“Of course I did,” Olive says. Maybe I should have considered it before, but no one ever told me to. She’s Olive. She’s my attendant. She’s kind and easy to be around and smart and pretty. I never thought to learn more about her. But there’s a bite to her voice now. A new sound.
“You’re angry,” I say. “You’re one of the angry people of Ever.”
Olive blows a slow breath up to the sky. I wonder if she’s seen what or who she wanted to. I wonder if she’s caught sight of her home. Her family. Her half brother. Her father. A used-to-be farm they must live on.
“Aren’t we all the angry people of Ever?” she asks before taking my hand and leading me to shore, where the ground feels exactly the same as the ground outside the castle, except also completely different.
* * *
“You’re here,” Reagan says when we are all unloaded onto the shore. Olive and the other attendants have gone off to see their families. We’re alone with the witch and our kingdom.
“We have to be here,” I say. “Why are you here?”
“We perform the Undoing together,” she says like it’s all so simple. “I thought you might be nervous, seeing Ever for the first time. I thought you’d get an early start. I’ve been waiting.”
She is something else, this witch of ours. She is not one thing or another. Sometimes I am only Princess Jane Who Can’t Eat and Alice is only ever Princess Alice Who Can’t Sleep and we wander our tiny section of the world being the Princesses of Without, the Spellbound, the Enchanted Royals of Ever.
I want Reagan to be this way too. Reagan the Evil. Reagan the Bad Witch. Reagan the Jealous Liar. Reagan Who I Hate.
But she is refusing to be one thing.
“You have to tell us—” I start, before stopping myself. I want to ask again why she cast the spell, what we ever did for her to punish us—punish our poor mother—so cruelly. But I stop the question before it has a chance to leave my lips. Her face makes me stop. It’s so bare and gentle. It’s kind.
A strange, unsettled part of my heart doesn’t want to know what could make her turn so cruel.
I’ll ask later. I’ll ask when the spell is broken, when we’re done. There is already too much to take in, stepping foot into the town of Ever.
Walking around out here, I don’t understand anything. The trees are sometimes tall and sometimes short. The homes are squat and sad. The gardens are mostly empty. This is not the Ever of my textbooks.
No one swarms us. No one blows kisses or sneers or says much of anything at all. They just watch us. Warily.
“This can’t be right,” I say, walking past a row of houses so small I could fit two of them inside my bedroom.
“They should really build bigger houses,” Grace says. “Prettier ones. These ones aren’t good.”
“I thought we were supposed to like our own kingdom,” Nora says. “This is—it’s ugly. And quiet. And—”
“Sad,” I say, looking at brown dresses hanging from clotheslines and what must be the Barren Fields in the distance. “Are we almost there?”
“Yes,” Nora says, pointing at the smallest house, the ugliest part of the road. There aren’t leaves on the trees. There isn’t growth from the earth. There’s just a wooden shack and a man outside it who is sallow and sorry and sagging.
Drum Drascall. He smiles. He has a long beard and a thousand wrinkles and beautiful hands. I notice them right away, because I am always looking at people’s hands to avoid looking at their mouths. Mouths make me jealous and hungry. Drum’s hands are slender with long fingers and freckles near the wrist. They are familiar.
The oldest man in town. I wonder how old he actually is.
“Princesses on my lawn,” he says. “I never thought I’d see the day.”
“You’re our first—all I’ve ever been told is not to talk to—princesses aren’t supposed to—” I wish I wasn’t the oldest, so I didn’t have to be the first to speak.
“Hello,” Drum interrupts, saving me from myself. He bows. Then catches himself and puts out a hand to shake. This is wrong too, so he bows again. “You’re more beautiful up close.”
“Oh,” I say. “Okay. That’s—thank you.” I’m not even sure it’s a compliment, but I’m as nervous as he is, and my sisters aren’t stepping in. Reagan leans against a tree and fidgets. I thought witches were still and sure, but she is all tapping fingers and sweaty forehead.
“You’re the oldest man in town,” Nora breaks in, seeing that I’ve lost my way. Drum’s eyes light up with shock; then he laughs. It’s a big laugh, the real kind.
“I suppose I am.”
“Well, then we need something from you.”
“Nora—” Alice says. She puts a finger to her lips. “You have a lovely home,” she says, staring at the saddest pile of wood we’ve ever seen. “It’s very nice to meet you.” Alice did the best job studying the ways of the people of Ever. We took classes on the rules of polite society and how the people we ruled live. But it never felt as interesting as studies about witches or our own royal aunts and uncles and pasts.
Drum cocks his head. He’s trying to figure us out and is moving through a dozen feelings in the process. Awe, confusion, amusement, fear—it’s all there. “I don’t have a very nice home at all,” he says at last. “None of us do. As you must be seeing. Finally.”
We learned how to dance waltzes and wear our hair and how to recite poetry and play the violin. We did not learn how to stand face-to-face with this old man in our apparently rotting kingdom and have a conversation. I want a violin and a pair of dancing shoes. I want a ball gown and a feather-filled chair to sit in. I do not want to smell barren dirt and this man’s skin.
Then I remember how many days are left until Reagan’s birthday—three—and I swallow down everything but my own need.
“It’s the spell,” I say. “You can help us break the spell.”
“Ah,” Drum says. He clasps his hands together in front of himself, lifting his fingertips and placing them back down over and over again. He looks at each of us greedily, taking in more of us than we want to give. He lingers on Alice’s hair, on Nora’s breasts, on Eden’s tiny little-girl legs. “And how can I do that?”
I look helplessly at Reagan. If she’s going to sit there watching us, I wish she would do something witchy and powerful, letting Drum know we aren’t to be messed with. But Reagan doesn’t even look up from the ground.
“Do you have a clock?” I ask.
Drum smiles. “Lill?” he calls into his home. “Do we have a clock for the princesses?”
A woman joins him on the stoop. She has the look of a person who used to be beautiful, used to be happy, but is now too worn out to be either. She’s as familiar as Drum’s hands. The woman is in an enormous black overcoat, buttoned all the way from her neck to her toes with silver buttons. It’s a strange outfit, a startling one, but then I don’t know much about the things the people of Ever wear.
“I’m so sorry to interrupt you,” I say. “We just need a clock. Do you have a clock? I think any clock is fine. Maybe even a watch? Reagan, would a watch be okay?”
I want to leave. I’m sure it’s written across my face. I want to leave so badly my body turns a little bit away from Drum and Lill. I don’t want to see them and their home and this part of Ever.
“We do have a clock,” Lill says. “Why don’t you come inside and take a look?”
“Oh, that’s okay,” I say. “I’m sure you can’t fit us.”
Reagan closes her eyes. I’ve said something wrong.
“I’m sure it’s not convenient,” Nora tries. This is better. She’s got more of her senses about her. I should shut up.
“We used to go to your home all the time,” Lill says. “It would be our pleasure to have you here.” She holds the door open, and in our confusion we walk through it.
“Our home?” I ask. That can’t be right. Subjects don’t come to the castle. Certainly not often. We follow her into their tiny home. Inside, the
re’s a long wooden table decorated with burlap and dried leaves and, yes, a clock. There’s a cake in the center of the table, next to the clock, and plain unglazed ceramic plates set up for us. They are all different sizes, as if not a single set of salad or entrée plates has survived, so they make do with bits and pieces of what’s left. They knew we were coming. Of course they did.
“You were young,” Drum says. “Some of you weren’t even born. It was a long time ago. Things were—well. Things were different.”
I squint at him, then at her. Scan the room for clues. The outside of their home is like every other one we walked by, but inside there are the trappings of old wealth. Velvet curtains that have gone threadbare. Floral carpets now covered in footprints and stains. A silver vase that hasn’t seen polish in a decade. And the clock. It’s fancier than anything else I’ve seen so far in Ever, a relic from another time, maybe, a more prosperous kingdom.
“Who did you used to be?” I ask.
“Sir Drum,” Drum says. “And Lady Lill. And now, I suppose, we’re the difference between you breaking the spell and not breaking it.” The look on his face frightens me.
Lady Lill pulls out a chair for each of us. Starts cutting into a sad cake that won’t taste anything like the cakes we’re used to eating.
It’s that motion—the cutting of the cake—that brings them back to me. I remember Lady Lill in our dining room, back when I could eat, when I was very small and she seemed very tall. I remember her speaking with my father in hushed tones that stopped when I entered the room.
I remember Sir Drum playing the fiddle for me, and all of us eating a thick potato soup that we never ate any other time.
“It’s what they’re used to,” my father said when I asked him about it. “We want to make them comfortable. They’re used to different foods than we are.”
It sounded kind, back then.
I hear it a little differently now.
“Maybe we should come back another time,” I say, because the smell of cake is lemony and strong, and every part of my body is telling me to go.
“We hoped your father might come with you,” Lill says. “We were looking forward to seeing our old friend. Showing him our home.”
“He’s busy,” I say.
“Busy,” Drum repeats, laughing.
“He’s king,” Grace says.
“He is,” Drum says.
“I’m sure he sends his regards,” I say. I’m drawing on all our old lessons about the ways of the people of Ever, but it’s coming out stilted, speaking a language aloud that I’ve only ever read about. I’ve never practiced for this moment. I could have used some practice. I can stay perfectly still; I can be quiet; I can wave when people are calling my name and smile when they ask me questions. I can keep my distance and bow my head when my father speaks. I am an excellent queen in training.
But they didn’t teach me about this.
“The king would like you to help us,” Nora tries.
“If that is what the king wants, why isn’t he here?” Drum asks.
Maybe the clock stops ticking, or maybe it’s my heart.
It’s a question so good we don’t have an answer for it. I want to tell them again how busy our father is, but he isn’t. This morning when we were piling into the boat, he was sleeping in. He spoke of having some of the visiting kings over for lunch. He talked about taking them on a horse ride around the moat.
Everything that seemed normal starts to twist. If my father wanted to help us, he would be helping us.
I try to unthink the thought. I try to shrug it off like a sweater that itches, like a pair of shoes that pinch.
But it stays. I’m sweating like Reagan now. Thick sweat that I’ve never felt before.
Where is he, our father? Why is the witch here and our father up there? Why, at the Thirteenth Birthday, did he not save me from the prince? Why did he look away? Why did he say the things he said?
My father has always been a solid thing to hang on to, and now that solid thing feels wobbly and wrong. I try to hold on to it, I try to make it be what it’s always been—concrete, stone, safety—but it wants to be something else. Something slippery and new.
My sisters, too, look like they are struggling to stay afloat in this current moment.
Drum waits for us to respond, and when we don’t, he shrugs his shoulders. “I think I’ll wait for the king to ask me,” he says. I swear there’s a smirk there too. A knowing look. “That clock is enchanted. I bet you didn’t know that. Keeps me alive. Counts down the days until I die. And I have another five years left, as long as I can hang on to it.”
“I don’t—magic? Out here in the kingdom?” I ask.
Even Reagan tilts her head at the thought of it. Magic, floating around Ever, not just locked up in the Home on the Hill where it’s meant to be.
“More magic than you think,” Lill says. She sounds a little sad and looks extra long at Reagan.
I glance at the clock. Its golden hand is almost the whole way around the circle, lingering on today’s date, moving toward a day five years from now, marked by a tiny, brilliant diamond. It scares me, being so close to something that could tell me what I don’t want to know.
Except: I know where my end is too, if we can’t get this clock. And it’s much, much closer than five years away.
The time on the clock suddenly looks like a luxury to me. A luxury that fills me with rage. When you are so empty from hunger, things like rage and jealousy and fear can fill you up fast.
“You’ve Spellbound the whole kingdom, haven’t you?” I say, turning to Reagan. “That’s why it looks like this. That’s why everything’s so awful. You’ve come out here and cast spells over everything and come up with some impossible list of tasks for us. It’s not fair. We don’t have magic. You can’t just come and enchant the kingdom against us—”
“Jane,” Reagan says. She doesn’t deny or explain. She doesn’t apologize. She just is. She always just is, and maybe that’s what being a witch is like, or maybe that’s what being not a princess is like, but either way it’s making me want to scream.
“Ever is under some awful spell from you and your family. Look at all this sadness, all the hunger. You cast spells on everyone, didn’t you? The Spell of Without isn’t just on us—it’s everywhere.”
“Jane, no,” Reagan says. She picks up the clock. “This is enchanted, yes. I didn’t know that. I knew they used to be friends of your father, that’s it. I didn’t know I was asking you to get a clock like this one—I didn’t know a clock like this one could be in a home like this.”
“There’s so much we all know,” Lill says. “And so very much we don’t.” She looks sad. Like she wishes things could be different, but knows they can’t be. “It’s not easy, being a subject. Being a witch.”
“Being a princess,” I say. Lady Lill does not nod in agreement. Neither does Reagan.
Reagan wilts and I rage, but Drum doesn’t care about any of it. He picks the clock up out of Reagan’s hands.
“If your father asks for it, I’ll happily hand it over,” he says. “Even knowing what it means. For the king, I’d do that.”
“It’s what he would want,” I say. But I can’t possibly sound convincing. I’m too seeped in shock and worry.
“Well, then I’m sure he’d be happy to come and tell me that,” Drum Drascall says. He shrugs his shoulders and moves out of the kitchen into a back room, the conversation over.
* * *
Outside Drum’s home, Ever has turned from quiet into something else entirely. The sun is starting to set, and night is coming, even though we’ve only just gotten started. The subjects are in their homes, but we are greeted with royalty. Princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses from other kingdoms. They’ve been waiting for us.
“Empty-handed!” Prince Felix of Droomland calls out, and the rest of them cheer. My sisters move closer to me. Reagan, too, drifts to my side.
“I love you,” the royals say.
/> “I must have you.”
“Marry me.”
“Choose me.”
“You are goddesses.”
“Stay just as you are. Forever. With me.”
They are holding, each of them, a goblet of water and a basket of white feathers.
In the kingdom of Ever, marriage proposals come with water and feathers, to symbolize the simplicity and softness of love. My father brought my mother a teacup filled with water and a dove in a birdcage. This is very different from that bit of romance.
“We should go,” Reagan says in a strong whisper.
“We love you,” the Prince of Soar calls. “Just the way you are.”
“I don’t want anyone else but one of you,” the Princess of Farr says. Her voice cracks, and I hate her for not even choosing one of us to love most.
“Why are you here?” Grace calls out. Her voice sounds at once panicked and proud. She hates not understanding everything, but all Grace has ever wanted is a princess with a goblet of water and a feather asking for her hand in marriage.
And now she has a dozen princesses, two dozen princes, clamoring for her.
Or at least for someone enchanted.
“The world needs you,” the Prince of Nethering says. He reaches into his basket and pulls out a single feather, waves it like a flag. “We want the Spellbound princesses. We don’t want you taken from us!”
“Don’t let them break the spell!” the Princess of Thorner calls out to Reagan.
I look at the witch, expecting to see a smile, maybe, an agreement. She hates us. She’s against us. She doesn’t want us to break the spell either.
But she isn’t smiling at the royals. She isn’t nodding in agreement. She’s looking at me.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice spotted with the same shock I’m feeling. “I’m so sorry.”
And with the words comes something else. A flutter of a feeling in my hands and my feet and my heart. A shiver on my skin. A funny sensation that I can’t seem to place.
It stays.
And so do the royals.
Ever Cursed Page 10
