Ever Cursed

by Corey Ann Haydu

  They’ve shown me what they think of anyone who isn’t old and male and royal.

  Maybe you didn’t see anything, my brain says, hopefully, one last time. I want to believe it so badly, but my father’s hand keeps moving through the air, haunting me.

  And by the time his hand finds his side, makes its way into his pocket, hides itself, the hope is gone. His face looks exactly the same and completely different. If I looked in a mirror, maybe the same would be true for me.

  I imagine Mom’s crown on my head. I imagine a scepter in my hand, gold and thick and topped with an enormous diamond. My back straightens, and I don’t move an inch.

  “We do have to talk right now. We have no time. You will help us break the spell. You will tell our subjects to help us.”

  “Jane. I’m in a meeting.”

  “Dad. We will die.” I match his tone. I hadn’t noticed until now, but I’m nearly as tall as him. My whole life he towered over me, hoisted me onto his shoulders, held me above his head so I could see the world the way he did. But now I am eye to eye with him, and it happens. He stops being my father. It’s only for a moment, a flash, but it shakes me up. He is the King of Ever and I am the princess and I will be heard.

  “My girls have had a rough time of it,” Dad explains to the King of Soar. “As you know. Things here are— Well, it’s been difficult. I hope you’ll excuse their behavior. We’re under enormous stress.”

  “Of course,” the King of Soar says. “We aren’t accustomed to magic, but I imagine it puts stress on even the sweetest princesses and noblest kings.”

  “It’s been hard for me,” Dad says, “very very hard. We are all doing our best.”

  “And we’re here to help,” the King of Soar says. “We are in this with you.”

  I don’t know if this is the way they’ve always talked to us and about us and around us, but it’s suddenly awful. It’s all turning ugly so fast—my father’s hand, the King of Soar’s smirk, the too-dark lighting of the study, the sound of attendants rushing around the hallways like frightened mice. And the words of these men who try to shut us up and dismiss us and tell us nothing is a big deal when time is moving so quickly away from us, and this hunger is about to turn True.

  I try to imagine what will happen if I tell Ever who my father really is. I want to imagine an army, taking him from his throne, demanding a new leader, maybe throwing him in a dungeon somewhere.

  But there is no dungeon in Ever. And there’s no army. And there might not be anyone who is ready to go to battle against the king.

  I take a step closer to the man I used to know. My sisters hover but don’t advance. Grace plays with something on Dad’s desk, and Eden’s eyes shoot daggers at both kings. But I am the only one with a voice. I am the only one who can do anything at all.

  “You will help us. You will tell them to help us. Because I know what you did. What you’ve been doing. You are the reason for the spell. You—you—there was a witch, and you—”

  It’s so hard to get the word out. I don’t want to say it. It’s such a final word, such an ugly one. I’ll never have my father, the king, back if I say it out loud.

  But I can. So I do. “You raped a witch. And just now, with Olive, you—”

  Dad tries to stand taller. He tries his best, but still we are the same. He can’t rise up any farther without standing on his tiptoes. And he does not want to be a tiptoeing king.

  “I see you. I’m not looking away.” I linger in the moment and do what I should have been doing this whole time. I look at him. I look at them both. I do not look away. I don’t know what Ever would do if they found out, and he doesn’t know either, but I decide to believe they would care. That at least a few of them, enough of them, would care.

  “I see you, too, Jane,” Dad says. “You’re hysterical.”

  My arms shimmer. My fingers pulse. My face feels like it’s glowing. I look at Grace’s hands, and still my tears are glinting there, too.

  But it’s my heart that’s truly strange. It stops and starts in a panic of a thousand feelings.

  “I don’t know what you’ve heard, what crazy person you’ve been listening to in your weakened state. You haven’t eaten in five years, we can’t expect you to be yourself, but this is—this isn’t acceptable. You’re out of control.”

  “You keep calling me hysterical,” I say. “You said it at dinner. And it wasn’t true. And it isn’t now.”

  “I’m worried about you,” he says, but his voice sounds like a snake’s, and the King of Soar has a funny smirk on his face, like he’s been caught but knows he’ll never pay for it.

  None of them think they will pay.

  But they are wrong.

  “I’ll tell them all who you are. Their Good and Gentle King. I will tell them what you did to make the witch cast that spell. What you are doing to their children that they send to work here in the castle.” Images flash through my mind. My father’s hand lingering on the shoulder of a tutor, his body squeezing too closely to an attendant’s, the way women and girls sometimes shrink away from his hand, the sheer number of young people in our castle, and how many of them seem shaky and strange and then, suddenly, leave, replaced by newer, younger people.

  The people of Ever might not care what happens to me, or to Reagan’s mother or even to Olive. But they will have to care when it’s their child, their parent, their loved one.

  But my father doesn’t seem scared of anything. “And I’ll tell them all how crazy you are,” he says. “How much this spell has ruined our would-be queen. How you are unstable and how the breaking of this spell isn’t good for you. For any of you.” He brings his hands together. I see now how ugly they are. How awful and large and roaming. “We won’t be trying to break the spell anymore. It’s not good for my girls. Look what it’s done to you. What a state you’re in. No. You’ll be staying right here, right where you’ve always been. Safe and sound. All of you.”

  I have more to say, but Dad doesn’t want to hear it. He’s turned into the king—the one they don’t know about. Decisive and cruel. Uncaring and too sure.

  He lunges at Eden and Grace. They don’t think to run. I wouldn’t either. We’ve never run from our father. He’s strong enough to get one of them in each arm and hold them there. Or maybe we’re weak enough, hopeless enough to not know how to fight back. They hang like rags, like nothing, from his elbows.

  “Get the other two,” he calls out to no one that I see but someone, I suppose, whose job it is to sit and wait for the king to need something.

  And when a king needs something, they have no trouble getting it. So my sisters appear, as if by magic, as if there’s a witch helping him and not us. Alice is draped in one horseman’s arms. Nora is squirming against another.

  Neither horseman will look directly at me.

  A third horseman, the skinniest one, comes for me. It won’t be a problem for him, of course. I can’t fight. I can barely stand on my own. My mind is racing and my heart is thumping, but my body is useless. It practically sags into him.

  “Please let go,” I say. “Please just let us all go. We have so much to do.”

  “The tower,” Dad says. “You’re not safe out there. You’ll be staying here. In the tower. Until you’ve all calmed down.”

  I try to imagine a world in which I am calm, ever again, and I can’t. I try to fight against the horseman’s grip. I cannot go to a tower. If I get locked in a tower, I will die.

  It has never felt more real.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, my voice finding strength and volume in the midst of my panic. “We can’t go to a tower! We have to break the spell! We have to do it right now! Let go!”

  “I don’t know about all that,” Dad says, as if we haven’t all been studying magic for our whole lives. “I just know what’s best for my girls.”

  I didn’t know my mouth knew how to scream anymore, but it does. And the remembering is loud.

  They carry us to the tower, past my bedroom, whe
re Olive is turning down my bed. She follows, calling my name, but I’m worried answering will only make things worse or draw his attention back to her. So I only scream louder, until I can’t anymore, the burst of energy so fleeting it’s as if it never happened at all. Within a few minutes we are in the tower, which is small and circular and the highest point in Ever aside from the Home on the Hill.

  The horsemen put us down, there’s nowhere to go, and my father, the king, crosses his arms over his chest and takes a wide stance with his legs. “You’ll be safe now,” he says.

  “We will die here,” I say, and I don’t apologize for the spit flying out with the words or the way my body leans toward him, like I might scratch or punch or hit, if I could only eat a sandwich first.

  Dad pretends not to have heard me, and Olive takes my hand, maybe to calm me down or to remind me of something or just to be in this moment with me. My sisters start to cry, all of them except for Nora, who is wrestling a horseman, and Olive squeezes my hand and I think again of the Home on the Hill being the only place higher up than we are right now, and I squeeze Olive’s hand back and there’s that shimmer again, that glint on the water, that splash of sparkly tears, that thing between us, and between me and the witch, too, and before I can take a breath to tell him to release us or to call down to the subjects of Ever or to tell my sisters it will be okay, I raise my hands and Olive’s into the air, and I am gone.

  I am gone from that tower, from that castle, from that life.

  And I am all of a sudden at the one place in all of Ever that I’ve never been but I’d recognize anywhere.

  The doorway of the Home on the Hill.

  16. REAGAN

  Their arrival is loud.

  We hear them before we see them, a crash and a screech and a frantic knocking. Willa and I rush to the door. We had been sleeping, but the sound woke us in the same moment, propelled our feet, every bit of our skin knowing something was happening.

  The ocean smell, the royal fear, so potent it chokes us both.

  It is Jane and her attendant, Olive, and they are both ghost faced and shaking.

  “Hi,” I say, because when a grand greeting is needed, I can only come up with something shallow.

  “Hi,” Jane says. “I don’t know why we’re here.”

  “I don’t know how we’re here,” Olive says. They cling to each other, and the places where they touch seem to glow. It could be moonlight sneaking in between them, or it could be drops of sweat or my own tired eyes. But it looks like something else.

  It looks a little like magic.

  Willa is still half in a dream, but she opens the door wide for the princess and her attendant. “Come on in,” she says.

  “You walked all the way here?” I ask Jane. She was struggling on the walk from Drum’s house to the moat. I can’t imagine her getting herself up the hill.

  “No,” she says. Her voice is a whisper of what it was earlier today.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “We arrived,” Olive says.

  “We were in the tower. He was locking us up. And then we were here. I don’t—I can’t be here. Not without my sisters. Are my sisters here?” Jane is talking so quietly and so quickly it’s hard to parse what she’s actually saying.

  “What tower? Who was locking you up?” I ask. I touch her shoulder to try to calm her, but instead there’s a spark of something—electricity maybe?—and we both jump from it.

  “Are my sisters here?” she asks again, louder, faster.

  “No,” I say. “Not as far as I know.”

  “We have to go back,” she says. She closes her eyes. “GO BACK,” she calls, like if she yells something, it will happen. She is skinnier right now than she was a few hours ago, and this feels like it, like the end, like the things that happen before the spell turns True. I want her to get a hold of herself, to start making sense again, but she’s gone.

  “Jane,” I say. “Breathe.”

  She looks at me like she was lost and now she’s found. “I’m scared,” she says. “I’ve never been without them.”

  I nod. I try to take in what that means, but it’s hard, since I missed my family for five years, and she is falling apart at missing them for five minutes. At first I think, I’m so much stronger than her, and roll my eyes a little. But louder than my own voice is my mother’s, reminding me there are a hundred ways to be strong.

  I give Jane a good long look, trying to see where her strength is hiding right now. It’s hard to see anything but her darting eyes, her shaky hands, the shimmer of light clinging to her elbows, her fingertips, her hair.

  “Let’s go up on the roof,” I say. “We can see the castle from there.”

  Olive breathes a sigh of relief and Jane nods and we climb the ladder to the roof.

  “There it is,” Jane says when we peer out at the castle. “The tower they’re in. It’s got a light on. I think I can see their shadows. Do you think they’re okay?”

  She looks at Olive first, who doesn’t answer. When Jane looks at me, I get caught between the truth and a lie. We’re all three of us thinking of the things men do to girls when no one is watching. “The only thing we can do to make them safe is break the spell,” I say, which is a half truth and a half hope and a half distraction.

  Jane nods. There’s a glimmer of strength, a trying to take in something terrifying. “There’s my mom,” she says, pointing to the woman in glass. “I’m glad we can see her from here. She always knew what to do.”

  “Do you miss her?” I ask.

  “It’s so much bigger than missing,” Jane says. My mother is just downstairs, but not all of her, not always. She’s right. It’s bigger than missing, when you want someone to be who they used to be, or who they are meant to be, or who you want them to be.

  “I miss my mother sometimes too,” I say.

  “When you were in AndNot?” she asks.

  “Then, yes. I missed everyone then. But my mother—even when she’s here, she can be not here.” I know I’m saying something Jane can’t understand, but it feels impossible to explain what it’s like to love someone who isn’t all the way here. Jane waits. I love her for waiting. And in that waiting, I feel a breeze of something that isn’t air. A princess wouldn’t understand how things are with my mother, I think, but in Jane’s waiting, she feels less like a princess. I’m tired of thinking of Jane as just a princess and me as just a witch and the two of us as just girls in this kingdom. Olive paces the length of the roof, and I’m tired of thinking of her as just an attendant, too.

  The queen is not the only one in an impossible box.

  “She vanishes sometimes,” I say when the breeze of not-air passes through us all, gives us all a shiver. “My mother.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Jane says. It’s direct but gentle.

  “Witches are weird,” Willa says. It is the Willa-est way to say something.

  Jane laughs. I’ve never heard her laugh. It’s louder than I thought it would be. Uglier. There’s a snort in the middle of it. The idea of a snorting princess makes me laugh. And the two of us laughing make Olive and Willa laugh. Soon the four of us are lost in that laughter. Every second is precious, the spell turning True with every breath, but the laughter feels good, necessary.

  Something happens to the sky. The color of it shifts, the way it does when a shadow moves or the sunset starts, but it is Always Day, so the light in the sky isn’t shifting. It isn’t turning darker. It’s warmer. The light feels less harsh. More like strong moonlight or a million candles.

  We all notice it. We don’t ask one another what it is.

  Instead I go on. “When we’re upset, when things are too much for us, bits of us vanish—an arm, a foot, whatever. We go hazy. My mother goes hazy sometimes. Me too.”

  Jane surveys me. “You’re all here right now.”

  “I am.”

  “But earlier today—I thought something was wrong with your shoulder. And your hand. I couldn’t s
ee your hand at one point. I thought it was just me. My vision can be—”

  “I’m sure.”

  “So you’re all here now, but your mother?”

  “She’s always missing something essential,” I say. Jane nods, and I know from the look on her face that we love our mothers in the same way—ferociously, sadly, with pain and wanting and wishing for a different past.

  “She’s sad a lot?”

  “Once a year she vanishes. The whole of her. She’s still there in the house with us, but her body is gone. It lasts a week, usually. I always wonder if maybe it will last forever, if she won’t come back one year.”

  “But she always comes back,” Jane says. She looks out at her mother again. Her fingers dance, wanting to pull her out of that box I’m sure.

  “She comes back, but something’s always missing,” I say. “A way she says a word. A lilt in her laugh. A twinkle in her eyes. A tiny, essential part of her. Gone. Forever.”

  “Once a year,” Jane says.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” Jane takes an enormous inhale and lets it out. She knows why. She doesn’t have to tell me she started believing me. It’s been all over her since she showed up.

  Her father appears on the balcony outside the tower. He waves to his subjects. And maybe also to us.

  “I hate him,” I say.

  “He’s my father,” Jane says.

  “Father” is another word like “princess,” like “witch,” like “attendant” or “girl” or “man” or “duke” or “king.” It sounds like it means something specific, but it could mean anything at all. It means what we want it to mean, and then it fails.

  For years, I suppose, he has been her father, and that has been a sweet word that holds eighteen years of memories and a certain kind of perfect love. But soon, sooner than I want to think, so soon I swear I can see it on her body right now, he will be the father who let her die, the father who wouldn’t save her, the king who locked away his daughters, the man who cared more about himself, who let things happen, who is the reason they happened to begin with.