“That’s true. But things change. Even if I don’t—well, never you mind that.” Amina seems flustered.
We are all shaken by what we’ve seen: the vague notions of a future beyond our control despite our best efforts to change the present. Constance moves to the piles of blankets next to the fire and stares up at the ceiling.
“Try to get some rest,” Amina says solemnly. She puts away her pipe and goes to her straw mat in the corner.
I curl up on a thick blanket next to Constance. We tuck in by the warmth of the crackling fire. Constance dozes off easily while I watch the fire die. I wait nervously for sleep to find me, fearing the king will be lurking in my head.
When I finally drift off, I fall into a dreamless, heavy sleep, but even then, I am thankful to see the sun rise the following morning.
27
The sense of foreboding that shadows me grows stronger as the day comes to begin our journey to Cinderella’s final resting place. The larger cart is still parked at the entrance to the footpath, but because our horse was killed by the wolves, we won’t be able to use it. We pack everything we need for the trip, including a live rabbit that Constance caught in a snare just behind the cottage. She puts it in a wooden cage and sets it in the back of a hand-drawn cart. I avoid looking at it. I know its fate.
Amina walks around the cart, carrying a stack of books. I glance at the book of spells. The cover is crisscrossed with fine lines that look almost exactly like the ones on my palm. It’s not leather at all. It’s human skin.
Fear stirs deep inside me, reminding me that Amina is no fairy godmother. She studies me for a moment and then holds out the book. I don’t want to touch it, but she puts it in my hands. A smell wafts into my face—the scent of death. “Amina, how did you make this?”
“I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you,” Amina says.
Constance’s head whips around, and I take a step back.
Amina grins. “Just having a little fun.” She takes the book and tucks it in the cart. “That story is for another day.”
Constance loads the rest of our things, and we set out on foot. Amina leads us down a narrow but passable pathway that is hidden behind the cabin and snakes around to the spot where we had to leave the big cart.
“I wish we’d known about this path when we showed up,” Constance says.
“I bet you do,” Amina says.
A rancid odor, like the one emanating from the spell book, hits the back of my throat as we step out onto the main trail. Our horse lies on its side. Buzzards and other wild animals have picked nearly all the flesh from its bones. I look away.
Amina leads us through the White Wood, her crow familiar swooping in every so often and then taking off again. We don’t stop to make camp for longer than an hour or two. Just time enough to eat and rest. The ritual needs to be performed on the next moonless night, which gives us only three days to make a trip that normally would have taken at least four on horseback.
Somehow, when we emerge from the White Wood, we have time to spare, and I wonder if the sleepy confusion Constance and I felt when we’d first gone in was some kind of enchantment. Amina stays mum when I ask her, but her little twisted smile is telling.
Three guards patrol the open space between the towers as we crouch low to the ground, watching them. I wonder if Constance might need to bring out one of her bombs, but I don’t have time to ask. Amina is walking straight ahead into the clearing.
“What is she doing?” Constance asks, her dagger drawn.
We squat in the dirt, staying quiet as Amina approaches the group of guards. One of them draws his sword, and I start to run after her when her hand juts out in front of her. The guard drops his weapon. It looks like she is speaking to them. She holds her hand near her face and gives a quick, hard puff. A cloud of a shimmering silver powder engulfs them, and they sink to the ground.
Constance turns to me. “What the hell just happened?”
Amina motions for us to join her.
“Did she—did she kill them?” Constance stammers.
I walk out into the clearing with Constance at my heel. The guards are slumped on top of each other, their eyes closed, breathing heavily.
“What did you do?” I ask as we approach Amina, who stands grinning at the foot of the lookout tower.
“A little sleeping dust to send them to dreamland.” She holds up a small leather pouch.
“I’ve had a hard time sleeping,” I say. “I could have used some of that.”
One of the men shrieks and rolls over on his side, whimpering.
“It brings nightmares,” says Amina. “The kind you never forget. The kind that haunt you even in your waking hours.”
Constance and I exchange glances.
“Okay, never mind,” I say.
“You should have turned them into mice,” Constance says.
“Maybe next time,” Amina says.
We’ve reentered the capital’s borders, and passing between the watchtowers brings with it a new and terrible sense of dread. We avoid the main road, instead taking a wagon path that loops around the outskirts of the city. As we walk along the road, wagon wheels sound on the gravel right before a horse-drawn cart comes to a stop alongside us.
“Looking for a ride?” asks the driver.
“No,” says Constance, sounding annoyed. She doesn’t even look up.
I tilt my head, trying to get a look at the driver from under my cap. His face twists into a mask of confusion when our eyes meet.
“It’s really dangerous for you to be walking around here, dressed like that.” He takes a swig of something from a flask at his hip.
I can’t tell if he’s threatening us or not.
“Leave us alone,” Constance says. She narrows her eyes at him and angles herself between us. I look for Amina, but she has disappeared.
The man holds his hands up. “Now just wait a minute. I’m not saying anything except it’s dangerous. I can give you a ride. Just hop in.”
Constance’s hand moves to her dagger, and the man glances at her.
He scratches the top of his head. He is completely confused. “Do you even know how to use a sword? Women aren’t permitted to—”
“The pointy end goes in your neck,” Constance snaps.
I catch Amina at the back of the cart, dumping something into the little flask that the man had on his hip just a moment before. She disappears again.
“I hate to be the one to tell you this, but if the king’s men see you with a sword, dressed like that, they will arrest you on sight.” He smiles, but a look of concern has overtaken him. He reaches for his flask and I tense, worried he’ll know it’s missing, but it has reappeared on his belt. He takes a long drink. “I’m just trying to—trying to—help.”
He is stumbling over his words as his body sways like a tree in a storm. He clutches at his neck, clearing his throat repeatedly, sweat dripping from his forehead. He leans over the edge of the cart as the pupils of his eyes expand into inky black voids. I yank Constance backward just as his eyes roll up into his head, and he falls headlong into the dirt. He groans, rolls over on his side, and sputters before beginning to snore. Amina appears at the side of the cart, holding the man’s flask.
“Belladonna.” She gives the flask a little shake and tosses it at the man, hitting him between the eyes. He doesn’t move.
“Will he die?” I ask. “I don’t think he meant us any harm.”
“No. I used juice from the berries, not the root,” Amina says. “Hear that snore? He’ll have a headache, but he’ll live. We can’t take the chance of him telling someone he saw us. When he wakes up, he won’t remember a thing.”
“You’re sure?” I ask, feeling a slight stab of pity for the man.
Amina looks thoughtful. “If I had a seeing stone, I could tell you for sure, since you seem so concerned.” She sighs as she begins to transfer our belongings into the man’s cart. “But I haven’t come across one of those in ages.”
“An alternative to the kind of divination we used at the pond,” Amina says. “An enchanted stone, polished up like a mirror. It can be used to see all sorts of things—the future, the present—but they are exceedingly rare.”
“I heard a tale when I was little about a queen in another kingdom who had a seeing stone,” says Constance. “A magic mirror, but I think it drove her mad. She became obsessed with her reflection and the visions she saw in it.”
“I know that story well,” says Amina. “And much like our own tale, it’s not exactly what it seems. The reflective power of the glass is a seductive thing. It can show you things that need interpretation, or it can reveal the truth as it is. It can be maddening trying to decipher what you see, but it’s important to understand that it’s only a reflection. The things shown within it are not always set in stone.”
“The story of that queen says she tried to kill her own child. She said the mirror told her to,” Constance says.
“But the mirror would not have told her to do so if it weren’t already in her heart,” Amina says. “It was a shameful turn of events. How did you learn of it?”
“The story about the magic mirror?” Constance asks.
“Yes,” Amina says. “It’s a very old story.”
“I have it,” Constance says. She goes to her bag and pulls out the book she’d been lugging around this entire time. The pages are yellowed around the edges, and some of them are detached from the spine and just stuck between the others. Constance hands the book to Amina, and she flips through the pages as we climb into the cart, Constance at the reins.
“Where in the world did you get this?” Amina asks. I’ve seen nothing that has shaken her to her core quite like this. She’s trembling as she looks through it.
“It’s been in my family forever,” says Constance. “Handed down by Gabrielle herself.”
I suddenly feel like I’m looking at a relic, a magical object not unlike the enchanted slippers or even the remains of Cinderella herself.
“It’s a collection of peculiar stories,” says Constance. “Put together by two sisters who spent the entirety of their lives traveling the world in search of strange tales. The story of the queen with the magic mirror is there, so vain she could not suffer anyone to be prettier than she. ‘The White Snake,’ ‘The Two Brothers’—they’re all here in these pages. Of course Cinderella’s story is there, too.” She points to a piece of parchment stuck between the pages at the back. Amina turns to the story.
I haven’t read the story since before the ball, but as I peer down at the book, something catches my eye.
“The drawings,” I say. “They’re so different from the palace-approved version of the story.”
“Indeed,” says Amina. She studies the images and then glances up as the cart bounces on the uneven dirt road. She inhales sharply, and I follow her gaze. The palace comes into view over a sloping hill. As much as I hate looking back at Lille, seeing the castle ahead is worse. Trepidation looms over me as we ride closer.
Amina tucks the book into the bed of the cart as Constance brings us to a stop near where I emerged from the woods on the night I escaped from the ball. Constance unhitches the horse, and we push the cart into the brush on the side of the road where no one will see it. We tie the horse to a tree a little farther in.
“We’ll cut through this way,” says Constance, ducking into the tree line.
Amina follows her in, carrying her supplies, but I hang back for a moment. The sun nestles into the horizon, casting an orange-yellow glow through the sky. That familiar movement of the setting sun is the only predictable thing that still holds any sense of wonder for me. Everything else in my life that was meant to be predictable has irrevocably changed. One decision and a turn of miraculous events have set my life on a new and uncertain path.
Out the corner of my eye, I see Amina standing so still she might have been mistaken for a shadow by a passerby. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t move. She simply watches intently as I honor the feeling inside myself that told me to wait, to watch the sunset, and to realize that something is shifting.
We navigate the woods by the dying light; long shadows cast in the confines of the forest make ghosts of the trees, and we come upon the tomb, shrouded in complete darkness. Constance guides us here with barely an upward glance, which makes me wonder how many times she has made this perilous trek.
The grand marble structure looms large in the dark. My life had been forever changed the last time I was here, and I hope that the same will be true of this night. I try to calm the racing of my heart as we slip inside.
Amina walks to the rear of the tomb, to the little alcove where the glass slippers are housed. “It’s been so long,” she says in a whisper.
The glow from the enchanted shoes dances across the walls of the tomb like sunlight reflecting off the surface of a pond. The entire enclosure is bathed in a soft blue-white light, much brighter than when I’d been here the first time.
Amina takes the sachets from her bag, along with several small jars, and hands them to me. Red ochre, burned myrrh, wormwood juice, and powdered evergreen leaves. I spoon them out in the proper proportions and mix them together in a glass jar. Constance fumbles with a piece of parchment that has been folded into a makeshift envelope where a single flax leaf is stored. I gently take the paper from her hands.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m shaken up all of a sudden.”
I put my hand on her arm. “It’s going to be okay.”
Amina walks up to the marble coffin, and we gather around her.
“We’ll need to push the lid back,” says Amina, looking at me questioningly.
I place my hands on the lid. Constance sets her still-trembling hands beside mine, and the three of us push. It doesn’t budge.
“Again,” Amina says.
“It’s not going to work,” says Constance. “It’s too heavy.”
“We have to open it,” says Amina, and a sense of urgency fills her voice. A little stab of panic. We are forbidden to be here. I don’t know if the king has his guards anywhere close by, but if they find us here, we’re dead.
“We have to lever it,” I say. I run outside to search for a large, sturdy branch. I find one thicker around than my arm and bring it back inside. “We’ll need to break a piece of the marble off and wedge this inside, and then we can slide it open.”
Constance hurries out and returns with a stone the size of a small melon. She holds it up and brings it down hard at the corner of the lid. It breaks off, sending a shower of chipped pieces to the floor. I put the stick in the jagged hole, and we all lean on it. Groaning, the lid slides completely away from Cinderella’s head, so it sits at an angle across the coffin. In the dim light emanating from the glass slippers, particles of dust float all around us, and the smell of lavender and jasmine permeates the air.
Constance leans in to look at what remains, gasping sharply. I peer in, afraid of what I might see. A mass of ringlets, silver to the point of shimmering, peek out from beneath a silken shroud, which has decayed around the edges. The outline of a body lies underneath. This is all that is left of the fabled princess.
“Remove the burial shroud,” says Amina, glancing at Constance.
Constance hesitates, her hands trembling at the edge of the open coffin. She slowly reaches in and pulls the cloth away. I clasp my hand over my mouth. Amina’s eyes grow wide, and her mouth opens into a little O.
Constance shakes her head. “This can’t be right. What is this?”
28
Cinderella was thirty-eight when she died, and she’s been in this coffin for almost two hundred years. She should be bones and dust, but Cinderella lies, hands crossed over her chest, as if she is sleeping. Decay hasn’t touched her, but something else has.
Her hair is so white it is nearly transparent. Her face is crisscrossed with a road map of lines, and her eyelids droop down in paper-thin folds. Her h
ands are withered, the nails yellowed and cracked, and every inch of her skin is a pallid gray color. Her appearance is almost identical to Liv’s the morning the palace guards hauled her up out of the ditch.
“It’s not right,” Constance says, shaking her head. “Why does she look like this? This isn’t what a body should look like at all.”
I cover Constance’s hand with mine. I don’t know what to say.
Amina reaches into the folds of her cloak and takes out a bundle of mugwort held together with twine. She lights the end, and a thick, earthy-smelling smoke clouds the confines of the tomb. She then tucks her sachets all around Cinderella’s body. “Sophia, prepare the ink.”
Giving Constance’s hand one last squeeze, I add a vial of rainwater to the jar where I’d mixed the powders. After stirring the contents, I hand it to Amina, along with the flax leaf. Constance grips the side of the coffin. She doesn’t look away from Cinderella. Amina carefully writes on the leaf with a quill and the freshly prepared ink.
Reaching into the coffin, Amina gently pulls Cinderella’s mouth open, placing the leaf inside. Turning and kneeling at the foot of the sarcophagus, she motions for us to join her. I take Constance by the arm and guide her away. She seems to be in some kind of trance.
“Come,” says Amina. “Sit down here. It will be all right.” It is the most comforting thing she’s ever said to Constance in my presence, and still it is a bit gruff. We kneel at Amina’s side.
She takes out the grimoire and, using a pair of silver shears, clips the ribbons that hold the pages together near the end of the book. The book falls open along a crack in the wax seal. She runs her fingers through the pages and stops when she comes to what she is looking for.
Scrawled across the two open pages are ingredients, the phases of the moon, and the instructions for the spell. There are sketches of a freshly opened grave, a flower, its petals pressed flat by the pages, crumbling and rotted. At the bottom of the page there are words written in red ink.
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