10. REAGAN
All I can smell is the royal fear. The princesses are in a cloud of it, the smell so strong it almost chokes me. It seems impossible that the royals from other kingdoms, Drum, Lill, even the Spellbound themselves can’t smell it. But they don’t seem to notice.
I walk fast, and the princesses follow. So do the royals from the other kingdoms.
“I want one in a box,” the Prince of Farr says. “Like the queen. I’d like a princess in a box. Hey, witch, put one of these girls in a box, why don’t you?”
Next to me, Princess Jane shivers.
“Don’t listen,” I say. “Tune them out.”
“How?” she whispers back. I don’t have an answer for her. She doesn’t know how to be outside the castle, and I don’t know how to be off the Hill, or far from my cottage in AndNot.
“Just move. Fast,” I say, and it doesn’t answer her question or any of mine, but we keep going.
“How the hell would you fuck her?” the Prince of AndNot says. I didn’t know princes say “fuck.” My heart jumps. Princess Jane’s shiver runs through all of them, as if they’ve been hit by an icy gust.
“Get in the box with her!” the Prince of Nethering says. He cracks himself up.
“I like the tired one,” the Prince of Droomland says.
“Nah, I want the one who looks like she’s about to break. All bones and knees and hunger,” the Prince of AndNot says. “She’d look good in a box.”
I keep them walking, the princesses on their shaky legs with their shallow breaths. “Come on, come on,” I say to them. They have never been scared. Not like this. They’ve never had to speak to anyone outside the castle, never been even this short distance from home. They keep wanting to stop, like little kids who think if they hide their faces behind their hands, no one will be able to see them.
“My father’s talking about putting my mother in a box,” the Prince of Farr says. “If we can find a witch of our own to cast a spell.”
A witch of our own. The phrase chills me. I look all over, hunting for a way to escape them, but there isn’t one.
“We could take one,” the Prince of Nethering says.
“Caused a lot of trouble last time,” the Prince of Farr counters.
“That’s ’cause we weren’t able to hold on to her. Slipped right though our fingers.”
“Things are different now.”
“Thank god.”
Jane starts to cry. It isn’t a sound I’d be able to hear if she weren’t practically on top of me, squeezing my shoulder with one hand, grabbing Eden’s arm and dragging her along with the other.
“We have to run,” I say.
“I’m tired,” she says, and she nods at Alice, who is even more tired. “I can’t run. You should.” She says it like she’s used to being left behind. Like it’s her job to be unimportant. I’ve been thinking of princesses as selfish—and they’re that—but this one has also spent her life learning to be queen. And a queen is quiet and sacrificing and sweet.
A queen is good.
A good queen doesn’t save herself.
Everyone likes a good queen. But it’s rarely enough, to be liked.
I might have given the king exactly what he wanted with my spell. A wife he can stare at but never have to speak to. A literal trophy on his lawn. A group of daughters so broken down and fragile that they are somehow more alluring than the strong, healthy, unenchanted princesses in other kingdoms. Possibly even the beginning of another war, another kidnapped princess, another search for a lost girl.
Everyone loves a lost girl.
I created this group of foreign royals, even. I made them want women in boxes. I made them desire princesses who are too tired to say no. And now they want me, too. A witch to do their bidding.
Princess Jane clasps her hands in front of her and looks at her sisters, worrying about them. She walks as fast as she can, which isn’t very fast, and then slows down when she realizes Alice can’t walk even at that pace. Soon she is walking only as fast as Alice can.
“Excuse me,” she says when the princes get too close to her. “I’m sorry.”
It’s not a hot day, but I’m hot. I’m sweating. I’m flushed.
I could run. But I won’t. I walk alongside her, as slow as Alice, as slow as the most tired person in all of Ever. It is not fast enough to outrun even their words.
“My family used to have a witch in it. That’s what my father says. Generations ago. When there were more of them,” the Prince of Farr says.
“When they couldn’t all hide out in Ever,” the Duke of Nethering says.
“There were too many in AndNot,” the Prince of Soar says. “That’s what I’ve heard. We took care of it.”
“Are there too many witches, do you think, Princess Jane? Princess Grace?” a long-haired prince asks. “Do we need to take some off your hands?”
I’m stuck on what they’re saying. It’s some shared idea of a history that I’ve never heard of. I’ve never heard of witches in royal families or being taken care of. I try to go over our history, and it suddenly feels like I barely know it. The princess. The War. The ten vanished witches. The agreement for peace. The Home on the Hill. The kingdom at rest. That’s it. Just a vague before and an urgent after and the tenuous now.
I’d like to go back to the Home on the Hill and ask more questions about the history I know and the history they’re hinting at. But I can’t leave these princesses, not cursed and alone like this. And there are a hundred things I could do to these people who are reaching for us, for me, leering at my chest and Jane’s bony shoulders and Alice’s sleepy eyes and Eden’s face and Grace’s long legs and Nora’s way of holding herself, as if we’re a thing for sale, a thing they are owed. But, for an instant, I forget every spell I ever learned, every Silencing or Disappearing or Invisibility spell.
A witch without her spells is just a girl alone in the woods.
And no one wants to be a girl alone in the woods.
“I know you,” the Prince of Farr says. He’s gotten close to us. They all have. They kept their distance and got to us with words, but I can see now they intend to let their hands find our skin. It’s right there on their faces: the wanting. The not caring what we want. “I know you,” he says again, the oo sound turning long and decadent.
Of course he means he knows of me, he knows about me, but it’s all the same to him. He knows I am a witch and he knows I am the Witch and he knows that I am scared. They all know that. It’s nothing special.
He grabs my arm. The Prince of Nethering grabs my other arm. They smell like meat and wine and diamonds. They smell rich and not at all scared. I hate them.
“What’s better?” Prince Felix of Droomland starts, his eyebrows rising and his mouth curling as he looks back and forth between me and the princesses. “A Spellbound princess, or the witch that bound them up in the first place?” He rubs his hands against each other. He’s enjoying how it feels to size me up. He bows. “Thank you,” he says. “You brought us the princesses we never knew we always wanted.”
Maybe I didn’t know what fear was until right now. Not the kind of fear that is urgent. The kind of fear that could grab you and take from you, because spells come from your heart, and your heart doesn’t seem to be beating.
They see the fear. Princess Jane sees the fear. It makes her more scared. Her sisters, too. All of us are stuck in this swarm.
“We won’t hurt you,” the Prince of Farr says, even though his leer says something entirely different. “Not if you keep our princesses the way we want them.” Jane bows her head. Nora lifts hers. God, I’d love to be Nora right now and maybe always. “You won’t be breaking that spell, right? Little witch? You wouldn’t do that to us?”
I wonder if they realize I haven’t spoken a word.
“She wouldn’t dare,” the Princess of Thorner says. She glares at me. I’d thought she and the other princesses would do something to take the men away from us. But she doesn’t feel aligned
with us in any way.
Prince Felix’s fingers twitch in my direction, and I fold my arms across my chest. I’m the one with magic. I’m the one who could cast a spell and turn any one of them into a frog, a mouse, a blade of grass. But somehow, the truth of my magic is amping them up, exciting them, giving them power instead of me.
As the royals stand uncomfortably close to me and lick their lips at my magic, I think of my mother. I think of how the king must have made her feel in the moments before. I usually only ever think of the during and the after. But maybe the before was even worse. Knowing what is about to happen, hoping beyond hope that it won’t. Dreading the very instant you are actually in.
I wonder if her mind raced through spells she could cast but came up empty. I wonder if, because he was king, she chose not to use magic. I wonder if he pretended to believe she wanted it. I wonder if she thought she had to.
I wonder which version of this I will be in, if this situation turns even worse.
I wonder if all he wanted was her magic. I wonder if we can be separated from our magic, or if wanting our magic is the same as wanting us.
I am wondering so much that I float above the situation, and it is only the Prince of Farr’s hand on my ass that brings me back. “Not great,” he says. He laughs. “Not magical. Let’s see how it compares to royal ass.” His other hand reaches for Princess Alice. He gestures at his friends to touch me, touch them, compare and contrast, as they wish.
“Guess you don’t have beauty spells,” the Princess of Farr says, watching as her brother, the Prince of Farr, kisses my neck.
It is that touch—warm, wet, awful—that raises up my arms and reminds me that I am a witch and they are mortals. Royal mortals, but mortals nonetheless. Spells don’t come easily to me after having been out of practice for five years. And I’ve promised my mother and grandmother that I won’t make magic out of emotion anymore.
But.
But.
“You know what happens, don’t you?” the Duke of AndNot says. I used to be able to see his home from my AndNot cottage. I thought it looked cozy; I hoped he might be kind. “I’ve heard your magic can leave you, that you could someday just be a human. I’ve heard you can vanish into thin air. I’ve heard you’re not quite as powerful as you try to make us believe.”
Next to me, Jane takes a sharp intake of breath. It sounds like it hurts, that’s how sudden it is.
The Prince of Soar’s hand reaches my chest. “Let’s check the rest of them,” he says, and his eyes are roaming over to tiny Eden and her stooped, hopeless shoulders.
Just as Willa’s magic is always sweet and clumsy and whimsical, mine is always rash and large. A smarter witch would simply extract herself from the moment—Quicken herself to the Home on the Hill or magic them into frogs for an hour or two.
I am not that kind of witch, no matter how many years they locked me away in AndNot and begged me to be better.
I am not who they want me to be.
So I turn my fury on the kingdom.
I turn the woods to ash, and light the sky up with day. Maybe awful things can’t happen between men and women, between boys and girls, between people with power and people without in the daylight, in the absence of trees and the shadows they cast. I beg this to be true. I turn Ever into an Always Day. The royals are startled enough by the ash clouds and the burst of light that the princesses and I can sprint to the moat, to their boat, to the attendants wringing their worried hands, wondering where we’ve gone, what’s taking so long.
We pile in, and the attendants row us toward the castle.
Behind us, Ever is a mess of dust and sunshine. But in the boat, things are clearer.
We catch our breath, all of us. It takes time, and the attendants row slowly, then let us float right in the middle of the moat. They know I can’t go to the castle. They also know there’s more to be said.
“Why did you do that?” Nora asks.
“To save us,” Grace says. She looks at me like I have answers that no one has. She looks at me like I could break a spell that she probably doesn’t remember I cast upon her.
“Thank you,” Jane says. She’s saying “thank you”; I said “I’m sorry”; we are not following our old scripts; we are trying out new words with each other. She rubs her hands together, waves her fingers. She looks at me with wonder, then shakes them out again.
“My magic—I get emotional. I’m not supposed to do magic when I’m emotional. But I do.”
“For good reason,” Alice says.
“I’m sorry?” I ask. She’s so succinct it is often mysterious. I can’t read her tired face.
“You do magic for a good reason,” she says. “In response to something. Only when it’s called for.”
“All witches do,” Jane says, repeating words they learned in their castle classroom.
“Yes,” I say. “But still.” It sounds like the beginning of a sentence, but it’s the end of one.
“And the spell you cast on us…,” Princess Jane starts.
“That was for a good reason too,” Princess Alice continues.
Nora closes her eyes. Grace flips through her notebook like the answer is somewhere in there, something she’s simply forgotten. Eden rolls her eyes and looks at the sun.
“There was,” I say.
“You can tell us,” Jane says. She rubs her fingertips against the palms of her hands. She is nothing like the princess I imagined her to be. “What did we do to you?”
I look at the attendants, as if they can tell me what to do. They hold themselves a little like my mother. There is a nervous energy around them, a pain they aren’t speaking, a way they look at the castle’s highest tower like it’s somewhere they’ve been but never want to be again, a place they can’t stop thinking about.
One of them, Olive, the one who attends to Princess Jane and visited me at the Home on the Hill, raises her chin. Her eyes flit to the tower, to me, to her charge. “It was the king,” she says.
I hiccup out something in between a cry and a laugh. The sound of being seen after so many years. The sound of a shared hurt that you’ve been shouldering alone. “It was the king,” I echo.
Princess Jane leans toward me. The boat rocks from every movement we make. It is precarious, the moment we are in. Her mouth is a straight line, her eyes are serious, and her hands are shaking. “And what did he do to you?” she asks. “My father. Our father. The king. What did he do?”
“It wasn’t me,” I say. The words are so small and jagged, and I wonder if she’ll even hear them. But I say them. I do. I think of Abbott, and I know he’s right. That I have to tell the truth, even if no one wants to hear it and no one believes me and none of it matters.
The truth is the truth, even if it doesn’t do what we want it to.
“It was my mother. It was a long time ago. Before I was born.” I touch the place by my chest where the royals touched me. I consider the way it felt, to have unwanted hands taking what was never given to them.
“He hurt her,” Princess Jane says. I can tell she wants me to say that he hit her. That he said something cruel. In the grand pause she knows it’s worse than a hit or a word, and I see her want it to be that her father killed someone.
Anything but what he did.
What she knows he did.
“He raped her,” I say.
I didn’t know what it looked like—the breaking of someone’s heart. I thought maybe tears, maybe loud noises, but it turns out there is silence. The thickest kind. The sound of a heart breaking is the worst, most dizzying quiet. It is dry heaves and bodies crumpling as easily as sheets of paper. It is a rocking boat and the worry of the whole thing tilting over—the boat, all of us, the world on its axis. It is fingernails dug deep into palms, into thighs, into cheeks. It is bodies that don’t want to be bodies anymore, skin that wishes it could be ripped off.
It is so much worse than a spell.
And all of it, now, is in the brightness of an everlasting day.
Suddenly, all I want is the cover of night.
11. JANE
My body responds with a giant no before my mouth can.
I shove Reagan. It must be an awful danger to attack a witch. The light in the sky, the Woods That Were, tell us that. But I do it anyway, as easily as taking a breath.
The boat rocks wildly in response. Shoving her is bad for me, too, since we are sharing this space, this moment, this stupid boat that we don’t even need because the moat isn’t deep. It doesn’t have to be. The people of Ever are as afraid of oceans as they are of puddles, because we asked the witches to enchant them to be afraid of water, so that the moat would truly keep them away from us.
Still, the push surprises her, and she grips the sides of the boat. Almost loses her balance. Almost falls out. But Olive doesn’t let her. In the blink of an eye, I feel something between them, a promise to matter to each other, even though they barely know each other.
The boat evens out, and Reagan stays squarely inside it. We are stuck in the middle of the moat, and I would rather be anywhere else with anyone else. I can’t stop shaking my fingers, trying to make the funny tingling feeling disappear from their tips. There’s a new glowing feeling in my body that maybe means I am nearly dead, but it feels almost powerful. Not how I thought the spell turning True would feel.
Reagan looks as surprised as I am. “I’m sorry,” she says. This seems to surprise her too, because she shakes her head and her hands and her shoulders and drags her fingers through her hair. “I shouldn’t have told you. Or I should have told you five years ago. Or none of it matters because you don’t believe me anyway.”
“No,” my mouth finally says. Because “no” is the only possible answer. “No” is the only thing that could be true.
“No,” Alice says.
Grace grips her notebook and looks at each of us for more answers.
We don’t have them.
Eden dips her hands into the water and draws disappearing circles onto the surface.
My mind rushes through every story I’ve ever heard about my father and mother. Every time anyone called him the Gentle King, the Good King. Every easy touch to my shoulder, every promise that he wouldn’t marry me off, every perfect moment with the man I love so much.
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