Ever Cursed

by Corey Ann Haydu

Also: the silence. I’m not sure I believe in the silence in front of our subjects.

  “A big night tonight,” Dad says to all of us.

  “Can I skip it?” Nora asks. She must know the answer. The attendants do. I hear one of them gasp, another giggle. There aren’t really skippable family events. Especially not Eden’s Thirteenth Birthday. But Nora has never liked things like Birthdays and Feasts and Banquets and Ceremonies. She likes wading in the moat and catching fish with her bare hands. She likes sleeping outside at night, under the stars, with nothing but a single wool blanket to keep her cozy. She likes spending time in the stables, coming up with dirt under her fingernails and the smell of horse in her hair.

  Still. She won’t be allowed to skip the party. It would be the talk of all the kingdoms for weeks. For years, even. The Princess Who Skipped a Birthday. It would be taught in school. It would, in a century, be in storybooks. Everything we do or don’t do eventually turns into a story spun from tiny threads of our actual lives. Dad’s voice is even gentler, his robe longer, in the stories they write about him. Mom’s glass box is larger. We princesses are suddenly beautiful. Even the kingdom is fancier, with more towers and bigger stones, and the moat is filled with dragon-fish and mermaids, instead of tadpoles and cool water.

  “Your mother loved the Birthdays,” Dad says.

  We are quiet in the awful absence of her. I miss the length of my mother’s arms. The there-ness of her face. The sound of a voice I no longer know the pitch of. A mother is simply one more thing we are without.

  “Mom cared about a lot of things before she ended up in a box,” Nora says. I try to remember the other Nora. A Nora who snuggled into me at night, the one who knit scarves for the horses and planted flowers for the attendants and let me kiss her knees when she inevitably scraped them all to hell.

  It’s hard to picture Nora that way.

  “It’s where we met,” Dad says, pretending not to hear Nora. “I was a visiting prince at your aunt Gloria’s Thirteenth Birthday. And your mother was—well. Spectacular.”

  “She wore yellow,” Eden says. We all know the story. It was told to us at night by our starry-eyed mother; it was told in the town square during speeches; it was told on their anniversaries and their Birthdays and by townspeople and other kings and queens and of course by our own parents, who told the story like it was the only one that mattered.

  Grace still asks to be told the story when she’s bundled under the covers, pulling at the too-long sleeves of her favorite peach nightgown, brushing out her short, curly hair so that it morphs into a kind of cloud on top of her head. She won’t listen to us when we remind her that you can’t brush curly hair into straightness.

  “She wore yellow,” Dad repeats. “Yellow and silver. Two colors you don’t see together very often.”

  “And that’s what you noticed first,” Grace says, happiest when we are talking about love. She remembers old stories like these, but nothing we’ve told her since the spell bound her.

  “That and her eyes. Gray eyes. Long lashes. A quiet sort of beautiful.” Dad smiles, so we all smile. It’s exactly the right way to describe Mom.

  “I like quiet,” Alice says. She’s only really half-here, only half listening to the things we’re saying.

  “Your mother was meant to marry the Duke of Soar at the time. Preparations were already being made ever since her own Thirteenth Birthday three years earlier. But the duke showed up, and your mother couldn’t stand the way he shook her hand. Like she was delicate. Like she could break. She went to her father and informed him she would not be marrying someone who didn’t think of her as strong.”

  We all smile. It’s the best part of the story.

  “And when you approached her, you practically broke her hand,” Eden says.

  Dad nods. “I was so nervous I squeezed her hand much too hard. I swore I could feel her bones cracking. And she took it as a sign that I was meant to be hers.”

  “And she was meant to be yours,” Alice says, her voice emerging from her dreamy state.

  “No,” Dad says. “No. She was only ever her own person. She didn’t belong to me. She didn’t belong to her subjects, either. She doesn’t belong to that witch. She doesn’t belong in that box.” He shakes his head. This part of the story is new. I lean in, waiting for more, for some new shade of something to hold on to. But that’s all there is, I guess. “Anyway, it’s a big night,” Dad says. “You need to get ready.” He starts walking toward his library, but I stop him. I have to.

  “Dad?” I call out. “Will it be hard? I’ve never broken a spell.”

  I have been holding down these questions for years. It’s always seemed so far away, Eden’s Thirteenth Birthday. It’s sounded like a fantastical moment in time that might never come. Now that it’s here, everything I’ve been holding back comes pouring out.

  “You’ll do your best,” Dad says. “Witches are—well. They’re evil. That’s clear now. They’re manipulative and cruel and unreasonable. They’re liars most of all. If we’d known what they were capable of, we never would have given them the Home on the Hill. But you girls are smart and strong. You’re good and pure and true.”

  Grace lights up from this, and Eden nods, brimming with hope. Even Alice makes a sleepy, content sigh of a noise. But they haven’t heard what I heard.

  He didn’t say we’d be able to do it. He didn’t say it would all be okay.

  He didn’t promise I wouldn’t die from this spell.

  I watch him go and try to will him to turn back and tell us we’ll be fine, we can do it, we will do it, things are about to go back to how they were before. He doesn’t turn around, though.

  “What time do you think the witch will get here?” I ask Olive. It isn’t the precise thing I’m dying to know, but it’s close enough.

  Olive looks at the ground but doesn’t answer.

  “What time did the invitation say?” I ask. The witch can’t come to the Thirteenth Birthday unless we send her an invitation. Hers should have been the first one engraved, the first one delivered.

  “I’m not sure she’s received an invitation yet,” Olive says. She speaks carefully when she doesn’t want to get in trouble.

  “How is that possible?” I ask. The other attendants are leading my sisters behind me; all five of us need our hair done, our faces painted, our dresses smoothed, our bodies covered in something that smells the way a princess is meant to smell.

  “I suppose your father… forgot?” Olive says, turning a statement strangely into a question.

  “Forgot to invite the witch?” I ask. Sometimes, speaking to Olive, I feel like there’s a conversation underneath the one we’re having. But I’m always too hungry and tired to unearth it.

  “I suppose maybe he did,” Olive says.

  There’s a pause. It’s a terrible pause, filled with things I’m too scared to look at.

  “Well, good thing we’ve remembered,” I say. My stomach turns. It isn’t like my father to forget anything at all, let alone something so important.

  Olive and I are eye to eye. “Good thing,” she says.

  “Nora’s attendant can help me while you deliver the invitation,” I say. I don’t have time for a conversation under a conversation. I need to have it right here, on the surface.

  Olive nods. I nod back.

  Outside, the people of Ever light candles and wait for their kidnapped princess.

  I am only waiting for the witch.

  4. REAGAN

  I would have gone to him, but he comes to me.

  He’s at the door and Willa answers it, but I recognize the knock. Two softs knocks, a pause, then two louder knocks.

  Abbott Shine.

  By the time I get to the door, Willa is practically dancing around him, saying she’s missed him and he could have come by even with me gone and he looks good and how’s his half sister, the one who works in the castle, and how’s Ever and did he miss me and does he love me.

  “Okay, that’s enough,�
�� I say when Willa asks this last thing.

  “It’s a joke!” Willa says, and maybe it is, because witches don’t fall in love. My grandmother reminds me of this constantly.

  “It’s a joke,” I repeat with a special smile just for Abbott.

  “That’s what you have to say to me after five years?” he asks. Abbott Shine is handsome in the heartbreaking way. Light brown skin, dark hair that turns gold at the tips, eyes so big and brown I forget myself at the sight of them.

  “You’re here,” I say to Abbott. “Like you promised.”

  “It’s the birthday,” he says.

  “I’m back,” I say.

  “You guys are just stating facts,” Willa says. “Hug or something.” She giggles and skips off the way she always does after causing her kind of trouble.

  So we do. We hug, and it’s familiar and not. He’s taller and broader and something else, too. I lean back from him, look at his face, and stop thinking about the beauty of it. He’s sadder. I look for his wrist, to see if all is lost. And I blush when I see tied there a tiny gray pebble on a string. He sees me see it, and in that moment we are in it together again. Remembering the past, facing the future.

  Abbott Shine came to the Home on the Hill when we were ten and declared himself a Friend of the Witches, and said he’d do anything to help us fight the royals. I’d never heard of such a thing.

  “We protect the royals,” I said.

  “You stay away from them,” he said.

  “Because magic needs its own space,” I said, repeating a thing I’d heard my grandmother say when my cousins asked her about our arrangement.

  “What if there was more to it?” Abbott Shine asked me. “What if the royals do terrible things, and you’re the only ones who could stop it?”

  His family was struggling, his sister had been recruited to be an attendant, and he wanted to fix things. He thought they were broken. He thought the royals were the reason. He believed witches were the way out.

  Maybe he made me believe that too. We thought we could make things better, Abbott and I. We had the kind of grand plans twelve-year-olds have. But I cast the spell before we had a chance to use my magic in some other way.

  We used to meet by the moat, and he’d tell me about Ever, and I’d tell him about the Home on the Hill, and it felt like we were the only two people in the world who knew about both places. He used to talk quickly, listing all the things we could do to change the kingdom, all the spells I should cast, all the people who wondered, like he did, why the royals and the townspeople lived such wildly different lives.

  I’d nod my head, but I didn’t really know what he meant. I had five years to think about it, I guess. But if I’m honest, I didn’t. Not much. I thought about the king. The king’s pain and humiliation and regret. How good it would feel to see him broken.

  Now with Abbott here in front of me, it feels shameful.

  “I can’t believe it’s been five years,” he says.

  “Five years is a long time. Something in Ever must have changed,” I say, desperate to feel anything but this sinking feeling that keeps bringing me impossibly lower and lower. Abbott looks at me. Somehow I’d forgotten that he would grow up, that when I returned, he’d be older just like I’m older. I’d been picturing twelve-year-old Abbott with his full cheeks and impish grin. I’d been picturing a child.

  “They’ve still never crossed the moat,” Abbott says. I’m so lost in thinking about the king that it takes me a moment to catch up.

  “The princesses?” I say. “They’re not allowed.”

  Abbott rolls his eyes. He never rolled his eyes five years ago. Things have gotten worse for him, or Ever has gotten worse, or maybe everyone gets angrier the more time they spend on this side of the moat.

  Now he’s pacing. “They don’t care about us. They don’t know us. If anything, your spell made it worse. They have even less time to think about our lives. They get to be victims again. Just like when their princess was kidnapped.”

  “I thought—” I start, but it’s hard, right now, to remember exactly what I was thinking. The image of the smiling, waving, straight-backed king is so distracting, so present, it’s obscuring the past.

  “You thought… what?” Abbott says.

  I don’t remember exactly how to navigate space with another person. I’m awkward around people now. Even ones I’ve known forever. I don’t know what my body means in relation to theirs. I don’t know how my voice is supposed to sound. I settle on a shrug.

  “I was young,” I say.

  “We were both young,” Abbott says. He stood behind me when I cast the spell. I heard him say Reagan, no, think, but the words were like the wind—sharp and there and then gone so fast I could forget all about them. Besides, my magic isn’t the kind that can be stopped by a boy and his worried words. “But I knew enough to wait and think. You were selfish.”

  I don’t like the way the word sounds. “I was protecting my mother,” I say. “That’s not selfish.”

  Abbott closes his eyes for a moment longer than a blink. “You’re like them, sometimes,” he says at last.

  “Like who?”

  “Royals.” It makes my spine prickle.

  “I have to break the spell. I made a mistake. I know that. I get it.” And I do get it, but I also haven’t let go of my anger, my need to see the king in pain, my sureness that punishing him matters. Abbott and my grandmother and my aunt Idle and my mother and everyone else in Ever want me to have done everything differently, but all we’ve ever done was wait around and be careful and worry about a kingdom at rest, and that isn’t good enough for me.

  “You only care when it happens to you, to your mother, to your people,” Abbott says.

  “She’s my mother,” I say. I am willing to apologize for a lot of things, but caring about my mother more than anyone else isn’t one of them.

  “It’s like the kidnapped princess,” Abbott says. He shakes his head back and forth. He is so grown-up now. He doesn’t feel like he’s my age anymore. He sounds like a teacher or a parent. A father, if I had any idea what a father was like.

  “This has nothing to do with the kidnapped princess,” I say. I’m tired of the old story of why things are the way they are. Why we live here, why we protect Ever, why we want the kingdom to be at rest.

  “Do you know how many people were kidnapped that month?” Abbott asks. It’s starting to feel like he’s having one conversation and I’m having another, and I’ve never felt so out of synch with my best friend, even when we were an ocean and many years apart.

  “The month I cast the spell?” I ask, squinting at him like that will help me make sense of him.

  “No,” he says. “Eighty years ago. When the princess was kidnapped.”

  “Are you saying more than one princess was kidnapped?” I ask. “Because a lot of witches vanished too. We all were hurt by that—”

  “Nineteen people,” Abbott says.

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Nineteen people were kidnapped before the princess. Nineteen people. Some from my mother’s family, but no one cared about those girls. They had brown skin and worn shoes and no jewels. Other young people were taken too. Ones no one cares much about. Poor kids and kids without parents and kids who have never been in a castle or a Home on the Hill.”

  Abbott’s speaking quickly, like he has to get this out before we have another minute together, and I don’t know why it’s so urgent, I don’t know why he needs me to care about this right now, but I try to listen—I try—and I try to care as much as I care about my mother and how much I hate the king.

  I try, but it’s hard.

  “It was eighty years ago,” I say. “This is right now.”

  It’s the wrong thing to say.

  “Right now, we’re all hurting,” Abbott says. “And it’s because of them. But it’s because of you, too.”

  “If you’d told them why—if you’ve told them what kind of king—”

&
nbsp; “You don’t listen, Reagan,” Abbott says. “And I did try, once, to tell them why I thought the spell had been cast. But we barely—my family barely survives. Barely. My sister works in that castle. We need her to work there. My father can’t think about— You think I can go accusing the king of—and be okay? And survive? You think that would be worth the risk for us? My family—my mother’s family—has already lost so much.” He keeps shaking his head and staring across the moat. When I was in AndNot, I dreamed about his bright eyes and the way he made me feel. I wished he could live in my AndNot cottage with me. I thought he’d like to see the ocean. That we’d learn how to swim together.

  I never imagined the look on his face, rage and dread and sadness and frustration. My heart flip-flops between anger at him and at myself. And then back, always, to the king.

  The thing about Ever is, we’re all just trying to survive.

  “My family has lost a lot too,” I say. And again, it’s wrong.

  “You have your Home. You have food. And magic. You have—”

  “Okay,” I say. “Okay, okay.”

  He’s saying things that are true, but I don’t want to hear them. Not now. I want us to be angry about the same things, the same injustices. I thought that’s what we had together, but now it feels like something else. I reach for the way we used to be.

  “Do you still dream of oranges?” I ask. “And… what was it? Peppers?”

  “Bell peppers,” Abbott says.

  “I still believe my spell might—” I start, but Abbott does that awful laugh again, the one that is more a dismissal than a laugh, and I stop myself. It’s all wrong. I put a hand on his arm. It’s strong in places it wasn’t before. “Tell me how to fix it. Tell me what needs to be done.”

  “Reagan.”

  “I messed up. I know I messed up. But there’s still time.”

  It gets so quiet I can hear Willa breathing. She only disappeared into the next room, and she’s still listening to us. An old part of me wants to tell Willa she’s not old enough for this talk, but she is now—of course she is. I’m turning eighteen in a few days; she’ll be fourteen not long after that.