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

by Lucy Tempest

  After they threw me into a cell with enough force to bruise me all over, I lay crumpled on the floor, heart almost racing to a standstill with the enormity of confusion and dread.

  This couldn’t be it. Yulian couldn’t just believe Sorcha’s words.

  I couldn’t be imprisoned for life, for a crime I didn’t commit. Not again.

  But this wasn’t a mere lie told by a simpering princess who claimed that I’d attacked her, pinning her wrongdoing on me. This wasn’t like when Darla broke something and blamed me for it, creating a thinly veiled excuse for her mother to abuse me, while she gloated in the corner.

  Yulian had asked if I came back to finish him off. Which means he thought that I’d attacked him, and no one in the room had disagreed. The only way Sorcha could have managed that was if she had changed her form, taken mine, attacked him, then run out. But—she was still there when I arrived. And her fairy kind didn’t have shape-shifting magic, so…

  Darla.

  The realization boomed into my head, almost bursting it.

  That was what she’d done before I passed out in the kitchen. What they’d been doing to me all along, draining my natural ability as a dryad to drastically change my appearance. That must have been why I couldn’t access it myself until I’d been away from them for enough days without them replenishing their glamor through me.

  Now, after Darla fed off my magic to turn herself into me, my body was too worn out to shift, keeping me in the state it had grown accustomed to over the years.

  They must have had my birth mother, a melia, enslaved for that purpose. But it seemed when she knew she was pregnant, she couldn’t let them have me, too. So she escaped far enough to take me to the edge of Faerie, even at the cost of her own life.

  How ironic was it, that after my mother’s sacrifice, Dolora still found me? I’d ended up suffering my mother’s same fate as her slave, anyway.

  But it must have been pure luck that my adoptive mother had gone into the woods that day, and likely found me at the roots of a dying ash tree, recognized me as one, and named me Ornella. Subconsciously, I must have taken on a form that mirrored hers, the fair skin, the blue eyes and the reddish-gold hair.

  And now Darla had stolen that form. Made a mockery of Lydia Dufreyne’s image, even if only the one modified by my dryad nature. To con Yulian into thinking she was me? Receive the proposal, and the title of Winter Queen she thought she deserved in my place?

  Then instead, for some insane reason, she’d attacked him. Why would she …?

  Suddenly, all thoughts came to a screeching halt as I heard something move across the deathly silent cell block. Another prisoner, or someone coming for me?

  Before I could decide which, the sound scurried away when footsteps entered the dungeon, heralded by a warm light.

  Traitorous hope soared within me when the light stopped at my bars, revealing Yulian holding a lantern.

  I threw myself at the bars, clutching the cold, glassy material. Before I reached an imploring hand out to him, I saw his face in the warm light. All the blood in my body dropped, like it had drained into the cold, craggy ground.

  He didn’t just look frost-bitten anymore, he resembled the miniature ice figure he’d given me yesterday. His body seemed to be chiseled from ice, his bare hands, like his lips, were a light crystalline blue, his hair and lashes seemed made of frost flakes and his eyes of white marble.

  This is what I would have looked like if he hadn’t saved me from that frozen lake.

  “What is happening to you?” I choked. “You were getting better.”

  “Stop.”

  His single, frozen word felt like an icicle through my heart. “Stop what?”

  “Stop acting like you care what happens to me. You already proved that you don’t.”

  I was too mortified by his freezing form to get upset about the total unfairness of it all. I reached through the bars, placing my hand on his icy knuckles. “Yulian, you have to believe that whatever happened, it wasn’t me.”

  “How can I believe you, if I don’t even know who you are?”

  “You do!”

  He shook his head. “All you told me were lies.”

  “I didn’t tell you specific details, but everything I told you about my situation was true. If anything, I left out the worst parts.”

  “I felt I knew you from the first moment,” he breathed, vapor clouds flowing through his icy lips. “But then I got swept up in everything with you and I didn’t think of it again. But now I know for certain. You’re the one who pushed me out of the way when the assassin first struck. And yet, you tried to put a knife through my heart just an hour ago.”

  He had recognized me through my disguise after seeing me for moments, when it had taken Dolora two nights. And this “recognition” he’d mentioned before, made it all even more painful for him, when I seemed to betray his total trust in the worst way.

  “Was your first rescue a part of some manipulative game to earn my trust?” he asked. “So you could come close to me and be sure to kill me? If so, you didn’t need to disguise yourself to approach me. I would have been beholden to you as my savior, and my indebted trust would have given you the chance to easily kill me. Still, if killing me was your goal, why didn’t you try to when we were totally alone? You had so many opportunities during the past two nights.”

  “The reason none of this makes any sense is because it wasn’t me,” I sobbed. “It was my stepsister.”

  He stared at me, void of any emotion. “I’m losing my senses, not all sense, so you will have to put more effort into your lies.”

  “None of what I said to you was ever a lie. Only the details of my identity, and that was Keenan’s fabrication.”

  “And where is he? Convenient that he takes off before you make an attempt on my life.”

  “I don’t know! All I know is that Sorcha attacked me yesterday, and she was the one who shot that arrow at you. She’s the one who’s been hiding her intentions in plain sight, not me.”

  Clearly disbelieving me about Sorcha, he said, “That still doesn’t answer who you are, why you’re here, and why you have an identical stepsister.”

  “It’s a long story. But I’ll tell you everything if you just listen to me!”

  “I’m listening.”

  At his coveted invitation, the whole story spilled out of me, one event after the other tripping over my tongue.

  When I finally stopped, I wondered if I’d made any sense. If he’d understood anything, let alone believed it.

  He finally exhaled a thick stream of vapor. “So you are really a dryad, who believed yourself human all your life, lived in Hericeurra, oblivious of the existence of the rest of the Folkshore. You were brought here by a friend who turned out to be a semi-fairy, and a member of the Autumn Royal Family. You participated in the Equinox Games with her, received my gift, visited the Autumn Court before you set out to Spring to seek the Queen who cursed your friend’s prince, and got separated along the way. After getting caught by your troll stepfamily, said Queen sent you here in a dryad disguise, before you realized she only exposed your true form. The true form you can’t assume now because your stepfamily have drained your shape-shifting magic to bestow it on one of them instead.”

  When he said everything that way, I had to admit it did sound ridiculous.

  But it was the truth, and at least he’d understood all my babbling. So I only nodded.

  His icy gaze continued to drill into mine without any hint of emotion or reaction. “If your stepfamily are such notorious social climbers, who utilize everything duplicitous including shape-changing magic and thralls, then why would they throw all that away by trying to kill me in a room full of guests?”

  I sagged against the cell door, worn out and at a complete loss. “I don’t know.”

  “If the Queen of Spring sent you to me, and you’re a dryad involved with trolls, both native to her Spring Court, and you came here with a Prince of Autumn, whose sister you
claim wants me dead—you expect me to believe this isn’t a conspiracy to get rid of me? That it has nothing to do with the growing paranoia in both Courts, that my effect on my realm’s weather is affecting the edges of their own, and might plunge all of Faerie into an eternal, barren winter?”

  “No! Etheline wanted to find out who was trying to kill you, to save you!”

  “And you believed her.”

  That wasn’t a question, or an invitation for me to continue my defense. It had a finality to it, as if he had heard all he needed to hear and made his decision on the situation.

  Sure enough, he announced it. “Either you’re naive and have been taken advantage of, and were left out of a plot that involves everyone you know in Faerie, or you’re lying to cover for yourself and everyone involved in the plot, deciding to only throw Sorcha and your stepsister to the wolves.” He blinked, slowly, his frosted lashes heavy and the stiffening skin of his eyelids crackling. “Yet—neither is a comforting answer, nor convinces me.”

  “Because neither explanation is true.” I reached for him again, desperate for him to believe me. “You kept saying you felt you knew me, who I truly am, beyond the need for information or time. Did nothing strike you as odd when ‘I’ showed up today? No strange behavior that contradicts what you knew of me? Is there anything I can do, or say, to convince you that it wasn’t me, and that I would never hurt you?”

  He leaned in closer and said, “Show me the other slipper.”

  Confusion slowed my streaking thoughts. “What?”

  “You dropped one slipper here last night, the one Sorcha claims you hit her with. I now have it, and had intended to give it back to you, once I proposed in front of all my significant guests and relatives.”

  I stumbled back from the bars, barely caught myself before falling down.

  He would have proposed to me tonight. Even after I’d run away again yesterday, after he’d become certain I had been lying to him.

  As if he read my mind, he nodded. “Yes, I didn’t care that you knew about the man Belaina ran away with, which meant that you’ve been hiding other things from me. I was certain you’d have a good explanation, and that nothing could shake my trust in you. Then you showed up, showed me the other slipper in your pocket, and I escorted you to dinner, where I was going to announce that the Midwinter Ball was a success. You were distracted the whole time, but I assumed it might be your problems with your stepfamily, or the risk you told me you were taking. I bent to ask you if you were feeling well, and …” He broke off, hand rising to the right side of his chest. “…you grabbed the carving knife off the table and stabbed me.”

  Confusion rose to maddening levels. Why in the world would Darla, who wanted nothing more than to be a queen, do this to the king she impersonated me to get?

  “None of this makes any sense.”

  Yulian tilted his head, staring at me, not unlike our first official meeting. “No, I’m finding that nothing in my life does. Perhaps I just have terrible luck.”

  “Wh-what do you mean?”

  “My whole family died, one after another, struck down by baffling causes. Belaina bound herself to me, then inexplicably abandoned me for a human smith, cursing us both in the process. I hold a ball to find the one who could take her place, and you show up, something out of my most indulgent daydreams, thawing my heart, until I’m certain you’re the one, to not only break my curse and halt my death…” A hint of emotion returned to him, heartache, permeating his voice and filling his eyes. “…but the one I could build a fulfilling life and find true happiness with. Then all this happens.” He stopped, then sighed heavily. “I want to believe you.”

  “Then do so! Let me out of here, let me help you find out why Sorcha attacked you, and who else is plotting against you!”

  “Even if we do catch the mastermind behind this convoluted plot, I’m deteriorating at an extreme rate. And when time here syncs up with time on the Folkshore, I will join Belaina in the death she marked us both for. I was foolish to think there was any way to escape my fate.”

  “It doesn’t have to end this way! You thought I could save you, you said I made you feel, you were getting better. Please, let me try to break this curse.”

  “Why? What would you get out of this?”

  “You” was the first response to leap into my mind. He’d truly become the one thing I wanted, even above my freedom.

  But without any proof to my words, and that stab wound in his chest as evidence against them, I couldn’t say that. I had to give him a reason he might believe, for now.

  So I said, “I’d be repaying the life debt I owe you. You saved me from freezing to death, it’s only fair I do the same.”

  “And if you succeed, I’d be in your debt, again. How would you want me to repay you this time?”

  “By doing what the Spring Queen said she’d do for me? Liberate me?”

  “And we just continue in this cycle of repaying debts for the rest of our lives?”

  “Isn’t that how this—works?” I gulped, unable to utter the word marriage. “You promise to do things for one another until death parts you?”

  “I understand neither of us had real relationships, but I know that’s not how they work.” He broke eye contact with me, the layer of frost growing further across his face, giving him a rough sheen. “You wouldn’t have needed to promise saving me, or wait until I owed you another life debt to enlist my help in freeing you. I would have helped you if you had just asked. I would have done it even you didn’t, if only I’d known. I would have expected nothing in return.”

  That claim was what made the least sense to me. “Why?”

  “Because I love you. Or I thought I did.”

  Hearing those words, then having them ripped back from me in the same breath, before I could savor them, delight in them, made me feel like I was the one who’d been stabbed in the chest.

  Speechless, I clawed at the bars, grappling for something to say, to fix this mess for us both. But I had nothing.

  Yulian shook his head, and the crackling of the ice encasing him echoed inside my fracturing heart. “I’m sorry if I find it hard to believe that you or anyone else truly want me to live. And then, it seems that something, be it other monarchs or even the Fates themselves, has wanted me dead for a while now. And whatever or whoever it is, will soon get their wish.”

  “Yulian …” I reached a shaking hand to him, tears scorching out of my very soul. I couldn’t contemplate losing him, would do anything at all to save him.

  But how, if he wouldn’t let me?

  He took a step backward, depriving me of even one last touch, before he said, “Forgive me, but I have to leave you here. Whatever is going on, whether this is a plot or not, I think this is where you’re safest. But I will find a way to remove your anklet before midnight. And I will dictate your release once I’m—gone. Now, if you’ll excuse me. I need to go announce my heir.”

  As he turned away and retreated, I sobbed his name, my abused voice broken, my shattered heart damaged beyond repair.

  Then he disappeared and the dungeon was plunged back into darkness.

  He had taken with him all the light, and all the reason for me to live.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  At some point, I had slumped to my knees.

  And there I remained, tears frozen, forehead pressed against the frigid bars of my prison.

  Nothing remained in me but thoughts of Yulian, and desperation on his behalf.

  He’d surrendered to his cruel fate. He might have all along, might have always thought it pointless to struggle to be free from his curse. This attempt to find a solution had all been pushed by Sorcha’s husband, and Yulian had gone along with it only to humor Simeon and his courtiers. He hadn’t really hoped to find someone to save him, someone to love. Someone like me.

  Now that he believed his love for me had been an illusion, and I wasn’t his key to freedom, he’d just retreated into the final stage of grief—acceptance.


  But it was even worse than the natural end of the despair he’d lived with for years. He was now suffering far more than before I’d given him false hope.

  And he had given me something I’d never even hoped for. Unconditional love.

  It was still impossible for me to believe. That he loved me. Had loved me. Though I believed he’d meant it, I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

  And because he’d loved me, he would have helped me without expecting me to break his curse. He promised he would, without asking for anything in return. Not even for me to be with him, when that was all he really wanted from me.

  I never dared to hope, before meeting him. But if I’d thought despair had been painful, I now knew true agony was having hope, only to have it ripped away. It was like illuminating the darkness for a creature who could have never conceived of light, only to put it out and leave them for the rest of their lives suffering its absence.

  I felt fate had brought him down here so I could see that light one final time.

  We were both unhappy people who’d been dealt unfair existences filled with nothing but pain and loss. And the final loss we now both suffered was my fault.

  I should have never been myself with him, should have never accepted Etheline’s deal. Now we were both worse off than if we had never met.

  My spiral into despair came to a screeching halt when something moved. I had forgotten that there might be someone else in the dungeons with me.

  A treacherous glimmer of hope sparked. “Keenan?”

  The response was a quiet bark, followed by an urgent shushing.

  There was a dog down here?

  “Hello?” I called, rising to my numb, blistered feet, knees creaking from kneeling on the cold, craggy ground. “Who’s there?”

  Light flashed before me, making me flinch and fall back on the ground, my burning eyes squeezed shut.

  Somehow, the sound of movement shifted behind me.

  I rolled around, hands raised defensively against the light. At least they were finally transforming, and if it was an attacker, I could spear them with sharp, wooden fingers.