The boxes cover the empty gardens as we look this way and that. Glinting across town. Startled into stillness by the moat.
Women in boxes. Girls trapped behind glass.
“What did you do?” Olive asks. She looks at herself, decidedly moving and unboxed. She looks up, as if a glass box might be dropping from the sky to get her at any moment too.
But there is no glass box for Olive. Or for me. Or, of course, for Jane.
“I—” Jane starts. “I—” She keeps shaking her head, back and forth and back and forth. She rubs her arms.
“How?” Olive asks. She goes to her half sister in the box. She presses her hands against the glass, bangs on it, but it doesn’t move an inch.
“The way all magic happens,” I say. “A moment of necessity, a moment of clarity. When something feels essential. But this isn’t essential. Shouldn’t be essential.” What I don’t say, but what we’re all thinking, is that this looks more like the kind of spell I might cast than the kind of spell a starving princess could conjure up. I check my waist to make sure there’s nothing new affixed there, that I haven’t accidentally let my magic get the best of me again. I’m covered with my dozens of layers, but there’s nothing new on top of the thick flannel from the Spell of Always Day. “Jane? Why would you do this? When we’re finally collecting some of the things we need?”
Jane is frozen. Not like the people in their boxes. Her hands can move, and her eyes can blink. But she is stuck in one place, trying to understand what her raised arms and rage have done.
“I wanted them to know how I feel,” she says at last. “To have the people you love trapped. I wanted them to understand. I didn’t mean—I thought about what it would be like if they had their wives and mothers and daughters in boxes. But I didn’t—I’m not a witch. It was just a thought. I’m not magical.” Even saying it, I think she knows it’s not true. I think she’s known for a while. There is magic among us. And it isn’t just mine, and it isn’t just Willa’s. Jane’s spell isn’t strong enough to reach a powerful witch like me or Willa. We are free from glass, and so is Olive. My heart pounds.
I take Jane in. There is one thing that makes a witch a witch. It won’t be hard to see. It will be right there, wrapped around her waist, forever.
Witches can’t hide the things we do. We can’t pretend away our mistakes. They never leave. We are nothing like royals, who can pretend it’s someone else’s fault, who can blame other kingdoms or their subjects or witches on top of a hill. We live with our decisions.
Even the ones that didn’t feel like decisions at all.
“Jane,” I say. She sees it. Olive sees it. Willa sees it. Abbott sees it. Anyone could see it.
Around her tiny waist there is a skirt. It falls all the way to the ground. It is blue. It is wool. It looks itchy and uncomfortable.
It will be on her forever.
The weight of a spell, wrapped around her waist.
“Jane,” I say again, to make sure she’s really paying attention, something I know is hard for her lately. “You’re a witch.”
21. JANE
It is an impossible thing.
I have only ever worn my dresses, hand-stitched by Olive, loosening every day, promises of all the ways in which I am dying. I have only ever worn one dress at a time, one color, one layer of skirt, one long line from my head to my toes. It’s what princesses do; it’s what princesses wear; it is how it has always been and how it will always be.
Except. There is now another skirt wrapped around me, bluer than my blue dress, heavier than I would ever wear in May, a material not right for royalty. “Take it off!” I say, because when something strange is tight around your waist, you want it gone.
“It won’t—” Reagan starts. “I’ll try.” And she does. But there’s no button or zipper. The fabric doesn’t pull or slide. It doesn’t tear. It’s not going anywhere. “The skirts are permanent. They’re forever,” Reagan says. “That’s why we’re supposed to be careful with our spells. Even Slow ones. The spells can break, but the skirts are forever. That’s why my grandmother is stuck in one place. Her magic is too heavy. She’s done too much, over the years.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I say. My voice shakes, and I hold back tears. The skirt makes me more aware of my waist and therefore more aware of my body, which I have been desperate to avoid thinking about for five years.
“But you did,” Reagan says.
“You did,” Olive says, her voice still a screech and a shatter as she watches Bess’s frozen figure.
“How?” I ask, but part of me—the part that felt my arms rise up high—knows. We sit in the uncertainty of what’s happened. We listen to all the families of Ever cry and yell and curse the witches, not knowing it’s their own princess who cast the spell.
“It’s a strong one,” Reagan says. “Strong and strange. You have strong, strange, big magic.” The glass boxes from my spell aren’t like the one Reagan’s magic made that my mother is stuck inside. That one was a perfect rectangle. These new boxes, from what I can see, are odd shapes. Some are cramping their prisoners; others are big enough to fit ten women when there’s only one. Some have smooth edges or points or cloudy glass. Some, like Bess’s, are lifted up from the ground, floating a few feet above it, untethered.
I try to take it all in, but it’s too much, so I keep closing my eyes, like that will give me an escape from what I’ve done. “I’m a princess,” I say. “I’m meant to be queen.”
“You’re a witch.” The voice that says it is hard. Durable. There’s no question mark. It comes from behind us and is accompanied by a smattering of fast-falling footsteps, a blur of a woman who is now here, as fast as any magic could make her appear. She is old and familiar. Last I saw her, she was trying to feed me lemon cake and was eyeing a beautiful clock. She is someone’s wife, so she should be in a box. That’s the spell I accidentally cast. All wives and mothers and daughters in boxes, except for witches.
But here she is anyway: Lady Lill.
“You’re a witch. I’m a witch,” she says simply. I look at her curiously, worried she’s ill, ranting, suffering some sort of brain injury. But she looks clear. “We’re all witches.” She isn’t breathing hard, even though she came here in a hurry. She isn’t sweating. She doesn’t look like she’s walked, much less run, the mile between her home and Abbott’s.
“You’re a friend of witches,” Reagan says, trying to correct her. But Lady Lill shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “I’m a witch.”
Her hands go to the buttons of her dress. It’s the same dress she was wearing when we went to visit her. Long. Black. Odd. For a reflexive moment, this seems strange. But only for a moment. I remind myself that a person might have one dress, and nothing else. Days ago, it never would have occurred to me. The thought of a closet with one dress inside would have made me laugh. Or at least wrinkle my forehead in confusion.
I do not miss that girl, that princess I am saying goodbye to. I do not miss that small life, that dreamy ignorance, the way Ever looked from my side of the moat.
My arms start to lift again, wanting to cast a spell to bring new dresses to the subjects of Ever, but most of the people who like to wear dresses are in boxes, and the rest need so much more than silk and tulle and a pleated skirt.
Lady Lill unbuttons the dress from her neck to her toes. When she’s done, she slips the whole thing off. I look away; a princess is meant to stay modest.
I have always been good at looking away when it’s important.
But I do not want to be that kind of princess anymore. I take a breath and look right at her. She’s not naked. On top she has a velvet blouse that used to be nice. On the bottom she has skirts. A dozen of them at least, maybe more. Some of them shimmer. Some of them look heavy. Some of them are lacy.
I touch my new skirt, wishing it was shimmering, wishing it was made of lace or silk or chiffon—something more fit for a princess. Then I quiet those thoughts. I am not owed a sp
arkly skirt, a castle, an attendant, the life I was living. The skirt I have is right for the magic I performed. It is mine. It is what I deserve.
“Why are you here? How are you here?” Reagan asks. Willa touches the layers of fabric like they are her friends, like she’s been searching for them. I look for Olive, who has been quiet for all of this. Olive, who has done nothing but everything I’ve wanted for years piled on years and now is standing next to her boxed-up sister, broken.
It is a familiar scene. Olive knows how to stand by someone who is Spellbound. My thirteenth year stretched on and on in a rage of loneliness, and Olive would sit with me while I let out my tears, ripped at my skin, stuffed sheets into my mouth to stop it from wanting.
It’s my turn to go to Olive now. She may not want me. She may blame me for the things my arms did in anger; she may hate the way she’s spent her life locked to my side. But if she hates me for anything, she must hate me the most for looking away.
I looked away.
“I’m not going to look away,” I say at her shoulder, and she lets me stay by her.
“My sister,” she says, desperate and raw.
“I know,” I say, because I do, because my sisters are there, in the tower, Without. I touch her arm, and there’s that shimmer again, that magic, and she gasps at it.
“I don’t want that,” she says. I slip my hand from her arm and wonder if it’s still there for her. The afterglow.
It’s all over me.
“I came to tell you your past,” Lady Lill says. “But also to give you my future.” She reaches into a pocket of her discarded dress. She’s been hiding something in its folds.
Not something. The thing.
The clock.
The clock from the oldest person in Ever.
It is ticking time away. And the second she hands it over, it stops. “He wanted me in a box,” she says. “He was disappointed when I wasn’t in there. They all want us—” She stops herself, emotion taking over. “You need this.”
The clock is in my hands.
All that’s left is the crown.
22. REAGAN
“Tell us,” I say. I know Lady Lill is meant to be respected, if she is in fact an elder witch. But right now there’s no time for polite talking-around. The magical clock has stopped ticking. Ever is frozen. And the spell turns True so soon that I can feel the skirt around my waist tightening. A Slow Spell is a loose skirt. It lets you breathe. A True Spell doesn’t leave any room between its band and your skin. A True Spell has a skirt that hurts. Only a pinch. But a pinch forever adds up to a lot.
“It should be your grandmother,” Lady Lill says. “She’d be angry if I told you everything. She doesn’t know—I shouldn’t have my magic anymore. But I hid it. I pretended that it was gone. Your grandmother and I are the only ones old enough to remember what used to be.”
“You know my grandmother?”
Lady Lill bows her head.
“I pretended my magic was gone, like everyone else’s. I pretended to not be a witch. I didn’t want to go to the Hill. I wanted to stay here. I was in love, and I thought it was worth pretending, worth acting as if my magic was gone too.” I can’t piece her words together, can’t quite seem to make them mean anything. “It’s never worth it, hiding your magic. Not even for love.” She shakes her head. If the clock she’s brought us isn’t ticking, it must mean Drum Drascall is dead. And maybe she’s mourning him. But the bigger grief is all the time she spent being someone else, tucking away her skirts, denying being one of us.
“I thought witches had to live in the Home on the Hill,” I say.
“I thought witches didn’t fall in love,” Willa says. My body blushes without my permission. I don’t want Abbott to see, but he’s right there, seeing me. Someday I’ll tell Willa that Grandmother doesn’t like it, but witches can fall in love. Someday I may even tell Abbott. But not today.
“Maybe you’re not really a witch,” I say, focusing back on Lady Lill. I’m almost hopeful. I want there to be rules, and I want them to be simple. Maybe I’ll stop messing up if someone can tell me what exactly it is to be a witch and how to do it right.
Lady Lill thinks it over. “Witches have magic. That’s it. That’s the metric. If you have magic, you are a witch. You were still a witch when you lived in AndNot, Reagan. You’ll still be a witch if they make you leave again. I’m still a witch, being out here, hiding everything. It can look however you want it to look. It can be whatever you want it to be. Don’t let anyone tell you what a witch is.”
I have so many more questions, but Lady Lill walks away without another word; she doesn’t want to be the one to answer them. And before we have a chance to call out to tell her to slow down, she is gone.
I look at Jane and Olive and Abbott. And all four of us look at what has become of Ever. It’s not a place I ever loved. But maybe Jane loved it once.
And Grandmother loved it. That’s why we stayed. And it kept us safe.
Mostly.
Now there’s not much left to love. Just the sound of people crying, preparing for a battle against an invisible magic. My grandmother told me about the ridiculous ways people try to fight against magic. With swords and cannons and rifles. With fists ready to bang on things, ready to punch out a perpetrator, but you can’t punch or shoot or cut the air. You can’t fight with magic. It just is.
And even if you hide it in a home at the top of a hill, it’s still there.
“Are we going?” I ask the people in front of me, who I guess are my friends or maybe something else that doesn’t have a name yet.
“Yes,” Jane says. She gives a last look to the castle. Her sisters in their boxes can still be seen in the tower. Her father is gone. She waves an arm, but I’m sure they can’t see this far, or if they can, they’re not looking in this direction. Maybe they’re not allowed to. But she does it anyway, because she is theirs and they are hers and the fight continues. I love her for the bit of bravery.
“I don’t—” Olive starts, looking at Bess and her mother and the hundreds of glass boxes ahead of us that we will have to weave our way through.
“Go,” Abbott says.
“You should go,” she says. “I’ll stay here. You go.”
“Olive,” Abbott says. “You all don’t need me. I don’t belong in the Home on the Hill.”
“Well, neither do I,” Olive says. But Abbott only smiles. He knows something. I know it too. Jane is knowing it. But Olive doesn’t know it. Not quite. Not yet.
“You can both come,” I say, because I want to walk next to Abbott all the way there. “Please come,” I say, because in spite of the way these days don’t end and in spite of the way it feels to be a witch in Ever who everyone hates, I still have room to want him close by, to smell the ends of a fire on his clothes, to know he’s there, breathing in time with me, seeing the same things I’m seeing.
That’s what I missed most, in AndNot. The simple feeling of seeing the same ocean as someone else. Watching the same seagull poke the waves. I want to see whatever we’re going to see next to him. I want to see it at the same time.
But Abbott is only taking steps back, away from us.
“You don’t need me for this,” he says. “Look at you all.”
I want him nearby, but I know he’s right. I see what he sees. Olive stands tall and doesn’t look at Jane for permission to be anymore. She leans against the glass case with her sister inside and closes her eyes like she’s conjuring something.
And maybe she is.
She raises her hands, dragging them against glass all the way into the air.
There’s a crack in the glass. Maybe it was there before. Or maybe it happened just now. I don’t know where one spell ends and another begins.
Jane misses it. She is already bounding after Lady Lill, letting weeds and thorns try to trap her ankles, deliciously unafraid of the men who are shooting at the sky, rushing at the moat, waving their fists at the Home on the Hill. There isn’t room for fear. Not an
ymore. I suppose Abbott sees that. But he sees me, too.
“You’re surviving,” he says.
“Barely,” I say. “I’m a mess. I’m—I keep getting involved and running all over and I haven’t thought anything through and I didn’t listen to you and then when I did listen to you, it still wasn’t right and I like the princesses and I miss my mother and I don’t want to be sent away but I can’t stay here and, Abbott, I’m not sure this spell will break. And the things they say about me might be true. And maybe when those royals touched us in the woods they didn’t mean to—and it wasn’t as bad as what happened to my mother—and I didn’t handle it with her quietness and her grace.” It topples out of me, things I haven’t wanted to say to Jane or my mother or Willa or myself but that rush out at Abbott and his beautiful face and his strong hands and kind heart.
“There’s more than one way to survive,” Abbott says. They are my mother’s words, and they sounded wise and wonderful when she said them. But I hadn’t thought they could be about me. I’d given them to Jane and Abbott and the other princesses and all the people of Ever with their many flaws.
The words are a kind of forgiveness I thought wasn’t meant for a witch like me.
Willa runs after Jane, leaving me alone with Abbott.
Olive kisses the glass her sister is stuck behind and runs after Willa. There, around her waist, a light yellow silk skirt appears. It doesn’t stop her. Not even for a second. I imagine the silk is light and soft and feels good, hitting her legs. She catches up to Jane and Lady Lill quickly. Olive has eaten and slept and loved and remembered and hoped for years. She can’t wear a crown and she can’t say no to the king, but she can run so goddamn fast I’m worried I’ll never catch up, even with all my magic.
“Go,” Abbott says.
And I do.
But I kiss him first. Because if I’m going to survive my own way, it can look however I want it to look. It can be messy, it can be brave, it can be scared, and it can be a kiss on the mouth with a boy I might love, no matter what Grandmother says.
Ever Cursed Page 19
