“Then I suggest you reward Cook for her efforts.” He said it without groveling or hesitation. It was a bold move. Rumbold nodded his agreement.
“Good. Just don’t send flowers or jewels or something equally useless.”
Rumbold shook his head this time, confused.
“What use has Cook for fancies? I hear she’s been asking the steward to allot the kitchens a bit of land for an herb garden. There’s an old walled-ln garden on the south side of the castle that would do. Give her the key and an orphan to tend it. That would set her up forever.”
“Yes,” Rumbold managed. “I would like ... to be useful.”
The guard grunted. “Is that so.” He put the bauble down, scratched his red beard, and folded his arms across his chest. “The soot suits you.”
Rumbold’s laughter quickly degraded into coughing. Erik handed him a small pitcher of water from the table. The prince gulped greedily, his lips barely moist enough afterward to spare a sincere “Thank you” as he handed it back.
Since Rumbold’s return, Erik had always looked him in the eye, never averting his gaze or avoiding him as many servants and members of court did. Whether it was because the prince had scared them before or because his presence scared them now, Rumbold wasn’t sure. He would never know if he couldn’t find someone to talk to. So he chose to offer Erik two of the highest and most dangerous compliments that royalty can bestow: honesty and confidence.
“I do not remember who I was,” Rumbold said carefully. He brushed the cinders off his knees; a cloud of ash rose before him, and he coughed again. “Velius said that he ... he was glad I chose life. What did he mean?”
“Who knows half the riddles Cauchemar spouts.” Erik uncrossed his legs, then recrossed them. He stared at the portrait on the wall in front of him, an elderly relation Rumbold didn’t remember. Finally Erik’s deep timbre filled the quiet room.
“Your mother died and Jack was cursed in the same season,” the guard said. “You were too young to know all the games different hands played around you, too young to see their intentions, and far too young to carry such a burden of sadness and loneliness. You hid inside yourself and spent a quiet childhood.
“Your godmother cast her own counterspell to put off the inevitable, but for how long? You had walked on eggshells for so long, a boy on his best behavior, living in terror of what was to come. As time went on, you began to embrace the curse’s deadline. You marked it as the time from which your life would start, when you would make your own choices and control your own destiny. You made every preparation there was to make as your eighteenth birthday came and went. The spell’s postponement only prolonged your waiting, and you’d had enough.”
Rumbold shifted uncomfortably on the flagstones. Erik tossed him a velvet cushion and the prince set it right in the ashes. “No harm could come to you until the curse had been fulfilled, but no one expected you to become ... selfdestructive.”
“Was I mad?” Rumbold asked.
“In every sense of the word, and—fo my mind—with every good reason.”
“Did I hurt anyone else?”
“I don’t think you gave a thought to anyone else. If anyone was hurt by your actions, you did not intend it.”
“Did I ... hurt myself?” Rumbold wondered, noting the guard’s tense position and tenser pauses, if he had ever concentrated on the body language of another person so intently before. Another person besides Sunday.
“You’re sitting there, so it couldn’t have been too bad, eh?” But Erik’s smile was gone; the lines on his forehead returned. “I will say, I would not trade places with you for the world. No man is meant to tempt Fate as you have. You were as much a victim of that fairy-feud as Jack was, and you deserved a happy ending for all they put you through. But your life from this moment will not be easy, my friend. You have only yourself to blame for that damnation.”
So. This difficult path was the life he had chosen. Rumbold wished he could be as glad as his cousin about that. He looked at his hands still clasped around his knees, his fingers gray with ash, the soot caked in black lines along his knuckles and under his nails. His hands were bony, but they were also strong. These hands would forge his destiny, clear the brush from the difficult path, and catch whatever Fate threw at him. He could not change the man he had been, but these hands would make him the man he could be.
If he’d had friends in his previous life, they had not made themselves known upon his return. Now he found himself with three: Sunday, Velius, and Erik. He wiggled three fingers. Counting himself and Rollins, they all made a hand, solid, the first and best part of a body slowly rebuilding itself.
A strange framed ancestor sneered at the Cinder Prince on his dusty hearth. Rumbold squinted back at him, at an elegant woman in a black dress, at a pudgy boy with an equally pudgy dog at his knee. “Who are these people?” Rumbold asked Erik.
The guard burst into a belly laugh. “No idea. Stern bunch, aren’t they?” Erik stood, extending a hand to the prince. “Come, Your Dirtyness. Let’s get you clean and then take you down to the field to mess you up again. The boys will be looking for you.”
Rumbold put his bony hand in Erik’s meaty one and let his friend help him stand. “Your father will see you now, sire.”
Rumbold nodded to another steward—had he ever known their names?—and summoned the courage to walk through the massive doors. The expectation of disappointment roiled in the pit of his stomach. His feet sank in the deep red carpet; more unfamiliar relations looked down on him from their gilded frames. The painted ceilings felt miles away, their moldings hidden in the shadows of late afternoon.
Anyone walking this hall to the king’s solarium was meant to feel small, to remember his place in the world, so very far below that of his wise and powerful monarch. To a man who’d spent half a year as a frog, size did not matter. Rumbold was nervous for some other reason buried in his mind along with his very quiet, very rebellious, and very cursed childhood.
The doors to the king’s solarium were closed. Rumbold squared his shoulders and knocked, the sound almost completely absorbed by the polished wood. Perhaps his father would not hear; perhaps he was gone and Rumbold could call again another day. Perhaps...
A door cracked open to reveal his father, cheeks flushed, dark gold hair and clothes a rumpled mess. His amber eyes glimmered, and the lines on his face surrounded a broad, lopsided grin.
“Come, come! There’s someone who’ll want to see you.” His father pulled him across the threshold and shut the door behind him. He dashed back across the room and knelt to continue his project on the floor. Rumbold smoothed out his sleeve, and the pressure of the king’s hand there faded. Someone, the king had said. Someone who obviously wasn’t him.
Thick tapestries covered the long, bright windows. Candlelight illuminated the king’s collection of curiosities: a fairy crown, a horn carved from the bone of a hundred-year-old stag, the petrified heart of an Elder Wood tree, a silver apple, a golden goose egg. Each was a moment in his father’s life; together they formed a timeline of the king’s great quests and conquests. Each was encased in glass on its own pedestal. Had any of these items been moved, removed, or altered in any way, the king would have had a fit and someone’s head, most likely in that order.
Rumbold wished himself under glass on one of those pedestals and knew it was not for the first time. But he was not a prize won or a gift treasured—to his father, Rumbold’s existence was as constant, common, and unwanted as the sunlight squashed behind those oppressive curtains.
As Rumbold crossed the room, the dusky candlelight turned blue. The shadows in the room swam, all fuzzy at the edges. The golden egg turned the color of blood. The king had pushed his throne to the side of the great mirror, making the room seem twice as large and oppressive. He had thrown back the carpet to reveal a pattern of stars, circles, and symbols etched deep into the ancient wood floor, burned dark and painted over with clear lacquer so as to weather the years of shifting feet a
nd furniture. There was a candle at each point of the largest star. Their flames were as blue as the clouds now filling the mirror with an unearthly glow.
The long shadows of the pillars strained toward the door, as if to escape. Rumbold found himself in his father’s shadow and smirked at the irony. His heart roared in his ears and rasping whispers filled the air: Rumbold. Rumbold. I will always be with you. The king did not seem to hear them.
A woman came into the mirror, looking out at them as they looked in. “Dearest,” she said to the king. Her faraway voice was like water rushing over smooth stones. “It has been so long. And yet...”
“Look who has returned!” Somewhere between the giddiness and the fairylight, the years on the king’s face slipped away. At that moment, someone would have mistaken Rumbold’s father for his brother. His younger brother.
“Has it been a year already?” The clouds parted, and the voice and image became clearer together, resolving a portrait of Sorrow inside the mirror’s frame. Ebony hair, alabaster skin, and violet eyes. Her spectacular beauty only added to the inhuman unrealness of her.
Those bitter eyes lit upon him in the darkness. “No. Not a year,” she said. “Your son should not be standing before you, my king.”
“What? What are you saying?” His hands reached out to the mirror, the stones on his rings of office blazing with inner fire in the fairylight. “Is this not truly my son?”
A corner of her lip curved wryly. “It is your son, for all that he is missing a piece.”
Rumbold thought back to his rebirth, took another mental inventory of all his vital parts, and did not come up short.
“What piece might that be?” The king’s eyes were as violet as Sorrows in the mirror’s light.
“His heart, of course.” She cocked her head and batted her eyelashes at Rumbold. “Tell me, Godson. What is her name?”
Rumbold said nothing. The ghostly whispers turned to screams in his ears, clawing their way through his mind, each vying to be heard above the others.
Rumbold! Rumbold!
Free me!
He couldn’t breathe. The other two did not notice his distress, or they ignored it.
“He will not tell us,” said one.
“Or he cannot,” said the other.
Rumbold saw their lips moving but could not discern the speaker for the cacophony in his mind.
Free me!
Kill me!
Was this Fate’s revenge? He clutched at his throat. Silly Fate. His life was going to last only a few more moments.
“I signed a Proclamation this morning,” said the king, “at the behest of my son, ordering a series of balls to be thrown in honor of his return to the castle. All the eligible ladies in the land are invited. I thought it a bit extravagant, but I indulged him.”
Open mouth.
Air in. Air out.
Gods, help me!
“They are all invited,” said Sorrow, “because he does not know who she is!” Her laughter echoed from the mirror, her voice as large as the room. Fighting the pain, Rumbold slapped his hands to his ears, expecting his palms to come away covered in blood. The wavering fairylight shadows made him sick. He stumbled away from the star on the floor. He needed air. He needed light. He needed ... reality. Stark, tangible reality.
Free me!
Kill me!
Rumbold!
The prince stumbled again, caught a thick tapestry, and pulled.
Daylight split the room into two sets of shadows: the fuzzy ethereal ones cast by the light of the mirror and the set that slammed sharply onto the wall opposite the setting sun. The pedestals and their treasures, the furniture, even the mirror’s edge, all now cast two matching silhouettes.
His father did not.
On the floor before the mirror wavered the shadow of the king, but on the wall behind him stood an angel. She spread her wings and raised her hands in supplication. Then she reached down, lifted the shadow of the golden egg, and smashed it. The corporeal egg crumbled to dust beneath its unbroken glass dome.
The voices in Rumbold’s head sang a chorus of jubilation.
The angel launched herself into the air and flew away.
The king collapsed.
As the angel vanished so did the cheers, fading first to whispers and then to nothing. One last sentence was audible before becoming breeze. He had not heard this one among the others in the dark hours of the night.
I love you, my son.
The pressure around his throat released and Rumbold gasped, inhaling a precious lungful of air through his nose and mouth. He coughed, and breathed again. The air tasted purple, the way his mother had smelled, like lavender and lilacs.
Rumbold rushed to his father’s side. The king’s hair now ran with streaks of dull gray; spots and deep lines marred his once youthful features. No longer a brother now, the thin, frail man Rumbold held in his arms might have been his grandfather, or his father beyond that. The king’s clothes were suddenly too big for his frame and his pale skin too large for the bones in his hands: it bunched along the knuckles and puckered on the fingertips. The purple air rattled morbidly in his lungs.
Lightning struck in the cloudless sky. The room was lit white for an instant through the open window; the subsequent thunderclap rumbled long and low through the thick stone walls and rattled the bones of the castle.
Sorrow stepped through the mirror.
His godmother had eyes only for the king. She sank gracefully to the floor beside him, calmly removing a pin of office from his breast and using it to prick her finger. Her blood was red; Rumbold had half expected it to be the deep violet of her eyes or the cold blue of fairy candle flame. Clouds still swirled in the mirror behind her, as if searching for their lost mistress or the errant bolt of magic lightning for which they’d been responsible.
Sorrow painted the king’s lips with the blood on her fingertip. His color immediately rose with a healthy blush. His flesh filled out, and he was soon too heavy for Rumbold to hold. Sorrow ran her dark-tipped nails through the king’s hair, golden once again. She patted the king’s chest, and his breathing came, deep and easy.
“It is a good thing you have announced these balls.” Sorrow’s voice now seemed close and real and small in the spacious room. “It is time your father found a new wife.” Her powerful violet eyes pinned him with their stare. “Welcome home, Godson.”
9. The Greatest Story
THANKS TO FRIDAY, the whole family thought Sunday’s depression was because she had a crush on Panser, the moneylender’s apprentice.
Poor Panser.
Sunday might have laughed if she hadn’t felt so old and tired, as if every muscle in her body realized that one small laugh from one small girl would never change the course of the universe and was therefore not worth the effort. The melancholy made her blood thick, her movements sluggish. Her heart was an invalid convinced that it would not survive many more sunsets.
Sunday had dark dreams of walking down long whisper-filled corridors. Party-dressed, flour-faced strangers scowled at her through gilded windows. The sheets of her bed felt like water, silken and cold. When she awoke, she was surprised to find her hands and fingernails free of cinders and soot. The nightmares left her sad and shaken.
The Panser issue might never have come to anyone’s attention had Friday not had her own feelings for the banker’s quiet young apprentice. Sunday neither confirmed nor denied an infatuation of any kind, so Friday moped in a productive flurry of lace, ribbon, and thread as she sewed her sisters’ gowns for the ball. No one bothered to cheer her up or change her mind.
Saturday, still upset over the unfairness of her normalcy and the heartless notion of a balanced universe, was vociferously reluctant to attend the “ridiculous display of pomp and frippery” and took her anger out on several cords of wood. Papa was miserable at the thought of anyone attending at all, given the host and said host’s well-known, unfortunate prior association with the Woodcutter family. Mama—who could always
be counted on to display a certain measure of unhappiness—was even more out of sorts because no one else seemed excited about being invited to such a prestigious affair.
Sunday blamed herself for the drawn faces and sour moods, so she stayed away from the family rooms, thinking her distance might cleanse the air. Trix’s idea of cleansing the air was to cart load after load of manure from the vacant cowshed and pile it atop the rose seeds he’d planted around the house. The resulting closed windows and doors sealed the Woodcutters’ solemn tomb.
The cloak of numb quiet that Sunday wore became a bridge from her subconscious to the inherent magic that had previously hovered so frustratingly out of reach. When nothing else mattered anymore, the world broke itself down and all that was left became ... simple. Logic fell into place and introduced clarity. Everything that had once been such an obstacle for Sunday now jumped to do her bidding, soft and easy as the whisper of a kiss blown to the moon. As soon as her mind reverted to memories of love or pain, the power escaped her, but as long as she kept her heart in that tepid pool of nothingness, her mind detached and the magic was hers to control. Even Aunt Joy was stunned by her progress.
Sunday wished she cared enough to be proud of herself. She was too busy suffering over the inadequate love she felt for a man she’d never met and the frog who was her friend. Papa said some things were meant to be and some things were just meant to be good stories. If that was so, then Grumble was the greatest story of her life.
Dawns tripped into mornings, mornings stumbled into afternoons, and suddenly the eve of the first ball fell upon the Woodcutter household.
Sunday sat still in front of the mirror, a hollow statue clad in her silver samite gown edged with the magic gold shed spun. Wednesday wove ribbons and Thursday’s silver pins into her hair. Sunday could have easily done the task herself; she had already put a spring in her curls that was absent from her step and a blush on her cheeks that she did not feel. But she needed to bask in the calm sereneness of her shadow sister. Sunday concentrated on the relaxing play of Wednesday’s fingers against her skin. She imagined them drawing the pain out of her heart, through the top of her head, and down the strands of her hair to fall like droplets of tar from the ends.
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