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

by Lucy Tempest

  “Oh,” said a small, disappointed voice. “I thought you were human.”

  A girl around my age, wrapped in a grey coat and a deep crimson dress, stood in the middle of my cell, with a ball of light bobbing over her palm. She had the blackest hair I’d ever seen, long and wavy, red lips, a snow-white face with a regal bone structure, and the biggest, saddest, darkest eyes I’d ever seen.

  “Who are you?” I asked, my voice a grating rasp.

  She shrugged elegantly. “Depends. What are you here for?”

  “I came to save the king, but they claim I tried to kill him.”

  She snorted delicately. “I came to ask for his help, but it seems that an unaccompanied human trespassing in Faerie is asking for trouble, instead.” She held down a hand to me, helping me up. “I am Snezhana, Princess of Belograd.”

  “I’m not going to pretend I know where that is.”

  “It’s right across the ocean. I thought I could get the fairy king’s help in reclaiming it.”

  “Who took a whole kingdom from you?”

  Her exquisite face fell into a formidable scowl. “My stepmother.”

  A harsh, humorless laugh rustled from my dry, burning throat. “And here I was complaining about my stepmother taking just my life.”

  An impatient bark brought my attention downward. As the princess lowered her ball of light, I saw the fluffiest, whitest dog I had ever seen standing by her, its back reaching her hip, head nudging her chest. It had a thick tail that curled towards its back, and the only hint of color was its blue eyes, black nose, and pink tongue.

  Still staring at the dog, unsure why its presence struck me as the weirdest thing in this situation, I asked, “Uh, how did you get in here?”

  “I teleported.”

  “Teleported,” I repeated, dumbfounded.

  “It means to disappear from one spot and reappear in another.”

  “I know what it means, I’m just lost on why you’re still in the dungeons if you could have left any time.”

  “Oh! Well, I thought I’d get an audience with the king this way, but since he looks like he could use some help rather than offer it, I better head on to the next Court.”

  “You should go to Autumn,” I suggested. “Ask for Queen Rowena.”

  “Which way is Autumn? Do you know the queen?”

  I leaned back on the bars, legs shaking beneath me. “Barely. I know her son and niece, and stayed with her family briefly.”

  Snezhana and her dog shared a look then faced me. “It sounds like you should lead the way.”

  “What?”

  “Come with us.”

  “I …” I paused, blinking at her, processing that offer.

  Yulian had promised he’d find a way to remove my anklet before midnight, and leave orders for my release, after he was—gone. And this meant, I’d be free. From Dolora, and this dungeon, and I could go anywhere I wanted.

  But I didn’t hold much hope he’d succeed in finding a way to remove the anklet in time. Even if he did, and I remained here, I very much doubted anyone would honor his command to release me. They believed I tried to kill him, and would believe I had bewitched him, and wouldn’t just let me go. They’d probably imprison me for life, or maybe turn me over to my stepfamily, if Dolora managed to convince them being with her was a worse punishment.

  Thinking it was the last time I’d see him, and that he’d soon be dead, I’d accepted my entrapment, whether here, or in Dolora’s clutches, with my only release being an execution.

  Now I suddenly had this teleporting princess popping up before me, offering me an instantaneous way out.

  “You’re not planning on staying here, are you?” Snezhana asked, sounding sincerely worried. “Look, I don’t care what you did, but there’s no need to stick around and find out what corporal punishment looks like here.”

  “You get turned into a tree,” I answered thoughtlessly, raising my wooden hands. “But since I beat them to that task, I’ll probably be chopped up and tossed in someone’s furnace.”

  She gave me a distressed once-over, lips curled over her teeth in a snarl. “Yeah, you’re definitely coming with us.”

  The dog barked its approval, earning another shush from its mistress.

  Snezhana extended a hand to me, while the other wiggled under the ball of light, making it crackle with pale red lightning.

  A part of me wondered if I had passed out after Yulian left and this was a wacky dream. Or if this was a dream within a dream with me still on the kitchen floor, filled with pain-induced delusions. Either possibility could explain my lack of enthusiasm towards this unforeseen solution to all my problems.

  This was what I’d wanted from the start. A way out of Midnight and back onto the Pumpkin Path, back to Bonnie’s uncle and his wife, where I’d briefly felt safe for the first time since I’d lost my mother. With a teleporting princess, we could be there sooner than I thought possible. Once there, I’d ask her to remove the anklet in repayment. Surely a witch could get around the spell’s failsafe. If not, losing a limb no longer sounded too big a price for my freedom.

  So why was I so reluctant to accept this?

  It might have been my aversion to hope, since I’d been burned by it too many times, many of those literally. Or I just wanted to remain here, in the event Yulian did find a way to liberate me, then stayed to spend his last moments with me.

  But if I left with her, I might yet be able to do something to help him. I surely couldn’t do anything while I sat in this cell growing roots and branches.

  “Come on!” Snezhana wiggled her hand impatiently. “I’m taking you with us and I’m not taking no for an answer.”

  I finally put my hand in hers, and sighed. “If you say so.”

  Snezhana’s grip tightened and the light over her other palm burst into a blinding brightness. Suddenly, the temperature dropped acutely and shearing wind buffeted me, then I felt a flurry of snow weighing down on my hair and skin.

  My vision refocused to find us at the base of the castle. A roiling mass of heavily snowing clouds was huddled ominously above it, and no place else across the valley. Yulian’s effect on the weather was either malfunctioning or centralizing. Whichever it was, it was bad.

  Snezhana shuddered, dusting the rapidly accumulating snowflakes off her clothes, but more kept clinging to them and to her impossibly dark hair. Giving up, she clapped her hands, drumming up more pale red sparks. “Leda, grow!”

  The light from her palms surrounded the dog, and in an instant, Leda went from two feet high to towering taller than me.

  Just as Snezhana started climbing her enormous dog, several hard points nudged my back.

  I swung around to find Oscar standing behind me, head lowered.

  Exhaling the overwhelming urge to cry with relief and fondness, I scratched between his antlers. “Hey there.”

  Panting happily, Leda lowered her own, now massive head and sniffed Oscar, making him back away warily.

  Snezhana reached down to pet him reassuringly. “Is this your familiar? What’s his name?”

  “Oscar. What do you mean by ‘familiar?’”

  “An animal companion, one that mirrors your soul.”

  “Isn’t that a witch thing?” It took a second to connect her magic and the now giant sled dog. “You’re a witch?”

  Snezhana frowned at me confusedly. “Yes? Is that going to be a problem?”

  A week ago, it would have been. But after being in the land of magic and uncovering my own status as a sentient tree, she was the last thing I should gawk at.

  I shook my head. “No, it’s just you’re not what I imagined a witch would look like.”

  “Trust me, the witch I’m now hoping to find looks very much like the fabled hag of lore.” Taking a firm grip of her dog’s furry mane, she steered Leda. They began trotting ahead before she stopped, and turned back to me. “Where do we ride to get to the Autumn Queen’s domain?”

  “Uh—I thought you’d teleport us
there.”

  “I can only teleport to places I can see, or have been before, or at least if I have accurate directions.”

  There went my hope to get there in a blink. But if we rode fast enough, we might make it before midnight. “In that case, we should ride through Midnight, then I’m sure I’ll remember which way we came through. It would have been better if her son led the way…” I then realized I had forgotten all about him. “Oscar, where’s Keenan?”

  Oscar appeared distressed as he looked towards the castle.

  My blood ran colder. I hadn’t known him long, and I knew him to be devious, but he wasn’t a killer. What if he’d found out what Sorcha had been plotting and tried to stop her? What if she’d done something to him?

  That gave me pause in seeking help from their mother, Rowena. If she was in on the plot to rid Faerie of Yulian and his spreading, eternal winter, and they were so bound on seeing it through that they wouldn’t let their own blood stand in the way, then that didn’t bode well for either of us.

  But there was no way her husband, Ossian, would have agreed to any of that. He was human, and the noble kind. And after witnessing the unique bond between him and his wife, which had given him near immortality, I couldn’t believe she’d hide something like that from him. Which meant one thing.

  Sorcha had to be acting alone.

  And if she was, maybe her mother would help us stop her, too. And help save Yulian.

  Taking hold on his antlers and fur, I mounted Oscar, urged, “Take us to Rowena.”

  Oscar launched into a gallop and Leda followed as we headed down the mountain.

  Heart in my throat, I kept looking back at the castle, watching it grow smaller.

  Terrible thoughts stormed through my mind, harsher than the snowstorm besieging us. Of Yulian alone in his quarters waiting for the curse to freeze his heart and end his life. Of him thinking I’d never felt anything real for him, and that he wouldn’t only die, but would die never finding someone to see him for who he really was, to love him for himself.

  Even more than his mortal peril, I was agonized for his emotional suffering.

  I wondered if he was now looking into that mirror, wondering why the woman he’d chosen for compatibility had abandoned him, and the one he’d chosen for love, had bared his soul to, had tried to kill him. I couldn’t bear knowing he’d die never believing I hadn’t …

  But—I almost had!

  The memory suddenly resurfaced, lodged in my mind like an axe.

  That—ghost—haunting the mirror! The one with the flaming blue eyes—it had planted such terrible hatred in my heart towards Yulian. Had urged me to kill him. Had made me want to kill him.

  And I would have done it—if I hadn’t somehow snapped out from under its control.

  How had I even forgotten that?

  Another memory came back to me now. The moments when I realized the memory had been slipping away, becoming harder to grasp. I thought it was so terrible, my mind wanted to erase it. With every passing second it had dispersed like smoke in a storm. Then it was gone.

  How? Had the ghost in the mirror cast some kind of thrall over me? First to do its bidding, then to forget everything afterwards?

  Rage surged inside me, that another monstrous entity had violated my mind and taken control of my will. But that wasn't the worst of it.

  Remembering those horrifying moments when those vicious thoughts had taken me over completely, brought other realizations bursting to the foreground. It framed them into the greater picture that was Yulian’s life, making me contextualize my whole experience in Midnight.

  Loud chiming jogged me out of my turmoil to find we were passing the clock tower.

  It was eight o’clock.

  A violent shudder shook me, but it had nothing to do with the deep cold burrowing into my bones, or the arctic wind blowing through my ruined curls and flaying my swollen face. The realizations were like an avalanche, all screaming for me to turn back, run to the castle again.

  But if I did, I’d only be arrested, wouldn’t even reach Yulian again. My best bet was to enlist Rowena’s help. I had only four hours to reach her mansion, introduce her to Snezhana, and, in return, ask my new witch companion to remove the—

  The anklet suddenly flared to such an intensity, I flopped forward over Oscar’s back. It was only then I realized its burn had been escalating for a while now, but I’d been too caught up in everything else I didn’t fully register it until it had become unbearable.

  We were at the city’s border and distance had activated it. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it would. My mind was more scrambled by everything that had happened to me than I realized.

  I had to go back, ask Snezhana to remove it now, or else I wouldn’t be able to take her to Rowena.

  But it hurt too much to think, let alone to talk, and all that spilled out my of throat were agonized moans as the burn spread up my body. I couldn’t see straight anymore, or to hold onto my galloping steed.

  I slipped off his back, hit the snow-covered ground with a bruising slam.

  I lay there, sobbing and heaving as I desperately rubbed the scorching anklet burning my skin off against the ice.

  It didn’t cool it—nothing could.

  In my delirium, I felt Snezhana pulling me up, yelling questions at me. All I could do was lift my leg as tears flooded from my eyes, freezing in a hard glaze on my face.

  When she released me to examine my leg, a shock zapped through me, and I contorted in a full-body spasm, my fingers curling, my limbs twisting. My whole body felt stiff and out of control at the same time. The pain surpassed that of the hot coal Dolora had maimed me with.

  “Get it off!” I shrieked. “Get it off me! GET IT OFF ME!”

  “I don’t know how!” she spluttered. “I don’t know what this is!”

  The anklet delivered another harsh shock that rode up my bones, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I needed to get away, to get out of this body, to shift into something else, something skinless, bloodless, boneless—wooden.

  Limbs twisting harder, I felt my toes growing into roots that broke through the cold earth, my arms burgeoning into branches, my fingers into twigs. My scalp felt each stem and leaf sprouting from every follicle of hair, and my body stretched and widened, fusing with my legs into a thick, unyielding trunk.

  Then everything went silent, still and dark, as I went from over-stimulated and wracked with pain to feeling nothing.

  Nothing but a hazy, soothing, alien awareness of the freezing wind blowing through my leaves and the snow coating my wood.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  It was peaceful, being a tree.

  It was powerful, pristine, serene.

  The awareness of everything around me was all-encompassing. I was connected to the earth, to the wind—to everything in the universe. I wanted to remain in this state, forever.

  I would.

  Then among the sounds I absorbed through the air and the ground, harmonious and eternal, one hit a discordant note. A muffled voice that interrupted the perpetual hum of nature, a shrillness yawning louder until it shattered it.

  I felt a touch on my bark, a pull on two of my branches, and that voice growing more desperate. And the placidity of ancient consciousness shattered.

  Vision seeped back in a steady emergence from darkness, the bright dot in the center growing to encompass something, a face. That of the man swinging from boughs that shrunk and morphed back into something else, something fragile and fleshy—shoulders. He shook them as he hung from them and screamed in my reforming face.

  “Cinders, wake up!”

  Keenan?

  One part after another of my massive body twisted and dwindled and softened. My trunk becoming chest and hips and legs, my roots retreating from the ground and transforming into feet and toes. Everything else retreated into flesh and bone and skin and hair. My legs finally snapped apart, unsteady, useless beneath my restored weight and proportions.

  I fell
against Keenan’s chest, bringing us both down in a swift slip over the icy ground.

  Pure confusion held me in a tighter embrace than his own as I looked around.

  My returning human senses felt so strange, so limited, and it took me a while to realize—that it was almost sunset. That Snezhana and her giant sled dog were gone. That Keenan was back.

  Keenan, who was sitting up beside me and had a scabbing forehead wound. And Aneira was there, too. In her violet-eyed, fair-skinned, fairy form, peering at me with concern.

  Shaking my head and focus off her, I ran my hands over my short hair, still feeling a twinge of sadness at its loss, then down over my tattered dress, reacquainting myself with my woman form, before curling my fingers and my toes, feeling the hard ground, the frigid air and—nothing else.

  There was no burn punishing me for being too far from Dolora’s house.

  Lifting my skirt I examined green-tinged skin, finding the bruises gone from one leg and the burn—and the anklet—gone from the other.

  I was…free?

  I was free!

  A raspy, disbelieving huff became as a wheezing giggle that rumbled its way out of me.

  Aneira bent over to pick up something near me, slim and steely. “How did you …?”

  It was the anklet, broken open and rusting at the edges.

  Shifting into my tree form had shattered it.

  I hadn’t needed any of them to help me break free.

  I had the ability to do it myself all along.

  Scowling at her, I slurred, “What are you doing here?”

  “Now don’t take that tone with us,” Keenan chided jokingly, standing up and pulling me with him to my feet. “We’ve been through a lot to get to you.”

  Swaying slightly, I now noticed the white pumpkin carriage, with Oscar and Angus at the front.

  “Where have you been?” I hissed at him. “Do you have any idea what happened to me?”

  “Yes, you’re a fugitive wanted for attempted murder, which is a level of tomfoolery even I couldn’t aspire to.” He grinned broadly, dusting melting ice off his green cloak. “Meanwhile, I was knocked out by my own sister, bound and gagged in a broom closet somewhere in the castle. If it weren’t for Annora—”