Princess of Midnight: A Retelling of Cinderella (Fairytales of Folkshore Book 6)

by Lucy Tempest

  “I found her at the end of that accursed town in Man’s Reach,” she spat. “The injuries that idiot brought on herself for escaping me finally killed her, and she turned into a tree at the edge of the Hornswoods.”

  This had me sagging in despair. It felt as if I’d lost my mother all over again. This time, she wasn’t buried in the town’s cemetery, but frozen forever at the edge of the forest.

  Dolora yanked harder on my hair, making me whimper. “I didn’t even know she was pregnant, or I would have cut open that tree and pulled you out, kept you as penance. But it all worked out in the end. When the authorities here eventually found out my racket and chased me, I escaped to that town. My supply of glamor magic was running out when I found you. I knew what you were immediately, knew I could use you forever. It was just my luck when I found out your father was a rich widower. Enthralling him into marrying me took even less effort than all my previous husbands. Using you was a two-for-one, the least I was owed.”

  “No one owes you anything!” I spat through the pain.

  “Oh, but you do. You owe me so much for the trouble you caused me. But it’s all good now, because I know how you can pay me back.” She shoved me down hard to the floor as she hollered, “Girls! Get in here—now!”

  Darla and Aneira burst into the kitchen, and I scrambled towards them, throwing myself at their feet. “Aneira! Aneira, you have to help me!”

  “And why would she do that?” Darla sneered.

  I barely dodged her kick, taking it on the chin rather than in the eye. My vision briefly blacked out regardless, and my disorientation increased.

  Hands turned me over and another was gripping my free ankle and taking off the slipper.

  Desperation roused me, and I clawed for my slipper, yelling, “No!”

  Darla elbowed me right between the collar-bones. “Where’s the other one?”

  Uncaring about the amplified burn, I slammed my knuckles into her cheek.

  Darla’s hand flew to her face with an aghast yowl. “Mother!”

  The poker slammed into my arm three times in a row, ripping a scream from my sore throat as Dolora growled, “There’s no point in you prolonging this. Just tell us where the other shoe is.”

  “It won’t fit any of your enormous troll feet!” I shrieked.

  That earned me a resounding punch from Darla, her hard, bony knuckles slamming into my mouth, almost loosening some teeth.

  Like the first night they’d brought me here, I was surrounded by pain, and I couldn’t run or fight back.

  But I had to try.

  Throwing myself up to my knees, I swung the broom at Darla and Aneira’s heads, trying to get them out of way. Aneira flopped sideways and Darla swiped the poker from her mother, but she didn’t know how to use it as a weapon, and just swung at me ineffectually.

  I endured the responding spike in the burning through my leg just for one good strike at hers. “Get out of my way!”

  Something blazing approached my shoulder, and I swung around to find myself staring at a large, red-hot coal.

  “That’s enough.” Dolora shoved the coal towards my face with a pair of silver tongs. “You make one more move, and I will feed this to you. Understood?”

  Aneira scrambled away, clutching the slipper, watching us with wide, uncertain eyes.

  Desperately throwing myself around Dolora, I clung to Aneira, rasping, “Help me! We can leave together—we can do whatever you want, just help me!”

  Searing pain had me howling, but it was the smell of burning wood that hit me so hard, making me almost black out. Dolora had pressed the coal to the wooden flesh right above the anklet.

  My screams rose until I felt my throat ripping as I begged her to stop. Dolora grabbed me by my thrashing calf as it morphed back into throbbing, bleeding flesh and raised the coal to my face.

  Having me pinned with crippling terror, Dolora viciously glared at her daughter, cowing her further against the wall, before spitting at me, “What have you been saying to her? Filling her head with idiotic ideas, like marrying a minister while you get your pick of royalty here?”

  “You’re th-the one feeding them your delusions about marrying princes and dukes.” I sobbed, praying for the coal to turn to ash. “That’s n-never going to happen for any of you.”

  “But it was going to come true for you.” Dolora pulled my head back to stretch my neck, moving her smoldering threat over my throat. “Now, where is the other shoe?”

  Nauseated by the heat, paralyzed by the unbearable pain, I had one last retort left in me.

  “Why?” I gasped. “You think it’s what made the king choose me? Like Aneira said, no matter what you have, the king will never choose any of you.”

  Dolora turned my head towards Darla. “Shut her up.”

  Darla grabbed my face, and a sickening green glow encased her.

  Like I had sunk back in frozen waters, I felt cold and heavy. Weakness strangled any struggle I had left, and all I could do was fight to keep my eyes open as I watched Darla’s troll face distorting.

  This time, when darkness engulfed me, I didn’t see the skeletal hand of Death reaching for me, but I would have welcomed it.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I awoke on a wet, cold floor.

  For endless minutes, I lay there, staring at a stone and wood ceiling, heavy, aching, and hazy.

  Slowly, awareness trickled back into my mind, forming a scummy pond of murky memories. It wasn’t until the gross sensation of something wrong floated to the surface that I gasped, and lurched up.

  Bright light was streaming through the windows. I was still in the kitchen, and it was almost sunset.

  Yulian.

  I couldn’t wait till nightfall! I had to get to him now!

  Struggling to my feet, pain stabbed me from so many places it almost drove me to my knees. The worst came from the burn above my anklet. It had grown a dark burn scab that had cracked in my effort to stand, looking like the surface layer of charred wood.

  The only reason I wasn’t firewood now had to be because Dolora still had use for me.

  Shaking all over, I cracked open the kitchen door and limped out warily. None of them emerged to demand anything, or to resume interrogating me about the other shoe.

  My glass slippers. The one thing that was truly mine, a gift from Yulian from before we’d even met. I’d lost one, and the other was taken from me.

  Like everything else in my life.

  Soon, it became clear I was alone in the house. They must be out shopping for the final night of the Midwinter Ball. But I couldn’t afford to wait in case they returned to dress.

  Today had to be the day my job was done, when we could put Yulian’s would-be assassin away for good. And when I was freed.

  As for anything else, after last night, and when Yulian found out my mission from the start, I doubted he’d still think I was the one to save him.

  And though I’d do anything to help him break his curse, I had to take one thing at a time. I had to make sure the immediate threat to his life was over first.

  Limping outside, hissing at every stretch on my burn scab, and every pull on a bruised muscle, I hoped to find Keenan waiting for me.

  He wasn’t.

  Wondering if he’d been held up because they’d apprehended his sister, or something even worse, I waited on the stump in the front yard, hoping he’d still show up. Spiraling nerves seemed to be feeding my involuntary shape-shifting, but instead of my limbs, it was my skin that grew a cracked surface, tinged by the greyish-brown of an ash tree’s trunk.

  The sun had set, and I had to give up hope that Keenan would come. And I couldn’t waste more time before the anklet demanded me back within these grounds.

  Hobbling back into the house, I grabbed one of their frilly coats to cover my tattered clothes, and some ridiculously fashionable ice boots. Putting them on, even after bandaging my leg as best I could, was agony.

  I ran out of the backyard, calling Oscar, hoping
he was still around.

  He wasn’t. There was nothing I could do but head to the Castle of Glass on foot.

  After what felt like an hour of uphill struggle, my body was close to giving up. Even if I kept going, I couldn’t make it up there. Not in time, not at this rate.

  Feet dragging to a stop, I doubled over with a hand pressed against the stitch in my good side, feeling swamped in helplessness and despair.

  Suddenly, something nudged my shoulder. Heart in my throat, thinking it was Dolora, coming to drag me back for more abuse, I whirled around—and came face to face with Oscar, his lowered head framing my own with its antlers.

  Relief tore through me, released a ragged exhalation that clouded my view. I reached for the reindeer, cupping his jaw, resting my feverish forehead between his eyes.

  “Thank you for coming for me.” In answer, he huffed and kneeled down before me. Stifling a grateful sob, I climbed up onto his back. “Did Keenan send you? Do you know why he didn’t come? Is it because of what his sister did?”

  His only response was to burst into a gallop, taking us up the road towards the castle.

  At one point, he took an abrupt turn as we came across a street fair, taking us down an alleyway beneath clotheslines and balconies with dripping icicles barely poised above my head level. I reached up as we passed beneath the last home and ripped off an icicle, pressing it over the burn on my leg. The bandage had fallen off, and the scab layer had been peeled, leaving the exposed patch above the boot burning with a reignited agony.

  We finally arrived at the castle base with a grinding halt, at the back of a long line of carriages, none of which was my white pumpkin.

  I hopped off Oscar and struggled up the glass-like stairs, the icicle hidden within the folds of my coat. I was desperate enough to attempt brandishing it at the fairy checking the attendees if she wouldn’t let me pass. But the fairy only did a double-take and kept staring at me as I scampered past her.

  Hoping to find Yulian roaming the main ballroom as usual, I scaled the spiraling stairs, every step harder than the one before. I was halfway up the second flight when the sound of a commotion and guards yelling instructions funneled down the stairwell.

  They were looking for someone.

  Sorcha? Had she tried to kill Yulian again? Had…had she succeeded?

  Panic brought strength I didn’t know I had pouring into my legs, and I climbed faster.

  Breath was shearing through my lungs when I reached the ballroom floor. Following the noise led me to an expansive dining room.

  As I reached the open double doors, across the crowded room, I spotted Yulian.

  Before I almost sagged where I was in relief that he was alive, the crowd between us parted—and I saw Sorcha!

  She was right beside Yulian. Her husband, Simeon, was on his other side. They were each gripping one of his arms.

  Seeing red at their brazen betrayal, I charged towards them, yelling for him to get away from her and flung my melting icicle at Sorcha’s head.

  I missed completely, and before I could take another step, a guard caught me around the waist, applying vicious pressure to my injured side. I tried to slip out of his crushing hold, seething, desperate to fight them all off. To keep Yulian safe.

  But I couldn’t break free no matter how I struggled. And instead of backing away from those two who might stab him in the back while everyone was looking at my unintentional diversion, Yulian just stared at me across the room with pale, lifeless eyes.

  Then I noticed he had his hand pressed to his chest, clutched over a napkin. A creamy-white cloth now drenched in a dark red. The sight made me cease all struggle.

  Blood. He was bleeding. Sorcha had stabbed him!

  But—if she had, why weren’t the guards grabbing her? Why wasn’t Yulian pushing her away? Why wasn’t he looking at her with the muted look of betrayal, the one he aimed—at me?

  Shaking off Sorcha’s and Simeon’s support, he made a regal, staying gesture at the guards, and they immediately ended their mauling roughness.

  As they held me in firm grips, he started walking towards me, to the vocal chagrin of the couple, and the alarm of everyone else.

  Uncaring about the protests and unwavering in his approach, Yulian finally came to stand before me. His towering stance looked diminished, his lean, whipcord body slightly hunched, as if he was struggling to pretend a strength and stability he didn’t feel.

  In fact, he was looking far worse than when I’d first seen him. His skin was bluer, his irises close to blending with the whites of his eyes, his lips dry and cracked.

  But it was the sight of the wound in his chest, still oozing dark crimson that now coated his fingers and ran down his pale, blue-veined hand, that made my legs give. If the guards weren’t holding me, I would have crumpled to the floor.

  Then holding my gaze in an inanimate one, he exhaled a choking breath as he rasped, “Did you come back to finish me off?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Yulian’s inexplicable question revolved in my head.

  With each turn, it made even less sense.

  But he seemed to think it did, and was waiting for an answer.

  Then I opened my mouth and all that came out was a stuttering, “Wh-what?”

  “I can’t imagine why you’d come back,” he said, no expression to his words, or any other part of him. But I knew him enough now to read the anger. No—not anger. Hurt. Deep and unrelenting. “Did you think a change of clothes, shorter hair and a human glamor would fool me? But I suppose you did fool me before. So easily. So completely. So why not try again?”

  At a complete loss, I just spluttered, “What are you talking about?”

  Simeon shoved himself between us, as if to take a deadly blow for his king, looking at me in total disgust. “We should have known not to trust Keenan. This must have been his idea of a sick joke.”

  Sorcha had the nerve to look offended. “Don’t blame my brother for this! He couldn’t have known she was a human infiltrator!”

  “Couldn’t have known?” her husband scoffed. “This is Keenan we’re talking about! His pranks involve tricking people into running off cliffs or giving gifts that could maim them!”

  “Everyone in Autumn is like that,” she argued heatedly. “It’s an age-old tradition that ensures only the strongest of us populate our Court!”

  “So, is this your mother testing if I’m fit to rule mine?” Yulian deadpanned. “I needed to survive your lethal prank to prove worthy? Am I supposed to have no hard feelings about this?”

  “No! What I’m saying is lethal pranks are not the same as plotting regicide!” Sorcha shoved her husband aside to face Yulian, face swollen and bruised from my attack last night. “There is no way Keenan had anything to do with this.”

  “Then where is he?” her husband countered.

  Sorcha blanched. “This human—or whatever she is—must have tricked him, somehow, the same way she made you believe she was here to save you!”

  Was I in the midst of a fever dream? Could this really be happening?

  Just what was happening?

  Uselessly trying to loosen the guards’ hold, I spat at Sorcha, “I didn’t do anything! You’re the one who tried to kill him!”

  They all turned to me and just stared, as if I’d grown a second head.

  “Yulian,” I pleaded, trying to elicit any reaction from him. “I know I look different, but it’s not because I was trying to fool you or pass as someone else. I can explain that, if you let me. But you have to believe me—she’s the one who tried to kill you! She attacked me yesterday when I was leaving!”

  “You mean when I tried to keep you from running off again?” Sorcha snapped. “You call that an attack? When you’re the one who bludgeoned me with your shoe?”

  I gaped at her, mortified at her ability to lie so smoothly, to feign such convincing hurt and incredulity.

  “I made excuses for you when Sorcha told me about what you did,” Yulian said. “
I told her you didn’t mean her harm, that you just panicked in your need to leave, in fear of being punished by your family. Now I realize you must have been fleeing before your glamor faded.” Yulian turned his head as if he could no longer look at me. “I suppose you were right when you said one night wasn’t enough to know someone.”

  It would have hurt less if he’d yelled, if he’d thrown things at me, if he’d done to me what I had grown accustomed to from my stepfamily. But being so hurt, so frozen, and deteriorating before my eyes, like my effect on him had not just been undone, but worsened his condition—it hurt more than the burn of a hundred red-hot coals being spilled onto my body.

  The one person who’d ever truly known me, who could ever know me, now looked at me like he didn’t know who or what I was.

  “Take her away,” he said, his eyes spilling tears that froze halfway down his hard, blue-tinged face.

  This wasn’t a nightmare. I wasn’t still on the kitchen floor being strangled by Darla and burned by Dolora. Sorcha had somehow convinced everyone that I was the one trying to assassinate him and—

  It had worked.

  “I couldn’t have done any of this, I just got here!” I cried, but Yulian was walking away, looking as if he was barely holding himself up. I struggled in my captors’ hold rabidly, desperate to run to him. “Yulian, you have to know I’d never hurt you—Yulian!”

  The guards twisted my arms hard enough almost to snap them off as they forced me out. I still tried digging my heels, hoping I’d turn into a tree there and then and be impossible to move, screaming every defense, screaming for Yulian, for Keenan, for Etheline, to come stop this.

  It was no use. No one came. And I couldn’t turn any part of me into wood.

  The guards roughly dragged me to a doorway at the end of the sprawling floor, then down a stone stairway that seemed to spiral down endlessly. I went hoarse with screaming as they bashed my legs on every sharp-edged step all the way down to the dank, dark dungeons in the bowels of the mountain.