He stirred. I hurried over to the hearth and made haste to light the fire. It had been years since I’d lit a fire by mundane means, and the task took twice as long as it should have.
When I turned from the hearth, I found the Prince awake and watching me. He evinced no shame in his nakedness, even though his cock now stood at attention. “I haven’t seen you before.”
I was surprised he spoke to me. Nobles rarely deign to notice servants, and he was the noblest man in the land, save his father.
I looked down, feigning embarrassment I didn’t feel, and made a clumsy curtsy. “I’m sorry to have disturbed your Highness. Please forgive me. I’ll be on my way and let you sleep.”
He looked me over once and then again. His eyes lingered, as though he liked the look of the Cinder Girl. “You needn’t leave.” There was seduction in his words, in their shape, sound and source.
I took a step toward him with no conscious thought. I meant to run for the door, but my feet brought me to his bedside instead. He caught my hand and pulled me down to sit on the bed beside him. “You’re a pretty thing, aren’t you?”
“Your Highness flatters me.”
He drew my face forward and kissed me. I did not know what to make of it, except that I liked the feel of his lips. I’d thought a man with no need to woo women would be careless when he kissed, but the Prince was as careful as an uncertain suitor. His lips were gentle over mine. Caressing, exploring, seducing. I felt the brush of stubble from his cheek though I hadn’t seen so much as a shadow of beard on his face.
His tongue brushed against my lips. I would have opened them for him, but he drew away. “You taste of ash.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and I was, unaccountably, hurt by it.
If he’d insulted my face or form, I would have shrugged it off, for they were illusion and thus no part of me. But I spent my days and nights near fire, listening to its whispers, Working magic with its light. I always smelled of ash and smoke, and probably tasted of it, too.
“I’m sorry to displease your Highness.” I began to back away, meaning to gather my tools and flee his presence as soon as I could.
Like something separate from his body, his hand reached after me. “Don’t go.”
My missing finger burned as though I were back in my mother’s parlor watching it crumble in the flames.
“Come here, let me touch you.”
His curse came upon me like the slide of snake’s scales across my ankles. It tickled my skin like a herd of millipedes scampering up my arms. I wanted to brush it off, to burn it away, but I could do nothing to free myself without betraying my disguise.
He took my hesitation for fear and tried to soothe me. “I’m not trying to get under your skirts,” he whispered.
I glanced down at his cock. It was thick and half-hard, making a liar of him in the plainest way possible. He had the grace to look ashamed as he drew the corner of the counterpane across his sex.
My missing finger burned, shooting shrill jolts of pain up my left arm. I made a fist of my hand and shook my head. “My mistress will beat me, Highness, if I abandon my tasks.”
“Then you must go.” He opened a box on the bedside table and withdrew a silver coin. “For luck.” He tossed the hateful thing at me, forcing me to catch it before it hit me in the face.
The coin itched against my bare palm, and I thought I could feel it writhing in my grip like a burrowing worm. I wanted to throw it back in his face, but instead I made a low curtsy and thanked him before fleeing his chamber.
Dulcie was asleep with her head on the table when I returned to the kitchen. Sylvie sat beside her, petting her hair.
“You did it,” Sylvie said when she heard my footsteps on the floor behind her. She turned to face me, and her expression crumpled in confusion at the sight of the Cinder Girl. “Who are you?”
If I told her the truth, the Prince might later compel the answer from her. Though I hated to do it, I smiled at my sister and lied. “I’m here at the behest of your sister, the witch, to protect you.”
“Are you a witch, too?”
I tried to make my voice kind, but there’s no unthreatening way to admit to witchcraft. “Yes.”
Sylvie’s face grew fierce. “I went to find her in the cookshed, but found only blood on the floor. What did your help cost her?”
“Not life, limb, nor any of her blood. Rest easy, girl. She’ll be back when it’s safe.”
Sylvie backed down and let me pass, though a low growl rumbled from her throat as I walked by. When I got outside, I threw the Prince’s coin over the back wall into the alley.
* * *
I was still awake when the cookshed fire began to flicker that night, for it is difficult to fall asleep while wearing a face not your own. I fed the fire pitchy twigs, and it again showed me the Prince’s bedchamber in our house.
He had Dulcie and Sylvie with him. They were clothed, and the gathering looked more like an interrogation than a tryst. My sisters sat side-by-side on the Prince’s bed, blank-eyed and witless from the force of his charm. The Prince paced, restless as a caged animal.
“She didn’t come to me.” He turned to Dulcie. “You promised you wouldn’t rest until she came to me, yet you slept today.”
“She must have come to you.” Dulcie’s voice held no inflection.
“I waited and watched. How could she have escaped me?”
I hated that he’d asked so general a question. Dulcie tried to resist answering for as long as she could, but at last she spoke, halting and through clenched teeth. “Our sister is a witch.”
“You mean she is a Wise Woman,” the Prince corrected. “We honor Wise Women here in Tierra del Maré, not witches. You d’Orans are too ignorant to tell the difference.”
Sylvie shook her head, bristling at the insult to her homeland. “No, she’s a witch, if ever there was one. She cut off her own finger and made the Witch’s Bargain with the spirits of Fire. She writes her spells in blood. When Lord Campos blacked my eye, she sent a plague of rats and ravens to drive him from the city. And she keeps a little doll made in his image to poke with pins or singe with fire whenever she needs amusement.”
“Is she wicked?”
“What does wicked mean? She watched the ravens harry Campos out of town, and laughed to see the wounds they pecked into his skin. But she did it to protect me. When Minette married her father, we meant to rob him blind. She struck a bargain with us to treat him well. She helped us. We’re sisters now and I do not doubt she loves us.”
“She loves?” The Prince’s voice betrayed an interest I’d not expected from him. “How?”
“Yes, she loves. Not easily, but fiercely.”
The Prince turned away from my sisters and the fire. I couldn’t see his expression. He was silent for some time, a man caught deep in thought. Finally, he kissed my sisters chastely, upon their brows. “You’ve both done well.” He pressed a silver coin into Sylvie’s limp palm and curled her hand around it. “You may go.”
My sisters left the room and the Prince sat down in silence, but still I fed the fire fuel and watched him. I didn’t know what he wanted from me, or why. I could think of no reason why he might care whether I loved, except a reason I did not want to contemplate.
Most witches walk a darker path than I. They sacrifice more of their flesh and blood for power; they barter their emotions for knowledge. Some even kill their children. Witchcraft’s unsavory reputation is far from undeserved. You’d be safer to assume all witches are incapable of love, than to risk your life and heart by loving a woman who loves power above all else.
Every lover I’ve ever had has gone to my sisters first to ask after me. They asked if I was kind or cruel, if I was forgiving or vengeful, and if I was loving or hateful. They asked how much I cared for power. Only when they were sure of my nature did my suitors dare approach me.
The Prince, for all the power of his awful curse, had sounded like a suitor when he interrogated Sylvie and Dulcie.
It softened me toward
him, to think he might want me as something other than a whore. And that frightened me.
4. The Stableman
The Prince became a patron of our house over the following weeks. He held parties there for his courtiers and cronies. He ate, drank and slept beneath our roof. He filled our coffers with his largesse. The nobles who followed him replaced my sisters’ paste gems with real ones. They showered gifts on my sisters and tried in vain to bribe the Prince’s new favorites to whisper recommendations in his ear.
Minette hired more servants and bought back our carriage. The Prince sent her a quartet of matched blooded mares to pull it, and a team of trainers, tigers and stablehands to mind the mares. Overnight, it seemed, our house was full of strangers.
I made a nest of blankets and old featherbeds in the cookshed, and slaughtered a witch’s dozen chickens to paint the outside walls and door with an aversion spell. I felt like an exile, huddling in the cookshed night after night. Hiding behind the Cinder Girl’s false face each day. Not even my sisters knew me, though they took pains to see me comfortable because they thought the Cinder Girl was a sister witch who had done Ember a service.
I was comfortable and well fed but lonely, though all who met me were kind. I began to loathe the Cinder Girl, her sweet eyes and golden hair. I hated how kindly the neighbors treated her and the way the new the world I’d missed. It wasn’t until I donned her face that I truly understood what my magic had cost me.
The first night of the full moon fell two weeks after the Prince first came to our door. He didn’t come to our house that night, but stayed at the palace, locked behind three sets of doors. I’d always laughed that he was so frightened to show his true face, but after donning the guise of the Cinder Girl, I understood his precautions.
Not candlelight nor firelight nor any spell known to man or beast can preserve an illusion on the nights of the full moon. Any who saw me from dusk to dawn would see my true face—my red hair and freckles and cold black eyes. My twisted foot and missing finger. They would know me for a witch. And worse, they would know I was the girl for whom the Prince’s servants searched.
When his geas on Dulcie failed to bring me to him, the Prince employed a far more powerful tack than mere magic. He had sent his guards around the neighborhood with velvet purses stuffed with silver coins. If I had not covered my tracks so carefully by twisting and blurring my neighbors’ memories of me, their greed and their desire to please the Prince would have overwhelmed any fears they had of my retribution. I would have been lost.
But after two weeks of the neighbors’ confusing stammers, vague recollections, and adamant assertions that the late Drayman’s daughter was not a redheaded witch, but a sweet Cinder Girl with golden curls, the Prince’s search had slowed. His guards still asked after me, but they did not seem confident of my existence, much less the eventual success of their search. I overheard a guard confide to one of the housemaids that he feared the Prince had gone a little mad.
The Prince’s guards’ doubt and confusion worked in my favor, for they did not look too closely at me or any of the other servants. If they had, they might have noticed the dragging, twisted print my right foot left as I trod across the rain-soaked mud of the rear yard from the cookshed to the kitchen door. They might have noticed stray red hairs dusted in ash that sometimes clung to the hood of my cloak when I hung it up to dry on the wall beside the kitchen hearth. The might have noticed that I left the print of only four fingers upon anything I grasped with my left hand.
Perhaps I became careless in those weeks the Prince’s men scoured our neighborhood and failed to find me. Perhaps I grew overconfident in the protection my illusion provided. Or perhaps I was merely foolish. Whatever the reason, the mistake I made on the very first night of the full moon could easily have cost me my freedom, had any of the Prince’s guards been present to see it.
Around midnight, I heard a commotion in our small stables. I called a lick of flame into my hand and went out to investigate. When I opened the door, I saw a man in the Prince’s livery struggling to quiet a panicking horse. The mare broke free of him and charged toward the now-open stable door. Straight for me.
I closed my fist around my witch’s flame. It disappeared with a swirl of smoke and the faint scent of singed skin.
“Close the door, you idiot!”
I jumped inside and pulled the door shut after me. The mare reared when she saw me, her great dark eyes showing white around the edges. She struck with her hooves and clipped the side of my head. I staggered and tried to keep my balance lest I fall beneath the horse’s feet.
A firm hand pushed me out of harm’s way. I fell against a stall door and onto my knees. My vision flickered with stars.
The stableman stepped in front of the frightened horse and grasped her bridle. He pulled her back onto all four feet and then put his face close to hers. He whispered and soothed the beast as he blew his breath into her flared nostrils. “Shhh, girl. All is well. All is well.”
His low voice was so gentle I almost wished he were talking to me. After a while, the mare quieted and the stableman led her back to her stall.
He seemed calm until he turned to face me. “Don’t you know anything about horses? You could have been killed!” His voice never rose above the level of conversation, but I could hear the anger in his words.
“I’m sorry.” I rubbed the bruise on my brow. My sight faded in and out. “I heard a commotion and thought I could help.”
“Help? You come into my stable stinking of ashes and dried blood and dash beneath the hooves of a panicked horse. Are you mad?”
Belatedly, I remembered the moon. I looked down at my hands. They were drawn all over with the ink I’d made of blood and charcoal. I wasn’t the Cinder Girl, I was a mad witch caught out on the night of the full moon.
I tried to stand, to flee the stable, but a wave of dizziness punished me for my sudden movement. My vision faded again, and when it returned, I was laying in a bed of straw with my head in the stableman’s lap while he wiped the ash from my face and hands. He paused a moment when he encountered my missing finger, but he didn’t seem upset by it. He continued his task with gentle determination.
“Little idiot,” he muttered as he worked, unaware I’d waked. “You should have known better than to come around a panicked horse. I would have taught you better if you were mine.” His voice was terse, and I detected the strain of worry in it. His hands were gentle on mine.
He smelled of straw, saddle leather and horses. It wasn’t an unpleasant scent. And the feel of his hands holding my hand was even less unpleasant. Indeed, it felt lovely.
I sighed. I sighed like a stupid virgin dreaming of her ideal man. Even now, I still cannot believe I did such a thing. I wanted to sink into the ground with shame.
He leaned over my face and met my gaze. He wasn’t handsome or particularly well groomed, but I liked the look of him. He’d a narrow face with a crooked nose that had probably been even more garishly prominent before it’d been broken. His skin was swarthy, not golden or sun kissed, but olive by nature and darkened by hours in the sun. His eyes were large and black and kind, but set so deep as to make him look imposing unless you were standing very close to him.
His hair was black, wavy and too long, except where it was too short. The front section looked like he’d cut it with a hunting knife to keep it from falling in his eyes. He could have done with a shave, too. His cheeks were dark with two days growth of beard.
“Mistress, are you well?”
“Well enough,” I said, struggling to rise. My body made a liar of me: I wobbled on my feet.
He urged me back down to the straw and sat beside me. “You aren’t well. You may have a broken skull. I should fetch a surgeon.”
“No.” I tried to shake my head, but the motion made me dizzy. “Let me go lay down. I’ll fix it tomorrow.”
“Fix? A broken skull is more than a bandage and a folk remedy will fix.”
“Easy,” his voice was soft and very like the voice he’d used to calm the panicked mare. “Very well. I’ll spare you the surgeon, but you can’t go to sleep tonight. Head injuries are tricky. You mightn’t wake.”
He took my left hand between his. If he thought anything of my missing finger, he kept it to himself. “Talk to me. Tell me something of yourself.”
“Must I?”
“Your voice will slur if your brain starts swelling. The quality of your words will warn me if you’re too badly injured.”
Ember Page 4
