Ever Cursed

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “I know what kind of king you are,” I say. “Give us the crown.”

  A dozen more glass boxes break. A dozen more witches step out into Ever, wondering why the air feels hot and charged, why their arms are begging to be raised, why they suddenly smell something too sweet and a little like coffee—the royal fear. The king’s terror.

  “You can’t trust a witch and a princess over a king. Your king,” the king cries.

  “What about a dozen witches?” I say.

  “What about a hundred?” Jane says. She looks out at Ever. A young girl, newly emerged from her box, raises her arms. An enormous cake appears in front of her. Another new witch raises their hands, and a silk gown appears on their body. Turner Dodd’s mother raises her hands and stops her son’s crying. Lady Lill raises her hands, and the king is no longer in his tower but right here, among us, on the ground, on the shore of the moat.

  He is smaller than I thought he was. Grayer than he looks in his tower. His crown is askew.

  “Is this what you want?” he asks the people of Ever, all of them in different states of surprise and fear and excitement and pride. “Is this really what you want?”

  There’s the sound of more cracking glass. It’s the loudest shatter yet, because it’s right here, practically on top of us. We move out of the way of the falling glass, some of us screeching in surprise. There is more to be afraid of than just a king in a tower or a witch on a hill.

  But when the shock is over, when the glass is all on the ground and my mother can magic it away, the fear is worth it. Because she is here with us again. The Queen of Ever. Out of her box. Moving her limbs. And turning to the king with a sureness reserved for royalty, reserved for queens. A certainty that comes from sitting in a box, watching the world go by, worried she’ll never be able to make it better.

  “You are not a king,” the Queen of Ever says, her first words in five years, but still they sound sure and easy, a little like music. “Give us the crown.”

  31. JANE

  I don’t recognize her voice. I thought I’d remembered it all these years, replaying her advice in my head, going over and over and over the things she’d told me about what it would take to become a queen. But she sounds completely different from the memory of my mother.

  A still comes over Ever. They’ve waited a long time to see their queen move and speak. I wonder if she’s what they want her to be, if she fits their memories better than my own.

  “Is the spell broken?” I ask Reagan, who looks every bit as surprised as me that the queen is out of her box. The king’s crown is still on his head, so it shouldn’t be possible, but boxes are breaking everywhere, and I have a sudden desire to eat. I look for my sisters. I’ll be able to see in their eyes if they are still Spellbound.

  “It can’t be,” Reagan says. “He didn’t give us the crown. I didn’t perform the Undoing. You haven’t performed yours. Spells break little by little, but there’s always a moment where they’re totally done. The Undoing.”

  I imagine Reagan, like me, poring over books upon books to understand how magic works, how Ever works, what it means to be royal or magical or none of those things. We have both studied hard. We were both brought up to carry on a tradition that we didn’t entirely understand. We both thought we were living one story, when really we were living another.

  There was nothing in our textbooks about a king who shouldn’t be king or witches who don’t know they are witches.

  I look up at the tower, and there they are. My sisters, out of their boxes. Nora grins. Alice lowers herself to the ground and maybe, maybe, finally sleeps. Grace looks alight with knowledge.

  And Eden. Eden is filled with hope.

  She rushes down from the tower, joining us on the lawn. She’s brought something with her. “Here,” she says. “I think you’ll like it.”

  It’s an apple, so red and shiny it could be fake, but the feel of it in my hand is so real that my mouth starts to water. “I can’t,” I say, because that feels true, because my father is standing there with his arms crossed and his head raised, daring us to take the crown from his head.

  “I think you can,” Eden says.

  So I try. Because if Eden can hope, maybe I can eat. My lips meet the apple’s skin, and for a moment I think it’s just like always. I can’t bite in. My mouth won’t let me.

  But it only lasts a second. My teeth break through. And I take a bite.

  It tastes nothing like what I remember. Sharper than I thought it would be. Sweeter. Messier, too.

  Like Ever.

  It’s gone in an instant. I am ravenous, desperate for more and more and more to eat. Alice will probably sleep for a month. I will eat for the rest of the day. For the rest of the week, barely taking a rest. But the look of confusion doesn’t leave Reagan’s face. And she doesn’t have a new skirt from the magic of breaking a spell.

  “This isn’t possible,” she says to me and to her mother and to Willa and to whoever in Ever can hear her.

  Reagan’s mother puts an arm around her daughter. She looks at the king. Maybe it’s the first time she’s looked directly at my father and not immediately needed to look somewhere else, to make herself disappear.

  “I’m not giving up my crown,” my father says, pretending to be sure but faltering, since the Spell of Without isn’t turning True but in fact is breaking down.

  “That’s just fine,” Reagan’s mother says. “There’s more than one way to break a spell.”

  My mother smiles at Reagan’s mother. They don’t look anything alike, except for the ways they look at us. A hundred textbooks we read, Reagan and I. A hundred rules we memorized. I was taught that nothing was more powerful than the royal family. And Reagan probably learned that nothing was more powerful than a witch’s magic. But all this time, there was the truth, there was the kingdom, there was bravery, and that was stronger than anything we learned about.

  “And more than one way to rule a kingdom,” my mother says. She raises her arms. It must feel good, to stretch like that after five years frozen. To feel magic rush through her after a lifetime without.

  “This isn’t right,” my father, the king, says. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”

  “We needed a crown from the King of Ever,” Reagan says, looking to her mother for an explanation. “He didn’t give his crown. Why are the spells breaking?”

  Again, Reagan’s mother looks at mine. Their stories have crissed and crossed for all these years, silently winding around each other, more complicated than they had to be. Made complicated by silence and shame and ignorance and fear.

  They look out over the kingdom, the masses of people demanding the king give up his crown.

  “A king has to have a kingdom,” Reagan’s mother says. “A king is only king because his people say that he is.”

  She smiles. It’s a beautiful thing, rare and precious and about-to-laugh.

  “There is no King of Ever,” my mother says. She straightens her own crown, then reconsiders and takes it from her head. “We are a kingdom without a king.”

  “We are a kingdom with a queen!” an eager woman across the moat cries. There’s a smattering of applause for my mother, the queen, and some grumbles, too. My mother shakes her head at the excitement, though. She gives in to Bethly’s beaming smile, and one finds its way onto her face as well. She looks happy to have her smile back. Her voice, too. She looks happy, in a way she never did before.

  She isn’t still. She isn’t quiet. She isn’t ruling from a distance. She isn’t the sun obediently shining on a garden.

  “Are you still queen?” I ask my mother. “What does it mean to be queen?” It is a question I asked when I was young, but I knew so little then. The question is different now.

  My mother thinks for a great long while.

  “There’s more than one way to be queen,” she says, the words of my mother and Reagan’s mother echoing off each other again and again.

  “You have to be royal,” I say. But
my mother shakes her head. We don’t know what royal means, anyway. It has changed, over the years.

  “You have to be quiet,” Reagan says. She knows what lessons I learned and how hard it is to unlearn them. My mother shakes her head again. That one was wrong too.

  “A woman,” Willa says.

  “No.” My mother is sure on that point. We grew up thinking queens were quiet women and kings were gentle, good men, but all of that was wrong.

  “A queen is a person with a crown,” my mother says. Her arms raise and crowns appear on the heads of people all over the kingdom.

  Willa touches the one on her own head. It looks small and delicate. Other crowns are large and opulent. Others are basic and sweet. “It’s not that simple,” Willa says. A crown doesn’t fix the way things have been. A crown doesn’t mean we are all the same. A crown doesn’t change the years that have gone by, the way things have been, how much work it will be to change Ever, to change the world.

  “It was never so simple, I suppose,” my mother, the queen, says.

  32. REAGAN

  Outside the walls of the castle, standing before the Waterless Moat, looking out at a world of witches, there is a man in a box. He is hunched and cross armed. He is gray haired and smirking. He still has a crown upon his head. He is not sorry. He is Jane’s father, the once-upon-a-time king.

  It is a perfect spell, because we cast it together. All of us, every witch in Ever. There are more of us than I thought there would be. Every woman in every kind of body, and others, who identify only as witch. And some men, too, who found the magic as if it were a sock they’d lost in the laundry, a key that had slipped through their fingers into the moat. Maybe there are people who are witches but want to keep that hidden. I don’t know. What I know is that though some men are witches, it is only men who are not witches.

  We cast the spell together, so that none of us would have to bear the weight of it alone. Each known witch in Ever was wrapped in a featherlight silver skirt, so thin you could forget it was there. Except that there is a king trapped in glass who refuses to be sorry.

  If he is ever sorry, the spell will be broken and he will be banished to AndNot, to a small cottage I once lived in. He will be allowed to listen to the ocean and think about what he did. He will be free to walk the shore, but not free to hurt anyone else.

  But for now, he is not sorry. Before the spell hit, he said he had done nothing wrong. He looked them all in the eye—my mother, Olive, a dozen other now-witches whom he’d hurt—and said he hadn’t done it, they had misunderstood, they had wanted it, they had asked for it, he was king, and if a king does something, it can’t be wrong.

  It isn’t true, but it also doesn’t matter. In Ever, now, there are no kings.

  There is an empty castle and an expanse of avocado trees and raspberry bushes and fields of greens and wheat. Jane works in what were once the Barren Fields, always stealing bits of food for herself. A cherry tomato. A bite of pear. A mushroom growing from the ground, earthy and delicate at once. Her mother works alongside her, loving the sun on her arms, the breeze in her hair, the way her limbs move when she wants, still when she wants.

  Jane wears her crown in the fields. It is a sight to see. A queen of Ever in thick pants and a heavy sweater, digging holes in dirt, picking fruit from trees, looking around before popping it in her mouth, always closing her eyes at the taste.

  She doesn’t want to miss a single bite.

  Willa wears her crown by the moat, where she spends most of her time. She teaches spells to new witches and is always forgetting an ingredient, a word from a chant, a detail. She thinks she is a teacher, but she is a light. A tiny light by the moat, a person who is both strong and sweet, both brave and silly, unlikely, perfect combinations that are befitting a queen of Ever.

  Olive wears her crown as she walks the kingdom of Ever, checking on magic, making sure no one has cast a spell so large it will weigh them down, so unruly it could unmagic a kingdom full of witches. She makes sure no one has lit a candle. Sometimes a non-witch tries. Sometimes a non-witch says we are dangerous, that our magic is evil, that we have made Ever a terrible place to live. Sometimes a non-witch says it is our duty to forgive the king. Olive assures them it is not.

  Olive speaks to the subjects of Ever in her gentle voice, and they believe she is soft when in fact she is unwavering. There is so much they don’t see of her, so much they miss.

  So much they miss about us all.

  “He is not the king,” Olive says when they ask and ask and ask. “There is no king.”

  I’m not sure if there are queens, either. There are people with crowns. There are witches with skirts. There are people who don’t want either, who want both, who want the past, who think the future is already here.

  Jane’s mother said a queen is a person with a crown, but she also said it was never so simple as all that. We could hand out a hundred crowns, a crown for every witch, but it wouldn’t make us all the same.

  Maybe I am not a queen, or maybe I am, but I wear my crown in the Home on the Hill, where I sit on the roof and watch over Ever. Sometimes I miss the smell of the ocean. Sometimes I miss the sound of frying berries. Sometimes I wish I could live in a home as one of only a few witches in the world, not knowing that there is magic everywhere.

  And on those days, at those times, I go down to the moat with Willa and wait for Abbott Shine to join us. He always does.

  “Look what you did,” he says, and he points at the gardens of vegetables and flowers, the women with skirts tied tight around their waists, the bursts of magic that explode in the sky a dozen times a day, the never-night sky that keeps us safe, the Woods That Were so that no one can hide what they’re doing.

  Sometimes we miss the way things were. The sky turning from light to dark. The woods with their tall trees and worn paths and hidden nooks. A fairy-tale kingdom with parties and jewels and enchanted princesses. A Good King. A beautiful queen. A clear role for everyone. Five hundred people in boxes fit just for them.

  But the way things were was never the way things were. Night was never just a starlit sky. Woods were never just trees. Not really.

  I keep looking at what Ever has become, the beautiful and the ugly parts in a strange sort of harmony. If we lit the candle, it wouldn’t be gold. We are not at rest. We are changing. We are trying. We are failing. We are trying again, harder.

  It is an imperfect and unbalanced Ever. It always was. Maybe it always will be. Even magic and crowns can only do so much.

  Abbott and I talk about Ever, like we used to. Some days he is angry and some days he is hopeful and some days he is too tired to talk about any of it. Willa tells us about Jane, who magics up more crowns, then fewer. She tries spells and then promises to never cast another one again. She doesn’t know quite who to be. Neither do I. Neither does Abbott.

  Neither does Ever.

  “We need to write a new story of Ever,” Willa says. “A true one.” She opens up a notebook that looks like the one Grace used to use; maybe it is the one Grace used. She doesn’t need it anymore. And Willa begins to write the truth of Ever, the way she sees it.

  She leaves room for more histories. More fairy stories. More once-upon-a-times and a-long-time-agos. Behind the castle, Alice chips away at stone, carving and recarving the people of Ever, trying to tell our story in marble, never getting it quite right, never finishing.

  Alice carves and Willa writes and Abbott worries and my gaze lands where it always does. On the king in his box, sure he has done nothing wrong, waiting for something other than his own heart to break the spell he’s under.

  We sit on the edge of the moat, dipping our feet into air that used to be water. And we think about the magic that used to be only mine.

  We wait for a night to come, but it doesn’t.

  It won’t.

  I won’t let it.

  Not again. Not Ever again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book has been a challenge, a gift, a thr
ill, a surprise. There are so many people to thank for helping this book move from the vaguest of ideas to a full-blown world.

  As always, a gigantic thank-you to my agent and friend, Victoria Marini, who is my rock, who makes me feel capable, and who I am so grateful to have spent the last eight years working with.

  I’ve been beyond lucky to work with my editor, Liesa Abrams, on this imagined fairy tale. This book and I both needed her buzzing brain, her big heart, her patience, her faith, and her brand of magic to push this idea to places I never knew it could go. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the long list of ways you showed up for me, for this process, and for this story. It is a gift to work with you. And a huge thank-you to Jessi Smith for her incredible editorial input and creative energy, which played a huge role in sculpting this story.

  An enormous thank-you to everyone at Simon Pulse who has worked on this book from the million different angles bookmaking requires. Specifically, thank you to Heather Palisi and Katt Phatt for the incredible cover and thank you to Chelsea Morgan, Sara Berko, Brian Luster, Jen Strada, Rebecca Vitkus, and the wonderful sales and marketing teams for all your hard work on and support of Ever Cursed.

  A very special thank-you to Sarah Gailey for their incredible, generous, valuable insight. And thank you to other readers who brought vital feedback to this project, helping me find the best path to tell the story I intended to tell.

  This is the first novel-length book I’ve written since having a baby, and I have to thank everyone who helped me find a space to be a parent and a writer, and everyone who helped make that space beautiful and safe and valued. Thank you to Fia’s grandparents for being available whenever we needed it, the incredible women at Fia’s day care, a long list of beautiful friends, and an impressive roster of babysitters, including my valued friend Alisha Spielman. And a very special thank-you to the other moms who gave me support, gave me inspiration, and gave me comfort. The list is long but includes Jess, Caela, Aly, Dana, Lauren, Katie, Nita, Anna, Monica, Carolyn, Carla, and many more at all different stages on this journey.