Ever Cursed

by Corey Ann Haydu

  And here’s Jane, still wanting him to be the father who saves her, who apologizes, who was wrongly accused, who is the Good and Gentle King.

  “We didn’t get the clock,” Jane says. “So what should we try for next? The hair? The tears? The clock again? Obviously the crown will be—I don’t know how we’ll get that.”

  “The tears,” I say. Some objects will be hard, but those, at least, will be easy.

  “Turner Dodd,” Olive says. Jane nods.

  “Who’s that?” I ask.

  “The saddest person,” Olive says. She knows the kingdom better than Jane, better than the king or me probably too. It’s hers, more than either of ours. “A young boy. He cries all the time. Everyone knows about him. Been the saddest boy in Ever since the day he was born. They all actually think he’s under a spell himself.”

  “That’s not the saddest person in Ever,” I say.

  “I’ve heard of him,” Jane says. “They say he cries one bucket of tears every day. I’ve heard he isn’t allowed to go to school because it was too distracting for everyone. Can we go to his house now? Do you know the way, Olive?”

  “Oh, everyone knows the way,” Olive says. “People bring him and his mother food and flowers and little gifts. Everyone’s always trying to make Turner Dodd less sad.”

  “It’s not Turner Dodd’s tears you need,” I say, louder this time. They both look at me.

  “You said the saddest person in Ever,” Jane says.

  “He’s not the saddest person in Ever,” I say.

  “Well then, who?” Olive tilts her head to the side.

  “My mother.”

  “But Turner Dodd—” Jane starts. Some stories are hard to shake. Some truths are hard to see. She has been taught one history of Ever, one way that her people are. She knows her subjects’ names like she might be quizzed on them someday, and maybe that’s how someone turns from princess to queen. I don’t know.

  What I know is that the story of Ever she’s memorized isn’t right. The boy who lives down the hill, by the moat, and bellows out his woes all day every day isn’t the saddest person. The loudest person rarely is. The king isn’t good and the princesses aren’t quiet and the witches aren’t evil and my mother is the saddest person in Ever. I put her tears on the list of things they had to gather so that they could see her pain. So that they could know what was taken from her.

  And it’s time.

  * * *

  I bring my mother up the stairs, up the ladder, to the place where Jane and Olive wait, watching the castle, wondering what is going on in the tallest tower. Willa and Aunt Idle and some of my cousins follow. Grandmother listens from her place downstairs. I clear my throat, and Jane turns to see my family.

  My mother’s face is a cloud of worry, and her right hand is gone. She is missing a part of her neck. Her hands are busy fretting at her sides. “This is my mother. She is the saddest person in Ever.”

  Mom recoils from my words. She holds herself, her arms wrapped around her chest like she’s making sure her heart stays right where it’s meant to be. She doesn’t speak, not even to deny it, but her body is doing enough of that.

  Olive bows her head as if my mother is the queen. Jane does the same, mustering out a strange curtsy. We don’t know what to do with one another—witches and royals. People.

  “Oh, Reagan,” my mother says. “What have you done?” Her head hangs, but she doesn’t cry. I suppose I’ve never seen her cry, something I hadn’t thought much about when I demanded a thimble of her tears to break the spell. I was thinking of myself, in AndNot, and the buckets of tears I let out. It seemed like an easy-enough thing, to get tears from a sad person.

  But looking at her now, I realize my mother would never cry in front of a princess. Maybe she would never cry at all. There is more than one way to survive, she told me. There is more than one way to be strong. I forgot, of course, that there is more than one way to be sad.

  Turner Dodd’s sadness is the kind that comes with buckets of tears. My mother’s is a dry sadness. An invisible sadness. A hidden sadness.

  Jane takes a step forward, and my mother takes a step back, afraid of this princess, of anyone with a crown and a title and a room in the castle.

  “I need your tears,” Jane says. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too,” Mom says. “I don’t have any. I don’t cry. Not now. Not ever.”

  17. JANE

  “Please don’t apologize to me,” I say. I am torn between looking at her and looking away from her. I don’t know what’s easier for her. Or for me. I don’t know what I expected, but when she’s in front of me, she’s just a person. A mother and a witch whose fingers fidget and whose voice is soft. Her hair is parted a little crookedly. There’s a blemish on her chin. She shifts her weight from one hip to the other.

  She wants to help us, the daughters of the man who hurt her. She’s kind and good, but also human. I want to sit down, lie down, have the time and space to understand the way our lives have collided, have met up here and now, so long after my father started all this pain. I want to hold her hand, to have her be my own mother for a moment, for her to tell me it’s okay, that she’s okay.

  Then I hate myself for wanting anything from her.

  And still, I have to want something from her. Something she says she can’t give me. Her tears. “We can’t break the spell,” I say, mostly to myself. “The spell won’t be broken. But it’s not your fault.”

  I once asked Mom if queens always tell the truth, like witches do. She said no, they do not. And I always thought that was a strange answer, so for my last week in Ever, I will be the kind of almost queen that I imagined being when I was small and not bound by an impossible spell. I will be a queen who tells the truth.

  The roof felt expansive when we first arrived. But it feels small now. Everything feels small, my whole body cramped, trying to fit into a life that is pushing me out.

  “I’m sorry,” Reagan says, and she sounds sorry, but it doesn’t matter. Time is passing, and we don’t have a single object from our list. We need time from a dying man and tears from a woman who never cries. And a crown from a man who would do anything—anything—to keep it.

  Even if Abbott Shine were to give us his hair, we would have only one object out of four, and that won’t break the spell.

  “Why?” I say, because I’m exhausted and I can’t ask a full question or even know what question I need answered. I want to know why we’re here and why she cast the spell on us and why she made breaking it impossible and why I care about her when she hurt me and why she cares about me when my father hurt her mother and why we are on a roof and my sisters are in a tower and why Ever seems to just go on as if everything’s fine.

  I want to know why we are all hurting, in this world run by my father.

  I want to know why he and the other kings aren’t hurting.

  I want to know why we didn’t see it, and why we didn’t want to see it.

  “I thought—” Reagan starts. “I thought—” She tries again. “I tried—” She can’t seem to finish a sentence. Five long, impossible years ago she seemed young but strong, small but sure. She was evil, she was ruthless, she didn’t care, she was powerful and cruel, and I knew I’d hate her forever. She was a witch in a cape with raised hands and layers of skirts and a look in her eyes that I thought was evil but was rage, which is a different thing entirely.

  I know a little about rage, which is running through me now. I try to direct it at the careless young witch who cast an awful spell and made it impossible to break. But the anger keeps folding back on itself and back to my father. Then it folds back further still.

  To me.

  And to the times I saw my father’s hand touch Olive’s wrist or a low part of her back that should never have been touched.

  I take it like a punch, which it is. The fault is Reagan’s and it is my father’s, but also it is mine, for the times I chose not to see and the things I decided weren’t important and
the things I believed to be real even though everywhere around me were signs they weren’t real.

  That is what being a princess is, I think with a rush of shame followed by my mind trying, again, like always, to unsee what is right there.

  I sit down on the roof, and maybe it is time for the spell to turn True; maybe it is right for it to turn True; maybe it is what I deserve.

  All this time I’ve wondered why she had to place the spell on us, on me, but I know now. I know, seeing her mother and the invisible parts of her, standing here next to Olive, who I must have known was hurting, who I must have seen suffering, who never told me because I was too silly and selfish and scared to care.

  “I did this,” I say, words that are more a gasp than a sentence.

  I don’t know who hears me or if anyone does. We are each in our own universe of shame and hurt and worry, and the roof is barely big enough for all of us.

  “You have to break the spell,” Reagan’s mother says, and her voice can’t break a spell, but it breaks through the trance I’m in enough for me to listen. “Willa. Show them.”

  The young witch who was at the party with Reagan lifts something up that I hadn’t noticed before. A candle. “It’s our Enchanted Candle,” she explains.

  “We know about Enchanted Candles,” I say. “To bring back the missing princess. To keep us safe.”

  “This is our candle,” the young witch says. “It tells us how the kingdom is doing. It’s supposed to be gold, always. Shades of gold. But now the kingdom isn’t at rest.” The flame of the candle is an alarming red, and even I know that can’t be good. Reagan’s shoulders jump, and I look out at Ever again. Of course it’s not at rest. I don’t need a Spellbound candle to tell me that.

  “Reagan. Willa. There’s a lot at stake if the kingdom isn’t at rest,” Reagan’s mother says to Reagan and her young friend. Her voice shakes, and for a minute my heart lifts, thinking she could cry. But she only straightens her back and leans forward. “If the kingdom isn’t at rest—all of the magic will go.”

  Reagan squints and I shrug. A magic-less Ever sounds good to me.

  “You mean all of my magic?” Reagan asks.

  “No,” her mother says. “All the magic. All that’s left. All that we’ve been protecting. It can all vanish.”

  A voice comes up from the air. It’s the voice of an old woman. I can tell from the places it breaks, the crackle of it. “It’s happened before.”

  I search my brain for everything I know about the history of witches. They live in Ever because we were kind and let them in after they had angered all the kingdoms during the War by getting involved in the battles. We were a safe harbor, and they are meant to spend their lives making it up to us. They perform spells for us, and in exchange we protect them from other kingdoms. Their magic is weak, and they are unreasonable. No one else wants them. We are the good ones; we are the kind ones; they never appreciate us enough.

  The history of the witches of Ever never mentioned vanishing magic or a past where there was more magic, more witches. The history I learned also didn’t mention anything about a cruel king and a desperate search for power and a quiet-voiced witch who lived with a painful history while her abuser reigned over a broken kingdom.

  There’s a lot history didn’t tell me, a lot my father left out and lied about and got me turned around on. I might not really know anything at all about Ever and witches and princesses and magic.

  Reagan looks as confused as I feel.

  “I’ll work on Bethly,” the voice says. “You go back out into Ever and fix this. Look at your cousins, Reagan. All my grandchildren. Missing wrists and ears. Even my own lips—it’s urgent. I’m not strong enough to—without our magic—we are necessary.”

  I thought Reagan was meant to be saving my sisters and me, but her grandmother’s voice insists she has to save her family too. Save us all.

  “Go to that Abbott boy. Get the princess away from us. Get her away from you, too. Break the spell, then never go back into Ever again. Hopefully a new burlap skirt will wrap itself around you and will keep you where you’re meant to be. Here. With us.”

  Reagan looks like she has a hundred questions trying to inch out of her mouth, but the voice stops speaking.

  Reagan’s mother fills the quiet space with a quiet voice. “I’ll try,” she says. “But I promised I’d never cry over it.”

  I know she’s speaking about my father and the things he did to her, but I can’t find words to say I’m sorry or I believe her or I wish it hadn’t happened. I want to tell her about every nice thing he ever did, like that will somehow make it better, but it won’t, of course. It won’t make me any better either. I keep scrolling through our family memories, like there is some pathway that will make this all make sense. And maybe there is that small dusty road, but it hurts to travel on.

  Every happy memory of him will have to turn sour, every bit of history I had will be rewritten. And if everything around me has to be reconsidered, so do I. Olive bites her lips so hard I’m worried they will bleed. The way I hate myself grows, takes on a new shape.

  “I shouldn’t be here,” I say. “I shouldn’t be anywhere.” The words don’t make sense exactly, but they’re close enough to what I’m feeling, seeing these witches, the way they are hurting, the things it feels like I could have stopped but didn’t. I’m searching for the right way to be with this woman whose pain was big enough to make Reagan cast a spell on me. I grab on to Reagan, to steady myself. I’m wavy and weak.

  “Hey,” Reagan says, gentler than she needs to be, kinder than I deserve. “He did this. Not you. Maybe not even me. He did it. He did it.”

  I hold on to her more tightly, and she holds on to me back.

  The touch does what our touches seem to do.

  There’s a shimmer. A glow. A shock of a feeling in my body.

  “Is this magic?” I whisper at last, asking the question I’ve been trying to hide from.

  Olive takes a step toward Reagan’s mother. Then another. Another. The steps are small and timid. They take forever. They aren’t sure of what they are doing. But then she’s next to Reagan’s mother, and her hand hovers above Reagan’s mother’s arm, not wanting to touch until she gets a nod of yes, you can touch me there like this.

  “There are so many of us,” Olive says. “You aren’t alone.” She doesn’t blink. I can see the words work their way into Reagan’s mother’s hurting heart. We can all see her take them in, wrestle with them, worry they aren’t true, see that they are. She lets go. Not all the way, not forever, but a little bit. Enough.

  Enough.

  Her shoulders unworry; her face unpinches; her heart ungrips just enough. And with that release, she starts to cry. I could fill a thousand thimbles with the tears that rush out. But I only need the one.

  Olive rubs her arms, looks at the sky. We all feel it. The shimmer. The glow. The flicker of the candle from red to redder and redder and redder.

  Willa shivers. There’s a hint of a smile on her face, and she reminds me of Eden, before she was Spellbound. Not because they look alike—they don’t. But because she is filled with the same hope Eden had. She hands me a thimble that appears in her hands from nowhere.

  Bethly’s tears don’t stop.

  “That’s magic,” the voice from nowhere says.

  But I didn’t need to be told. I knew.

  18. REAGAN

  We have the tears. It is time to get the rest. Somehow. So we walk down the hill, toward the end of the spell, toward the things we hope we can change. It should maybe just be Jane and me, but Olive and Willa join us as if it is meant to be that way, as if the four of us are in something together.

  “The handsomest boy,” I say, like we are still just checking people off the list I invented instead of trying to understand what is happening between us and trying to save Jane and her sisters and maybe my entire family and the kingdom of Ever. And all the magic in the world.

  “Abbott Shine,” Jane says. I swe
ar I can see her smiling. Or maybe it’s me that’s smiling at the sound of his name.

  “Oh sure, locked in a castle your whole life, but you know all the beautiful boys,” I say. It’s the way I would talk to Willa, not a princess, but Jane isn’t a princess anymore. Not like that. For an awful second I think I’ve said the worst thing in a serious moment, but then she laughs.

  That great sound again. The snort. The heartiness.

  “I’ll miss that,” Jane says when her laughter has faded and the rhythm of our walking has taken over. “Laughing. I mean. If I can miss things when I’m gone.”

  “Don’t,” I say. “Don’t give up.”

  “We have the tears,” Olive says. “We can do this.” I’d been thinking Olive was here to help Jane, and that’s true maybe, but I see, I’ve been seeing, that she’s here for the same reasons I’m here too. To punish the king. To fight back. Maybe when the spell is broken, more of him will be exposed, more things will change. The princesses know who he is. And if they are saved, they can tell their subjects. They can reveal their father. They can save their attendants. Maybe. Hopefully.

  I put a hand on Olive, who has put an arm around Jane.

  Willa nuzzles against me. “We can do this,” she echoes Olive, and she sounds so sure I can almost believe her. Then the four of us are caught in this moment together, and there it is again, stronger now. The shimmer. The thing that feels like magic but can’t be magic but so clearly is magic.

  “Oh!” Olive says.

  “What is that?” Willa says. She wiggles her toes, shakes out her arms.

  “You feel it?” Jane asks. Olive looks frightened. Willa looks excited.

  “What is that?” Willa asks again.

  “It’s something,” Jane says. She rubs her arm, her heart, the back of her neck.

  Olive considers her hands. She looks at the sky, which is day, but more golden than day usually is. Less bright and more warm. A new sky for Ever.

  “Abbott Shine,” Olive says. “That one will be easy.”