Cinders: The Untold Story of Cinderella

by Finley Aaron

  Fairies, though small, have emotions as big as that of any human, and arguably bigger. And we squeeze all that fervor and passion into bodies which are ordinarily almost microscopic. Needless to say, this makes us as explosive as a spark in a room full of gunpowder. At this moment, as Ella was letting her sword droop, and her brother was scoring points, or almost scoring them, I began to glow brighter than usual, and to stomp on Ella’s cap, trying to goad her into remembering to fight, no matter how tired she felt.

  With all my attention focused on the fight, I let myself glow a little too bright, and buzz a bit too loudly. Who knows when Gustav first spotted me? Gongoozling gardyloo! I didn’t realize what a spectacle I’d made of myself until Gustav told the pair of them to stop, and he tromped between them and stared straight at me.

  He stared silently for one long second, holding his monocle up to his eye, blinking, looking without it, and then looking through it again. Finally, he laughed.

  It took all my restraint not to fly at Gustav and shush him (remember, I was already excited). But he’d chosen a moment when Ella and her brother were away from the others, practicing their skills in a clearing in the woods at a bit of distance from their camp, so there was no one to overhear, and the siblings decided it was time to let Gustav in on the secret.

  Once Gustav learned I was, indeed, a fairy, he quickly deduced the obvious (since only girls have fairy godmothers). And so Bertie and Ella confessed that Allard was really Ella. They made him promise to keep the secret, and he did.

  But kudzu and kittiwakes! Here I am, telling you about their traveling years, when we must get on with the story. All you really need to know of that time in Ella’s life was what came of it: she and her father and brother grew quite close—though of course, she always missed her mother when she was away, since Nora stayed behind to tend the house and horses. Ella learned skills that would become surprisingly helpful later in her life.

  The most significant thing to come out of the travels, at least in terms of its importance to the story (and this is where Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm did history a terrible disservice by cutting out facts they felt didn’t serve the storyline (but then, they thought the story was all about how pretty Cinderella looked, as if that was the most important thing about her (cockamamie codswallop!))) was that Bertie and Ella began to compete in tournaments.

  They started out playing at tournaments with other children, the same way children in other places play the popular games and sports of their culture. Just as children in your neighborhood might break into teams to play with a ball, Ella and Bertie and the children they met on the road played at tournament, and it became a well-established fact that the two brothers from Caprese were skilled riders and swordsmen.

  Most nights when they were traveling, they slept in their wagons at byways along the road, which were like campgrounds for you modern folk.

  At these campgrounds there were often other travelers, and many of these parties included children and teens who played at tournament with Bertie and Ella. Gustav would act as both coach and judge, along with some of the other elders, and the children would fight until all the sunlight had been drained from the sky, and sometimes, if their fires were bright enough and the sky clear and the moon full, they’d fight into the night.

  Over the years, Robert’s path had crossed many times with those of other merchants and travelers, and the children made friends with several of these folk, and were always excited when they encountered them again on future trips.

  It was one of these friends, an older boy named Rolf, who was gangly and freckled and not much good at swords, but passing fair at pole staffs and quite decent with any kind of arrow (I suspect he was slightly farsighted) who told Ella and Bertie about the first tournament. The events were to be held near the city they were headed towards already, and the timing was right that they’d be in town in time to participate. In addition to the regular men’s tournament for participants ages fourteen and older, there was to be a junior tournament open to those eight to thirteen years of age (Nora was ten at that time).

  To say the children were excited would be inadequate. Even I buzzed brightly at the news (though not so brightly Rolf might notice me—I did learn my lesson after Gustav). Their travels had been dull and their campgrounds rather empty of friends for a full week before that, so the news brightened their hearts all the more for the relief it brought to the streak of dismal days.

  Robert was not so keen on the idea. Oh, I saw his eyes brighten when he first heard word of the event. Anyone could tell he’d have loved to stay and watch.

  It was the idea of his children competing—especially his daughter, disguised as a boy, fantastic fighter though she was—that made him frown and shake his head at the thought. “Let’s discuss it inside the wagon,” he told the children, well mindful that Rolf and the other travelers could not be allowed to hear his biggest argument against participation—that Allard was a girl.

  The children, who were raised to be obedient anyway, and who knew exactly why their father didn’t want to speak openly about his concerns, followed their father into the clapboard wagon, which was only soundproof as long as no one yelled.

  “Tournaments are for men and boys,” Robert reminded his children in a heavy whisper once the wagon door was securely shut.

  “It’s not fair if only I can participate,” Bertie argued. He knew full well his sister was at least as good as he was at most events, and notably better at swords. Like the others, including Gustav, he’d often wondered how they’d fare if pitted against other junior fighters in a real tournament. Based on how they did against their fellow travelers, he supposed they’d perform rather well.

  But he couldn’t know for sure unless they actually entered the tournament.

  After a long silent frown, Robert concluded, “Then neither of you should enter. I don’t want you getting hurt. Men die in tournaments sometimes, you know. I won’t risk that.”

  “Men die in real tournaments,” Ella noted. “This is a junior tournament. It’s specifically made for children, which we are. It’s safer than the real thing.”

  Robert nodded solemnly, and looked Ella full in the face with apology brimming like unshed tears in his eyes. “That doesn’t change who you are.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be who I am!” Ella’s voice got louder than a whisper.

  Her father quieted her with a look. “Your mother used to say the same thing. She said it for years, especially when they told her she couldn’t inherit Caprese because she wasn’t a man. But if she hadn’t been who she is, she wouldn’t have married me and we wouldn’t have you, and what good would Caprese be then, if we didn’t have the two of you to share it with?”

  “What good are the two of us,” Bertie countered, “if we don’t get to do anything? If we don’t get to live? Come on—if we can’t enter the tournament, that’s the same as not having any children at all!” His voice got a bit loud, too, but he didn’t care, and he hadn’t said anything anyone on the outside wouldn’t have expected him to say.

  “Yes!” Ella added, also not very quietly. “What’s the point of even having children if you’re going to keep them locked away? If you don’t let us live, we might as well be dead.”

  I flew up to a knothole in one of the higher clapboards and peeked out. The others had gone on their way and weren’t really listening, anyway.

  By the time I flew down, the tears in Robert’s eyes were no longer unshed. “You two and your mother mean more to me than anything, than everything else in all the world.” He took a great breath and sniffed away his tears. “Nothing brings me more joy than to see the two of you doing what you love. You’re right, I suppose, though the thought of what could happen to you terrifies me. You’re put on this earth to live. So live. Fight. You have my blessing.”

  With that, the children tackled their father with hugs and kisses, thanking him and assuring him they would be fine, and probably safer in the long run, for all they
’d learn at the tournament that would help them improve their fighting skills.

  So the children competed. It was just a few events that first tournament, but they did well—even Gustav was impressed, and he’d tutored many a knight in his time. They made friends at that tournament and the next and the next, and those friends made sure to keep them always informed of more contests and when and where, so that Robert’s days became half chasing down tournaments, and half merchant trade.

  It wasn’t so good for them financially, but he wasn’t about to complain.

  Over the course of many contests, the children tried all manner of sports, and learned they weren’t nearly as good with arrows as with swords. After a year of success and no serious injuries (Ella did once wrench her pinkie finger awfully hard, and Bertie got a bruised rib several times, since he tended to focus overmuch on the kinds of offensive maneuvers which left his sides unguarded) their father let them try the mounted melee.

  The melee, for those of you who’ve never had the fortune to watch one, is a kind of mock battle where two sides rush one another, and fight using lances and swords until all the riders on one side are dismounted. It’s a true testing of skill, but it’s also the place where participants are most likely to be injured, though of course in the junior tournament, all the weapons are made of wood—unlike the real tournament, where swords are blunted, but otherwise real.

  The most common and ugliest injuries in the melee are the tramplings. But, as Ella and Bertie argued until their father finally consented to let them try it, the only ones who ever got trampled were those who were knocked from their horses. Since the siblings had learned to ride before they even quite knew how to walk (with Nora for their mother, you might expect that), they could stick to their mounts better than many men could stick to their own feet.

  So Robert relented, and the children soon proved to be exceptionally good at mounted melee—so much so that their father eventually allowed them to also participate in the foot melee (technically safer than mounted, since there were no horses to trample anyone, as Bertie pointed out while his father rolled his eyes and sighed).

  In the course of a few years, the children became so good at the sport that Ella (or Allard, as she was known in the circuit) made a name for herself (himself) as being one of the best fighters to watch as she approached her fourteenth year.

  But fourteen wasn’t just the age at which boys became men, as far as tournaments were concerned.

  It was also the age at which girls were expected to put aside childish things, and focus on becoming women.

  The birthday loomed, for Ella, like a guillotine, threatening to cut off everything in life that made her life worth living. For not only would she no longer be allowed to compete, or even to practice the sports she loved so much (not even her indulgent father would let her fight in the ring with grown men), but it was at that age that girls of her station were sent away to become handmaids, or ladies-in-waiting, in other households.

  More than anything, Ella dreaded being sent away from the family she loved, to a place where she would be expected to act, not just like a girl, but like a lady.

  And though her parents and I all knew the transition would be a difficult one for her, none of us could see any way around it.

  Fairies may be able to work magic, but we’re otherwise bound by the same rules as everyone else, and I knew of no enchantment that would save Ella from becoming a handmaid.

  Just as concerning—because no amount of skill with the sword would make up for lack of feminine refinement—I had no magic that would make her a lady.

  Chapter Four

  This, I suppose, is where Cinderella’s story properly begins. All I’ve told you so far is background, but it’s the very background Perrault and the Grimms skipped over, which is why their stories so completely failed to capture what really happened between Cinderella and the prince. So this is precisely the background you need to know in order to understand (to really understand) Cinderella’s story.

  While I’m on the subject, I imagine the Grimms never knew any of the parts I’ve related thus far, since Perrault had failed to include so much, and he and those who came between were the Grimm brothers’ primary sources of the tale. But why did Charles Perrault exclude the truth?

  Perhaps it was because he wanted the prince to be a hero, and if he had told the whole truth, everyone would have known the real hero was a girl. Then again, I doubt Perrault was aware enough of his own motivations to understand why he chose to remove from the story the parts he cut.

  Likely his reason was a simple one. If we can take a clue from the way Perrault swooned over Cinderella’s looks in his version of the story, I imagine he thought the point of the tale was how she looked, and not who she was. Perhaps he couldn’t understand why the prince loved her so fiercely, and assumed it must have been because of her beauty?

  His very inability to understand Cinderella is our biggest clue to her struggle.

  Handmaids, or ladies-in-waiting, which is the more proper but cumbersomely-worded title, were meant to be pretty bits of flutter with little substance. Like bridesmaids at a wedding (a tradition directly descended from ladies-in-waiting), handmaids were meant to add décor and a bit of function, flitting here and there like butterflies, framing the bride or the lady of the house like an arbor of flowers, adding emphasis to her beauty.

  Perrault understood handmaids, and crafted his story to be that of a girl who was vaulted from the lowest rank of handmaid to the highest. But Cinderella never wanted to be either of those things, and she has been misunderstood for centuries, just as she was misunderstood by Madame Augusta De Bouchard, who she served first as handmaid, and later as step-daughter.

  Oh, piffling pettifogger! I’m getting ahead of myself now.

  Back we go to the last few days of age thirteen, to Ella when she was on the cusp of losing everything she cared about, to become who society thought she ought to be.

  I remember one night, when it was just Robert’s party camping alone in the woods, and they were only a day or two away from reaching Caprese and Nora, when Ella and her father were sitting by the campfire, and I was alight like a tiny blue spark on her cap.

  Bertie and Gustav and the two hired men who were working for Robert at that time had all turned in for the night, leaving just Robert and Ella to watch the fire, which was smoldering down to cinders and ashes.

  The wood, as it burned, crumbled to cinders, which fell away from the main logs, rolling a bit through the ash as they tumbled, and frequently losing their glow in the process. Ella had watched the cinders do this a thousand times, on a thousand different nights. But that evening, she was missing her mother especially, and couldn’t wait to get home to see her. At the same time, she was mindful of her fourteenth birthday looming far too close in the future, and the likelihood that she would be separated from her family much like those cinders were separated from the rest of the fire.

  “Do you ever watch the cinders fall, Father?” She asked, ideas swirling in her mind like the pictures painted by clouds in the sky—shifting, becoming one thing and then another, clear for only an instant before they changed into some other form entirely.

  “Of course I do, night after night. They remind me of stars, or fairies when they’re at their smallest.” He reached over and patted her cap, narrowly missing me.

  Ella felt slightly encouraged by his words, so she continued, even though she wasn’t exactly sure what picture she was making in her mind. “Some of the cinders, when they fall, they tumble away all by themselves, and their fire goes out.”

  “They get too cold,” her father explained. “Without the heat of the rest of the fire, there’s nothing but their own fire to keep them burning, and sometimes that’s not enough.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Ella whispered.

  “Of what?”

  Ella tried to make sense of her thoughts, and realized there was more to it that she needed to explain. “Some of the cinde
rs fall away in a clump. As long as they stay together, even if they roll farther from the fire, they still glow. They still burn, because they have each other. And you and I and Bertie, our fire stays warm because we have each other. But when I go away to be a handmaid…”

  “Your fire will never go out.” Robert must have understood what she was getting at. His assurance came swiftly, unbidden.

  “But what if it does? If I’m all alone—how do you know it won’t go out then?”

  “You’re my little Cinder, Ella. You’re my Cinderella.” Robert chuckled, pleased with the sound of the name he’d just made up. “You have in you a fire that’s unlike any other. Brighter. Stronger. I’ve seen you fight. Do you know why you win? It’s not because you’re bigger than the boys—you’re not. You’re smaller than nearly all of the boys in your age bracket. And it’s not because you’re stronger—not physically stronger, anyway. But your fire burns. It burns strong. That’s why you win.”

  “Gustav says it’s because I’m agile.”

  “Well, that’s something, too. But I’ve seen plenty of agile men who can’t cut their way one inch through a melee the way you cut your way all the way to the winner’s podium. You have fire, Cinderella. Look at your mother.”

  “Mother?”

  “She’s alone at Caprese every time we leave, but her fire never falters.”

  “She has her horses.”

  “She does. And you’ll still have…” Robert paused, trying to think what Ella would have that she loved that would never leave her, not even at Madame De Bouchard’s.

  “What will I have?” Ella asked in a whisper, afraid there was nothing, after all…that she was right, that her fire would go out, just as the fire before them was crumbling away into ashes, dark as the night, and dead. I felt her despair, and wished to reassure her that I’d still be with her, at least. But since I’d never been much use to her ever before, I couldn’t think what help I’d be at Madame De Bouchard’s.