Cinders

Ding, Dong…

The church bell sang the midnight chorus. Beatrice plucked frayed edges off the hair between her fingers, feeling the braid unravel in brittle, coarse fragments with just a swift tug of the wrist. She counted three chimes when the stairs creaked right on queue. Each ding, ding, ding echoed the footsteps scrape, scrape, scraping down to the butler’s pantry and to the little door where the girl would disappear into the night. It was their nightly routine—Beatrice, ensuring the girl didn’t deviate, watching from her open window; and the girl, trudging down the pebbled pathway, melting into the landscape until the next sundown.

The girl, always faithful to her chores. She dusted the furniture, swept the halls, scrubbed the floorboards, and weeded the garden. All things she would have done when she was still alive.

But now, no one dared to approach her.

The corpse’s presence tormented her daughters especially. Regina, her eldest, had lost so much weight she fainted if she walked farther than to the carriages by herself. She told Beatrice she couldn’t eat without smelling the black smoke that still perfumed the girl’s charcoaled flesh, and imagining the yolks of her breakfast eggs running like the girl’s eyes had. Edith was in no better shape. The youngest woke up each night plagued by dreams. Of rats eating away her skin, of birds clawing out her eyes, of the girl cutting her toes off one by one—each dream varied. But each night, holding a kitchen knife by her side as she watched with bloodshot eyes her candles burn down their wicks, Edith sat upright in bed before she eventually fell victim to another dream.

Beatrice told her daughters it was the girl’s fault this happened. But neither them nor herself believed that anymore.

“My dear gems,” Beatrice said one morning, as Regina let her oats grow cold and Edith drank her sixth cup of tea. “I’ve found a way to remove the curse.” She set the royal invite into Regina’s cold, fragile hand. “There’s a Harvest Ball at the end of this week. The Prince has invited all the noble families.”

“You think we care about dancing?” Edith asked, biting a roll like she was biting the head off a chicken.

Beatrice smiled. “I think you care about killing Ella once and for all.”

The girl was supposed to have been her adoptive daughter. But her husband loved that girl more than he ever loved Beatrice—spoiled her with spider-silk lace and mermaid pearls, talking songbirds and enchanted slippers, and anything else he found on his travels. He never gave Beatrice or her daughters more than the estate he left them after he contracted tuberculosis. She was glad he died in the old cottage. She wanted the girl to have died, too.

But that was the cursed part: the girl had grown favored by the faeries. She had once told the servants a faerie had seen her wearing her precious slippers, and her songbirds told them of her sad, little tale. And they actually believed her life as a maid was miserable. Of course the girl didn’t mention how Beatrice had educated her, clothed her, given her a purpose. No, instead she told the fae that Beatrice had stolen most of her precious gifts. She told them Beatrice was wicked. According to the servant, the girl had said the fae queen let her dance with her sons, the princes of the Wood—princes even more powerful than the mortal prince Beatrice had spent years preparing her daughters to seduce. And yet little Ella danced with the fae princes. They wanted to wed Ella, once upon a time.

Edith helped Regina into her dress the afternoon of the ball. Her corset strung up easily, the purple of her dress matching the rouge under Edith’s eyes. “Let us help,” Edith told Beatrice. “I’ve wanted to run a stake through her heart for weeks now.” She strapped her kitchen knife with a girdle beneath her gown.

Regina’s eyes fluttered shut. “I can barely stand, Mum.”

Beatrice put her hand on Regina’s shoulder. In her daughter’s face, she saw her own. She saw the face she was to wear, not Regina, as the priest read her the last rites that were once read to her own mother, and her mother before. It wasn’t the face her daughter should own. “You must. Let Edith carry you to the castle if needs be. But you both need to get to safety.” She reached a hand out to touch Edith’s face, holding both of them. “This is my fight, and I intend to finish it.”

As the carriage and the few remaining servants drove off by the half-past-six bell, the church sat as a silhouette, obscuring the sunfall like a Sphinx in the desert. Beatrice used to overhear her husband tell Ella stories of sphinxes. They were one of Beatrice’s favorite creatures. Those particular nights, she’d stand by the closed bedroom door and listen to his decadent voice recount stories of feline-bodied men and women, the size of warships and with eagle wings made of pure gold. How they guarded treasure troves from arrogant thieves that tried to worm their way past their claws. Like mice beneath a lion’s paw, they’d sink their fangs into their filthy bodies, strip limb after limb off, lapping up the blood of their foes. They protected their treasures. And she would protect her daughters the very same way.

She tried to put an end to the girl once before. Beatrice beat her with a belt when the servants told her the story of the fae princes. Called her ungrateful, a liar, told the girl she sold all their prized possessions to save them from the famine—not just Ella’s trinkets, Beatrice lost everything from marrying her father. She’d let Ella sleep in the same bed her father died in. If the faeries really did love her, then they could collect her themselves. On her way out of the cottage, Beatrice grabbed the glass slippers from the ground and told her she’d sell them, too, since she was so wicked.

But the girl reached for a piece of kindling in the fire, wrapping her bare hand around the burning stick, and swung it at Beatrice’s head.

Beatrice felt nothing when the stick slammed into her cheek. She felt nothing when she pried the stick from the girl’s hand and shoved the girl’s head into the hearth’s cornerstone. She felt nothing as the cottage lit up around her like a field of poppies, and Regina shook her to her senses, and the two of them fled while Ella’s body turned to char.

In the hallway, she heard the straw broom scrape, scrape, scrape against the naked hardwood floor. Beatrice clenched the ax close to her chest. “Ella, dear,” she called around the corner. The scraping continued, like rat claws pawing the boards in slow, calculated strokes. Beatrice lifted her voice. “It must be so uncomfortable sleeping in the cinders of the old cottage. I bet they’re as warm as the Arctic, now.”

The sweeping continued.

“I’ve decided to offer you an agreement, Ella. If you go back to the Wood, never go near my daughters ever again, I’ll give you your slippers back.”

The sweeping stopped.

Beatrice caught her breath, forcing her voice to stay strong. “That’s all you want, isn’t it? Those ugly, glass slippers. They’re in your old bedroom, you know. I’ll let you take them and go to the Wood, back to your cursed princes. Only if you leave my daughters and I alone. Forever.”

The broom dropped, and a guttural groan bubbled out from the girl.

“You can skip the apologies. Just go.”

The air was still. No scraping, no hobbling feet, no deathly groans. Just the sound of Beatrice’s heartbeat tapping against her throat with each second. It took the memory of her daughters, full of despair and rage, rotting away, to boil enough courage in her veins. She turned her head down the hall.

Ding, dong . . . The church bell echoed through the halls.

The girl stood a breath away from Beatrice’s face.

The girl let out a screech as parched as her skin, and Beatrice swung the ax. The girl ducked, pushing her fingers towards Beatrice’s eyes and clawing at her scar. Beatrice kicked her, broke her stick-thin leg until it cracked, and swung again. The ax got lodged in the girl’s skull. She fell to one knee and bit Beatrice’s arm. Beatrice yanked her forward, into the wall, again and again until both the ax and her arm were free. Then she swung down like a woodsman, and the ax blade cut straight through her spine. Beatrice watched her cracked head roll like a die, until the jaw tore free and the skull fell flat on her remaining teeth.

The girl stopped moving.

Beatrice dropped the ax, then fell with her back against the wall. The church bells rang. The girl’s body lay still. Beatrice felt the scratches on her face, the bite mark on her arm, and the age in her bones all catch up to her at once. She cried, smiling.

At the ball, Beatrice stepped through the open doors into the throng of glittering dancers. An orchestra played sweet waltzes. The air smelled of the finest roast meats and richest of cakes. The room felt warm but light, and glowed like a field of marigolds.

Edith and Regina were standing with the crown prince and some of his advisors. He was dressed in a feline mask and had golden wings on his shoulders. Regina sat in a chair, waving her hands profusely like she always did when telling a story. Edith slapped the prince on his shoulder when she spotted Beatrice, and pointed towards her.