Ember

by Bettie Sharpe

  “Don’t fret.” Minette patted my shoulder. “We’ll be feasting in four days. Leave everything to me.”

  * * *

  True to her promise, Minette had us feasting by week’s end. She rechristened our house with a d’Oran name, Maison d’Aube, and put word out that Master Drayman’s d’Oran widow and “virginal” stepdaughters were fallen on hard times and in need of help. There was no shortage of kind-hearted, wealthy men to “help” the lovely widow and her daughters. In deference to my distaste for the Prince’s silver coins, Minette stipulated Maison d’Aube would only accept “help” in gold coins or gems.

  Three months after my father’s death, our debts were paid and our house was a favorite among wealthy merchants and the nobility. We had some problems at the beginning from men who thought they could treat my sisters roughly because there was no pimp in residence. But they soon learned witches are both creative and persistent in their vengeance.

  At each week’s end we held a feast, just for we four sisters. We drank and laughed and joked we would conquer the world with our combined talents. Or, at the very least, the city.

  Minette raised her glass. “To us, Sisters. To Ciú Dellos Reyes’ three most sought-after courtesans, and to its most powerful witch!”

  “We’ll be wealthy before the year is out.” Dulcie sing-songed. “I’d an offer from the Grand Duke today.”

  “That’s nothing.” Sylvie tossed an envelope of bleached parchment onto the table among the dirty dishes and empty wine bottles. The phantom of my little finger throbbed as though it was burning all over again.

  There was a profile stamped into the blue-black wax of the seal. It drew my eyes, though I tried to look away. I closed my lids and struggled to keep my voice steady when I spoke.

  “What is that thing?”

  Sylvie was too pleased with her news to notice my discomfort. “That is a letter from the Prince.”

  “The Prince?” I felt lightheaded, fearful and excited, all at the same time. The profile in the wax seal was his.

  “Sylvie,” Minette chided, “where is your consideration? You know Ember does not care for the Prince. Now take the seal from the envelope before the poor girl faints.”

  I’d told them of the time I’d seen the Prince, and we’d all had a good laugh about my overwrought reaction to the man. “Virgins do such stupid things,” Minette had mused. “I shall ever be thankful to the newel post, for at the time, it had a better head on its shoulders than you did.”

  I could laugh because I wasn’t a virgin anymore. I’d taken three lovers in the time since I’d first seen the Prince. They were the kind of men I liked, big, with muscles hardened by work and faces softened by humor. They all had the aura of daredevils about them, addicted to risk and brave beyond reason. And so, I suppose, they would have to be, to dare lay down with a witch.

  They were not unskilled, my lovers. They were thorough and attentive to detail, taking their satisfaction both from my body and from the sense of mastery that came of pleasing a woman whom other men feared. I adored them each in my own way but the sad secret of my heart was, I had never wanted another man the way I’d wanted the Prince. The way I wanted him, still.

  I hated him for it. Hated him and his stupid curse for robbing me of a real first love, and spoiling me for a second. If I could have withstood a second sighting of him, I’d have ordered the Fire to burn him to ash, and damn the consequences. But, then, if I could have stood the sight of him, I’d not have hated him so very much.

  “What does the Prince’s letter say?”

  Sylvie plucked the thick, cream-colored paper from the envelope and handed it across the table to me. “You must tell us what it says. We don’t read in our native tongue, much less in Maréan.”

  Don’t dismiss my sisters as ignorant for they were merely untaught. Terre d’Or does not care for literacy in any but its clergy and nobility. A common woman who reveals she can read may as well admit to witchcraft. Her neighbors will burn her on her books and speak of how they’ve done her soul a favor.

  I didn’t want to touch the Prince’s note but my hand grasped it before I could ask Sylvie to hold it open for me. A shiver of excitement ran up my arm. As I held the paper close to my face to read the elegant, looping script, I inhaled the scent of leather and straw. I knew it was the Prince’s scent. I imagined him coming in from a long ride and signing the note his secretary had drafted for him.

  “What does it say?” Dulcie asked, her eyes bright and eager.

  Embarrassed by how quickly I had lost myself, I made hasty work of the letter. “He—he wants to come here. He wants the whole place for himself and his cronies for three days, a week hence.”

  Sylvie smiled in her quiet way and Dulcie squealed in delight. Minette kept her calm. “We can’t turn down the Prince,” she mused. “It would be bad for business. If the nobles learn we turned Adrian Juste away, the nobles will spurn us and the merchants will follow.”

  A frisson of excitement skittered over my skin at the sound of his name. I wanted to say it myself, to feel it on my tongue, to shape it with my lips. “Don’t say his name to me again!” I hissed. “That damned curse gets stronger every year.”

  Dulcie looked at me askance. The curse was no stronger for her, or for anyone else, than it had ever been. I was the only person who thrilled to the sound of the Prince’s name; who became entranced at the image of his face; who woke in the night wanting him. Perhaps it was my magic that made the Prince’s charm pull so strongly at my will. Perhaps it only tormented me as punishment for my resistance.

  “We can’t let him near Ember,” Minette said.

  “But who will protect us and manage the books if she goes away to hide?”

  “I’ll sleep in the summer cookshed.” I said. “I’ll keep to the kitchens and the servant’s hallways.”

  “What if the Prince’s followers don’t behave?” Dulcie asked.

  “Keep the fires lit. If any of his courtiers behave boorishly, whisper the man’s name into a candle or a hearth, and the fire will deal with him.”

  “You can do that?” Sylvie leaned across the table to look at me with new eyes. “I did not think you’d so much power.”

  I shrugged. “Power builds with age.”

  “Like the Prince’s curse,” Minette said.

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to think I had anything in common with him. I didn’t want to think of him at all.

  * * *

  The neighbors’ gossip transformed to lurid speculation when the Prince and his courtiers began to visit our house. They whispered that my stepmother and stepsisters had stolen my magic to make love charms to enthrall the Prince, that Minette and her “daughters” had forbidden me from entering my own house, and that my stepfamily made me rub ashes into my hair so no nobleman would notice the color of it and fall in love with me.

  I don’t know where the neighbors got such nonsense. I’ve never been beautiful, or particularly loveable, though I’d kept to myself for so long, perhaps the neighbors had forgotten. The truth of it is, I hid my hair with ash of my own volition, after the Prince’s first visit.

  He took Dulcie to bed that time. Though the moon wasn’t full, he kept the shutters closed against the moonlight and kept the candles lit the whole night through. Few people suspect a thing so homey as a candle flame or a hearth fire will betray them, but every spark of flame that springs to life in Ciú Dellos Reyes will do my will. How do you think I always know what my neighbors think of me?

  The cookshed fire woke me in the hours before dawn, dancing and flaring with the urgency of its message.

  “What is it?”

  I fed the fire a bundle of pitchy pine twigs so it could speak through the crackling sound of burning sap.

  It formed an image of the Prince and Dulcie reclining on her bed. “I have a question for you.” The Prince’s voice was a low crackle of burning wood.

  “Anything, your Highness,” Dulcie breathed, her usually bright eyes du
ll with lust and wonder.

  “There used to be a girl who lived in this house. She’d red hair and black eyes.”

  I prayed Dulcie would find the strength to lie to him, but none could deny the Prince. She barely hesitated before answering, “My stepsister, Ember, has red hair and very dark brown eyes.”

  “Ember,” he said. I closed my eyes and shuddered at the thought of my name upon his lips. “Does she work as you and your ‘sister’ do? Will you send her to me?”

  If ever I’d doubted Dulcie was my sister, or doubted she loved me as well as if we’d been blood kin, I had the proof of it in her answer. She denied the Prince, as best she could. Her voice shook when she answered him. “I cannot send her to you, Highness. She is not for sale. If it is red hair you want, I know a whore with hair like a stormy sunrise and a muff to match.”

  “No.” The Prince shook his head. “I want Ember. I saw her once, five years ago. She watched me ride by on the street. She wasn’t beautiful, that’s not what I noticed about her. When I go out in the streets, every face in the crowd turns as I pass like flowers following the sun. But she looked away from me.”

  He turned, staring at the shuttered window, perhaps thinking of the day he’d seen me. “I’ve wanted her since then. I’ve looked for her in the streets, for the flash of red hair and the cold regard of those dark eyes. I get everything I want, but not her.”

  “I—” Dulcie tried to deny him a second time, but her voice died in her throat as the Prince traced his hand along her face.

  “Promise you will send her to me. Promise you will not rest until she comes to my bedchamber.”

  His words had power to them, more power than just the weight of his curse. I suspect he might have been a great sorcerer if Gaetane’s cruel blessing had not directed his innate ability into his Charm. With magic and wisdom to aid him, he could have been the greatest king in the history of our little kingdom. Instead, he was a selfish, dangerous man with a voice none could refuse.

  “Yes, Highness,” Dulcie droned. “I promise I will send her to you. I will not rest until she goes to your bedchamber.”

  I cursed. The fire flickered in fear of my anger. The image disappeared. That stupid man! How could he be so cruel to compel such a promise from my sister? The force of his power would ensure the literal truth of her words. Dulcie wouldn’t rest until I went to the Prince. And if I didn’t go, she would die from lack of sleep.

  3. The Cinder Girl

  My sisters came to supper in the kitchen at sunrise. Minette and Sylvia were cheerful and chatty as magpies. Dulcie did not sleep well under even the best of circumstances, and that morning she had shadows like bruises beneath her eyes.

  I set our food on the table: meat, eggs, tea and toast.

  “Mmm! Ember, this is perfect.” Sylvie sang. “It is not so tasty as a good d’Oran breakfast, but there is no better cook in Tierra Del Maré than you!”

  Sylvie meant it as a compliment. Truly. Though her countrymen had been ready to burn her at the stake as punishment for her affliction, she still believed (as do all d’Orans) that nothing in the world is as good or as beautiful as the art, language, food and culture of Terre d’Or. I imagine I would feel the same way, were I forced to leave Tierra del Maré. How fortunate for me that my homeland would never be so backward as to persecute one of her citizens for the loup or any other unwitting manifestation of magic.

  “How goes the royal visitation?” I asked.

  “Do not ask me,” Minette answered, “for I shall only chatter on about the Prince. He’s so charming—”

  “And so handsome!” Sylvie interrupted.

  I looked to Dulcie, but she said nothing. Her face was pale and tinged with green as though she might be ill.

  “…But when I think about it,” Sylvie continued happily talking of the Prince, “I do wonder where he got his lovely face. I’ve seen old Justinian. The man has a nose like a hawk’s beak and eyes set so deep, his sockets might be empty for all I know.”

  “And all that dark hair!” Minette complained. “The king always looks in need of a shave.”

  “So does his wife!” Sylvie giggled. “But it isn’t surprising. She’s a distant cousin, right?”

  They looked to me, the only native to Tierra del Maré, to settle the question. “The queen is the king’s second cousin.”

  “You see!” Sylvie took a great gulp of her tea and swallowed it in a hurry. “His parents both have hawk noses and brooding eyes and too much hair on their cheeks, but the Prince…Oh, he’s golden and perfect.”

  I had lived my whole life in Ciú Dellos Reyes. I was a fool not to have seen it before. “It’s the curse! The curse makes him appear handsome, the better to make people love him.”

  Minette shook herself, seeming to wake from her daydreams of the Prince. “Ember, you look happy at the news.”

  “Yes,” I smiled.

  “When you showed us to the parlor the day we first arrived, you had the same wicked smile. Tell us what you are thinking.”

  “I have just figured out how to break the geas the Prince put on Dulcie, and how to make sure he never sees me.”

  “You knew about it?” Dulcie sobbed. “I’ve been trying so hard not to say anything to you, but I keep hearing it in my head: ‘You must tell her to come to me.’ I thought I would go mad!”

  “Don’t fret, Dulcie,” I said, trying to sound as gentle as Minette and failing utterly. From my lips, the words emerged as an order. “The curse is strong, and the Prince is wise to its uses. He’s right, I must go to him.”

  “No! You mustn’t. Once he has you, he won’t let you go. There’s something mad about him, about the way he wants you. I could almost feel it, like a lash against my skin, when he said your name.”

  “To break a geas, one need only obey the letter of the promise. I’ll go to his bedchamber, and he’ll never know I’ve been there.”

  “How?” Minette asked.

  I opened my mouth to reveal my clever plan, to tell my sisters I could hide myself in an illusion and the Prince would never know me. But I remembered how persuasive the Prince could be. “You’ll have to forgive my secrecy. I’ve already said too much.”

  My words made Dulcie cry in earnest, for no matter how loyal we four were to each other, the Prince could make traitors of us at any moment. I rose from the table, and went back to the cookshed.

  That day, I became the Cinder Girl.

  I made an ink of chicken’s blood and charcoal, and painted sigils on my hands before writing the words of my spell ninety-nine times on ninety-nine scraps of paper. I fed the paper to the fire. When the ash cooled, I worked it into my hair, skin and clothes until it smothered the smell of my skin and my red hair was gray with it.

  The secret to a good illusion is not to change too much, for illusion alters appearance, but nothing else. You can bespell a large man to appear as a small one, but his footprints won’t change. He will still bump his head on doorways and take up the better part of a bench when he sits.

  When I had donned the illusion, I looked in my old brass mirror and a Cinder Girl stared back at me. She was pretty in a dull sort of way with wide blue eyes and wheat-colored curls. She’d all of her fingers and she didn’t walk with a limp. Her face wasn’t afflicted with my orange freckles, or with my cold expressions and sly smiles. I would have to learn to hide my prickly demeanor on my own, though. Magic cannot alter personality.

  To complete my disguise, I wove a little spell of forgetting into my illusion. It was simple and subtle—a whispered suggestion to forget Ember the Witch. A breath of old memory to make anyone who did not know me well believe the Drayman’s daughter had always been golden and pretty, sweet and kind. It would not work on those who had formed a strong impression of me, but it would be enough to blur the memory of my presence in the minds of passing acquaintances and nosy neighbors.

  I gathered a bucket of kindling and coal and went upstairs to the Prince’s bedchamber. I was almost to his door before I re
membered to tuck the moonlight pendant beneath my bodice and shift. Sunlight overpowered it, but it might betray my illusion in darkness or weak candlelight.

  The Prince was sprawled across the blankets, naked and perfect. He was asleep, so I let myself look at him. The vial of moonlight between my breasts kept the worst of his curse at bay, but it couldn’t stop the natural lust that coursed through my body at the sight of so fine a masculine nude.

  Sylvie had said he was fair, but his hair appeared quite dark to me. I wished he were fair, for I liked dark men better, and I didn’t want to like the look of him at all. It must have been the magic of his Charm that made me perceive in him every feature I considered handsome.

  I tried to detect the edges of his illusion. I looked at the outline of his body against the blanket. He was taller, perhaps, and bigger framed than he appeared. He appeared to have broad shoulders and smooth, golden skin, his chest lightly sprinkled with dark hair. His torso was muscled to perfection, neither too much nor too little. His cock lay long and thick against his muscled thigh, sated and peaceful as he slept. I imagined the size and the girth of it when he grew hard, and shivered at the thought of taking it into my body.