“Hate doesn’t break a spell,” Mom says. “Hate doesn’t make for good magic.”
I cross my arms over my chest and shake my head at it all. “We’re the only ones who see it the way it is,” I say. “They’re just wrong. About everything. You should have seen the party. Their dresses. The food. And him. He still doesn’t care. He isn’t paying for any of it. For what he did. For who he is. Princess Jane—if you’d seen her—she’s—it’s awful. And Alice, barely able to keep her eyes open. They’re his children and they’re suffering and he’s smiling at other kings, rubbing his chin, smirking at my list of objects. And the princesses, they’re in pain, but they don’t know anything about their people. They have attendants bringing them everything they want; they are draped in silk and eating cake like it’s nothing. It’s all so ugly. If you’d seen—”
“I’ve seen it,” Mom says. She looks directly at me. She is entirely visible. Every bit of her full. She is talking about the king and the castle and the time she was inside that awful place, but for the first time she is entirely here. I lean against the sudden sturdiness of her and wait for her arm to encircle me. I wait for her to shake her head at the king in his tower, the girls in their dresses, the people of Ever toiling away in their potato gardens.
“Of course you have,” I say, remembering all of a sudden Willa’s question: Why was my mother there in the first place? I know what the king did to her in the banquet hall of the castle, twenty years ago, and I know how it lives in her bones, lives in the Home with us, makes us all whisper and tiptoe and try not to clang or break or grab too swiftly at anything. But I don’t know the whole story. “When you were there—” I start, but that’s not the right way in. “Were you there at, like, a ball or something? Like I was?” I don’t want to say it the way Willa said it, so blunt it felt like a bludgeon. I want to ask in a way that will make her happy to tell me the rest of the story we all live with.
“Something like that,” Mom says. I try to imagine her getting a silver invitation, walking through the doors, tasting the delicacies, dancing with a prince. None of it makes much sense.
“Why were you invited to a ball?” I ask. But it’s a question too far, and Mom starts shaking, her hands vanishing, her skin turning blue around her lips. Her breath is gone, and I have to find it. I list off everything I see on the roof, except for the castle. “There’s the flower patch,” I say. “Blue violets. Orange pansies. Herbs I don’t remember the names for. There’s our dining table. It’s brown. Willa and I painted on it when we were little and snuck up here alone, so it’s got paint all over it. Remember? Red paint. Purple. We told Grandmother we’d magic it back to normal, but she said magic wasn’t for making life perfect. I loved that.”
My mother’s breathing normally again, even though I’ve done a terrible job listing what I see. I am listing what I remember and what I feel about what I see, and I’m thinking about what I want to see. I need Aunt Idle, to make things clear and crisp and black and white.
I list what we’re wearing and what we’re sitting on until my mother tells me she’s fine, I can stop. We sit in silence for a while, with me looking over every few seconds to make sure she’s still here, she’s still breathing, she’s okay. It’s what she said she used to do when I was a baby.
“Him being wrong doesn’t make you right,” she says after a great long while. I don’t have a response, and she lets me stay on the roof alone. She goes downstairs, and I watch my hands fade into nothing.
I don’t come down at all. I watch and watch and watch and wait to feel something else.
Instead my toes vanish one by one.
Hate is hollowing, it turns out.
* * *
My invisible feet take me back to the moat. To Our Place. A strip of land that is mostly hidden by trees. It might not be safe, but Mom has left me alone and my cousins are lost in lessons that don’t interest me, and I want to be near someone who doesn’t think I’ve failed.
Abbott is my only hope.
He’s there. I wasn’t sure he would be. I thought maybe I would take the journey and end up alone, watching the castle from a new angle for no reason at all. But Abbott’s right here, leaning against a tree.
“You’re the talk of the town,” he says by way of a greeting.
“Always have been, always will be,” I say. We used to be able to joke, Abbott and I. Five years ago, we’d go back and forth for hours, but now he doesn’t even respond when I try to make light of this moment.
“They’re excited to meet the princesses,” he says. “The Spellbound.” He nods toward the town, the whole of it. Most of them are still tucked in bed, and those who aren’t are tending to their tiny patches of garden.
“And excited to help them?” I ask.
“They want to know why.”
“Why what?”
“Why they should help. What good it will do.” Abbott shrugs. “I guess I’m wondering the same thing.”
“They’ll die,” I say. My voice screeches a little, by accident. I thought this is what Abbott wanted. To be seen. “Maybe not all of them. But Jane. Alice. They won’t just be Spellbound princesses if the people of Ever don’t help. They will be dead princesses.”
It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud. It’s a thing my brain has known, but my heart has kept quiet.
They will be dead princesses, my heart repeats. They will die.
Him being wrong doesn’t make you right. I hear Mom’s voice over and over, saying a thing that is true even though I hate it, and Abbott would hate it too.
“The people of Ever are starving too,” Abbott says. “I’m starving.”
I conjure up a pie. It’s hot. It’s apple. It smells like cinnamon.
“Fuck, Reagan, that’s not what it’s about,” he says.
“I did what you told me to do,” I say. “They’re going to leave their castle. They’re going to see Ever. They’re going to see you. And the kingdom. And their father. The real one. The one we see. I was very careful choosing—” Abbott shakes his head, stopping my words. His face might as well be my mother’s. The two of them disappointed in whatever I try to do. The two of them wanting some indecipherable and impossible more from me. Abbott won’t even look at me. His arms are crossed right over his chest, and he shakes his head at his own feet.
“I thought—you get invited to the castle and you just hand them a list of objects. You didn’t even try to tell them—”
“I thought we were friends,” I interrupt because I am tired from a day of being told that what I did wasn’t enough. “I thought we were in this together.”
“You sat on a beach for five years,” he says. “And we went on. We go on. The best we can.”
“I know that,” I say. I want to argue with him, but I’m not sure what part isn’t true. It feels untrue, the way he says it, but I did. I sat on the beach in AndNot, and I thought about waves and how they roll and palm trees and how they wave back and forth in the wind. I ate oysters and crabs straight from their shells. I missed Abbott and my mother and magic.
But that missing wasn’t enough for anyone.
“Maybe if we break the spell—” I say.
“You,” Abbott says. “You and the princesses will break the spell. It will be like it always is. You try to protect the royalty. The royalty tries to protect you. And the rest of us sit around hoping for something better.”
“We can’t do it alone,” I say. “We need the people of Ever to—”
“The people of Ever are tired,” Abbott says. “We’re so fucking tired.”
“I can conjure more pie,” I say, but the second it’s out of my mouth, I hear how unbelievably stupid it is. How small. An apple pie. For a starving kingdom.
“Reagan,” Abbott says. “You have to tell them. The princesses.”
“Tell them what?” I ask, but I know.
“Who their father is. They deserve—they should know. That’s what you wanted me to do, isn’t it? I thought you were going to
tell them last night. I thought you would tell everyone as soon as you got back. Isn’t that what you wanted this whole time? The kingdom should know.”
“Look at us,” I say. “Who’s going to believe the two of us?” There’s something else, too. Something I know Abbott won’t understand. He cares about the big picture, the good of Ever. And I care about my mother more than anything else. I’ve never asked, but I don’t think she wants anyone to know what the king did to her. She wishes she hadn’t even told me, I’m sure. “We can’t tell them,” I say. “It was probably a good thing that you didn’t end up telling them when I was gone.”
“They deserve to know,” he says. I don’t know how to explain to him that I agree that Ever deserves to know who their king is, and my mother deserves to have her story kept to herself. I don’t know how to insist that both things are true.
I don’t know how to say it, so I don’t even try. “They won’t believe us,” I say, which is truer than the rest of it anyway.
Abbott’s clothes are worn, and I am a mess of skirts and a thick sweater borrowed from Willa that is too big for me in some places and too small in others.
We are a farmer and a witch. Not the kind of people Ever wants to hear from.
Not the kind of people who are believed.
“That’s for them to decide,” Abbott says. “They’ll believe or not believe. But it’s up to us to decide to tell.” He pauses. Shakes his head, because what he’s said is wrong. “It’s up to you.”
9. JANE
When I wake the next morning, it’s later than I intended to sleep. Eden’s Thirteenth Birthday lasted deep into the morning hours. I should have woken at dawn, to get the most hours out of our three days to break the spell. But it’s past noon. I nearly yell at Olive, but I’d told her not long ago to never ever wake me, since my dreams are the only place I sometimes don’t feel so hungry.
I’m surprised to find my sisters just getting to breakfast, everyone but Alice. We finally find her outside.
“We have to come up with a plan,” I say. The dark circles under her eyes have turned heavy and black. Her head bobs, trying to right itself and failing over and over again.
“That’s what I’m doing,” she says. “It’s not ready.”
“We’ve already lost time,” I say. I can tell I’m speaking quickly. Alice hates when people speak quickly, when they lead with their nerves, when they rush through sentences that are impossible for her to keep up with.
I check her hands. They’re covered in stone dust. The gray stuff is packed underneath her fingernails and smudged all over her face. She’s been working.
“I have to finish,” Alice says. It’s impossible to argue with her when she’s in a state like this. So we wait, even though time is ticking away. We wait, because we trust Alice and we need her, we need all of us, to break the spell.
An hour passes. Two. The boat is set up; we are dressed and brushed and powdered by our attendants. Three hours have passed. The day is getting away from us, three days turning to two in the time it’s taking Alice to finish what she feels she needs to do. When we are ready to go—a snack packed, our attendants given instructions on how to keep us protected, our shoes shined, the boat checked for safety—we join Alice again on the lawn.
She’s done. “Drum Drascall,” she says, the answer to a question no one actually asked. “Turner Dodd. Abbott Shine. And our father.”
“What are you talking about?” Grace asks. Alice sighs. She’s used up all her energy on a list of names and doesn’t want to explain. Nora goes to her side to hold her upright, to give her a place to lean. Even without any love, Nora has moments of kindness. I would have thought the two were inextricable, but it turns out there can be one without the other. This is kindness without love. It pains me to imagine what love without kindness might look like.
I shove the thought away.
Alice gestures to the stone she has spent the evening and the morning and much of the afternoon carving. There are four faces. A tired old man. A young boy with an exaggerated frown. A heartbreakingly handsome face. And the face we know best, our father’s. “Drum Drascall. Turner Dodd. Abbott Shine. Our father,” she says again, like it’s a chant, a prayer, a call to arms.
There are 537 residents of Ever. When I first told my mother, years ago, that I wanted to be queen someday, she said that to be queen you have to know your people. I told her I would be the very best queen Ever had seen. She laughed, because I hadn’t realized that meant I thought I could be better than her. “Let’s go meet them!” I’d said.
“No, we don’t meet them,” Mom said. “That’s not how royalty knows its subjects.”
I had a hundred questions about how we were meant to know people without meeting them, but she said it so simply that it sounded easy. So instead I took my mother’s words as an assignment and set out to learn something about all 537 residents of Ever. I put their names on flash cards and asked Olive to go out into town and take photographs of everyone she saw. “I want to know one thing about each of them,” I said, giving Olive a notebook. She came back after that first day with one hundred photographs.
One of them was Drum Drascall.
One was Abbott Shine.
One was Turner Dodd.
I reach for the facts I once knew about them.
“He used to grow spinach,” I say. “Drum Drascall. Lives on the edge of town. The one thing he wanted me to know about him was that he used to grow spinach. He’s the oldest man,” I say. “And Turner Dodd. He’s the saddest. Wanted me to know there hasn’t been one day in his whole life that he hasn’t cried. And Abbott Shine.” I reach for the fact about him. What I mostly remember is that he had one of the most beautiful faces I’d ever seen. “He misses his mother. He loves his sisters.”
My heart pounds in recognition. I miss my mother and love my sisters too.
“You could have just written down their names,” Nora says. Her nose turns up to the sky, and her eyes roll. “What a waste of a day.”
But Alice is Alice. She has to process through stone. Her brain is a foggy mess, but stone is clear and sturdy and strong. I go to her side and sit with her under Drum Drascall’s chin. These sculptures make our goal clear, our journey solid and doable. Nora would rather rush through things, but Alice knows we need a map carved into stone if we’re going to do the unthinkable and venture out into our kingdom. She knows that to break the spell, we need to be durable and sure and committed. Maybe it seems like a waste to Nora, but to me, it’s a bit of hope.
“We’ll do it,” I say. “Maybe we’ll like it. Being out there. In Ever.” My heart pounds. I wonder if the air is different across the moat. If there’s a stronger breeze. Maybe the ground feels shakier, maybe there’s a magic that could hurt us more, maybe the witch is luring us into a trap. Princesses aren’t meant to wander the kingdom, and perhaps there’s a reason for that.
We all turn to the moat. The thing we’ve never crossed. The places we’ve never been.
We linger by Mom in her glass box before getting into the boat our attendants have tied to the shore for us. I want something from her—permission, maybe.
Queens are meant for castles, she always told me, and it feels wrong to be disobeying her when she can’t argue her side. The words sound even sadder now, though, with her trapped like this. Queens may be meant for castles, but they can’t possibly be meant for glass houses.
We don’t get permission from Mom. Or Dad. But our attendants start rowing, and we wave goodbye to the castle we’ve never left. It isn’t a long distance, but our boat is the only way to get across. A moat without a drawbridge. It’s always felt like the way things are, but now I’m wondering if it’s the way things have to be.
Mom and Dad talk about Ever like it is set in stone, the rules already decided and unchangeable. But Alice can carve up stone, shift it into something else entirely.
My heart thumps as we chip away at the things we thought had to be. We are crossing the moat, I think
. We are princesses going into our kingdom. These are facts that I was told weren’t possible. Those thoughts rock me more than the boat.
“Are boats safe?” Grace asks. “What are they made of? Has anyone ever been hurt in one? Why are we going in one?”
I close my eyes. Her questions are too much for me today. It is taking every bit of energy I have to be on this boat, swaying toward Ever. “It’s just Ever,” I say at last.
“They won’t know how to be with you,” Olive says. “They might be—they’re not—you know different things. They know some things. And you know other things. And they might be angry. Or strange. Or kind. They could be kind. Some of them.”
“I’m a princess,” I say. “They’re obsessed with princesses. They’ve been waiting for the vanished one to return for eighty years. They light their candles. They tell her story. They wave at me from across the moat and tell me I look just like her and—”
“It’s complicated,” Olive says. She’s never interrupted me before. I don’t know what to do with the words I was going to say, so I swallow them down.
“We’re royalty,” I say. “It’s simple.”
Olive sighs. I’ve never heard her sigh. “Try to forget the things you’ve learned. The books you’ve read. Your father’s words. Try to… put it aside.”
We hit the shore. Olive looks past the people waiting at the moat, strains to look past the brick buildings on the shore where dukes and duchesses and the elite live. She looks for something else. Someone else.
“You lived here once,” I say, which is true, but I’ve never given much thought to it.
Ever Cursed Page 9
