Ever Cursed

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “Nothing’s real,” she says.

  “You’re real,” I say. “We’re real.”

  I don’t know what either of us means, except that somehow everything we know isn’t what we thought it was, but here we still are. Our history is being rewritten, and we will both have to find new ways to understand it. But right now, Jane is shaking. I move my hand from her arm all the way around to her shoulder and pull her close to me.

  Magic bubbles up between us. It is sweet and sparkly. It feels good, in the midst of all this. I think it does for her, too. I hope.

  Grandmother takes a deep breath to go on. “That young witch didn’t trust anyone. Not her own kingdom. Not the men who were once her royal subjects and friends and family. She was so scared she enchanted a candle to make sure she could watch over the kingdom of Ever,” she says. “Then a candle for every person in Ever, so she would know what was happening down below the hill. Because a kingdom in unrest releases magic. She would make it her duty to keep Ever at rest. To keep things as they were, to maintain the magic in the world, even if it meant watching Ever turn cruel and unfair and broken.”

  We know, before she says it, what else is coming.

  We know because of the way she looks ashamed at the choices she’s made, and we know because of how scared she’s been our whole lives. We know because she is draped in so many layers of fabric it seems nearly impossible one witch could perform so much magic. We know because she doesn’t mind being anchored to her chair, stuck in a living room, never able to leave, never able to be taken.

  Still, she says it. We need her to say it.

  “I was that girl.”

  “You were a princess of Ever?” Jane says, squinting like she needs to see the resemblance. It’s there. I saw it just the other day. I see it now.

  “I was,” Grandmother says.

  “And your mother was the queen?” Jane is slow, and maybe it’s from the lack of eating or maybe it’s from the flood of information, or maybe Jane is simply careful in a way that I’m not.

  “Yes. And later, when the Wars were over and the magic was gone, she had your grandmother. The first non-magical queen of Ever.” Grandmother swallows. It looks like it hurts.

  It is hurting.

  Jane takes a few steps toward Grandmother. “We’re related,” she says.

  Grandmother nods, once. She isn’t one for sentiment, and even now, she’s not rushing to hug Jane or calm her or let it be more than a fact, a moment, a truth that was hidden and is now out in the open.

  “You were that young witch,” I say.

  “You were the kidnapped princess,” Jane says.

  “I had to protect the magic,” Grandmother says. “I am still protecting the magic. This is still my kingdom. My flawed kingdom. My Ever. I want to protect it. And I want to protect us. And sometimes it’s nearly impossible, to protect both. But witches make sacrifices, just like royals.”

  “But now?” Jane asks. She’s scared. She knows, we all know, that by tomorrow, she could be the one who vanishes.

  “We were meant to stay separate. That was the agreement. The witches on the hill. The royals in their castle. And the rest of Ever in between.” Grandmother sighs. “It was working.”

  Olive shakes her head. It never worked for her. Or Abbott. Or Ever.

  “Until I cast the spell,” I say.

  Grandmother shakes her head. “Until the breaking of the spell.”

  “Because the kingdom is in unrest?” I ask. There’s so much I don’t know about magic and even more I don’t know about my family. Even Grandmother, who I thought I knew, who I thought I understood, who I thought was predictable just because she stayed in one place, is a mystery.

  “Because the kingdom is coming back together,” Grandmother says. Her eyes, ever blue, ever clear, ever dry, fill with tears. And finally, I see it. None of us knows. None of us understands. Not even Grandmother, who is really only the young princess who was stolen for being too magical, too powerful, and now just wants everyone to stay safe. “My magic is heavy,” she says. “But my magic is scared. I cast a spell to keep us separate, but your magic is big and beautiful and stubborn, Reagan,” she says. “Mine was only ever scared. Not built to last. Not built to battle against brave, bighearted magic.”

  Mom’s hand finds my shoulder. Jane’s eyes find my face.

  “Bighearted,” I say, like it’s a question, a thing I can’t possibly be. I am the reckless witch who cast the Spell of Without on all the wrong people. I am the one who ruined everything.

  Grandmother nods. “Like your mother,” she says.

  I look at my mother, who has never seemed very brave to me. Of course, there is more than one way to be brave.

  “Your mother is why we stopped telling witches what happened all those years ago,” Grandmother says. “Or who I am. Who we all were, how many witches there were, how much magic.” She says it gently, so it’s not an accusation so much as a wistful recollection. Something that hurts but also fills her with pride.

  “Because she couldn’t handle it,” Aunt Idle says. She rolls her eyes, as if she is tired of my mother, a thing that feels impossible.

  “No,” Grandmother says, shooting Aunt Idle a look that doesn’t need any extra language.

  “Your grandmother told us our history, and I couldn’t stand being banished from our castle,” Mom says. She shakes her head like she was foolish, back then, but I can tell she was brave. Is brave. “So I went there. To see the king. To demand he give us back our castle. I told him the agreement was over and that we could rule together. I told him forty-five years was a long time, and we were ready to return Ever to my mother, to the witches.”

  “Peas in a pod, you two,” Grandmother says, as she’s said before, but for the first time I believe her. My mother was not always this cautious, quiet witch. She was bold. She was brave. She still is, I know, but it looks different now. A different kind of brave, like she’s always told me.

  She closes her eyes. I close mine, too. It’s what we do when things hurt too much. It’s what we do when we need to know something we don’t want to know, when we have to understand something it will hurt to understand. It is what we do when we face the memories of the things that have hurt her. Hurt me. Hurt us all.

  Then we open them again.

  Sometimes, the opening hurts too.

  “He didn’t take it well,” my mother says. She bows her head. “He said he was king. He said we should be grateful. And when he was done, he said I knew what I was getting into, when I came to the castle.” I can’t see her face, but I can tell from the sound of her voice, the choppy rhythm of it, that her cheeks are flooded with tears.

  I take her hand, and it helps but also probably doesn’t, really.

  Olive takes her other hand.

  She was brave and determined. She thought she could make things better; she wanted the royals to be kinder; she wanted to soften them. Like me, she came to the castle sure she could fix something.

  Like me, she was wrong.

  “I didn’t know what I was getting into,” my mother says, like it’s the first time she’s said it, like she’s never before imagined that it wasn’t her fault, not at all, not even a little. “I never could have imagined.”

  Grandmother looks out the window, to the castle, to the place where she used to live.

  “For witches,” she says, “we don’t know much at all.”

  “For royals,” Jane says, “we don’t either.”

  The Enchanted Candle flickers pink and blue and red, from the things we are trying to understand.

  Down below, hundreds of other candles flicker hundreds of other colors.

  No golden flames anywhere.

  25. JANE

  I join Reagan’s grandmother by the window. Olive does too. Willa beside her.

  “There’s still the rest of the kingdom,” Olive says at last, a little shy and a little angry at once. Because again we are witches and royals who have forgotten to care about e
veryone else.

  “Yes, of course,” I say, as if I hadn’t forgotten Olive’s sister in her box, as if I weren’t so enamored with the bubbling up of magic inside me that I’d forgotten what I’d done.

  “The spell will have to be broken,” Reagan says. “You know about breaking spells.”

  “I don’t know anything about breaking a spell I cast. I’m still trying to understand the breaking of a spell you cast.” After five years of hating Reagan for her impetuous spell-casting, for not thinking through all the repercussions, I can’t believe I’m just like her. Every bit as reckless and thoughtless and selfish. Casting a spell, forgetting I’d have to Undo it. Not being sure how it all works.

  “You have to break it before it turns True. You’re not eighteen yet?” Willa asks.

  “Not yet. Another month.”

  “Well. Then you have a month before it’s True.” I can tell that Willa loves studying magic the way I’ve loved studying the kingdom.

  “A True Spell can’t be broken?” I ask.

  “Once it’s True, the effects are permanent. So even if a True Spell was broken, the Spellbound would never fully recover,” Willa says. “Some spells have the breaking built in. A rule made when the spell is cast that tells the enchanted how to fix it. But a spell like yours, like Reagan’s, that doesn’t have the Undoing baked into it—a spell like that has to be broken before it’s True. Right, Reagan?” Willa looks proud of herself, but my head is spinning. We were told that magic had a logic, had good reasons, but I didn’t understand what that meant, how intricate their rules were, how delicate the whole thing was.

  “You’ve studied a lot more than I have, Willa,” Reagan says, and the way she looks at her cousin, I can see the love right there on the surface, all soft and easy and sweet. It’s the same love I have for my sisters.

  “I don’t know everything,” Willa says. “But I know we need to break these spells soon. Now. For the people of Ever to survive.”

  “And my sisters.”

  “And your mother,” Reagan’s mother says.

  “My mother, the queen.”

  “One of many queens,” Reagan’s mother says. Because if her mother was once princess, then maybe she is meant to be queen. Maybe Reagan is. Willa could be queen, or one of the other witches. It’s possible I am not the heir to the throne, that being queen is not my destiny. It seemed like a straight line. The oldest daughter of the Queen of Ever.

  Except that was never the true story.

  We all look at Reagan’s mother. Bethly is a serious woman with curly hair and a strong jaw and a stronger silence. She looks spent from telling her part of the story. Reagan’s grandmother does too, all of us exhausted by history.

  “It’s time,” Bethly says.

  “No,” Reagan’s grandmother says.

  “We can’t be afraid forever,” Bethly says. It sounds like it is hard to say. That choosing not to be afraid is, somehow, terrifying. Being afraid is safe. It keeps you locked up in the Home on the Hill, casting small spells and watching a flame to make sure everything is okay. She’s spent practically a whole lifetime pretending there is no magic tucked into the very fabric of the kingdom, pretending every person she watches from her Home on the Hill might not be a witch, and pretending that every witch wandering the halls of her home couldn’t someday be a queen.

  Being afraid means not seeing the way your father, the king, looks at attendants and tutors, chefs and visiting royals. That fear is comfortable, like a castle you never have to leave, like a story told so often you never wonder if it’s true or not.

  “It’s not safe,” Reagan’s grandmother says.

  “I know,” Bethly says. “But nothing’s safe.”

  She walks over to Willa. She watches the flame as it threatens to lick the ceiling. The whole Home could burn down. Ever could crumble into flames. Women could end up in boxes forever. Men could trap them in the woods. The night may never return. That spell too will turn True in another day, on Reagan’s birthday. And then, if Willa’s right, it will be nearly impossible to break. So many rules at work that we didn’t know about, so many witches we’d never heard of, so many secrets buried all over the kingdom we thought we knew, even though we’d never seen an inch of it.

  “The kingdom was never really at rest, anyway,” Reagan’s mother says. She leans forward, closes her eyes, and blows out the flame. Like it’s a birthday candle. Like it’s nothing.

  26. REAGAN

  When our candle is blown out, the second it unflickers, the candles below are extinguished too. One minute they are flicking their dangerous colors, and the next, Ever is just in Always Day, not a candle to be seen. Not a speck of extra light on the horizon.

  We can hear them gasp.

  We can hear the men of Ever whisper and wonder at what is happening to their little kingdom.

  Grandmother closes her eyes. She’s told a story today that’s been weighing on her for years, heavier than decades’ worth of spells wrapped around her waist. “Stay here,” she says to Mom and Willa and me. “Let these girls go. Let them go and work out their magic themselves. Let them fix it. Let them unwind it. If you go with them—we can’t put that back together. We won’t ever have this again. We won’t be safe.”

  I’ve wondered, from time to time, what my grandmother might have looked like when she was a girl, when she was seven or twelve or almost eighteen like me. But I think I can see it now. She is that little girl, thirteen years old, stolen away from her home, which just so happened to be a castle, and her mother, who happened to be the queen. Her eyelashes flutter with nervousness, and she keeps looking around like she wants to remember every detail of the life we are living this moment, before it might change.

  I wonder if that’s what she did, when they took her.

  “What did they do to you?” I ask.

  Grandmother looks surprised that there could be more questions. She’s told the story that’s gone untold for years. And it turns out she’s bad at predicting how we feel about it.

  “Kings and princes have been doing the same things to princesses and witches for ages,” she says.

  “And to attendants,” Olive says.

  Grandmother’s surprise grows. “Yes,” she says. “I suppose that’s true. Even when there was magic. Always. It was a king’s kingdom, and we all suffer for it.”

  “In very different ways. With different consequences.” Olive’s voice is clear, and I see how similar they are, Grandmother and Olive. They have both been waiting their whole lives to speak, thinking maybe it would never happen. They are both finding voices that were buried, and they are both finding their balance right now, right here.

  But Grandmother has had power her whole life, and Olive is just starting to wonder if some is meant for her, too. Suffering for my grandmother is living in the Home on the Hill, which is secluded but beautiful, filled with food and love and flickering candlelight. Suffering for Olive, for Abbott and Bess and so many others in Ever, is more base, more immediate, bigger.

  “Stay here, Reagan,” Grandmother says again, not quite looking at Jane or even Olive. “You’ve tried. You’ve helped these witches find their magic. They’ve made their own messes. You belong here. With me. It’s better this way.”

  She can’t leave, of course, but I see that she’ll never want to either. Maybe she cast hundreds of spells, and the layers upon layers of skirts weighing her down are the price she pays. Or maybe, maybe, she cast hundreds of heavy spells so that she’d never have to leave, never be taken away again. Maybe the spells are bits of bravery, or maybe they are signs of fear. I don’t think I’ll ever know.

  I don’t think she knows.

  But I will not cast a hundred spells. I will not sit in a chair and give orders. I will not let my magic turn True and wait to see how it ends up changing the world.

  “We have to keep Ever at rest,” Grandmother says, her words on a loop. So much is changing here and now, but she’s trying to hold on to the way things have been.<
br />
  “We can do better than a kingdom at rest,” I say. I see now that the golden flame, all the golden flames, were meant to keep things predictable and calm and contained. But there’s more than the golden glow of a calm kingdom. There’s more to life than waiting on top of a hill and hoarding your magic.

  Grandmother wants nothing to change, but of course everything already has. It’s too late for the things she wants. It was too late when I cast my spell and too late when Mom tried to talk to the king and too late, probably, the second they declared it the War We Won.

  We can’t be at rest when the king still has his crown. I started something, or continued something that had started long before I showed up. And now it’s time to finish it.

  And besides, there is no flame that tells us how Ever is anymore, but we know. We can hear the bellows and see the hundreds of glass boxes catching the sun’s flare, reflecting it out.

  That candle had glowed for years, and with one breath of air it was gone.

  Magic doesn’t have to be forever.

  Even the strongest flames are extinguished.

  Spells are meant to be broken.

  “We have to go,” I say. “We have spells to break.”

  “We have magic to do,” Olive says. Her fingers dance, like they are itching to experiment with her new abilities.

  “We have spells to Undo,” Jane says.

  She has never sounded more like a queen.

  27. JANE

  We run through Ever. Running is doubly hard, from the spell placed on me and the spell I cast. But we run, because time is running out. We have to get the crown. We don’t have a plan for how or when, but we run—me, Reagan, Olive, Bethly, and Willa, who is the youngest and the surest and the most ready to fight.

  “Oh, Jane,” Bethly says over and over and over again until it stops sounding like my name and becomes an admonishment of what kind of princess I am. Or what kind of witch, I guess. Or maybe just what kind of person.