Ever Cursed Page 3

  “I am older.”

  “And wiser?” she asks. She hasn’t forgiven me.

  “I don’t know,” I say, because witches tell the truth.

  “Mmm.” Aunt Idle would have banished me forever if she could have. We are trying to prove we are not who they think we are, she said the day I cast the spell. What have you done, but shown them their stories of us are right? And now you’ve gotten rid of the queen, too? A kingdom with no queen? What were you thinking, Reagan? Her voice had gotten louder and louder with every impossible-to-answer question. We’re supposed to protect our magic, not hurl it at young girls.

  “It’s up to them to break the spell,” I say. “Hopefully, they’ll—”

  “You’ve learned nothing in your time away,” Aunt Idle interrupts. “They’ll do what they can do to break the spell. But it’s you who has to Undo it. The real work is yours.” I have an awful feeling gnawing at my insides. A hollowness carving me up. I don’t think regular humans can be filled with emptiness, but as a witch it isn’t an unusual sensation. To be absolutely bursting with absence. Sometimes parts of us even vanish: a finger, a shoulder blade, a foot—gone until the feeling passes.

  In worse circumstances, if the kingdom itself is in unrest, a whole witch might vanish. Forever. After the princess was taken eighty years ago, a great battle broke out between the witches and the royals. Ten witches disappeared. First their feet. Then their hips. Their hair went last.

  It’s a detail they never leave out when they warn us about what could be.

  Ten witches. Gone. Because of a war that went too far. Because of a kidnapped princess who was never found and kingdoms that all blamed one another. Because of unrest. It’s why we watch the Enchanted Candle on the kitchen counter. It’s why we keep the peace. It’s why my aunt Idle looks at me the way she does now. The only way for us to be safe is for the kingdom to be safe. So we protect them, and that protects us.

  “I needed the king to suffer,” I say weakly, “so I hurt the princesses. You all taught me about justice, and that was—”

  “You didn’t just hurt princesses,” Aunt Idle says. “You think of spells as small. But they are huge. A spell is like an infection, Reagan. It gets to everyone nearby. It can spread through an entire kingdom. Making the whole place diseased.” Aunt Idle sighs. I’d forgotten about the force of her sighs. They are hurricanes of disapproval. It’s awful to be caught in one.

  In the distance, there’s the melody of the song the townspeople sing whenever a princess comes of age. It’s a rollicking song about princes and princesses and royal weddings and beautiful babies and growing up. Willa and I used to sing it to each other, as a joke. Now it sounds sinister.

  The empty feeling grows, and I watch as my pinkie finger vanishes.

  A new smell wafts in, covering up the roasted-pig smell. Aunt Idle’s nose wrinkles from it. My mother’s, too. My grandmother’s. A too-sweet, dense smell. Royal fear.

  When it’s from the king, the smell of royal fear has hints of coffee. With the queen, back when she was not in a box, there would be an undertone of pine. And when the princesses are afraid, we can smell a touch of the ocean.

  Without princess fear, we’d never smell the ocean all the way in Ever.

  And there it is. It’s the smell I lived with for five years on the shores of AndNot. It’s faint, but it’s there. The ocean.

  “The princesses,” I say. “The princesses are afraid.”

  “But not the king,” Aunt Idle says. “He hasn’t been afraid a single day since you cast your spell. Not one moment.”

  “That can’t be true,” I say. “His wife is—and his children are—”

  “Yes. Well. It’s quite a disease, your Spell of Without. The men, they simply love it, most of them. Even the king. He pretends not to. But we know. It’s smelled of nothing but burning wax and dead fields and the ocean for five years.”

  Aunt Idle doesn’t blink. She watches it all sink in. My failure. My other pinkie vanishes, and a part of my knee. Gone, just like that. She watches my invisible parts, satisfied. They’ll come back. They always do. But it’s never the same.

  “Ever has always loved keeping people in their places,” my aunt says. “Witches on a hill. Princesses in a castle. And now a queen in a box.”

  My heart sinks further and further down. A thousand skirts wouldn’t be as heavy as my heart right now.

  “Anyway, I suppose it’s time to celebrate,” Aunt Idle says in her least celebratory voice. “Fried berries for breakfast.” It’s her way of dismissing us all, and it works. My aunts and cousins go to the kitchen to prepare the food. They don’t say another word to me.

  The Home on the Hill is chilly in the mornings. At noon sun floods the place and warms up the floors and the walls and the air itself. But right now, without the help of the sun, our home is the temperature that witches manifest—forty degrees on the dot.

  I am missing the warm breezes in AndNot. And a hundred other things that made the last five years bearable.

  It’s only Willa who stays beside me. “You know Aunt Idle,” she says. “Always cranky.” She shrugs, like it’s nothing, what I’ve done, and I love her for it, but it’s bullshit. Still, I give her another hug. She has a few more layers of chiffon skirts around her waist than when I left. They are featherlight and lovely. She’s been busy in my time away, but only doing small, gentle spells.

  I’m jealous without meaning to be.

  “Let’s have a picnic!” she says, like no time at all has passed, like we are just two witch cousins making our way in Ever. We used to have an enchanted picnic every week, sitting underneath a tree on a blanket made and Spellbound by our grandmother, who invented a picnic blanket that creates the picnic for you after you lay it on the grass.

  It’s a flawed spell, because the only picnic the blanket knows how to make is bread and pickles and jam.

  But Willa and I like bread and pickles and jam. We make pickle-and-jam sandwiches and tell secrets in the moonlight. We used to pretend we were princesses too, ordering the littlest cousins around as if they were our attendants, picking out stars to name after ourselves, the way princesses do. We gave ourselves titles, pretending to have royal Thirteenth Birthdays. Willa the Whimsical. Reagan the Ravishing.

  “I can’t,” I say. “I have to come up with the spell-breaking.” First the princesses will have to follow my instructions. They’ll have to perform a feat or gather some objects or make a sacrifice. If they accomplish what I demand of them, I’ll perform the Undoing, and that will require its own magic, an even heavier skirt around my waist.

  Willa’s face changes. It turns serious, and I have never seen Willa serious. “Make it easy,” she says. “Make it easy for them to break. Make it kind. Please, Reagan. Be kind.”

  Willa has a soft heart, and her magic reflects it. The spells she casts are gentle and sweet. She’s good with wishes and love and food. She can cure the ill. But she never could have cast the Spell of Without like I did.

  Maybe no other witch could have.

  Maybe no witch should have.

  3. JANE

  Nora and I aren’t alone with Mom for long after Dad’s toast. Our sisters come out one by one. Alice’s gait is slow and practiced. She hasn’t slept since she turned thirteen two years ago, so she is prone to falling. Alice is taller than the rest of us, and she talks the least, but when she does speak, it’s always clear and sturdy. When she was born, it was assumed that she was the first and only royal son. But after a few years it became clear to everyone that she was actually their third daughter.

  Grace walks without paying any attention and sometimes loses her way from the door of the castle to the glass box, a mere fifty paces away.

  Eden is the only one who bounds out of the house. She runs toward me and throws her arms around my waist. She holds on tight.

  Eden has not yet turned thirteen. She is hours away from it now, and the spell is attached to her like a shadow we can all see. She hugs me tighter,
and I give in to it. Dad doesn’t hug me anymore. Neither do my other sisters. I think it has to do with the jab of my bones, the smell of skin that hasn’t been nourished.

  There’s a surge of love when Eden crashes into me. Then it hurts. Because it could be gone forever.

  Nora scoffs. Things like a hug from her baby sister mean nothing to her now.

  Dad is following behind my sisters. He has his red robe draped around his shoulders. It is trimmed with white fur, and Mom used to call it a little much, but Eden loves it, so he wears it every day for her. She hides in its folds; she snuggles against the fur; she hangs on to the fabric, attaching herself to Dad for hours a day.

  Sometimes the rest of us do as well. My favorite mornings are the ones when Dad and I hole up in the library, talking about the kingdoms. I have a passion for the history of our world, and Dad knows more than anyone else about our past. He and Alice spend long nights outside doing stonework. He tried to teach us all the ancient trade, but she’s the only one that took to it. The backyard is covered in enormous slabs of marble that he and Alice chip away at, turning lumps of stone into works of art. He’ll tell Grace romantic stories for as many hours as she wants of princes meeting princesses and falling in love. And when she presses him for stories of two princesses falling in love, he tells the few of those he knows too. His patience with her is endless. She asks over and over if she can marry a princess someday, and every time he answers yes with the same wide grin, the same gentle voice, the same clarity.

  Even Nora wants to be in his glow. She’d deny it, but she sits next to him at every meal and walks the grounds with him in the evenings when they both grow restless and sad. It isn’t love, but it’s comfort, which is maybe as close as it gets for Nora.

  His subjects would do anything to have access to him the way we do. “Your Majesty!” a chorus of voices call out now. They want even one second of his gaze on their shoulders.

  But that’s not how it’s meant to be. We are royals. We are not meant to speak to our subjects like they’re our friends. We were chosen for this and they were chosen for their lives, and they can yell across the moat as much as they’d like, but it won’t change that simple truth.

  “Hello!” Eden calls out to the subjects. Dad stifles a smile at her precociousness. Mom taught the rest of us to keep what she called a Royal Distance between ourselves and the people of Ever. But Eden was too young for that lesson, and she wasn’t built for distance anyway. I’d put a stop to it, but the spell will take care of that by the end of the day, so what’s the point? If we survive it, if we break it, Mom will be here to explain the ways of Ever to Eden. She’ll teach her how to be royal, how to be distant, how to live in a castle and care from a tower.

  It’s unimaginable that sometime before midnight Eden will be without hope. Right now she’s brimming with it. She hopes to travel the world over and barter peace. She hopes to bring her light to other kingdoms, other people, other universes if she could. I’m not sure any of that will be allowed, but we let her dream it. I’ve only ever wanted to be the Queen of Ever, but Eden wants to help the whole world.

  “Dad?” I try. “Do you think it will be a hard spell to break? Do you think she’ll tell us why she did this? Do you think she feels bad?” I tried to ask just one question, but the rest came spilling out. I’ve been counting down days to Eden’s birthday for five long years, and these last few hours are proving to be the hardest. My whole body is on edge. I want to do something now, immediately, but we haven’t been given instructions, so I can’t do anything but invent ways the spell might be broken.

  Dad looks out over the moat, at his kingdom. I’ve noticed he doesn’t look at Mom often. I think it must be too painful for him, to see her trapped there. He has his red, fur-trimmed robe and his crown with diamonds that glint in the sun. He is the Gentle King. The Good King.

  But still, he can’t save her.

  Or us.

  I go to him and hold his hand. Maybe I’m the only almost-eighteen-year-old in the world who still holds their father’s hand. But I’m also the only one with this man as my father. He holds my hand back, gives it three squeezes, which is an unspoken language between the two of us. I’m here, his pulsing hand says. We’ve got this, his strong fingers beat out.

  The townspeople have caught sight of Dad and me holding hands. I can see them pointing to the place where our fingers interlock.

  “Such a kind king!” they yell. “Such a good daughter!”

  “They’re louder today,” Grace says. “Why are they so loud?” She has taken up Dad’s other side.

  “They’re excited for Eden’s Thirteenth Birthday,” I say. “They love Thirteenth Birthdays, just like Mom used to. Remember?”

  Grace looks at me blankly. No, of course she doesn’t remember.

  “It will be loud the next few days,” I say. “Will you be okay?”

  “Do you think I’ll be okay?” she asks.

  “You might get scared.”

  “Why?”

  “You get scared sometimes.”

  “Why do I get scared?” Grace asks.

  “Because you don’t always understand what’s happening,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “Because you can’t remember anything, Grace-bell. You’re Spellbound with the Spell of Without. You are without the ability to remember.” It always ends exactly here—the place where I remind her of the spell, of her particular curse.

  Her little brown eyes fill up with tears. When those tears fall, they will be huge and heartbreaking. They will wreck me. They will make Alice scream, desperate to be allowed to sleep and escape the pain. She has made stone sculptures of Grace’s face, made holes where the tears are. Eden will wipe them away. Nora leaves us to deal with them.

  “We know you try,” Dad says. “We know, honey.” He is gentle with Grace. With all of us.

  Not remembering won’t kill Grace, though.

  There’s the rage again, accidental and shameful and aimed every which way when it should only be aimed at that witch. I clench my jaw and will it away. Queens don’t get enraged. They aren’t jealous of their sisters. Their insides don’t itch with desperation at the thought of a slice of buttered toast.

  The people of Ever call out to us from across the moat. Dad gives us a look, reminding us to be kind about it. It is our job to be kind even when they are making us dizzy with questions we can’t answer.

  “Which prince do you most want to meet at the Thirteenth Birthday?”

  “When you are allowed to eat again, what will you eat first?”

  “When you can sleep again, what will you dream about?”

  As I look at each face in the crowd, I can guess at what they ate for breakfast this morning. It’s something my brain does now. That one had oatmeal. That one toast. Eggs. A cup of coffee and nothing else.

  “Will the kidnapped princess return this year?” an extra-loud voice asks. One of them always asks. Will the kidnapped princess return? Is our wait over? Will this old pain finally come to an end? Can we find out, once and for all, who to hate for taking her?

  The kidnapped princess would be well into her nineties now, if she returned. And we are right here. We are alive and trying to survive. I want them to worry about us, the way they fret over their vanished royalty. If I die, will they light candles for me the way they do for her? Will they fight for us, if we need them to?

  I’m scared of the answer.

  “You girls have to start getting ready,” Dad says. “The day’s escaping us. And it’s a very big day.”

  He leads us back into the castle after waving at his people. He lifts another glass of champagne in their direction. “To the princesses,” he says.

  “To the princesses,” they call back.

  But we stay quiet, as princesses are meant to.

  Once we’re inside, our attendants line up for us. They are from a dozen different families, and they look nothing alike except for their clothes. Every gender of attendant wears gr
ay pants with a white shirt and a gray apron. At twenty-two, Olive is the oldest. She isn’t as pale as my sisters and me but maybe would be if she wasn’t outside all the time. She has honey-colored hair that she wraps into a high bun every morning. I know only a few things about her: that she lives with her father and her half brother, who was offered a job in the castle that he refused to take. Before she died, Olive’s mother had also been an attendant, her grandmother and grandfather, too. Her brother’s mother was a schoolteacher who taught the history of Ever to the older children until her death ten years ago, right after the beginning of the Famine.

  When I asked how it was possible that both of their mothers had died, that her father had lost two wives, Olive looked at me like my question was sad and silly.

  “A lot of people die,” Olive said. “Just not people like you.”

  “We’re all the same,” I said. My mother taught me that. Olive let out a sound that could have been a laugh or could have been a sigh or could have been a cough and didn’t say another word. We never spoke about her family again.

  We princesses tuck our hair behind our ears, smooth our skirts. Dad won’t notice, but Mom loved those little rituals. “It’s what makes us royalty,” she used to say. “Holding on to tradition.” She’d give Nora a heavy look when she reminded us of this. Nora’s knees were always bruised, her hair never brushed, her whole self entirely out of order, uninterested in the old royal ways.

  This is something that hasn’t changed. Nora’s elbows are skinned from who knows what, and her bangs stick this way and that, unkempt and unclean. Her attendant presses them down against her forehead, brushes dirt from her dress, shakes their head at the impossibility of making Nora look like a princess.

  I don’t think I’ll care enough about tradition if I ever become queen. I don’t want to disappoint my mother, but I like the way Nora’s face shines with sweat, and I think the lining up of attendants is silly. They fidget and cough and seem to hate it.