“Ella Coach!” she yelped, stumbling into the middle of the kitchen. Soon, surely, the guard would sift through her belongings and find the royal ring, and then — the dungeons? Execution? What happened to people who carried around royal jewels after queens vanished?
The door that separated the kitchen from the tavern beyond swung open, and a flood of music and conversation rolled in like a wave. In misery, Ella looked toward the happy noise — and gaped. In the doorway stood a woman — a tall, dark-skinned, impeccably dressed woman — whose eyes pinned Ella with a look so deadly furious that all of a sudden the king’s guards were not the most frightening people in the room.
Her stepmother was.
“So you are here,” said Sharlyn angrily, sweeping into the kitchen. “How dare you, Ella? And what have you done? Sir, what mischief has she done?”
“We have reason to believe,” the guard replied, “that Ella Coach is involved in the disappearance of Her Majesty the Queen.”
Sharlyn’s eyes widened. A dry laugh escaped her painted lips. “Preposterous,” she said. “She ran away from home is what she did. Let her go — she’s coming back to Quintessential with me.”
“By order of his Majesty the King —”
“Show me the order,” said Sharlyn briskly, putting out a hand. “We will gladly comply with any mandate of His Majesty the King’s.”
The guard faltered. “She’s under suspicion,” he said.
“If you have no royal order,” said Sharlyn, “then we’re finished. When and if you do have permission to arrest my stepdaughter, please do so at number 76 Cardinal Park East in Quintessential, which is where she lives. My name is Lady Sharlyn Gourd-Coach. I am the cousin of Governor Calabaza of Yellow Country, and if you claim to speak on behalf of your monarch, you require official permission. Now let her go or I will report you.”
The guard released Ella’s wrist. Moments later, he was gone, and all the others behind him — except the red-haired messenger boy in livery, who was sitting on a barrel by the door, trying to catch his breath. Ella drew a deep breath herself and realized she hadn’t taken one in a long time. She rubbed her wrist where the guard had kept hold of it.
“You arrived in the nick of time, hey?” Tallith said to the sweating messenger. She looked as relieved as Ella felt. “Name?”
“Tanner.”
“Well, grats to you, Tanner. Stay the night, if you want — room and meal for free.”
“That’s kind,” said the boy, waving a freckled hand. “But I’m wanted at the palace. Prince Dash will be anxious to know it all went off all right.”
“Might’ve known I had my nephew to thank for the help,” Tallith muttered. “Poor lad. Kit, you get Tanner as much stew and drink as he wants before he gets back on his horse.”
“ ’Course,” said Kit, and, with a brief, worried look at Sharlyn and Ella, she gestured for Tanner to follow her into the tavern. The door swung shut behind them. Silence fell in the kitchen, so thick and loud that Ella squirmed.
“I hope you feel as foolish as you are,” said Sharlyn. “Look at the trouble you nearly got yourself into.”
“I didn’t —”
“Quiet.” Sharlyn turned to Tallith. “My apologies,” she said. “Ella is here under false pretenses. She doesn’t need employment. She is more than adequately provided for.”
“I’m not coming back to the city,” said Ella. “I’m not living with you —”
“You are not of age to make that choice.”
“Fourteen’s the legal working age in Blue, so I’m old enough for an apprenticeship if I want one. Tallith’s giving me a trial. We’ve already worked it out. I’m staying here — right, Tallith?”
“Sorry, Ella,” Tallith said, almost gently. She shook her head. “I’m not interfering in family business. You go on home with your mum, hey?”
“She’s not my mum.” But Ella’s shoulders sagged. Without a job, she couldn’t stay. Kit’s family would let her sleep in their cott, of course, but they had five children already to provide for, and she hadn’t come down here to be their burden. “I have a trunk upstairs,” she muttered.
“The driver will fetch it,” said Sharlyn. “Get in the carriage. Now.”
The private Gourd-Coach carriage was shining and white, with fashionable black trim, and drawn by two black horses and two white ones. Ella huddled to one side of the cushioned bench, putting as many inches between herself and her father’s wife as possible. How her dad could’ve married this woman, Ella would never understand. And he’d done it just a year and a half after her mum’s death.
Must’ve been nice to get over things so fast.
“Unbelievable,” Sharlyn muttered as the horses started onward. She removed one yellow shoe and wiped mud from its heel with a handkerchief. “Unbelievable. As if I have time for this.”
“Then you shouldn’t’ve come,” said Ella. “It’s not like I wanted you to. How did you even know I was here?”
“Your headmistress sent a messenger home saying that you had run out of the prince’s breakfast reception — which is a whole separate conversation. I am absolutely mortified, Ella. Clover and Linden brought the message to my office, and I hurried straight up to your school to search for you. I met your friend Dimity Gusset—”
“She is not my friend —”
“— who told me she’d seen you throwing out a big packet of letters. I searched the bin in the privy, and I found them. Letters from your friend Kit, full of sympathy about your terrible school and your evil stepmother, inviting you down to work with her at the Corkscrew.”
“Those letters are private!”
“You ran away. For a tavern job.” Sharlyn snorted. “If you want to throw yourself away apprenticing for reduced wages, you should at least come to work for us on the Avenue, where you won’t be robbed and murdered.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Salting! Just because it’s not plush —”
“The Corkscrew is full of transients and criminals — and cankermoths, from the look of it. Do you want to end up bitten like that poor miserable girl in there, and spend the next seven years with a face full of hideous pustules?”
“You shut your clap! Kit’s my friend! C-Prep is what’s miserable!” Ella cried, furious.
“I weep for your misfortunes,” said Sharlyn, wiping down her other shoe. She slipped it back on her foot and went about cleaning her bright red fingernails. “If you hated school so much, you should have asked to live at home,” she said. “But of course you couldn’t give me a chance, could you? My children and I have barely been in the city for a week. Ever since the wedding, we’ve looked forward to being near you and becoming closer as a family — and the moment we arrive, this is what you do? We packed up our entire lives in Cornucopia to move here —”
“Like it was some sacrifice!”
“It was an extraordinary sacrifice. It took four months and a lot of pain to sell the estate and settle the old family business into new hands, but I did it, and even though it was difficult for all of us, we left our home country to make a new life with you and your father —”
“Living in the city was your idea. You’re the one who wants to be plush and fashionable. You’re the one who made my dad’s business the way it is now —”
“Successful?”
“Useless! He used to make real inventions, now he just makes quinty fashions —”
“Your father’s inventions,” said Sharlyn coldly, “are brilliant. That they also happen to be fashionable is why you are able to live like nobility. And while we’re on the subject, though I can absolutely believe that you would insult me by running away, I can’t believe you’d do it to your father. He adores you, Ella. Are you trying to break his heart?”
“He broke mine first.”
“Skies, you’re dramatic.”
“Yeah,” said Ella, laughing angrily. “That’s me. You should both be ashamed of what you’ve done.”
“And what have we done, pre
cisely, to incur your righteous wrath?”
“You knocked down my old cott. You put up a workshop right next to my mum’s grave.”
“And you’ve been stewing over it for four months. Really, the way you hold grudges —”
“Four months? Try four hours. I saw it just now, today, when I rode down to Eel Grass.”
Sharlyn blinked. “You didn’t know about it before?”
“You never told me, so how would I know?”
Her stepmother was silent for a long moment. “I see,” she said. “Ella, you should know that the area around your mother’s plot is unfinished. Your father and I never intended for you to see it like that. We have plans to install some really quite beautiful fencing around the grave and the pomegranate tree, and a proper monument is being built —”
“That makes it all better, then,” said Ella, and her voice wobbled in spite of her anger. She was close to tears. She clenched her teeth shut and balled up against the window as tight as she could, but her own reflection in the glass made her wince and she shut her eyes. It was no wonder that Tallith had mistaken Sharlyn for Ella’s mum. Sharlyn’s skin was darker brown, and her eyes were dark too, not clear brown like Ella’s, but their features otherwise were similar enough that they could pass as natural family.
Beside her, Sharlyn sighed quietly but said nothing else. In silence they rode northward, until Ella jolted awake, thanks to the bumping of the carriage wheels in the rutted road just outside the city. She didn’t remember falling asleep, but hours had passed and it was already twilight. The city streets were thick with noise: vendors shouting, the clattering of hooves on the stones, and the gonging of the great clock at the Essential Assembly. Here at the far outer edge of Quintessential, the buildings were ramshackle and low, with tiny, soot-blackened windows. A girl in rags played in a puddle with a boat made of driftwood and torn fabric. She looked happy enough with her makeshift toy.
The adults around her, however, looked gray. Their clothing, their faces — gray. Many outer-city dwellers were dragging themselves home now from long shifts in the workshops and warehouses that lay east in the labor districts: garment and slaughterhouse workers, blacksmiths and cobblers. The labor districts and the slums were hidden behind a long, dense thicket of forested land that ran south through Quintessential, dividing it. Within minutes of entering the city, the carriage pulled up alongside the forested divide, cutting the unsightly half of Quintessential off from view.
Eventually, the carriage turned onto Cardinal Park East, and the horses halted in front of number 76. Ella followed Sharlyn through the gate and up the steps to the enormous stone house that she and her dad had lived in for the past four months, ever since the awful wedding. Sharlyn opened the door, and the house gaped before them, all marble and tapestries and carpets. Ella couldn’t have dreamed up this place, living back in Eel Grass. Sometimes she’d wished for a roof that didn’t leak. Or walls without mice in them. That was as far as her imagination had taken her.
“Earnest!” Sharlyn called out in a strong, cheerful voice that suggested nothing at all was the matter. She strode into the house, and Ella trudged after her. “We’re home!”
HE paced his room, waiting. Many times he sat and tried to write some of his letters; many times he tried to read, but he couldn’t concentrate on anything except what might be happening in Salting. He jogged down the long, private path that led from the palace to the sea, and he had a good, hard swim. When he emerged from the water, he realized that his father had been quite serious. Half a dozen guards — not his usual ones — stood on the beach, watching his every move.
He would have no privacy until his mother came back.
He toweled off and strode back to the palace, unfazed. He could handle a complete lack of privacy. It will be worth it when I’m king, he thought, stopping in his stride to gaze up at the breathtaking picture Charming Palace made, radiant atop the cliff ahead. However troubled his family line, he knew that he was fortunate to be a Charming, heir to the happiest and most prosperous kingdom in Tyme. His father was a poor example of a ruler, and the nobles could be shallow about their fashions, but Blue itself was as perfect as was possible. A land of beauty, comfort, and plenty, whose great army had crushed the mighty Pink Empire near a century ago, leading all of Tyme into an era of peace. He would be the first king in one hundred and fifty years to rule this nation without the shadow of the witch’s curse upon him. Happiness might one day truly be his.
The scroll that awaited him on his desk, however, did not promise any happiness. It was gilt-edged and ribboned, and Dash unrolled it to find the swirling calligraphy of a formal royal invitation.
Dash took a deep, steadying breath, but it didn’t help. The twelfth was tomorrow. How his father would manage to stage a royal ball by tomorrow night, he had no idea, but he didn’t doubt that it would happen. Once his father had decided something, it always happened.
He collapsed into his chair and tossed the invitation onto the desk. Tomorrow would be a rush of frantic fittings and tailorings and scrubbings and tweezings and everything else that went along with public life. They’d anoint him with cologne and drape him in velvets and silks until he could scarcely breathe. He rubbed his scalp, where the short hairs were just beginning to poke through. At least his head was bare. That would be able to breathe, even if nothing else could.
Suddenly he realized that he could hear someone else breathing. Panting, in fact. He turned in his chair to see his messenger, Tanner, kneeling just outside his door, head bowed, waiting for acknowledgment. Sweat trickled from his freckled temples.
“Tanner,” said Dash, jumping to his feet. “Did you stop the arrest?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did they hurt her?”
“Well, sir, I didn’t see it, but her mouth was bloody.”
Dash grimaced. They’d struck his aunt. But at least it had ended there.
“Then Spaulder started to arrest a girl from Coterie, sir,” said Tanner. “He thought she’d helped Her Majesty to escape.”
“Who?”
“Ella Coach, sir, her name was. She was there in the kitchen.”
Ella. Same as the girl whose bag had been on fire that morning.
“Did she have curls?” said Dash. “And old boots on?”
“Yes, sir.”
It had to be the same girl. So she had run away from Coterie and gone to Salting. Strange coincidence. He wondered what business she had there.
“The girl,” he said. “Did they arrest her?”
“No, sir, not in the end. Her mother showed up, and they let her go.”
Dash nodded. “Good,” he said. “Thank you, Tanner, you’re dismissed.”
Tanner bowed and retreated.
SERGE arrived at number 76 Cardinal Park East, an impressive park-side home, and he hung back at the park’s edge, hidden by foliage and the falling dusk. He pulled a folded evening Crier from his pocket to entertain himself while he waited. HEARTBROKEN QUEEN MAUD ABANDONS CHARMING PALACE. Serge skimmed the story, shaking his head. Maud had been a sweet girl with a good heart who’d deserved better. But then, no one had forced her to marry the king. She had adored him and thought that she could break the curse if she just loved him hard enough.
He folded the Crier and watched the street, where he expected Jasper to appear. They had eaten dinner together an hour ago, and his apprentice had seemed tense. Agitated. At the end of their meal, Jasper pretended to have an appointment at the Academy. But Serge had known exactly where he was really going.
Because Jasper had stolen Elegant Coach’s contract.
Serge should have reported him for it at once. There was no question about that. He should have told Jules right at that moment when he’d seen Jasper stuffing the scroll into his sleeve, but something had stopped him — and whatever that something was, it scared him. He wasn’t a rebel; he didn’t want a mess. He wanted the Slipper, and that was all. He couldn’t let Jasper have an illegal client. If Jules found ou
t, they’d both be finished.
He was so very tired of Jules.
A moment later, Jasper flitted into view, his huge crimson wings as obvious as fire, even in the twilight. He looked shiftily around, then flew close to the gate that surrounded number 76. He gazed up at the house, and his mouth opened in dismay.
With effort, Serge dredged up a lick of fairy dust and flicked it into the air to make himself invisible. He stepped out of the bushes and sat on the bench directly across from number 76, rubbing his ears with the remainder of the fairy dust on his fingers so that he could hear Jasper even from across the street.
“She can’t live here,” muttered Jasper, still staring up in confusion at the splendid home.
Serge knew that she did. He had found the Coaches listed in the property register. Two years ago Ella might have been a charity case, but things had changed.
Jasper pulled from his coat pocket a small bright blue book that could only be the National Academy’s Official Guide to Fairy Godparenting. He flipped to the center, where there were instructions on the best ways to approach a client for the first time. It was the trickiest part of the business, and it never happened on the first visit. The first visit was purely for getting a sense of the client’s situation through a bit of careful spying — not in private chambers but in a parlor or garden. Serge wondered with some trepidation how Jasper would manage to spy. Unlike Blue fairies, Crimsons couldn’t make themselves invisible.
A sleek black-and-white carriage turned the corner and approached number 76. Jasper pocketed his official guide and flew across the street to the park, where he alighted on the bench beside Serge, so near that if he flexed his wings, he’d knock into him.
Serge remained motionless.
He still didn’t know what he was doing here. He told himself that he had come to talk Jasper out of this madness, but if that was the case, then why wasn’t he saying anything? And why did he feel a strange thrill of excitement — the kind he hadn’t felt in years?
Disenchanted: The Trials of Cinderella Page 6
