Ever Cursed

by Corey Ann Haydu

  I nod. “He’s my best friend,” I say. “Or he was. Is. I don’t know. He’ll help, though.”

  Olive smiles. Then grins. “He’ll help,” she says. “That’s my brother. Half brother. But, you know, brother.”

  Jane looks even more confused. “Your brother?” she asks, like she’s forgotten that attendants have families.

  “Abbott Shine?” I say, like maybe she doesn’t know his whole name, as if her brother is some other Abbott and not the one I’ve spent long mornings with on this side of the moat, the one who hates royals and sometimes witches, too. That cannot be her brother.

  “I’m sorry,” Olive says. “I was waiting for the right moment, I guess.…”

  I try to see the ways they might be related. They don’t exactly look like brother and sister. Or act related. Olive is a white girl with a small voice and a polite, timid way about her. Abbott is a half-black boy who says what he means and wasn’t even scared of a home filled with witches.

  But they have the same pointed chin and relaxed gait and their own ways of being brave. Of being strong.

  “He must have hated you being in the castle,” I say, remembering that of course he’d said he had a sister there. He said a hundred things to me that I heard but didn’t listen to, didn’t think about enough.

  “He saw once,” Olive says. She turns to Jane. “He saw your father. His hands.” She speaks in code like my grandmother, but we all speak the same language now. It’s the language of the secrets we’ve been holding and the wrongs that have been done.

  “Oh,” Jane says. She takes a shallow breath. Lets it out with another “Oh. Gosh. What are the chances?”

  “It’s a small town, Jane,” Olive says.

  “Five hundred thirty-seven residents,” Jane says, and I smile, even now, at the way princesses are taught to see their kingdom. Numbers and facts and silence and distance.

  A little like witches, I guess.

  The rest of Ever doesn’t get the benefit of distance. They are in it. They are struggling through it. It is what we made, but they have to navigate it.

  “Abbott Shine,” Jane goes on. “The one thing he wanted me to know was that he missed his mother and had the best little sisters in the world.”

  “And he’d do anything to protect them,” Olive finishes.

  “We have a lot in common,” Jane says, and I think she means she and Abbott do, both of them desperate to save their sisters, and having a hard time figuring out how to do it.

  But maybe she means more than that. I look at her to try to decipher it. When witches are struggling, we go hazy, but Jane’s face is the opposite. It is coming into focus. She is sharpening, clarifying.

  “Peach!” she says, so random I think I’ve misheard her. Or that her hunger is making her hallucinate.

  Willa giggles at the strange exclamation, and I hush her. But Jane smiles at it. She has little sisters. She gets it.

  “You okay?” I ask Jane. “Do you need a break?”

  “I taste peach,” she says. “I taste it. In my mouth.” She grins. Licks her lips. She brightens. “It’s there,” she says. “It’s in my mouth. Peach.”

  Her voice sounds a little out of control, like it might break loose and do its own thing. She’s trying, I can see, to stay calm, to be a queen about it, but it’s hard because her mouth is tasting again, after five years.

  When spells break, they do so slowly, a little at a time. I wonder if Jane knows that. That spells don’t shatter at once; they crumble and dissolve and shift. The taste of peach after years of nothing. A pocket of hope. A crack in a glass box. The sky turning from all bright to mostly bright.

  Like it is right now.

  “I love peaches,” Willa says.

  “I’ve never had a peach,” Olive says.

  “When this is all over,” Jane says, “we’ll eat peaches. All of us.”

  She might mean just the four of us. But she might mean all of Ever.

  I don’t know what it’s all about, the buzzing and glowing, Jane tasting peach, the sky shifting, the breeze blowing, but it doesn’t matter. We are walking again, without having discussed it, without even noticing the moving of our feet. I wonder if Olive’s and Willa’s and Jane’s toes are scrunching and unscrunching too, experimenting with this thing between us.

  It is a powerful thing that was supposed to be trapped up on a hill. A thing that isn’t supposed to be pulsing between us all, changing the shade of the sky, bringing a princess from a castle to the top of a hill.

  Magic.

  And by the time we reach Abbott’s house, it is singing in our limbs and sweetening our breath and making our hearts beat beat beat with something that feels a little like hope.

  19. JANE

  He is waiting for us. Or maybe he is simply planting potatoes in the garden as he might do any other morning.

  He is as handsome as they’ve all said he is, but it’s obscured by how sad he looks. How worried. He keeps looking at the castle. He is so real. This is Ever. It is filled with worried people and heartbroken people and handsome people and terrible people. In my books, the subjects of Ever are one thing, one crowd that raises their chins to the castle and listens to the king and works hard and lights their candles and thinks of nothing but their royal family.

  But Abbott Shine isn’t looking to the castle in the hope of seeing a man in a crown or a bunch of princesses in silly gowns. He is looking for his sister. I wanted to know one thing about him, but there are a hundred things to know about him, a thousand.

  “Abbott,” Olive says. The way she says his name is so sweet it breaks my heart. She loves him like I love my sisters, in the way that makes you soft and striving. She can’t even finish the second syllable before he is running toward her, stomping out the beginnings of plants, the tiny bit of vegetation the ground allows him to grow.

  “My Olive,” he says, and he’s crying. He turns to Reagan next, and they embrace too, like old friends, which maybe they are. Half of my heart is with my sisters, locked in a tower, and the other half is right here, wondering at the impossibility of this beautiful boy and me loving the same people.

  Hating the same people too. I realize it in a gasp, the feeling blooming in my heart before I’ve even had a chance to wonder about it. I hate my father. Maybe not the same way Reagan and Olive and Abbott do. But I hate him in a smaller, pointier, dizzier way.

  I don’t know how to greet this Abbott Shine. I am still a stranger in my kingdom, and the things I was taught don’t work here. I half curtsy and half wave and almost offer my hand to be kissed but settle at last on bowing my head and whimpering out a thin “hello.”

  “Princess Jane,” he says. It’s not that he’s not beautiful up close—he is. But now he isn’t the idea of a person. He isn’t who Alice carved into stone. He looks tired and hungry and sad and hopeless. I know, because I know the way that looks on people. “Welcome to Ever,” he says. “What do you think?”

  I look out at the kingdom, his view of it. All I can see are sad homes and sadder gardens and the tower that my sisters are locked in rising above leafless, fruitless trees.

  And a bit of magic in the sky.

  And a little bit more right here, on my fingertips.

  “It’s awful,” I say.

  “That’s not very queenly,” he says. Olive clings to him but smiles at me. I’ve failed her in the biggest, worst, ugliest ways, but here she is. A person I don’t deserve. I almost ask again for the spell to turn True, so I don’t have to keep feeling the way it feels to have been wrong, to have been selfish, to have been small and cowardly and silly.

  But Reagan shakes her head at me, like she can see the shame on my face and doesn’t want it to settle there.

  I look for something beneath the shame and beneath the hunger and beneath all the ways I’ve ever learned to be a princess and a someday queen. I don’t know the word for what I find there.

  Or I do know the word, but it can’t possibly be true.

  Magi
c.

  “I guess I’m not that kind of queen,” I say.

  “Not a queen at all yet,” Abbott says. He tilts his head. He knows why I’m here. In Ever, everyone has a box they live inside, a category we have placed them in. I have always thought these things were true, something more than stories we tell one another at night.

  We were wrong about who was saddest. But we are not wrong about who is handsomest. We know that, and this boy in front of us does too.

  Abbott Shine gets a pair of scissors. I open my hands to use them myself, but he shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I’ll do it. My hair’s been touched enough.” He snips a curl from his head and hands it to me with a sigh. “I said I’d never help a princess.”

  “When the spell is broken, I promise we’ll—” I start. But he doesn’t let me finish.

  “I’ve been promised a lot of things by people like you before,” Abbott says. He looks at Reagan. She isn’t like me, but I guess to Abbott she sort of is. “I don’t need any more promises.”

  It’s hard to stay silent, to not fill up the awkwardness with apologies and assurances. But I do my best to be quiet. It’s a skill I should be good at. And with my silence in check, Abbott invites us inside. Olive doesn’t need the invitation, of course. She rushes through the front door and hugs her father and a small child who must be her and Abbott’s younger sister. She’s told me about her little sister before. “She reminds me of you,” she’s said. I immediately look for what we have in common, but it’s right there; it’s crystal clear; it’s not some hidden trait or inner strength or quality of character.

  Her sister is skin and bones. She is starving.

  She plays with the hem of my dress, gravitating toward me like she knows me and asking over and over if I am the princess.

  “I am,” I say, but it doesn’t feel so true anymore. “I’m Jane.”

  “I’m Bess,” the little girl says. She looks like Abbott—her face just as lovely, her eyes as big, her skin the same light brown shade, her chin as sharp. She could be four or twelve; the shape of her body is so small and wrong and hungry that it’s impossible to know. She is not the size and shape she is meant to be, and her hunger hurts me almost as much as my own.

  “She’s why,” Olive says.

  “Why what?” I ask.

  Abbott makes a noise like I should already know, and Reagan looks to the sky like she wishes she could fly up there instead of being down here talking to us.

  “Why I stay in the castle,” Olive says. “We need to be in his good graces for her sake. Even though he—”

  “Oh,” I say, still not wanting to hear the words. I bring my hands to Bess’s ears, to cover them so they can’t hear what we’re talking about. Whatever age she is, she’s too young, and I know that because I am too young and Olive is too young and we are all too young for this.

  “She knows,” Olive says. I shrink. Even this small child knows the thing I decided not to know. The thing I saw but didn’t see.

  “Everyone knows,” Abbott says.

  Reagan tilts her head even more toward the sky, the hurt of it so big that she can’t bear to look at us. She would do anything for her mother, which I understand, because I would do anything for mine.

  “The whole kingdom can’t know about— They love him,” I say.

  “Some of them do,” Abbott says. “But the rest—we’re scared of him,” Abbott says. “You know the difference, don’t you?”

  I think of my father in his tower, giving speeches, and the way the whole town gathers, claps, nods their approval, calls his name. And the way they’re waiting for his permission to help us. I think of the attendants whispering to one another, trying to give one another breaks, trying to make it tolerable, living in our home.

  The way Drum Drascall’s wife looked at us with sad eyes. The way the royals in the Woods That Were didn’t seem worried that someone would find out about what they were doing. The way they call him Good and Gentle, but maybe only because he likes to be called Good and Gentle.

  The bells ring out from the castle. It’s a sound I know well. A beautiful chiming that signals a speech from the king. We all tilt our heads up, like Reagan, who is lost in the clouds. And we watch the tower until he appears. Which he does. With four princesses by his side. If I squint, I am sure I can see that they are dressed in silk. I am sure, even though they are too far to see clearly, that they are wearing heavy crowns and smiles that hurt.

  “It is time,” my father begins. As with every speech, there is an enchanted crystal vase below his chin, and the sound spreads across the kingdom. “It is time to remember the past.” I look at my sisters for signs of something. Life? Pain? Okay-ness? I don’t know, but I’m too far away to see anything except their tied-back hair, their jutting chins, the heaviness of their gowns.

  “Some of us know what our kingdom survived when our princess was kidnapped. How hard our kingdom fought to find her. How much Ever battled with other kingdoms who we thought might have taken her. The chaos that ensued. The pain and brutality and effort of the War We Won. The answers never came. The princess was never returned. So many lives lost, so many kingdoms blaming one another, and still we don’t know what happened to our sweet princess. It was a long time ago. I wasn’t there. You weren’t there. But we know. We were in crisis. And now we are back in that same place.”

  I realize how very little I ever knew about that war. That princess. Inside the castle questions didn’t arise. We memorized words and dates and names and recited them back. I was the fastest, the most accurate. And I felt smart, knowing all those facts.

  But I knew nothing.

  “How can we trust the other kingdoms,” I asked once, “if we don’t know for sure who took the princess?”

  “It’s for the best,” my mother said. But that wasn’t an answer, of course, and we both heard the nothingness of it. “Maybe we don’t really trust anyone,” she said moments later. “But peace is better than war.”

  It was a very queenly thing to say. But when I try to think about it now, it doesn’t mean much. It doesn’t promise anything. It doesn’t help me know Ever and our history and myself.

  “Why would someone take her?” I asked back then.

  “She was rumored to be very beautiful.” My mother paused. She looked at me, and I couldn’t decide if I wanted to be beautiful enough to take or plain enough to stay safe.

  I know now.

  “Why candles?” I asked. I could see my mother’s interest in talking about the War We Won and the princess we lost was waning.

  “The witches,” she said.

  “And we trust them?” I asked. “I thought we didn’t trust anyone.”

  My mother kissed me on the forehead. She was done answering questions. Maybe because she didn’t know the answers.

  Or maybe because she didn’t like them.

  Those candles made Ever look beautiful, from the castle. Dots of light all over the countryside. Little golden orbs that reminded us that we were the only magical kingdom in all the kingdoms of the world.

  “Let’s not forget that we won the War We Won,” Dad booms now from his perch. “We won, and we chose to protect the witches.” Abbott makes a sound that’s like a laugh, if a laugh could be exhausted and heartbroken. “We don’t negotiate with those witches. We did them a favor. Now they want us to sacrifice to break a spell, and that is not what we do in Ever. We protect our kingdom, above all else. I love my girls. But I love all of you more. I have to. I am King of Ever.” He says it again, “I am king,” and it booms out over all of us, so loud I want to cover my ears now.

  “Princess Jane the Spellbound, Princess Jane Without, has left. She has run away from her palace. She has abandoned her people. And her family. Her young sisters. We stand here, in unity, as your royal family, and ask you not to help her.”

  My heart stops. It’s only for a moment, and no one would know except me. But it stops. My breath, too. The blinking of my eyes. The clicking of my mind as it proce
sses words. It all stops. And then, because I still have a day to break the spell, it all starts again, foggier, clunkier, worse than before.

  But my mouth tastes berries. And cream. All is not lost. Most, but not all.

  My sisters bow their heads, but from a certain angle, it could look like a nod of agreement.

  My sisters, trapped in that tower, without me—Without so many things—can’t do a thing.

  There is applause. The people of Ever applaud my father and his plea to let me die.

  The sound is deafening. There is cheering. “Ever forever! Ever first! Ever above! Ever Without!”

  And in the echo of that awful noise, my hands rise, on their own. They stretch up to the sky, to the Always Day, to the never night. There is a crash. The sound of glass.

  I close my eyes. I try to look away, as I’ve done for years, as I did to Olive, as I promised I would try not to do again, but still I don’t want to see what I’ve done; I don’t want to see what might be wrong.

  “Jane. Oh, Jane. No,” Reagan whispers.

  “Oh!” Willa’s shock is quiet but powerful.

  I hear Abbott’s cry. It strangles itself. Olive’s cry is behind it, a weep that turns wild. The gasp of their father and the sound of a body hitting the ground.

  I do not hear a little girl shout. I don’t hear Bess.

  “Open your eyes,” Reagan says. “You have to look.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You cast a spell,” Reagan says. “You cast a spell.”

  I open my eyes. Right in front of me, frozen, trapped inside a glass box, is Bess.

  20. REAGAN

  Jane’s arms come back to her sides as her eyes open and she looks at what she’s done. For a moment, I think it’s only Bess in a box, and the cruelty of it, the senselessness, astonishes me.

  Then I see the home next door, a box in the backyard with Abbott’s neighbors trapped inside. And when my heart slows down enough to let me listen, I hear the shouts of all the people of Ever. There are more people in boxes. Women and girls. I look up at the tower, and they are trapped in boxes too, all four of Jane’s sisters caught in their hung-head, clasped-arms poses, all of them on display, just like their mother.