Cinderella Is Dead

by Kalynn Bayron

  He would use my fight to end him as fodder for another book of lies. I think of people whispering my name as a curse, fearing to walk in my footsteps. I can’t let that happen.

  My heart crashes in my chest. I take a deep breath. I straighten up and plant my feet. I reach into the folds of my dress and grasp my dagger. In one quick move, I plunge it into his neck. I twist the blade the way Constance showed me. He blinks. Standing upright, he staggers, clutching at his throat. I jump back, pulling the blade out. I smile at him. I’ve done it. I’ve ended him.

  Constance said that if I killed him, he would probably collapse in a heap.

  King Manford doesn’t move.

  She told me blood would rush from the wound.

  Manford does not bleed.

  Constance said when people die, sometimes they groan and sputter.

  Manford does neither.

  The sound echoing off the walls is something I hadn’t expected to hear, something that makes my blood run cold, something that makes me realize I’ve made a terrible mistake.

  A laugh.

  34

  I stumble back as Manford laughs himself into a fit. He snatches my knife away.

  “That was your plan?”

  The hole in his neck is gaping. I didn’t miss, and yet he is still alive, taunting me.

  “Take her away,” he says.

  A flurry of activity erupts on my right. Palace guards appear from out of nowhere and drop a hood over my head. Someone yanks my arm so hard it feels like my shoulder might come out of its socket. Pain shoots into my fingertips. My hands are bound in front of me, and I am pushed down the hallway. Someone grabs my elbow.

  “Get off me!” I scream. I swing my arm up as far as I can before thrusting it backward, hitting the soft flesh of what I picture is somewhere in the person’s midsection. A yelp rewards my effort. Laughter and a snide remark from the others let me know I’ve hit the guard in a far more sensitive place.

  The cloth covering my face shifts so I can see the floor. The guards lift me as we descend a set of stairs, and the ground below transforms from polished wood to gravel and dirt. I struggle against the hands that hold me but can’t make contact again. A door clicks open, and a guard drops me onto a cold, damp floor. My hands still roped together, I pull the hood from my head as the door clangs shut. I throw my entire weight against it, only to lose my balance and fall to the floor again.

  “Let me out!” I scream. I hear the murmur of voices.

  “Be patient,” the king’s voice hisses through the door. “You’ll have me all to yourself soon enough.”

  Bells toll in the distance. It’s eleven o’clock.

  “See you at the stroke of midnight,” the king whispers.

  A swell of anger courses through me as I drive my foot back into the door as hard as I can. He laughs before his footsteps recede down the hall.

  The room I’m in is no bigger than a pantry. Stone walls, no windows, and the ceiling slopes low enough that I can touch it with my outstretched arms. A steady drip of water leaks from one of the creases where the wall meets the ceiling. The stub of a candle sits on a rock in the corner, along with flint and a thin, twisted piece of linen. I use the rock to ignite the flint, and a shower of sparks briefly lights up the room. It takes me several strikes with my bound hands to finally set the linen aflame to light the candle with it. It casts shadows all around me, making the space feel even smaller.

  I can’t believe what I’ve witnessed. My dagger went straight into his neck and still he lives. Amina told me he was not a normal man. We assumed he couldn’t die, but we hadn’t considered that he couldn’t be killed. Now I’m unsure if he can be stopped at all, but I know for certain he’ll be back for me soon and I need to find a way to escape.

  Gathering my resolve, I set to work wriggling my hands out of the restraints. The rope digs into my wrists, causing a deep gash. Pain shoots up my arm with every tug. The pain becomes too much to bear, and I search for something to cut the rope with. The bricks and stones that make up the wall are uneven and jagged, and some of them have cracked clean in half. I find a piece of one that looks sharp enough and twist my hands around, sawing at the rope until, after several minutes and several more cuts to my hands, the rope frays and I wriggle out.

  I rub my wrists as I look around the room. In the corner, the tattered remains of a book lie on the ground. I pick it up and leaf through the pages. It’s Cinderella’s tale.

  Of course this would be here.

  I toss it back into the corner and bend to look through the keyhole. I see the wall opposite my cell, the darkened hallway. The smell of damp earth fills my nose. I know exactly where I am. I’m in one of the little rooms where I heard a woman’s voice on the night I escaped the ball. I go to a wall and knock on the stones.

  “Hello? Is someone there?” I wait. The steady drip of the water is all I hear. I call out again, louder this time. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  “Be quiet,” comes a hushed voice.

  Grabbing the candle, I try to look through the little hole where the water trickles out, but it’s too high.

  “Hello?” I call again.

  “There’s a loose brick at the bottom of the wall,” says the voice. “Take it out and stand on it.”

  I find the only intact brick and, following the voice’s instructions, I pull it out and stand atop it. A flicker of a candle from the other side outlines another person, the dark-brown orb of their eye glinting in the dim light.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “You should be quiet.”

  “He’ll come back for me, regardless,” I say. “It’s only a matter of time.”

  “You seem to have accepted your fate quicker than the others. That’s probably a good thing. No use crying about it, right? He’s just going to kill us anyway.” Her blunt attitude about her terrible fate makes me pause. She’s waiting for death, and it sounds like she wishes it would hurry up.

  “How long have you been here?” I ask.

  “A few weeks—maybe longer. It’s hard to say.”

  “How did you get here?”

  She laughs lightly. “Blowing up the Colossus was a punishable offense. Who would have thought?” Sarcasm colors every word, but it is all tempered with hopelessness.

  My foot almost slips off, and I scramble to keep my balance. “You did that? Are you Émile?”

  There is a rustle on the other side of the wall. “How do you know my name?”

  “I’m with Constance! I’m Sophia. We’re here—or I’m here—” My voice catches in my throat and tears well up. I don’t even know if Constance has made it to the castle. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to see her again, but I have to set that aside for now.

  “She lives?” Émile asks. “And there is a plan?”

  “Yes. But I—I just put my dagger in the king’s neck, and he laughed in my face.”

  She huffs loudly. “That sounds very much like Constance, always stabbing someone.” I think I hear her laugh. “But as you saw, it doesn’t work with him. He has been poisoned, stabbed, and a few of the girls on this row tried to get close enough to him to slip a rope around his neck. He was quite amused by that attempt. It failed, obviously. And he made them pay for it. Tell me, have you or Constance been able to find anything else out about him?”

  “Yes.” I hesitate because I know how it will sound, but I continue anyway. “Do you know that King Manford and Cinderella’s Prince Charming are the same person?”

  “I’ve learned the impossible truth from the other girls on this row. Before I was captured, I would have said that it cannot be, but now I have seen too much to discount it.” She sighs heavily. “But it doesn’t matter. He’s killed or captured so many of us that there are barely enough of us left to stage any sort of real resistance.”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “There are seven other girls in the cells next to us, and I hear there are more cells in the bowels of the castle, but n
one of us are in any shape to fight back. Some of them have been here for months, maybe longer. We don’t have enough to eat or drink, and the draining—the draining is too much.”

  “The draining?” I ask.

  “Oh, Sophia.” Émile sighs. “You cannot know what it’s like. It’s like dying. He wraps you up and then you’re falling, and if you return, you are—changed.”

  I press my face against the bricks as I struggle to hear. My heart is beating furiously. “How? Tell me how he does it.”

  “It’s a kind of magic I’ve never even heard a whisper of. He siphons the life from your very soul. There is a light, a pull, and whatever he takes from you, he uses to make himself young, to live as long as he so chooses.”

  My mind runs in circles, and a memory from the ball stands in my mind. The door Liv was taken through stood open for just a moment as the king exited. The old woman with the snow-white hair—wearing Liv’s dress. It was her. The king had done that to her. And when I saw him across the crowd, he looked different, happier, his eyes brighter.

  I begin to pace the floor. The light from my vision and the pull at my chest, the illustrations in Constance’s book of tales, and Cinderella’s own words all fit together like a puzzle.

  This is how he does it.

  This is how he keeps himself young. And just as the thought settles in my mind, another terrible reality makes itself clear. I run back and stand on the brick.

  “The ball. Is that its purpose? To bring the young women of Lille here for him to do this?”

  “It is a reaping,” Émile says. “A way for him to feast on them like the monster he is. And knowing now that he has been doing this since the time of Cinderella, I fear he can go on like this forever.” Her voice becomes a whisper. “I’ve dreamed of finding a way out, but I think that’s all it will ever be. A dream. A nightmare, really. He’s taken so much from me. I’m changed in the very deepest parts of me.”

  “When you get out of here, you will have yourself and your freedom, and that will be enough. I promise you.”

  I think I hear her laugh, but it could have been a sob. “I want to believe you. Really, I do.”

  I step down and take a deep breath. She’s lost all hope. She sounds so much like Erin, like my parents. But I refuse to accept that fate. I need to get out, and I need to find Cinderella’s journal.

  I go to the door again and peek through the keyhole, listening for a moment. There are no sounds other than the steady drip of water and my own heartbeat. I hold the candle up to the locking mechanism inside the keyhole. It’s rusty, and a piece of the keyhole’s frame is broken off. I look around the room for something I can use to open the lock. Nothing useful.

  I run my hand through my hair, frustrated. My fingers pass over the glass butterflies that still hang there. I yank one down and break off the glass figure, leaving just the metal pin, which looks like it will fit perfectly in the lock. I wonder if my own personal fairy godmother had something to do with crafting these little pins.

  I jam the metal rod into the keyhole and try to mimic the motion of a turning key. Flecks of red-orange metal rain down as I probe the lock. I twist the pin as hard as I can, and then pop! The lock clicks.

  The door groans as it opens just a crack. I expect to be rushed by the guards at any moment, but nothing happens. I poke my head out and look down the darkened corridor. A patchwork of newer-looking wood planks crisscrosses the hole in the ceiling, but the chilly evening air still gusts through. From somewhere farther off, a melody drifts in, and a sweet smell, like fresh-baked bread, wafts past me. I try the handle on the cell next to mine.

  “If you come in here, make sure you kill me. Because if you don’t, I’ll strangle you with my bare hands!”

  “Will you be quiet?” I whisper. “It’s just me. From the cell next to you.”

  I hear her scramble around, and the light under the door flickers.

  I put my makeshift key in the lock and try to get it to turn. It clicks gently as I try to find the right angle and then snap! The pin breaks off inside the lock.

  “Where are the keys?” I ask.

  “They’re with the guard. You’ll never get ahold of them. Just go. Get away from here and never come back.”

  I see faint lights under each of what must be a half dozen doors down the hall.

  “I’ll come back for you. I promise,” I say. “I’ll find the keys or something to break the lock.”

  Faint sobs fade away as I head toward the end of the hall where I’d found my way out before. I twist the handle. Locked, boarded shut from the outside. The king must have amended his lapse in security.

  A monster. Not a fool, I remind myself.

  I turn to the opposite end of the hallway. A narrow, spiral staircase is tucked in the far corner. I rush to the foot of the stairs and look up.

  The wooden stairway spirals at least two floors into the darkness. The first few feet are passable, and I’m sure this is the way the guards came when they dragged me down here, but beyond that, the staircase is in rough shape. Some of the steps are missing, and cobwebs hang between the slats of the rail. I rush past the sturdy stairs and then ease onto the first tattered step that leads into the darkness. It moans under my weight. I take a deep breath before making my way up cautiously, each step groaning in protest.

  The bells toll, marking the half hour.

  As I near the top, I narrowly avoid a gaping hole in the structure. When I set my foot on the other side, a sickening crack echoes through the dark. My foot crashes through the wooden stair, and I grab on to the rail to keep myself from plummeting to the floor below.

  A shower of debris rains down and clatters to the floor. I scramble to hoist myself up, and when I’m steady, I stand still, listening. Someone must have heard the commotion. I try to calm my racing heart. Just above me, at the top of the staircase, is a door.

  I climb the last few steps and lean against it to see if I can hear anyone on the other side.

  Silence.

  Turning the handle, I push the door in slowly and find myself in a hall much like the one the king had shown me. The walls here are painted a pale blue with white lilies all along the ceiling. Oil lamps light up the space every few feet, set in golden fixtures on the walls. The doorway is built directly into the wall, with no handle on the outside. I gently push it closed and tiptoe down the hall. The floor beneath my feet is a dark oak color and polished to such a shine that I can see myself reflected in its surface.

  I pass several rooms before coming to a set of gilded double doors at the end of the hallway. A muffled voice sounds from somewhere behind me. I try the handle on the double doors and they creak open, sending a sprinkling of dust down onto my head. Clearly, no one has been in this room in a very long time. I take a lamp from its holder just outside the door and go inside.

  It’s a large bedroom, painted the same pale blue as the hallway. The air is stale, and I can taste the dust in it. Windows run along the south-facing side, though they are shuttered, and on the recessed ceiling is a plaster medallion with swirling arms stretching out like the rays of the sun. An enormous gold chandelier hangs from its center, cobwebs dangling between its candle cups like delicate lace. A four-poster bed draped with navy-blue linens sits underneath. It, too, is covered in a blanket of dust.

  On the adjacent wall is a vanity with a mirror covered with a black cloth. A portrait of Cinderella hangs above it, but it’s much different than the one in the main entryway. Here, she looks straight ahead, no hint of a smile, her mouth pressed into a tight line.

  I hold the lamp up. Light cuts through the darkened room, illuminating an open closet filled with beautiful dresses. I walk over and run my hand over the folds of the luxurious fabrics. In the rear of the closet hangs a dress separate from the others: a plain frock frayed around the hem, its long sleeves tattered at the wrists.

  Unlike the other dresses, it looks like it’s been worn a million times. A picture starts to form in my mind. The dust on every
surface, dresses hanging in the closet, the eerie silence.

  This room belonged to Cinderella.

  35

  I back away from the closet as an oppressive sense of sadness washes over me. This is her gilded cage, her pretty prison.

  On the wall next to her bed hangs a small painting no larger than the cover of a book, showing a man and a woman standing behind three young girls. They all smile and the girls hold hands. The tallest of the three has red hair. This must be Gabrielle. I ache for what was stolen from them, but now is not the time to mourn the past. Getting to Cinderella’s journal is the only thing I can think of to do. She knew something we don’t.

  I pull open drawers. I look under her bed and in her closet but find nothing. Would it still be here after all this time? Maybe Manford found it and destroyed it long ago.

  I move toward the doors of the washroom but feel a tug at the back of my dress. I spin around to see that my hem is caught on the corner of the little table next to the bed. My dress has pulled it away from the wall, and as I bend to free myself, something catches my eye.

  On the back of the table, a small rectangular object sits in a small groove behind the single drawer. I reach down to pick it up, realizing it is a small book. Opening the cover, I see that the words are written by hand in black ink. A journal. My heart ticks up as I read the first page.

  I skip ahead several pages.

  My skin pricks up as I reread the passage. He drained her, slowly, over time to punish her. My hands tremble as I continue reading.

  I turn the pages as if they are made of glass. I’ve stumbled upon something sacred. The words of Cinderella herself, in her own hand. In the last pages, the handwriting becomes nothing more than scribbles. I squint against the dark to read the passage.

  The noise of a door opening in the hall stops me. I tuck the diary away between the shell of my dress and my corset. Someone is walking toward Cinderella’s room. A gold candlestick, caked with cobwebs, sits on a table by the door. I pick it up. It’s heavy as a brick. Raising it over my head, I listen as the footsteps come closer. Whoever it is pauses just outside the door. I hold my breath.