All I have to weigh against that are Reagan’s words and the last few strange days as things around the kingdom have started to shift. A few unsettling hours and the way Reagan looks broken. The way night turned to day and didn’t let up. All these tiny details lined up against a lifetime of kindness.
“That’s my father,” I say. I try to sound like a queen. Calm. In control. Certain. “That’s the king.”
“That’s your king,” Reagan says. “Your father. Not mine.” I am starting to hate her face and the way it shows nothing. Her limbs that shrug at anything I say. Her hair that can’t decide what it wants to be.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask. My hands buzz. I want them to stop. It’s making it hard to concentrate, and I need to be entirely present right now.
“I just told you,” Reagan says.
“You know that’s not true. My father would never—he’s the Good King. Everyone knows it. There’s something else. You haven’t been around men much, so maybe you’re confused. Or angry. Or jealous.”
“Jane,” Reagan says.
“Princess Jane.” I am trying to hang on to the things that make me me, the things that are true and real and important. I am a princess. I am Princess Jane. I am the daughter of the Good King. I am Spellbound. I am hungry. I am trying. And I am still the princess.
“Princess Jane.” Reagan clears her throat and lifts her chin. She isn’t shifting. I want her to shift. I want to see the crack in her lies. Instead she looks more sure, more pointed. “I don’t know everything about your father. But this one thing I know is true. It happened when my mother was younger. In your castle.”
“This was a long time ago?” I ask. I’m flooded with a kind of relief. If it was a long time ago, the details could be hazy and shifty and wrong. If it was a long time ago, it must not have been him. “Decades ago? The kind of memory that can get all twisted up with time? I know my father.”
“No,” Reagan says. “I know your father.”
Her eyes frighten me. They are so steady and sure. But I have to be steady and sure too. I am the future someday queen. And queens are certain.
My father told us we could marry a prince or a princess as long as we loved them. Or we could marry no one at all. My father let Eden run wild in the Grand Yard even though others in the kingdom thought girls shouldn’t act that way. He let us be ourselves, whoever that was. My father brings flowers to weddings of young couples in Ever. He hired farmers hurt by the Spell of Famine to be his horsemen, our attendants. He reads to me aloud from volumes of history and taught Alice how to turn stone into art. He keeps us safe in the castle and teaches us how to rule from a distance, how to listen and hear and be present for Ever in the way royals do best. He sings under his breath in the mornings and smiles at every silly thing Eden does and says.
He is not a man who raped a witch.
Good and Gentle Kings aren’t rapists.
I want to tell Reagan all of this, but I’m guessing she wouldn’t be able to hear it. Whatever impossible story her mother told her is a part of her story about herself, and she won’t let it go. She destroyed us because of it. She ruined lives because of this belief. She won’t budge.
So, fine. I won’t either. Reagan is a rash witch who believed a story about my father, and, instead of putting him under a spell, she stole vital bits of humanity from the rest of us. She’s impulsive and reckless and unhinged.
“Ask anyone,” I say, “and they’ll tell you how much my father loves and respects women. I’d tell you to ask my mother. But of course you can’t. Because you put her in a box. But she fell in love with him because of how much he respects women. He wasn’t like the other princes who treated her like some lesser—he loves women. Those princes today were awful. The things they did—disgusting. Terrifying. But my father—he isn’t like those princes. You don’t know him. You don’t know him at all.”
Reagan’s face doesn’t move. Her eyes go dead. I wait for her to ask my sisters, ask our attendants, just like I’ve told her to. But she doesn’t.
The boat doesn’t move either. No one knows where we’re going or what we’re doing.
“I shouldn’t have bothered,” Reagan says at last.
A strange, impossible part of me wants to hug her. I try to shove that part away and focus on the part that hates her. That wouldn’t mind shoving her again, harder this time.
It’s easy, actually. Easier than I would have thought, to focus on hate and ignore everything else.
“I’m going home,” Reagan says at last. Olive picks up an oar to row her back to shore. Reagan shakes her head. She stands up and the boat responds in kind, the rest of us gripping its edges to try to make things steady again.
“What are you doing?” I ask. It comes out as a yell.
Reagan looks me right in the eye and steps one foot, then the other, into the water. Her skirts, the dozen or so of them, float to the top of the water. Even the burlap is buoyant, here in the moat.
“You can’t go back there,” I say, pointing to Ever and the royals who attacked us. “It’s not safe.”
Reagan smiles a terrible smile, like she knows so much more than I do, understands things I never could.
“Well, it’s safer than up there,” she says, jutting only the tip of her chin toward the castle.
She turns away, and her skirts float behind her, trying to pull her back to us. I swear I can still hear the royals in the Woods That Were, cackling about which of us has a better ass, whose face would look better on which body, like we are paper-doll girl cutouts and not solid people at all.
I think about the way she walked slowly, alongside Alice and me. That she didn’t magic herself away. That she didn’t leave us behind when it would’ve been so easy to.
She walks farther away from the boat, her shoulders moving back in a show of strength. She plows toward the shore.
My hands, which had been tingling and warm, go cool. It’s sudden and strange.
I miss the warmth.
“Reagan,” I call out. She turns around, her face weirdly hopeful. It’s confusing to notice that I’ve stopped hating her. An impossible part of me wants to jump in alongside her. My fingers, my shoulders, my heart flicker with something. And Reagan just stands there in the moat, waiting for me. “Be careful,” I say. “Please.”
Light dances across the water. It surprises me, the look of it, how sudden and lovely it is. A shimmer of something that I feel in my heart as much as I see it on the water’s surface.
For a second that is fast, that is found and swiftly lost, we are something like friends.
Then I remember what she just told me, and she remembers what her mother told her, and we are a witch and her Spellbound princess once again.
12. REAGAN
When we were little, Abbott and I had a bit of magic between us. An enchanted pebble that I would use to alert him whenever I wanted to see him. And he could use it to summon me.
Leave it to a ten-year-old witch to enchant a pebble to tell a handsome boy to meet up with her.
Maybe I didn’t even know he was handsome then. I don’t know what I knew when I was ten. I barely know what I know now.
But I know the magic on that pebble was strong because it was mine, and I know he still has the pebble because I saw it on a string around his wrist when he came to my home. And I know he wants me to know I can use the magic, because he didn’t hide his wrist from me; he didn’t take the pebble off before seeing me. He wanted to tell me without telling me that as furious as he is, all my mistakes don’t add up to me losing him.
So I close my eyes and think of Abbott Shine. His beautiful face, his adorned wrist. The things he said to me, and the things I wish I had said to him. The fact of his arms, which I know could hold me right now and maybe make me feel better or at least less alone or maybe less scared of running into another pack of royals wanting to touch or harass or kidnap me.
He arrives in moments that feel like hours, and he knows something’s wrong as
soon as his eyes meet mine.
“What did they do?” he says, rushing to me.
“It wasn’t the princesses,” I say. His hand reaches for his heart. “Not the king, either.” It’s nice, to be able to read his mind, to speak in shorthand, after a day spent with girls who don’t know me at all, or know only the worst and wildest parts of me. “Other royals. Well, and then I told them. The princesses. About their dad. And that was—they didn’t believe me.”
“They never do,” Abbott says. And I think he’s about to lecture me about all the ways the royals and the witches are wrong and all the ways we’ve failed Ever and all the things I did to make it worse. But he stops there and touches my arm, gently, like he’s asking permission to be close to me.
I nod my head, and he shifts so that we are fully touching, his arm reaching across my back.
“I didn’t want to be alone,” I say.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says. His touch is certain. He understands things I don’t about royalty, about Ever. He has been hurt by the king too, in different ways. We all have. The royals are the ones that touched me. But the king, the way Ever works, made it possible. “What did they do to you exactly?”
I think through the words I would use, a quick touch here and there, the sneer and leer of it all, the threats that could be jokes. I don’t know how to make it sound as bad as I feel. I’m scared it will sound like nothing, in the retelling. It will sound silly.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I want to tuck it away, like my mother did. Already I see how I could pretend it didn’t happen, how I could treat it like a nightmare and not a flesh-and-blood thing. It’s tempting. It seems so much easier.
“Let’s walk,” Abbott says. And I guess that’s why I called him, to walk me home, to keep me safe, but that feels ridiculous, because I am a witch and I am strong and I should have been able to stop everything, and it makes no sense that I didn’t.
I can’t say any of that, either, though, so I follow him, and we walk in silence all the way through town to the Barren Fields.
Without the princesses, no one notices me, even with my layers of magical skirts. I could have walked home alone, and no one would have blinked in my direction.
Maybe I should go right back to AndNot today. Maybe I can give up, let go of magic and my home and Abbott and the spark of something I feel between Jane and me. I could give up, couldn’t I?
I feel nothing like myself. Somewhere between the prince touching my ass and the other one touching my breast and the lot of them grabbing at me with eyes and hands and words, I lost myself. I shouldn’t have told the princesses. Not today. Not like this. I shouldn’t have come here; I shouldn’t have called Abbott; I shouldn’t be a witch; I shouldn’t exist.
The places they touched throb. In the moment, I was fine; I was me; I was waiting for it to be over. And even in the boat, it was okay—what happened seemed small and quick, and it was over, so we could row away from it and that would be it.
But it’s an hour or two later, and it has stretched out, a thing that is happening instead of a thing that happened, which makes no sense, because there isn’t a royal anywhere to be seen. Only the smell of the princesses’ fear making the air sweet and salty, but I’ve gotten used to that.
“I’m cold. Are you cold?” I ask, trying to put a name to this feeling. But no, that’s not right. “Or, like, hot?”
Abbott pulls me toward him again, and it’s good, but also not, to be touched right now. He knows the jerk of my body, and he pulls away, tries to be the exact right amount of close to me, but I don’t know what that amount could possibly be.
I put a finger to my lips and try to make them belong to me again. They’re drier than I’m used to. Like a lizard adhered to my face. I don’t like it, so I jump my hand away and try to find something familiar to rest it on. My thigh doesn’t feel like my thigh and my hand doesn’t feel like my hand and my hair is in tangles and couldn’t possibly be mine either.
So I sit down in the Barren Fields, and I plunge my hand into the earth. It’s dusty and as dry as my lips. But it’s more real than my body or face. I dig my hand into the soil, letting dirt gather under my fingernails.
“Abbott,” I say, “am I here?” He looks at all of me, all the parts that I guess belong to me but don’t feel like it.
“You’re here,” he says.
“List everything you see,” I say, because it’s what worked for my mother, and I need something real to hang on to. I wait, but there’s nothing for Abbott to list. We are in the Barren Fields. There’s nothing.
“Dirt,” Abbott says. “You.”
I dig farther down. My whole hand up to my wrist is covered in the dirt. Then my wrist is covered too. The ground has some give to it, so it’s not hard to cover myself, to hide my fingers, to imagine my whole body sinking into the ground and staying there.
The idea sounds a little sweet, a little irresistible. “What if I left?” I say.
“We need you,” Abbott says. He looks sure, even though mere days ago he rolled his eyes at the idea of anything changing.
“You said—”
“I saw you with those princesses, walking through town. I watched you go by. And it felt—”
“Like a shimmer of something?” I’m thinking of that last moment with Jane, when she maybe didn’t want me to go, or at least didn’t want me to die, and how it felt like a seismic shift, before feeling like nothing at all.
“Yes. A shimmer,” Abbott says. “I don’t know why. But I felt it. Maybe others did too.”
He gets up, and the line of him is straight and narrow and a little delicate, too.
“The things you do matter,” Abbott says.
“Same to you,” I say, because I am certain that Abbott is the most beautiful boy in all of Ever, and in a day or two, we are going to need a lock of his hair. I wanted the princesses to see this person I care about, to see the way he lives, and the way it hurts. And I knew that Abbott, at least, would give them what they needed.
“Hasn’t been true yet,” Abbott says with a shrug. “But maybe someday soon. Look. You’re—tired.”
It’s not the word for what I am, but he knows and I know that I don’t want to talk about what I am right now.
“Let me walk you the rest of the way home.”
“I’m not ready,” I say.
“So let’s stay here,” he says. He doesn’t ask me how I feel about what just happened, or how it went with the princesses. He doesn’t critique what I ended up doing with the spell, and he doesn’t make any more suggestions. I know his brain is thinking, always, only, about how to make Ever better. But right now he sits with me like we are Abbott and Reagan who have always been friends. Who will always be friends.
It’s the one thing that makes me feel the tiniest bit here.
My hand’s still in the dirt. The rest of me has to sit in the sun; Abbott and I are the only things in this whole field that are alive.
But just barely.
13. JANE
They are eating roast chicken with apple stuffing, and I am trying to make the air be enough. The smell stops at my nose. I work to inhale it through my mouth, but even that taste isn’t allowed for me. Even that small almost-pleasure is forbidden.
But for once I don’t care.
My father didn’t do that, I think, watching him offer Grace an extra helping of potatoes.
My father wouldn’t do that, I think as he asks about our day.
My father isn’t like that, I think when he smiles at me with an unsaid apology for the food, like he does every night. A quiet moment between us that shows me he sees me; he knows my pain; he respects what I’m going through.
Not my father, I think, until he smiles at the newest attendant, and I watch her eyes dart to an older attendant, who makes a tiny come here hand gesture that I must be misunderstanding. The young attendant scurries to the older one, who grabs her elbow and doesn’t let go.
My body aches from the da
y. The walking. Drum’s wandering eyes. The hands that touched me. The words that were said. It’s all bruising me, and now I’m seeing things that aren’t really there: looks and movements and elbow squeezes that are probably the hallucinations of a very hungry princess.
Except: there is also the tingling in my fingers, the glow between my shoulder blades. The first good feeling my body has been allowed in five years. I don’t tell them about it. I barely let myself know it.
“To Ever,” Dad says, raising a glass of wine to our four glasses of berry juice and one glass of nothing.
“To Ever,” we echo.
And then there’s silence. He hasn’t asked us what we thought of the broken-down houses or the dirt roads. He isn’t making conversation about the spell, about Drum, about the friendship they used to have and why it ended. He isn’t seeing if we’ve made progress. It’s as if he doesn’t care. I make fists with my hands and try to squeeze that thought away, but it lingers. Repeats itself in my head until it sounds a little bit like the truth.
He is licking his lips from the chicken, a greasy sheen on his chin that makes me ill. I want to be outside with my mother, imitating her stillness. But Dad insisted we all stay together in these troubling times.
I look at my sisters, to see if they are thinking the same things I am, if they are working just as hard to remove Reagan’s words from their heads, from their bodies. Because what she said is now making my legs twitch and my heart beat and my mind circle around and around, no matter how sternly I tell it not to.
“I remember my first time stepping out in Ever,” he says as if one of us has asked. “It didn’t look anything like my home of Farr. Farr is icy. Cold in temperature, but also temperament. Not a friendly people. Then I walked through Ever, and people waved hello; the sun beat down on my head so hard it got burned on the top; there were fruit trees everywhere, warm pears hanging off branches, begging to be eaten. I stole a dozen. I couldn’t stop myself.” He shakes his head and grins at the memory.
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