“Spells aren’t random. They aren’t arbitrary or thoughtless. Witches don’t cast spells for fun. Witches are serious. They pay for their spells forever.”
Dad shakes his head and looks for an argument. “You don’t understand witches,” he says.
Eden’s right, of course. There isn’t much to do as a princess, and even less to do when your sisters can’t eat or sleep or love or learn. Eden had nothing but hours upon hours to read and study.
And what would a little girl whose family is Spellbound choose to learn everything about?
The witches who cast the spell, of course.
We know this, Dad knows this, and I’d bet anything even our frozen mother knows this.
The part of me that remembers the history of Ever nods and stands next to my sister. Every bit of magic a witch does results in a new skirt around her waist. They cast some small spells and get sheer skirts in exchange. Some of these spells might be frivolous. The payment for them isn’t large. They might make mistakes along the way; witches aren’t perfect, especially the young ones. But a large spell, like the one cast on us, would result in a heavy burden for the witch. Even a young witch would know this. Even a young witch wouldn’t be able to cast a spell so large without a very good reason.
The tiny, uncomfortable part of me that heard Reagan today in the boat stands up straighter, more alert than I’ve ever been. I am waiting for something from my father. But I don’t know exactly what.
“A spell is a lesson that there’s no other way to learn,” Eden says, quoting from a thousand textbooks we’ve read over the years. I hadn’t noticed before how bright Eden’s eyes are. They are a brilliant blue, so sharp and clear they look like a piece of sky.
My father shakes his head. He tries to regain his composure. “You’re so young—” he starts, as if we don’t understand a thing.
He shrugs again. The way he shrugged about stolen pears and a stolen princess and now our stolen lives. I close my eyes. I want to open them and see this room the way I used to: my father smiling special smiles at each of us and attendants happily flitting around, bringing out different foods and drinks, a sunset outside the window, all the answers to every question I’ve ever had answerable by my father, the Good and Gentle King.
It’s hard to know what a Good and Gentle King is, if you’ve never been outside the castle. It’s impossible to know what a kingdom needs, what a kingdom is, if you’ve never stepped onto its soil.
I open my eyes. There’s the Always Day sun and the long table piled with food and the attendants and my father, but I can’t make it look the way it used to look. My father helps himself to another piece of chicken. Somewhere in Ever, people are fighting over half a turnip, some slices of stale bread, a crop of tiny potatoes.
Somewhere in the Home on the Hill, Reagan and her mother are trying to protect a kingdom that is falling apart.
Sometime long ago, this place belonged to other families, and now it’s ours, and I don’t know why or how or if we deserve it.
I never wondered before, about deserving it.
And here we are, watching my father eat chicken and shrug away our worries.
“What did you do?” I ask, my voice low first, then louder. “What did you do to the witches?” My feet are rooted to the floor. I stand up. It feels good, to stand. I’m so solid I’m not even hungry. I feel a little like Reagan, standing in the water, not wavering even as her skirts try to pull her down. I feel a little like a queen, the kind that is still and quiet even when they’re not trapped in a box.
Mostly I feel like a person who has three days to try to survive, and I am talking to a man who is making it harder for me to get out alive. He keeps licking his goddamn fingers and adjusting his ridiculous robe and looking somewhere else, his eyes not quite on us, as if there are a hundred other things on his mind.
How often has he looked past me? Or someone else? How many times has he not cared about someone else’s needs over his own?
And how often have I?
My heart beats out a terror that could make me weak but is making me strong instead.
“Tell us what you did to the witches,” I say again. “Just tell us.”
Maybe I sound like I’m accusing him, but all I want is to see something that tells me Reagan is a liar, Reagan misunderstood, Reagan’s mother is crazy, the world is the way I want it to be.
Show me she’s wrong, I say in my head. I beg him to be the man he’s promised us that he is. The one they’ve written songs about, built statues of in the center of town. The one I’ve felt lucky to have. The one who would do anything for us.
He doesn’t say anything. He half smiles, starts to roll his eyes like it’s a big joke, except I can feel my heart slowing, my body begging to give up. I can feel three days left turning to two. I can feel something Slow turning True.
“You have to help us,” I say. “You’re the king. You’re our father. You have to help us break the spell. The spell that you caused. You did this. You keep shrugging. Why are you shrugging at something this huge? How can you shrug at me when I’m going to die?”
“Jane. My god. You’re hysterical,” my father says. “Look at you. You’re out of control. You need to calm down.”
I almost believe him, that he did nothing wrong, that he’s never done a single wrong thing. I really almost do. He’s so confident, his voice at once sure and light, dismissive and patronizing.
Except I’m not hysterical. Inside, maybe, my body is rebelling, is working itself up into some kind of frenzy. But I have never stood more solidly on my feet. I have never been so sure of something I have to do. I don’t yell or flail or throw a tantrum right here on the floor of the castle, even though it would feel good to let go like that.
I am not hysterical.
I am not making something out of nothing.
I am fighting the Spell of Without and asking for his help. And he is refusing.
He won’t answer why. We don’t know why they stole that princess eighty years ago, and he’s saying we don’t know why this spell was cast, but spells have reasons and princesses don’t just disappear and I am not out of control. I do not need to calm down.
Not now. Not ever.
My father is lying.
My father, the king, is a liar.
And if he is a liar, it might mean that Reagan is telling the truth.
My fingers feel a shimmer. The palms of my hands hurt. My shoulders lift on their own, a jolt of strength.
I look at my sisters to see if they know it too. If they feel the same shimmer in their hands, the same sureness in their hearts.
They stretch their fingers. They squint at the man before us. They clear their throats, and Alice looks like she would cry if she had the energy.
The smell of chicken is still in the air. My father doesn’t know what I would do for a bite of it. He doesn’t know what my body is telling me to do. He is a man in a robe who doesn’t seem to know anything about desperation.
He’ll see. I’ll show him what it means to fight for your life.
14. REAGAN
We can’t sleep; the smell of royal fear is too thick in the air. Willa climbs into bed with me, nuzzling her nose into my pillow, asking me to tell her stories until she falls asleep. “I can’t sleep with all that smell,” she says.
I nod. I can’t either. None of us can.
When she finally drifts off, I wander downstairs to be near my grandmother. I’ve avoided her since coming home. I didn’t want to know what she would say about the Spell of Always Day. I didn’t want to see her disappointed face or get another lecture about all the ways my magic is failing her.
But she’s the only person I want to talk to now. I want to ask her about what I felt with Jane, that little glimmer of something. The light on the moat. The shimmery thing that Abbott felt too.
She’s where she always is, in her chair, smoothing the wrinkles in her hundreds of skirts. I take her in. Something in her face reminds me of Jane. It’s
in her mouth, hiding around her jaw. Even the way she sits—straight-backed, trying very hard though she is physically suffering—is just like the princess.
“You look a little like Princess Jane,” I say, even though I’m not sure either of them would want to hear it.
Grandmother looks startled; then the look passes, and I guess I imagined it.
“Maybe this is how a person looks when they are waiting and hoping for a spell to be broken,” she says pointedly.
“I haven’t smelled it like this in a long time,” Mom says instead of greeting me.
“Strong,” Grandmother says.
“It was a bad day,” I say. “We’re all afraid.”
“Yes,” Grandmother says. “We are.”
“You shouldn’t cast spells out of fear, Reagan,” Mom says. She gestures to the sky, to the Always Day.
“There was a good reason,” I say, which is what they’re really wanting to know. I want them to believe me, but I can see that they don’t trust me anymore. My grandmother wants me to be a different kind of witch, a better kind. More like Willa or my mother.
Grandmother looks at me with raised eyebrows, and for the second or third or tenth time today, I miss my lonely existence in AndNot. She folds her hands in her lap. Her skirts rustle. “Bethly,” she says, giving my mother the gentlest sort of look, “it’s time.”
Mom takes three deep breaths. Each one feels longer and sadder than the last. “It’s been good to have you back,” she says.
“It’s good to be back,” I reply, as if from a script someone else has written. We aren’t usually formal like this, my mother and I. But things went wrong when we spoke in the morning, so we are more careful this evening.
“You’ve grown,” Grandmother says.
“Yes,” Mom says. “You’ve grown. And the older you get, the more potent your magic is.”
“Powerful,” Grandmother says.
“You are a powerful witch. You were before. And you are even more so now.”
“Thank you,” I say, even though it doesn’t sound like a compliment the way she’s saying it.
“Your grandmother is a powerful witch too. I’m not. Not like you. I consider that lucky.”
“Your magic is—”
“My magic is simple. It’s elegant. But it isn’t big. Yours is big, Reagan. And big magic can be dangerous.”
“Is dangerous,” Grandmother corrects her. “And that attitude. Like your mother. Wanting things to change. Not knowing when to stop.” She is looking at me hard, like I might be hiding something on my face that she’s missed until now. A new freckle. A different shade of eye color. A wrinkle.
The things she’s saying are true about me, I guess, but certainly not about my mother. Still, I don’t correct her.
“When someone has dangerous magic, we have to be careful,” Mom says. Her hands shake. “I’m so lucky I didn’t have that.”
“That’s why you sent me to AndNot.” I don’t want to be dangerous, so I try to make myself sweet and easy and fun like Willa.
“We’ve spoken a lot, your grandmother and I, about how to proceed,” Mom says. Her voice shakes faster than her hands. I’m starting to feel seasick from it.
“Proceed?”
“With your place. With your role in the family, in the Home.”
“My role is your daughter, the disgraced witch. The fuckup.” I mean to be humble, to listen and wait and do whatever she wants me to do. All I’ve ever wanted is to make her happy. The spell itself was to make her happy. But I fail, always. I fail at being quiet and sweet; I fail at protecting my mother; I fail at getting revenge; I fail at knowing what in the world she even wants from me. Five years in AndNot didn’t help me figure it out. Maybe nothing will.
My grandmother shakes her head. She’s disappointed in the way I’ve turned out too.
“We want you to stay,” Mom goes on. “But what you did—you haven’t been forgiven.”
“By you?”
“By the family,” Mom says. It pinches, because she doesn’t rush to say of course she forgives me. “Those girls—you hurt them. And the queen. And you don’t apologize, Reagan. Not really. All that time away, you were supposed to reconsider everything. You were supposed to regret what you did.” She’s shaking her head now too. The two of them in sync with their shame. “You were supposed to consider your family, and instead you’re taking advice from a farmhand—”
Witches don’t lie. I wish we did. “The king deserved to be hurt,” I say. “He deserved it for what he did to you. And you always said that parents are more hurt by their children’s suffering than by their own. So I did what I thought would hurt him the most.”
“It’s my fault,” Mom says. “I never should have told you about what he did to me. You were too young to understand, and too young to handle it. I knew that better than anyone.”
Now it’s me shaking my head.
“We all do the best we can,” Grandmother says. “But that’s not always enough. And, Reagan, your best isn’t enough.”
The room grows. I’ve heard people say that in terrible moments everything shrinks, but the room right now expands so much that I am tiny inside it. It grows so much that I am lost.
“You cast the Spell of Famine,” I say. It’s another thing we never speak of. That the Barren Fields are barren because of my grandmother. “It’s caused pain. You’ve caused pain too.”
My mother shoots me a look that tells me to shut up, but my grandmother’s response is slow and measured. “Yes. I cast that spell. Do you know why?”
I shrug. We’ve come up with dozens of reasons, Willa and I, over the years. But we’ve never asked. You don’t question my grandmother.
“For the things they let happen. To your mother. To others. I gave it one last try, Reagan. One last punishment to try to shake them into caring about the king and what he does. All the royals, what they all do. What so many people do.” She shakes her head, at the royals, I guess, but at all of us really. The ways we are all, always, letting her down.
Mom rubs her forehead. She’s heard this story over and over, but I’m only now understanding what little I’ve been told, how many stories there are underneath the stories I’ve spent my whole life learning.
“I cast the Spell of Famine, and I built that spell carefully, so it could be broken if the king stepped down. A True Spell that could be Undone under the right circumstances. All he had to do was step down.” Grandmother looks at me. She’s teaching me something I never bothered to learn before. She tried to tell me a hundred times, probably. A good spell takes time to build. A good spell is delicately balanced and does exactly what you want it to do. A bad spell is one cast from fear or anger or sadness. Or even love. A bad spell doesn’t have the breaking built in. I nod. I want her to know I’m understanding now, finally. She goes on. “That’s it. I even told him he could tell his kingdom he did it for them. He could walk away a hero, if he would just leave the throne, let the queen rule alone, or let a new royal family come in. He could live somewhere far away by himself or with his family. But he wouldn’t. He said I was unwell. That he’d be a hero anyway. That he’d help them through the Famine. That it would make him look even better. And that was it. That was the last of it. Our final try to do something about it.”
“It didn’t work,” I say. It’s not a question, because I live in Ever and I can see that things are worse, not better. Still, I try to straighten my back and raise my chin so that we can be two witches who made mistakes and not a perfect grandmother and her disappointment of a granddaughter.
“Of course it didn’t work,” Grandmother says. “That’s what we learned. That type of spell makes things worse. So we don’t mess with things anymore. Even if the spell is ever broken, the damage it’s done, the people who have already died, already fallen ill—well. The spell was True, not Slow, so there’s no fixing what’s been done. Even the best-built True Spells are dangerous. So now we try to help when we can. We keep the moat filled with fis
h. We watch the weather. We send spells of ease when someone is suffering. We try.”
“So that’s it. You cast one spell, saw it failed, and never tried to help again?” I think about the people of Ever lighting their candles, waiting for the princess to return. And now the witches, waiting for goodness to return, for a king to change, for a people to see something they don’t want to see. All of us just waiting for something that might be impossible.
“Over the years we cast dozens of spells,” Grandmother says. “You think I let that happen to my daughter and did nothing? But our spells weren’t reckless. We thought them through. You have to think a spell through. A True one especially, but a Slow one too, Reagan. We tried our best. We’re still trying! We’re waiting for the king to break the Spell of Famine. His people are getting tired of him eating whatever he wants while they suffer. Things will shift. They’ll see. And when they see, he’ll leave the throne. And meanwhile they light the Enchanted Candles, and that means they aren’t forgetting the past. Change is slow. We are patient.”
“The Spell of Famine was powerful and hurt people too,” I say, my voice quiet with the surprise of disagreeing with my grandmother.
“When I cast the Spell of Famine, I was eighty-three years old,” Grandmother says. “I considered other spells. Other ways to fix things. And after a lot of thought, I decided on the Spell of Famine. I knew what I was doing, casting a very serious True Spell, and I accepted that responsibility. I have earned the right to use powerful magic. You are so young to have cast such an enormous spell. Too young. And you come back and still don’t understand—” She breathes heavily, my grandmother. “You’ve cast another spell in just a few days here! Again without thinking about what it means, about what other harm it could cause. We cast spells for a good reason. Your fleeting feelings aren’t a good reason, Reagan. A good reason is one that’s thought through, one that is considered. Look outside! Another enormous burst of magic without consulting any of us! Without thinking. Always Day? That’s a spell I’ve never even used—” Speaking is hard on her body; the breaths she takes are hidden underneath pounds of fabric, and she has to stop herself from going on, from getting any more upset.
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