“The queen always said that with distance comes wisdom,” I say. I look to my father, who smiles with pride. “She’d say it now. If she could.”
Reagan looks at the witch next to her, and that witch shakes her head. Reagan plays with a heavy burlap skirt. She seems to consider its weight, its texture. She clears her throat. The witch next to her grabs her elbow. A look passes between them that I know from the way I gather strength from my sisters. “I turn eighteen in four days,” Reagan says. She’s looking at her friend, but the message is for us. She simply isn’t brave enough to look at us while she says it.
“Four days,” I repeat. My whole body starts to shake. It’s just a tremble at first, but quickly it is a rumble, an earthquake of bones. I can hear Nora breathing next to me. Her inhales are quick, and her exhales are coming out heavy. Little gusts of angry wind next to me. “It can take months to break a spell,” Nora says. “It can take years. Years. And we have days?”
Alice sits down. She rests her head on a table. Grace whispers questions in Alice’s ear that she’s too tired to answer. But I can’t stop looking at the witch. She is so many things at once: wobbly knees and strong shoulders and nervous fingers and certain words. It’s confusing me, because I’ve been told she is only one thing: cruel. No. Two things. Cruel and hysterical.
“I’m sorry about the timing,” Reagan says. “If I’d known when I cast the spell that Eden’s birthday was so close to my own—I didn’t—back then I didn’t have time for—”
“Thinking?” Nora sputters.
“Math,” Reagan finishes.
“Can you—” I start, but there’s no point finishing the question. The earthquake moves to my throat. A thousand tears gather there. A thousand screams. There’s no end to my question.
“There are rules,” Reagan says, answering the question I know not to ask. “There have to be rules. That’s what makes it magic. I don’t know how much you know about witches and the way we—”
“We know,” I say in the lowest, meanest voice I can find. “We know about witches. About Ever. We know plenty.” My sisters are all stiff beside me. We have waited long enough.
“We’ve taken classes too,” Reagan says. She doesn’t go on. I know what some of the books say about us. There are books written about royals that tell tales of our cruelty, of the way we have taken wealth from our subjects. That we have abused witches to draw us to power, that we do nothing for Ever, that we are silly.
And there is the story of the kidnapped princess, the question of whether or not she maybe deserved to be taken away, and the theory of some people on the fringes who think we got rid of the princess on purpose. Questions about whether it was worth it, to battle over that one girl. Questions about why we don’t fight as hard for others in the kingdom.
Without definitive answers, some people are sure to make up stories. Don’t worry about why she was taken, Dad told me when I asked why we still invite all the kingdoms to our Birthdays in spite of all we don’t know about them. Worry about how to keep our people filled with hope that she will return. I don’t know exactly what the witches believe. I know we are supposed to be grateful to the witches for enchanting our candles with the Spell of Return and for restoring all the kingdoms to peace. And they are meant to be grateful to us for giving them a place to call home after the wars and battles between the kingdoms.
But maybe none of us are truly grateful, none of us are safe from one another. The balance is so tenuous it’s very nearly not there at all.
Certainly not now, not in this ballroom, with this witch and her four days and tasks that I imagine will be impossible and my limbs that are ready to give up.
I’d like to sit in the library with my father and ask him a hundred more questions about how Ever works, what witches are, why we’re still waiting for the princess to return, why we let the witches live among us, why we let kingdoms who might have kidnapped royalty party in our castle. I’d like him to talk me through it slowly, calmly, the way he talked me through what he knew about the Spell of Without, what he knew about Slow Spells and True Spells, what he knew about what happened to women frozen in boxes for years at a time.
Sometimes I’d fall asleep on his arm in the middle of his explaining, and he wouldn’t move a muscle all night, wanting me to enjoy my dreams the way I could no longer possibly enjoy waking life.
But right now we don’t have time for libraries or catnaps or lessons about Ever.
We don’t have time for anything.
I look closely at Reagan to see what she believes about us, how much she hates us, whether or not she thinks a princess deserves to be hated or kidnapped or Spellbound. I try to see the truth of her heart, but she is stony.
I asked my dad once why, if the witches are supposed to protect us, this one would have cast a spell that hurt us. I asked when they cast the Spell of Famine, and I asked when she cast the Spell of Without.
“Cruel creatures,” Dad said. “Vengeful. Unhinged, honestly. Our protecting them is a great kindness. No one else would take them in. Not for how little they give us. They’re supposed to be protecting us. But what do they do for us? Cast spells. Bewitch us. Undermine us.” He shook his head. I wanted to know why we kept them around if the arrangement was so fractured. But he straightened his back and reached for his crown, setting it atop his head, as he often did when he was done with a conversation. “But still, we persevere,” he said. It sounded very royal.
But it didn’t really answer all my questions.
I have so many questions, still, always, and not enough time to ask them all.
Four days. Fine. Fine. We will persevere. We will survive.
I will survive. I’d yell the words directly into her ear if that was the sort of thing a future someday queen could do.
“There are four objects—” Reagan begins.
“Louder,” Dad interrupts. “Say it louder.” He crosses his arms and walks over to us at last. He hovers over the witch. He is too close, and she angles herself away from him but can’t seem to make her feet move. This is a rare side of my father, but one I’ve seen before. He’s towered over kings from other kingdoms who have tried to work with our witches. He has stood close to gardeners who stole enchanted tulips and a horseman who stared too long at Alice.
So of course he’s doing it now, trying to protect us from this witch, making sure she knows who’s king.
She knows. She doesn’t seem confused.
“Four objects,” Reagan says. She holds her hand up like we are children who need to see four fingers and a folded down thumb. Four days for four objects. We can do it. We have to. Grace takes out her little silver notebook. It’s where she writes the things she wishes to remember. It’s already brimming with information so simple it squeezes my heart to think about it. She’s written down sweet things Dad has said to her and reasons why Mom is in a box. The name of her attendant and her own bedtime. The reason she’s mad at one of her sisters and the color she’s decided is her favorite. And now, the way the spell will be undone, little by little, as spells always are.
Her hand trembles as she writes. She doesn’t want to get a single word wrong, doesn’t want to leave any room for her own confusion.
Grace doesn’t understand that we don’t need her to remember the things that are impossible to forget.
“The princesses have to gather them. They have to do it on their own. They can’t send attendants and horsemen. The objects have to be given willingly. They can’t be forced.” Reagan’s eyes flit to my father. He doesn’t even blink. “The objects are as follows.” She clears her throat and looks to her friend, who is wide-eyed and slack-jawed at all of this. “A clock from the oldest person in Ever. A lock of hair from the most beautiful one. A thimble full of tears from the saddest one. And a crown of jewels from the richest one.”
Reagan stops. That’s it. That’s the list. We look up, expecting a crack of lightning, a flurry of snow, something to mark the occasion. We know how to break the spel
l. We have four objects to gather in four days, and we’ll be free. Surely the ceiling should open up for that.
But instead there’s stillness.
“Only four objects,” Eden says. She grins. It’s eight in the evening, and she still hasn’t officially turned thirteen yet. It can’t be far off. I hang on to that grin, that spirit, the shrug of her shoulders that says It’s fine, we’ve got this, no problem.
“That’s it?” Nora asks. She squints at the witch, looking for something to be skeptical of. But there’s a simplicity to the way this Reagan talks that makes it hard to imagine trickery. She’s too nervous for fooling us, and her words are too basic to be twisted up.
“That’s it,” Reagan says. “Then it’s my turn to do my part. We unbind spells together. The Undoing. Magic is a collaboration. That’s what my grandmother always says.”
I wonder if her grandmother’s voice is in her head the way my mother’s and my father’s are in mine. All of us following age-old ideas of how to be.
I almost like her for a second.
Before I remember to hate her.
Alice lifts her head and doodles on a napkin, ideas for a new sculpture, I’m sure. Maybe, unmagicked, Alice won’t have time to care about pressure applied to stone to make it beautiful. Maybe she will abandon her late-night projects and become someone else entirely, when she doesn’t have long nights to herself.
I’d miss it, but she would probably trade a hundred sculptures for one night of sleep. The spell has changed us, and I don’t know what to do with the things I have come to love about my Spellbound sisters. I don’t know if that makes me the same as the royals from other kingdoms, loving our pain.
There is nothing to love about my mother trapped in glass.
And there’s nothing I love about my Spellbound self, either. I can’t be a queen this way. I can’t rule Ever wisely, like my mother, and surely, like my father. Not if I’m so hungry.
Not if I’m dead.
And then there’s Eden.
She is looking at Reagan now, with a half smile that turns to a half frown. It happens in an instant, the way magic sometimes does.
There it is. 8:07 in the evening. The exact moment Eden turns thirteen. A fact we would have happily gone our whole lives without knowing.
“We’ll never be able to do it,” Eden says, her voice an entirely new one, her hope lost.
She is one of us now. A Spellbound princess.
I miss my hopeful sister the moment she’s gone.
“Look what you’ve done,” I say to the witch.
Reagan and her friend look around, following my instructions, I suppose. It’s their first time inside a castle and probably their last, and maybe they’re soaking that in too.
“Look what you’ve done,” Reagan says. She has a thing for echoes, this witch. She keeps repeating us, throwing back everything we say. “Look what you’ve done,” she says again, quietly.
She is looking at only one person.
My father, the king.
8. REAGAN
“You have to want it,” Mom says. We are on the roof of the Home on the Hill the next morning. From here, we can see all of Ever. The Barren Fields, where so many used to live and thrive, where now there is only an expanse of dust and memories. The town, bustling and impoverished save for a few brick mansions by the moat. The houses of the residents: small shacks with gardens that only grow potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips. Avocado trees that don’t bear fruit. Lemon trees that don’t have lemons. Apple trees missing any sign of an apple. A land ravaged by royalty. If only they all understood it that way. “You have to want them to break the spell.”
Then the castle, rising up above it all, filled with everything the rest of Ever will never taste. Filled with riches they’ll never understand and people who don’t deserve a lick of it.
“What will they think of their kingdom,” I say, “once they actually step out into it?”
“Don’t worry about that,” Mom says. “We don’t worry about what the royals think and feel. We worry about them staying away from us, letting us remain here. We worry about keeping ourselves strong, keeping our magic safe.”
“Other kingdoms would take us in,” I say, because after yesterday I know it’s true. Kings came up to me, said they had homes on hills and homes on mountains and homes on islands and homes in the woods. Any kind of home we wanted.
“Other kingdoms aren’t our home,” Mom says.
“What makes Ever our home?” I ask. I stumble over the word “home.” I don’t know exactly what it means anymore. I think it’s supposed to have something to do with safety and stability and a promise of forever, or at least a long while, but I’m not sure Ever has any of that for us.
“Your grandmother grew up here,” Mom says. “And as the oldest witch, her home is our home.” The way she says it, it sounds simple, but it doesn’t feel simple.
“That’s it?” I ask. With witches, there’s usually more than what seems to be there at first.
“Sometimes you choose a patch of uninhabited earth and declare it your own, and that’s enough,” Mom says. “Your grandmother is trapped in a chair from spells to let us keep this patch of earth as our own. We’re not going to desert it. Certainly not because of some shiny offer from a greedy king. And not because you made a rash mistake. Witches stay. We stay and we keep our word. We promised to keep Ever safe. That’s what we’ve always done. That’s what you are meant to do.”
It sounds noble and loyal, coming from her. But she’s not saying the truest thing, which is that witches are scared. It’s been true my whole life. When Willa and I snuck out to use the magic picnic blanket, we’d come inside to a fretting house, our cousins and aunts asking if anyone saw us, how far we went, if we remembered to hide our skirts. We don’t use all of our power, just in case there’s a magical deficit someday. We gather around the Enchanted Candle at night and mix up spells that bring peace, always peace. We don’t talk to non-witches. We are careful. Once a year we magically raise the hill one more inch, slowly moving farther and farther away from the rest of Ever, but not wanting them to notice. In case the king gets mad. In case our magic fades. In case we lose more witches. We won’t leave this Home on the Hill, because we’re too scared to do much of anything.
Except I’m not so scared anymore, and neither is Willa.
“I want them to see things as they are,” I say.
Mom sighs. “You’d have to see things as they are first, Reagan.” She looks out at the castle. Even now, even here, safe on our roof, my mother is missing her elbow, her ear, her knee. She’s missing pieces that keep her connected. There’s nothing between her shin and her thigh, just a patch of invisibility that tells me she is hollow inside, too. That she isn’t whole.
I wonder if the princesses would care, seeing her. I try to guess at what they know and what they don’t know, but judging from their party, I’m not sure they know a single thing. Not about me, not about Ever, not about their father or my mother. Not even about themselves.
But maybe I don’t either. I thought my mother would be happy with the way they are meant to break the spell. But she seems as nervous as the king did. The only people who want the princesses to leave their castle are Abbott and me.
“I’ve never seen your joints go,” I say to my mother, who is waiting and waiting and waiting for me to be a better kind of witch. The right kind of witch. It’s harder than I thought when I was little. I don’t know the rules.
“They go sometimes,” Mom says. “On hard days.”
“And it’s a hard day.”
“You’re not whole either, sweet girl,” Mom says. She doesn’t often use pet names for me, so when she does, they go straight to my heart and make it ache. She nods at my hand, which is missing a pinkie again, and my shoulder, which is missing a patch of skin that creeps close to my heart.
“It’s been happening since I returned,” I say. Mom nods. She’s thinking all kinds of things she isn’t going to tell me
.
“Your heart needs to want things to go back to the way they were,” Mom tries again. She wipes her brow. The heat is heavy today, the sun extra bright in the sky, the air extra still. I reach to try to remember some perfect Before that we are striving for, but my mother has always been hurting and the king has always been smirking and the princesses have always been tucked away and their queen always silent.
“I don’t know if that’s what my heart will ever want,” I say.
“I used to be that way,” Mom says. “It didn’t do much. Wanting to fix things. Wanting to make some better, different Ever. We’re hurting. They’re hurting. We’re all trying to survive.” She says the words like they are rules from a book that she memorized but maybe doesn’t fully believe. I search her face for clues, but she’s so hard to read, aside from her shakiness, her big-eyed sadness, the worry that keeps her shoulders hunched and her lips bruised from anxious biting.
“The king isn’t hurting. The princesses weren’t hurting until—”
“Ever hurts everyone,” Mom says. She’s sure on this fact. So sure that I don’t remind her that Ever hurts some people more than others, that there’s a difference between the way the princesses are hurting and the way Abbott’s family hurts and the way we hurt.
Below us, the kingdom rushes around, readying itself for the Spellbound princesses. The king appears in the tallest turret of the castle, as always. We can’t see his face from here, only the form of him, the glint of his crown, the red of his robe.
I wish I could cover my mother’s eyes. I would do anything for a spell to make her blind to him.
“I hate him,” I say. I’ve said it a hundred times before. Down below, the people of Ever think he is good and gentle and kind. The Gentle King. Because he throws a spring festival and gives the children of Ever candy and the people of Ever turkeys to eat. The Gentle King because he lets dogs jump up and lick his face, because he asks his impoverished subjects about their lives, looks them in the eye when they speak. The Good King because he hired the families from the Barren Fields to work for the royal family when he saw how much they were suffering after my grandmother’s biggest spell. Former farmers no longer able to farm. Fertile land gone dead. The Good King because he lets the attendants stay in adorable cottages next to the castle. The Gentle King because he can be seen having tea parties with his daughters and their dolls on the Grand Yard.
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