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

by Lucy Tempest

  “Madame, we just established that any murder attempts this week were the orchestration of a mad queen,” Simeon snapped, clearly unhappy to see her. He must have been hassled by her several times during the entire Midwinter Ball.

  “That doesn’t change the fact that she’s not the one His Majesty chose,” Dolora shrilled. “She is deceiving you all, just like the queen did.”

  It was just her luck that I was so worn out, or else I would have turned into a tree and strangled her in my roots. “Really? If she’s me, then I dare you to prove it.”

  “Yes, please, any proof would be very helpful,” Yulian said, face back to being expressionless.

  Dolora became worryingly smug as she reached into her bag. “When my dear Ornella was leaving the ball to return home by her curfew, she dropped one of her magnificent glass shoes here in the castle.”

  “Yes, we know, I have it,” Yulian said. “I meant to return it before she attacked me.”

  “Well, now’s your chance, Your Majesty.” Dolora prodded Darla who took out the other glimmering glass slipper they’d pried off my body.

  All the blood left my head as Yulian stepped away from me, eyeing us both.

  He couldn’t possibly be considering her words, could he?

  Darla approached him with big, hopeful eyes, my eyes, holding the slipper.

  Reaching into his coat’s deep pocket, he took out the other slipper.

  “You can’t …” I breathed, feeling lost and desperate, reaching for him. “You can’t possibly believe her!”

  Yulian raised a hand to me, cutting me off, before turning to Darla.

  “Is it really you?” he asked her, gaze softening, voice reverent.

  Darla nodded. “Of course, it’s me, Yulian. What more proof do you need?”

  “None.” He picked up one of the fallen chairs, righted it for her. “Here, I’ve been dreaming of this moment for days.”

  Shooting me a vicious leer, Darla plopped down on her seat and raised her foot. “This has been all that I’ve ever dreamed of, to finally get what I deserve.”

  Yulian kneeled before her and my heart almost burst.

  He slipped one shoe on, before reaching for the other. “And what’s that, my dear?”

  I was screaming inside now as Darla fluttered her—my—lashes at him and breathed giddily, “To be with you, to be your queen.”

  Both shoes now on her feet, Yulian stood and held down a hand to help her up. “Just to be certain, dance with me like you did that first night.”

  The triumph in her eyes made me feel sick. But it was his uncertainty about me that crumpled my heart.

  I could barely look at them as they joined hands and began to move around in a slow, graceful dance to imaginary music.

  Feeling bile rise in my throat, I caught Dolora watching me with a harsh focus. It was as if she was projecting all the horrid punishments she was planning for me across the room, now that her goal had been achieved.

  I wanted to ram through the dancing couple, shove them apart, beg him to believe me, to punch Darla in the face, to stab Dolora with another large shard.

  But most of all, I wanted to weep.

  I couldn’t lose him to her—couldn’t let him fall into the trap of another abuser…

  A loud scream suddenly ripped out of Darla, her legs shaking as she slumped against him, clutching at his shoulders. “What—what is happening?”

  “What is it, my dear?” Yulian asked in a sickeningly sweet tone.

  “My feet! They hurt, they feel like—” She screamed again, devolving into pained sobs as she lifted up her skirt as if it were on fire.

  And it was clear for all to see—the blood pooling in the translucent shoes.

  “Help me! Make it stop, make it stop!” she moaned, clawing at him. “Get them off me, get them off, please!”

  Smiling at her broadly, he drawled in that jarringly cordial tone, “I bet that’s what your stepsister begged you, when you put that slave-anklet on her leg.”

  Darla and her mother faced him with matching dumbfounded looks, while my hammering heart stopped.

  He remembered!

  He remembered and believed everything I’d told him down in the dungeons!

  And Keenan had been right. At the end of the Equinox Games, he’d told me if anyone else tried wearing the slippers, they’d make their feet bleed.

  Yulian shoved her off him hard, snarling, “Just how stupid do you think I am? You think I’ll just marry any woman who has the other slipper, or even fits in it?”

  I found myself laughing, just as tears of everything—exhaustion, hysteria, smugness, relief, delight, joy—came pouring down my face, as he bent down to where she’d fallen on the ground and ripped the slippers off her feet.

  He gestured for Simeon, who rushed to take them.

  Yulian towered over Darla’s huffing, puffing form, his arctic scowl one of the scariest things I’d ever seen. “These shoes shape themselves to perfectly fit one woman, and one woman only—the one they were made for and gifted to. Now tell me, do you know what the punishment is for deceiving a king?”

  Darla remained squirming on the ground, bawling in pain as she sniffled at her mother helplessly. “Mother, do something.”

  “Ah, you. I heard all about you.” Yulian rounded on Dolora, who backed away fearfully. “Let me see if I have all your crimes right—theft, deception, impersonation, child abuse, and slave-trafficking.”

  There was no way she could talk or bully her way out of this mess. And she knew it.

  With the look of a cornered reptile, Dolora turned and barreled her way through the crowd.

  Her hand had barely brushed the doorknob when the doors burst open and a dullahan appeared, snapping a whip made of spine bones at her head.

  It laughed maniacally, the light shining behind the carvings in its pumpkin head flickering as it chased her back into the room on the back of a large reindeer.

  “I hear troll skin makes the best leather,” it taunted in a horrifying voice as it snapped the whip at her, lashing the back of her head hard enough to knock her down. “Would you rather be skinned alive, dead, or half dead?”

  Sorcha caught a tight grip of Dolora’s hair, pulling her up to her knees. “Want us to throw her in the dungeon, Your Majesty?”

  Yulian turned back to me, hand outstretched. “What do you think?”

  Sniffling, yet smiling, probably the widest I ever had, I set my hand over his palm. Cool enough to be calming, but warm enough to be living, a reminder that I had succeeded. I had liberated him from his curse.

  Hand in hand, we stood over Dolora, who struggled, and flip-flopped between swearing at Sorcha and begging Simeon who’d returned to give Yulian back the cleaned slippers, in a bizarre attempt at negotiating her freedom.

  I supposed this baffling mixture of rudeness and simpering was how someone who was so used to being in power reacted to being helpless for the first time.

  When the couple only stared down at her disdainfully, Dolora grabbed at my legs, begging, practically spitting with manic desperation.

  “Ornella! Ornella, you can’t let them do this to me!”

  I goggled at her. “Why not?”

  “It’s the least you owe me! I kept you alive all these years!”

  “Kept me alive, not cared for me, not loved me—kept me,” I spat venomously. “As opposed to killing me, as you’ve no doubt done to others like me before. And you didn’t, only because I was of great use to you.”

  Her eyes bulged with unfounded fury. “I’m your stepmother! If you kill me, you’ll be committing a crime against nature, killing a family member.”

  Considering Yulian had just killed his murderously insane aunt, it was confounding she tried to invoke kin-slaying as an argument for her life.

  She really had no shame, calling herself family.

  “Oh, we won’t kill you,” I said softly.

  “We won’t?” The dullahan approached, whip hanging limply, sounding disappo
inted. “But I wanted to set her loose on the Pumpkin Path, and chase her into the axe of a knuckelavee—or the claws of a real dullahan.”

  “That’s fun for you, not me, Keenan,” I chided.

  “Then what will we do with her?” mumbling crankily, Keenan removed the pumpkin head and tossed it directly at the rising Darla’s head with a petulant grunt, knocking her back down on the floor.

  Yulian frowned down at me. “You can’t show mercy to this monster.”

  I held his eyes. “Remember what you told me the first night, on the balcony?”

  “Which part—oh, I see.” Yulian nodded gravely. “A very poetic sentence.”

  “What?” Dolora tried standing up, heading for me, back to troll shape now, yellow-and-green eyes frantic. “What is it you’re going to do to me?”

  “I’m going to let you find out what it’s like being my mother,” I said.

  Simeon gestured to the guards who descended on Dolora, bound her hands behind her back, and dragged her away.

  She grew more panicked, kicking, struggling. “What does that mean? Where are you taking me? Stop! Darla, do something!”

  Darla, also looking like her troll self completely now, lay uselessly on the floor, her first encounter with pain overtaking her small mind.

  Dolora then remembered her other child and moved to beg help from her, too. “Aneira! Aneira, I am your mother, I command you to do something!”

  Aneira was standing off to the side, pretending she couldn’t see either her sister or her mother. She was also in troll form, but somehow nowhere as repulsive as her family, petting Oscar’s head while she chatted with a blue-haired, pot-bellied man who must be the minister she fancied, and who amazingly seemed to fancy her as much even now.

  “Aneira, look at me!”

  Aneira, not paying her a single glance, just said, “Oh, now I’m worth your attention?”

  “Don’t talk to me like that, say something! Defend me, tell them how this is all a lie!”

  Aneira faced Yulian and I, stone-faced. “It’s all true. You can add the kin-slaying she’s so worried about to the list. My father was among the men she duped into marrying her, then killed when he ran out of money to fund her lifestyle. She would have eventually killed your father, too, Ella, when he could no longer provide for her. Only you escaping saved him!”

  “ANEIRA!”

  Aneira waved her off, then returned to cooing at Oscar, and fluttering her lashes at the minister. “Goodbye, Mother.”

  “Wait, I just need to do one more thing,” I said as I strode towards Dolora.

  Then willing my fist into rough wood, I slammed my knuckles across her face.

  I allowed myself one moment of vindictive thrill as a faint bruise blossomed on her cheek, along with a few splinter cuts.

  Then I stood aside as they dragged her away.

  Yulian’s hands settled on my shoulders as he turned me towards him. His cool palms swept up my neck to cup my face, deep empathy a blue blaze in his eyes. “Feeling better?”

  “That wasn’t the point, but yes.”

  “What was the point, then?”

  “That was for comparing herself to my mother, either of them.”

  He exhaled heavily. “Speaking of which, does what I just did count as regicide, kin-slaying, or disposing of a dictator? Or is it all three?”

  I leaned in, resting my face into his touch. “Was she really ever anyone’s queen? And she sure didn’t treat you like you were family. I think it counts squarely as the heroic act of slaying a monster.”

  “I’d say this heroic act was a team effort.”

  I blinked at him, startled. “You did the deed.”

  “I wouldn’t have been able to, if you hadn’t figured out her presence and her plan, if you hadn’t risked everything to return here and expose her.” He brought his face closer to mine, our cold foreheads touching, and we shared our breath. “If it weren’t for you, I’d be dead. I was holding this assembly for my courtiers, ministers, and subjects, to announce that no, the Midwinter Ball wasn’t a success, that I was on death’s door and was naming my successor.”

  I knew that, but I found myself choking on air all the same at the very memory. So many things could have gone disastrously wrong…

  His thumbs stroked my cheeks tenderly. He was so gentle, I’d totally forgotten to panic about someone’s hands being near my face.

  But he’d never raise a hand to me. He knew what it was like to be on the end of the blow as much as I did. If anything, he was going to the other extreme, handling me like glass.

  And though I wouldn’t want that from anyone, I’d take that gift of utmost care from him, and bask in it.

  “You came back for me,” he said raggedly. “You changed the entire trajectory of my life and the fate of this realm. I will never be able to thank you enough for this.”

  My lower lip trembled as the urge to weep spiked again. “The moment I realized what was going on, I would have done anything to stop her. I couldn’t let her prey on you, especially when you didn’t know it was her. I always knew it was Dolora, so did so many others, and no one did a thing about it. I couldn’t sit back and watch what happened to me happen to you.”

  With a groan that sounded like both distress and relief, he swooped down and pressed his lips to mine.

  He kissed me so softly, he seemed to be sharing his very life force with me. And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t suffering between extremes, was not torn between despair and hope. I just felt at peace.

  He finally pulled back to gaze down at me, eyes solemn as he said, “You waited all your life for someone to save you. Just like I waited for someone to love me. But instead, I loved you, and you saved me—and that’s what liberated us both.”

  “But you’re wrong about something.” I sniffed as I smiled up at him tremulously. “I loved you—love you. And you saved me, too.”

  His face softened with such emotion—relief, gratitude, joy, all laced with such passion. It was the most expressive I’d seen him become. And I just knew I had far more expressions and emotions to look forward to.

  Then he took the slippers out of his pockets. “Now take those back. These are yours, they were only ever yours. Just like I am.”

  I took the slippers but was too lightheaded to notice them or anything else in the world but him right now. I could barely breathe as I gasped, “Are you saying…?”

  He lifted one of my hands to his lips. “I am, indeed, proposing that we love and save each other forever.”

  My lips wobbled as I wiped at my eyes. “Till death do us part?”

  He laughed tiredly. “There will be no more dwelling on death or other depressing topics, but only uplifting ones from now on. Now, I’m proposing that if you accept my hand in marriage…”

  “I do!”

  He grinned at my eagerness, the broadest he ever had. “Wait till you hear the whole proposal!” I grinned back sheepishly, poking him shyly in the chest. He cleared his throat and went on in mock seriousness, “After a betrothal period, when you will act as the Princess of Midnight, you may someday become my wife and the Queen of Winter.”

  “That sounds like a lot of responsibility,” I joked, even as my heart sputtered with agitation and disbelief.

  “That’s why I said ‘someday,’” he teased. “I want you to become my wife immediately, but I have to treat you with caution. You’re a flight risk. Can’t have you getting cold feet and running out on me. Not again. And again. And again.”

  Cracking up at his mimicry of an echo, I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him myself this time, the flutter in my stomach back, not as oppression or dread but pure, giddy love. “I tried to run so many times in my life, and it is something I never want to do again. I am making my own decisions from here on out, and the first one I ever made was to come back for you.”

  “And the second decision?”

  I waved a finger, encompassing the room. “If I’m going to live here, we’re goi
ng to need to redecorate. At least three quarters of those mirrors you shattered need to go, not be replaced.”

  He shuddered. “I agree. I don’t think I can ever shake the feeling of being watched whenever I pass by one ever again.”

  I leaned into him and sighed. “How do you think we’ll fare, if we avoid our reflections?”

  “We’ll fare fairly enough,” he said, and I chuckled again, rubbing my cheek against his broad, now warm chest. “We can always be each other’s mirrors, tell each other how we really look.”

  I wrinkled my nose, suddenly feeling insecure. “You think that’s a good idea?”

  “We started out brutally honest with each other, and it was the best thing we’d ever done. Why stop now?”

  “You’re right—let’s never stop,” I breathed as I buried my face in his neck and nestled into his strength and safety.

  “Never,” he promised as he wrapped me in his arms in a tight hug.

  And I knew that I’d forever trust him. With my heart, my life, with everything,

  Suddenly laughing, the first real laugh I’d heard from him, he spun me around.

  As I laughed, from the heart for the first time, and I heard the murmurs of approval buzzing all around us, I finally felt unburdened, happy, and most of all—

  —I felt free.

  Epilogue

  Spring had finally come to Midnight.

  Or at least the season a land dubbed Winter considered to be spring.

  It had been a week since Yulian was rid of Isolda, and Aneira and I were rid of Dolora, and the effects of his curse had faded from his Court.

  The snow had lessened significantly, the weather was now a cool breeze rather than a marrow-freezing cold, and the sky was closer to blue than grey. The most telling change was the proliferation in animals, as furry rabbits, silver foxes, and nesting birds returned to the land, and as blossoming trees unearthed from beneath layers of snow.

  One tree in particular, planted across the river, and visible from the ballroom balcony, was never going to bloom.

  Dolora’s final defensive position was now immortalized in its arching boughs, the holes in its trunk what was left of her screaming, venomous face. This was the sentence she’d been deemed to deserve, by the law of the land I’d one day reign over with my king.