“Be sure to listen to Serge, Jasper. He’s the only one around here with a lick of common sense — which is why, eventually, the Slipper will be his.” Jules gave Serge a wink. “I’m getting tired of this big chair, and there’s no one better suited to take my place.”
She had said it so many times that Serge had almost learned to curb his longing. Almost. His eyes roamed the penthouse as he imagined himself behind the glass desk, making the real decisions. Two new pairs of slippers stood on a long, slim table beside the window wall. He squinted at them.
“Whose are those?”
“Georgette’s,” Jules replied. “She said they were ready for my signature. Why?”
“Because I’ve never seen them.”
“Oooh,” sang Jules softly, laughing. “Look out, Jasper. Georgette was Serge’s apprentice before you, and I’m sure he told her the rule.”
“What rule?”
“I have the final say on all slippers,” said Serge, picking up a glass ankle boot and inspecting it for flaws. “Nothing goes on any client’s foot without my approval.” He couldn’t help a little hiss of revulsion. “These toes,” he said. “The shape. I can’t.”
“So change them,” said Jules. “You always do.”
He always did. The Glass Slipper was so named because glass slippers were the symbols of mortals’ most extraordinary dreams. Shoes so fragile and splendid that without magic, they were impossible. Glass slippers had to be breathtaking. Visionary. But these slippers were no such thing.
Serge thought of Georgette. She was a proud young fairy, and even though he detested her sense of style, he could empathize with her sense of pride. He shut his eyes to concentrate on that flicker of compassion and he closed his fist. He was just barely able to draw a fine layer of fairy dust to the surface of his palms, and he used a little bit of it to fix the offensive toes. When they were slimmer and longer, more exaggerated and artistic, he could almost relax — but the heels still looked clunky and empty. It only took a few final grains of dust to slenderize the glass stems and fill them with dark gray, swirling smoke. Jasper murmured appreciatively, and Serge smoothed his plume of hair, hoping that neither Jules nor Jasper could see how much effort that had cost him.
“There,” he said, and he plunked the now-stylish boots down on Jules’s desk so that she could affix the signature glass dots she loved so much. Serge hated the little dots — they marred his designs. But Jules was the one fairy at the Slipper whose taste he was not permitted to correct.
“Does anyone get to do their own slippers?” Jasper asked. “I could make a pair you’d like. I’m sure I could.”
Serge raised an eyebrow. “Prove it. Fix these.”
Jasper joined him at the table and picked up Georgette’s second pair of slippers: red with black polka dots. “Ladybugs,” he murmured. “But the insect trend is over. It’s all about transparent details now.”
“Good. So what would you do?”
Jasper steepled his crimson fingernails together. He giggled. As he gazed at the slippers, the black dots shifted and shrank until they looked like very small, inky fish. And then, to Serge’s surprise and envy, the little fish began to swim within the red glass, schooling first on one side of the slipper and then on the other, swimming into the toe and then filling up the heel.
“Brilliant,” cried Jules. “Serge, you wouldn’t dare change that.”
“No. They’re flawless.”
“Perhaps you’ve finally met your match,” she said, grinning wickedly. “Oh dear. And for so long you’ve had no real competition. How exciting to see an apprentice giving my seasoned executive a run for his money.”
Serge set his jaw. A faint blush stained Jasper’s pale cheeks.
“Now, Jasper,” said Jules, “are you ready to make somebody’s wish come true?”
“Do you mean I can get a name? From the List?”
“Serge, show him.” Jules relaxed back into her chair.
The List stood against the high glass window. It wasn’t a scroll or a book, as Serge had expected upon his first visit; instead, it was a white stone obelisk, chest-height and slender, with a concave top. In this white basin, small orbs of blue light rotated slowly.
“What do I do?” Jasper whispered as they approached it.
“Put your hand in the basin. It will release the scroll with the most urgent client history.”
“Urgent,” Jasper repeated, glancing at him. “So the child who needs help most will come up first? That’s what we learned at the Academy.”
Serge nodded, though the truth was that the List was bought and paid for these days. There wasn’t a child on it — besides the ones Gossamer sneaked through now and again — who was in truly dire need.
Jasper peered into the basin. He looked back at Jules.
And then he did something that Serge did not expect.
“Bejeweled?” Jasper’s voice shot up nervously. “Earlier you said something about a charity case that came up tonight, and I was just wondering — will that name be assigned to anyone?”
Jules raised her pale eyebrows. “Never mind that,” she said. “Choose a name.”
“It’s just,” said Jasper, “that if there’s someone who isn’t getting served because they couldn’t pay — well, I’m just an apprentice, so wouldn’t I be a good fit?”
“I don’t want to kill the illusion on your first day, babe,” said Jules, smiling, “but the cruel reality is that we can’t help everyone. If we aren’t paid, then we can’t do what we do.”
It was, as Gossamer had said, pure nonsense. But Serge said nothing.
“Of course,” said Jasper, nodding, “That’s life — but could I see the contract anyway? The client contract, for that name? I’d love to read the history.”
“I already sent it out.”
“Isn’t that it right there?” Jasper pointed to a dark green scroll that sat alone, half unrolled, near the corner of Jules’s desk.
Jules was caught off guard. “I guess it is,” she said with forced casualness. “Sure. Read it.”
Jasper took up the scroll and unrolled it to peer down at the silvery script. “Elegant Herringbone Coach,” he read. “Goes by Ella. That’s pretty, isn’t it? Listed by her mother, who died two years ago of roop. Mother’s reason for listing the daughter …”
Jasper unrolled the scroll further. He scanned it for a minute without speaking, and then he looked up. “I want this one,” he said.
Jules merely took another drink. “Stick to the List,” she said.
“The only reason I would even dare to contradict you,” Jasper said, “is that I look up to you so much. You’d never give up a client if your instincts told you not to. You’d break all the rules, I just know you would — and I want to be just like you. Please let me try.”
He could not have played Jules more perfectly, and Serge began to wonder whether his apprentice’s enthusiastic childishness was merely an act. A very good act.
Jules burst out laughing so hard that she nearly spilled her drink. “You are just too much,” she said. “Just too much. But we have our little systems for a reason. It looks like you’re not quite ready for a name after all.”
Jasper looked crestfallen, and even Serge was disappointed. For a minute there, he’d thought his apprentice might actually crack her.
“Don’t be glum, babe,” said Jules. “Stick with Serge for a while before you draw your own name. You’ll catch on.”
Jules held out her blue hand for Ella Coach’s contract, and Jasper relinquished the scroll with a tiny sigh. Jules flicked the contract into a crystal tray at the corner of her desk, where it sat with several others among the rest of her correspondence.
“Now,” she said, sitting back again with her drink in hand. “I need a little time to think. Serge, stop by tomorrow, would you? Alone. No offense, Jasper, but our most exclusive clients expect total discretion. This business is highly confidential.” She swiveled around in her chair to face the moonlit sea.
All they could see of her now were her little blue wings protruding through the oval hole in the back of her seat. The meeting was over.
Serge beckoned for Jasper to follow him. He strode to the Slingshot, opened the door, and turned back just in time to glimpse his apprentice tucking the edge of something up into the cuff of his sleeve. Something dark green and rolled up.
SHE rode her borrowed horse hard along the main road that paralleled the shore, heading for Eel Grass. Kit could not be right. Ella’s dad might’ve married a quint; he might’ve started dressing in the latest fashions and acting like a different person, but he would not destroy their old home without her knowing.
The salt wind cut across her face, but she didn’t slow down until she came to the steep, rocky slope that led down from the outskirts of Salting into the northernmost corner of Eel Grass. The horse shied back, unwilling to hurry down the hillside, but Ella knew the way. She carefully maneuvered her ride to the bottom of the slope, where her home should have stood.
Should have. Didn’t.
The old cott and the small field they’d generously called a farm were gone. The only thing left that Ella recognized was a grassy patch of ground marked with a stone slab chiseled in the shape of a keyhole. Her mum’s grave marker. At the head of the plot where her mum was buried stood the tree her dad had planted there after he’d met Sharlyn, because it was some sort of Yellow Country custom to plant trees on the dead. That intrusion had been vicious enough.
This was worse. Looming over her mum’s grave, there now stood an enormous, drab, rectangular building made of stone. A notice had been pasted to the front wall of it, and Ella urged her horse forward until she came close enough to read it.
PRACTICAL ELEGANCE
Garment and Accessory Workshop
Seeking skilled tailors and assorted fine crafters.
Send employment inquiries to Lady Sharlyn Gourd-Coach
76 Cardinal Park East, Quintessential
Ella shivered despite the late-afternoon sunshine and the heat that radiated from the sweating horse beneath her. She gazed up at the workshop, but all she could see was her mum kneeling on a mat at Jacquard, hunched and squinting, her raw fingers spinning strand after strand of Prism silk into spools. Ella could still feel what it had been like to sit there in that place in the winter, aching with cold, her hands stiff and chapped. Summer had been nearly as bad; they’d been near fainting in that dank oven, perspiration rolling down their necks and the backs of their knees.
Her mouth tasted bitter as memories coursed through her. Her mum’s songs, hummed to make the working hours bearable. Her mum’s tough hands demonstrating how to comb raw wool or thread the embroidery needle. Her dad’s constant absence, and the way her mum had encouraged him to go. “He’s brilliant, Ell. One day people will see.” Running barefoot down to the seashore together. The bonfires they’d built. The swims they’d taken. The backbreaking work they’d done side by side, uncomplaining, because whatever else they didn’t have, they always had each other. Every year on Shattering Day, her mum and Mrs. Wincey would put colored lanterns all the way down the road, over the dune and down to the beach, almost until the sea could lick them.
And then roop swept through the workshops in Fulcrum.
Ella remembered the first wet cough. The way her mum had tried to mask it with Ubiquitous lozenges. Pretended it was just a common cold, even while she spat blood.
“Mum, please, you’ve got to rest. I can go to the shop and work for you—”
“You get to school. I’ll kick this, I promise you.”
But she hadn’t. No one recovered from roop unless they rested and got proper care. Her mum hadn’t been able to afford either one.
Now her dad and Sharlyn could afford whatever they wanted.
Ella gazed up at the awful stone thing that stood in her mum’s place, and then she slumped forward over her horse’s neck and sobbed.
“You all right?” Kit asked anxiously when Ella returned to the Corkscrew. “You were gone almost three hours.”
“I’m fine, grats,” said Ella, though she was not fine. Her home was gone. Her mum’s grave was defiled. “Could I talk to Tallith now? Want to make sure I get this job.” She was never going back to Quintessential. She couldn’t stand to look her dad in his rotten, quinty face.
Kit led her into the kitchen, where Tallith stood at the wooden worktop, chopping fish and tossing it into a kettle. At Kit’s introduction, she turned and wiped her hands on her apron, pushed back her yellow curls, and surveyed Ella.
“So you’re Kit’s friend from the city, hey?” she said. “She speaks highly enough of you. Swears you’re a hard worker.”
“I am,” said Ella, who was struck once more by the familiarity of Tallith’s face. She’d seen her before — and not just in the Criers.
“And you’re looking for what?”
“Any job,” said Ella. “With room and board if I can get it.”
“I need another pair of hands on the evening shift. Six in the evening to four in the morning. You’d be preparing the boarding rooms upstairs, washing up the supper and drinks dishes, mopping up the tavern when it closes, clearing down the kitchen, and setting up for the breakfast shift. Probably some laundry too.”
“I can do that.”
“You’ll start tomorrow night. Eat and sleep here, work the three-month trial period, and if I’m happy with you at the end of it, I’ll employ you long term. Deal?” Tallith stuck out her hand.
Before Ella could shake it, the kitchen door flew open with a bang. Guards in royal armor marched into the kitchen. They flanked Tallith and grabbed her arms with unnecessary force. Terror flashed in Tallith’s eyes, but her mouth closed in a hard line and she raised her chin.
Kit grabbed Ella by the back of her tunic and dragged her into a shadowy corner of the kitchen, where they stood together, still and silent.
“Tallith Poplin,” said the largest of the guards in a deep voice. “By order of His Majesty King Clement, you are under arrest for your actions as an accomplice in the disappearance of Her Majesty Queen Maud.”
Tallith’s cool expression fled. “Maudie’s gone?” she gasped. “What happened?”
“That’s nearly a convincing performance,” said the head guard. “But His Majesty believes you know the whereabouts of your sister. You can tell us what you know, or you can come with us to the dungeons.”
“Is Maud hurt?” Tallith demanded. “What has he done to her?”
“You’re speaking of your sovereign!” shouted the guard, and Tallith cried out as the back of his shining hand struck her across the jaw. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth. “Your establishment here will be closed down till further notice,” said the guard. “So it’s not just you who’ll suffer. All who are employed here will be out of a job until you confess what you know.”
Kit gripped Ella’s hand hard.
Tallith looked up at the guard in undisguised pain and confusion. “But I don’t know where she is,” she pleaded. “I swear it. I didn’t even know she was gone, hey? When did she disappear — can you tell me that, at least?”
“Her Majesty vanished from Coterie Preparatory School at breakfast time this morning,” said the guard. “She had a disguise, and a plan. She was running somewhere. Tell us where.”
All at once, like a shock of cold water through her blood, Ella remembered where she had seen a face like Tallith’s. It was the face of the maid in the carriage. The one who had been so kind to her and given her the big paste ring.
The genuine sapphire royal wedding ring.
Ella backed flat against the wall, as though by crushing her knapsack she could make the ring within it disappear. Her heart started beating like it wanted out of her chest; she was almost afraid the guards would hear it slamming against her ribs.
“Wait,” said Tallith softly, turning her face to her shoulder to rub away the blood that had dripped to her chin. “You don’t mean to say that Maud left him? Really left him?
On purpose?”
“I think you know what I mean.”
Tallith laughed — a sound of joy and vicious enjoyment both together. “She did,” she said. “Well then, take me to your dungeon. I don’t know anything, but even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you lot. There’s nothing I would say to put her back in that wretched palace.”
The head guard unlocked a length of chain from his belt. The two who held Tallith by the arms turned her roughly around and offered the head guard her wrists.
“Stop!” cried a breathless voice from the kitchen door. Every head in the kitchen turned to see a red-haired boy no older than Ella, dressed in royal livery and waving a scroll. He was sweaty and panting — he could barely gasp out his words. “By order of — His Majesty King Clement — stop the arrest!”
“What?” barked the head guard. He snatched the scroll from the boy’s hand and read it. His frown turned to a snarl. He crumpled the missive in his enormous fist. “Let her go,” he said, jaw clenched. “There’s to be no arrest.”
The guards instantly freed Tallith. The head guard surveyed the kitchen slowly, caressing the chain with his thumb as though he wished very much that he still had permission to use it. His eyes came to Kit and Ella. His gaze flicked to Ella’s tunic, his heavy eyebrows arched, and she realized, too late, that she had never unpinned her silver C-Prep brooch — the same miniature silver gate that all C-Prep students had to wear on campus to identify them as belonging to the school.
“You,” said the guard, advancing on her. “You’re from Coterie. Were you at school this morning?”
Ella nodded, terrified.
“So you were there when Her Majesty vanished — and now you’re here with Her Majesty’s sister. That’s no coincidence. What’s your name?”
Ella tried to speak and found that her throat was dry. “Ella Coach,” she whispered.
“Speak up,” the guard commanded, and he reached out and seized her by the wrist to drag her into the light.
Disenchanted: The Trials of Cinderella Page 5