked up at Jule.

She wanted to thank him in return, but she could only laugh.

He was laughing too, his mouth a generous stream slowly trickling into something more serious.

His hands bracketed her waist and Ella felt like a jewel.

A mirror to his joy and to his building black-eyed look of unmagical need.

Inside, the smell of bodies had been a confusion mingled with perfume.

Now, distinct among the garden smells, she could smell him.

Amazing, unfathomable, that living people walked around all day wearing themselves on their skin like they were being squeezed for it.

Ella wanted to roll it around her mouth.

Her core was molten.

“Ella,”

said Jule, like someone drowning, “can I—”

No past, no future.

Ella buried her fingers in his hair and dragged his face all the way close and brought his mouth down to hers, just as she’d put her mouth to the first bites of juice-dripping plum and sweet shortbread.

It was clumsy at first.

Ella had only instinct and romance stories to guide her, and all the strangeness of flesh rang in her anew.

To feel lust with only this soft funny frame was so unlike what she’d thought it might be, and so good.

The tree behind her helped: it was wood, it was solid, and it held her in place so that she could feel the glorious shock of Jule turning equally hard against her stomach.

She bit his lip and tasted her own selfishness.

He growled against the soft skin of her neck and then kissed her there, teeth and tongue, and Ella was a boiling muddle of everything she’d ever read and everything she wanted.

The coronet in Jule’s hair was a warm etched band of metal.

One of his own hands was at her jaw, and the other firm at the side of her rib cage now, cupping her breast, the nail of one thumb a sudden scratch against bare skin.

Despite it all, a small part of Ella was tensed for the chime of midnight.

Surely, this was too good to be real.

It would be snatched away at any second.

The urgency of that thought made her even bolder.

Bold enough to find her voice and whisper to Jule what she wanted, and to help him to lift her skirts, and to grab his hand and put it where she wanted it.

That too was awkward to begin with.

But this was a partnered dance and Jule was a dancer.

His long fingers learned quickly how to move and how to listen to the music of Ella’s hitched breath, and change their rhythm in response, and move some more.

Pleasure built and crested and ebbed, and left Ella trembling.

“I,”

she gasped, “I want—”

and yanked at the front of Jule’s shirt where it was tucked into his trousers.

She wanted that again, but she wanted more of him; she wanted her hands on another human body’s skin.

Jule gave a joyful little burst of laughter and let Ella’s skirts fall so he could fumble for the ribbons and buttons which were in their way.

Then his shirt was off and on the ground and Ella could not only touch his skin, bury her nose in that scent, she could taste it.

She wanted to bite him.

She settled for rubbing her mouth incoherently back and forth beneath his collarbone, reaching her hand down where his trousers were straining.

Jule groaned outright—Ella could feel the buzz of it on her bruised lips—and his hips bucked against her—

Someone cleared their throat, loudly.

Jule sprang away.

Ella tried yet again to melt into the tree.

The light from the globe shone attractively on Princess Nadya’s jewelled headband.

She stood in the middle of the courtyard with her hands clasped in front of her; she might have been posing for a portrait, but nothing about her was demure.

Only controlled, like a clock spring held in position.

So Jule’s guards had chosen to let his future wife intrude on what they had assumed was his moment of solitude.

Or maybe they hadn’t had a choice at all.

Ella didn’t know what kinds of sorcery Nadya could wield.

Jule scrambled to pick up his shirt.

“Nadya—Your Highness—”

“Your Highness,”

said Princess Nadya, quiet and dry.

“I beg your—”

“We are not betrothed.

Unless certain final negotiations have been taking place in my absence.”

She had the air of someone leaning over the side of a barge with a rope, and Jule seized it at once.

His face appeared, still flushed, through the neck of his shirt.

“No.

Yes.

Even so.

I do beg your pardon.”

“As do I,”

said Ella.

She had no regret at all, but perhaps some guilt.

Jule wasn’t for her.

“I’m sorry I stole him away.

We really did have a conversation half-finished.”

Princess Nadya inspected Ella, who fumbled to smooth down her own skirts.

A dark eyebrow rose in an achingly perfect arc.

“So I gather,”

said the princess, even more dryly.

Her Cajarac accent was like a coating of dark, hardened amber-sugar on candied fruit.

“Come here.”

“Come…?”

Nadya beckoned impatiently, and Ella, uncertain if she was about to be slapped for impertinence, walked over to where Nadya stood.

She had to step over Jule’s discarded brace as she went.

“There’s something…”

Nadya frowned.

If Ella were to commit to the way her leftover lust was swinging itself back and forth like a witless weathervane, she might have said, There’s something about you, too.

Were you going to slap me, just now? You can.

I suspect I’d enjoy it.

In fact Nadya did reach out toward Ella’s face.

Ella’s jawline thrilled in the beautiful moment when there was only a sliver of air between them.

And then Nadya’s skin met hers, and Ella’s knees nearly buckled.

Not with lust any longer—but with magic.

Princess Nadya was a sorcerer, of course, she knew that.

But there was knowing and then there was this. The magic felt both like Greta’s and unlike it, and it was turbulent and purposeful up close: like Ella truly had been pinned in place, her wings fluttering, and was being inspected.

Nadya sucked in a breath.

Her fingers dropped.

“You’re dead,”

Nadya said.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

Suddenly her magic was a threat, and Ella wasn’t going to stay to work out if she was only imagining it.

A human sorcerer could do more to a ghost than a fairy could.

She still had one more night.

She couldn’t let herself be trapped, or banished, or hurt, or—whatever it was that Nadya, with her simmering power and her frowning eyes, was preparing to do.

For the second night in a row, Ella bolted.

* * *