Cinder House, page 11
She let it take her. She hadn’t the strength for anything else.
Drifting upward, floating, she could see Jule and Nadya looking around. Searching. There were gasps and whispers from those who had been in eyesight, and demands from everyone else to know what had just happened. As far as everyone in the ballroom was concerned, Ella had vanished into nothing at all.
No. Not everyone.
Someone who’d been standing very close in the crowd—only a few yards away—was looking in the right direction, which was upward. Someone who had always been able to see Ella in her ghost form. And now Ella was no longer a polished stranger in a disguising gown, but her usual, unruly roof-red self.
Ella made eye contact with Greta, whose mouth was open in the start of something, and then the pull of the house turned to the snap of elastic and Ella was gone.
PART
FOUR
Ella had the lamps lit and the fire going in the largest parlour when her family returned.
She’d thought about fading. Hiding. But a confrontation was inevitable and Ella was sick of cowering. Whatever happened might as well happen tonight, when so much had already happened that it would be simply another stone in the pile.
She took the largest armchair, which Patrice usually favoured. She arranged her hateful lavender skirts around herself, and when her family entered she was sitting as if she really did own this house and they were unwelcome guests.
The illusion was broken at once when Greta, hot-cheeked above her lovely gown, charged across the room and delivered a slap with bent, raking knuckles.
Her hand went straight through Ella.
“How did you do it?” Greta cried. “It was you—and you were solid enough to stop a knife! And living enough to ask him to dance last night, and cunning enough to obscure it from us. How.”
“Magic, of course,” Ella said bitterly. “I made a bargain. Paid a price.” She looked over Greta’s shoulder. Danica, unreadable, hadn’t ventured past the doorway. Patrice had already taken a seat and was rubbing the bandage on her arm. She met Ella’s gaze and Ella said with deliberation, “It wasn’t about you.”
Her stepmother’s mouth thinned. Ella wouldn’t find any fellowship there, no matter what had passed between them. It was easy for Patrice to show vulnerability in front of a ghost who could do nothing—not a girl who’d proven herself capable of deception.
And indeed: “You’re a malicious little liar, Ella,” said Patrice tiredly. “To deliberately attract his attention, to sabotage my efforts to provide for my daughters . . . I should have known. You always thought yourself above us.”
Malicious. Lying. Really, it was like Ella’s father was alive all over again.
“You made a bargain?” said Greta. “With who?”
Danica’s mouth moved in a silent, mocking whom.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Ella. “It was only for those three nights, so I could go to the balls.”
She would keep Quaint a secret if she could. And she would not tell them she had the ability to leave the house—even in her ghostly form, even midnight-bound—in case they somehow found a way to take that away.
Greta looked her up and down. “Why bother?”
“Why?” Ornaments rattled on the sideboard. Ella had meant to keep her temper; she had practice with that. But this was too much. “I’ve been stuck haunting this house for six years, cleaning up after you, and you ask why? I wanted some life! To see the court, to dance—”
“To ensnare a prince,” said Greta. “To take him away from me.”
Ella felt the magic building like a raised whip. She couldn’t argue with it. She merely braced herself.
Whatever the first whipcrack was, it didn’t work. The magic fizzed through her and seemed to be seeking her edges, and fumbled her when it couldn’t grip them. The top of the weathervane cockerel went odd and hot for a moment.
“No,” said Greta. “All right.”
The second spell was worse: a sickening hiccup of displacement, as if Ella had been wrenched sideways in the world by a small but significant inch. She stifled a cry and began to fade into the chair at the look of satisfaction on Greta’s face.
No. No. Not tonight.
Ella solidified, and glared.
“Why punish me? I danced with him. You danced with him. He was never going to marry either of us.”
“You’re wrong,” said Greta. Hatred soaked her words. “He would have married me, if you had stayed out of the way instead of hurling yourself in front of a knife and ruining everything.”
The short silence was broken by Danica, still leaning on the doorframe and silently removing jewelled pins from her hair. Now she laughed: short and final like a twig snapping. “Of course,” she said. “Of course you did.”
“Greta,” said Patrice.
Magic had filled the Cajarac attendant as if poured from a jug and then drained. Strong, trained magic.
“You would have killed him? Out of spite?” Ella snarled. She was up and out of the chair. Here it was, the bravery from the stories come hot on the heels of what might have been love, if it had ever been allowed to grow.
“Don’t be a fool. What good would he be to me dead?” Greta tossed her head. “The knife was enchanted to send him into a swoon, and only my magic would have awakened him. I was thinking of doing it with a kiss—imagine the stories they’d tell! And saving him from a Cajarac assassin? The prince couldn’t have married her, after that.”
It was a very Greta sort of plan: bright and bold, thinking less of the real than of the beauty of the damage. An enchanted knife, a hapless pawn. True love’s kiss. A sorceress hailed as saviour and then as queen.
“I thought he was warded” was all Ella could think to say.
“Wards are weakened when blood’s already been spilled. But even if he’d only been wounded, without the swoon . . .” A shrug. “I could have rushed in to heal him.”
And if he’d died, Greta mightn’t have cared. She’d still have won, because everyone else would have lost.
“I can’t believe you tried something like that,” Patrice burst out. “The Crown Prince, Greta! What if someone knew it was you?”
Greta turned to look at her mother and sister.
“Nobody does know,” she said, clear and flat.
“Nobody does know,” echoed Danica. “All right. I’m done here. I’m done.” She took her handful of pins and left the room.
“Ella’s the one who’s done,” said Greta, turning back to the armchair. “Ella won’t tell anyone anything. And she won’t steal anything from me ever again.”
A targeted surge of magic. Beneath Ella the armchair wrenched apart at its joints with a violent flurry of splinters and tearing fabric, and the pain of it had Ella screaming like she too had been ripped into pieces. She was in every corner of the room at once for several long, strange moments. Then she was collapsed amid a pile of ruined furniture, with the house trembling around her.
“We do still have to live here,” Patrice said to Greta. She now looked so tired she was threadbare. “And if Ella’s in no shape to fix things, I have to pay for repairs.”
Not as if she had a preference one way or the other. Just stating fact.
“Oh, I wouldn’t remove a ghost from her precious home.” What would be the point in that, said Greta’s expression, when the best way to hurt Ella was through the house? “I’m sure quite a lot of a place can be dismantled while keeping it livable.”
After the armchair, Greta didn’t bother with magic. She preferred to use her hands. She reached for the jigsaw; and then for other tools.
Patrice went to bed, her ears plugged with cotton wool.
Danica didn’t flinch at Ella’s cries either. She changed out of her ball finery and methodically packed two large bags full of her own belongings. Then she called for a carriage, despite the hour, climbed in, and was gone.
By the small hours of the morning Greta was satisfied, and took herself burning-eyed to bed.
Ella had lost the look of a girl entirely. She’d refused to beg and plead, but her snappish bravery had faded to an ember of despair huddled in the undamaged parts of herself, trying desperately to be unseen and therefore safe. Time meant little until the sun rose and stroked her roof as if it were any other morning. Certainly the house’s exterior gave no hint as to the wreckage within. The shattered plaster and splintered wood, the broken glass ground into Ella’s floors, were lingering tortures which would take forever to clean up.
It had been worth it, the ember of Ella told herself.
It had been worth it.
If nothing else, Jule was safe, for now.
Or so she thought. In fact, a little before noon he was knocking on Ella’s front door.
It wasn’t actually Jule who knocked; it was a liveried attendant whose fingers grasped the brass knocker. Even so, Ella might have spent her last gasp of strength flinging open the door, but she stopped herself. She didn’t know what this was. All she knew was that Jule—and Nadya, too!—had passed through her gate and now stood on her front steps, where an escort of guards and servants attracted gawking from people on the street.
Patrice did not know who was on the other side of the door until she opened it. Her poise cracked into stammering before she collected herself and managed to invite the entire party to step inside—her humble house was always open to such illustrious visitors—ah, yes, the mess. They were in the early stages of . . . renovations. She hoped Their Highnesses could forgive them.
“I quite understand,” said Jule, stepping around a white lake of crumbled plaster from where Greta had ripped some lamp brackets from the walls.
He was holding a pair of shoes covered in mirrors.
Ella, existing mistily in the entrance hall, felt something strongly enough that tarnish spread across a silver vase which lay tipped on its side.
Greta pulled to a halt halfway down the stairs. She had woken with renewed malice and had been carving grammar exercises into the walls of her bedroom. The wounds stung in a faraway way. Ella had too many other things to concentrate on now, and was barely in a shape where she could concentrate at all.
“Your Highness,” said Greta. She looked particularly pretty and entirely unafraid: cheeks flushed with violence, golden hair shining with health, gazing down at a charming prince. “I did not think to see you again so soon.”
Jule’s polite expression did not budge.
“I would invite you to step into the parlour,” said Patrice, whose best armchairs were all exploded, “but as I said, we are . . .”
“Renovating,” said Jule. “No matter. This shouldn’t take long.” And he explained, there in the crowded entrance hall, that these shoes were the only clue he had to the identity of a young woman who had saved his life the previous night, at great cost to her own safety, when an unknown sorcerer had attempted assassination using an innocent Cajarac man as intermediary.
The woman had mysteriously vanished, and Jule and his new fiancée Princess Nadya were determined not to rest until she could be found and their debt to her repaid. They had been seeking her since sunrise, knocking on every door in the city.
“Oh,” whispered Ella. Somewhere in that telling she had found her own form again. Parts of her kept leaking into the wall, and she had to extricate them. But she was there.
Greta had weathered both the words sorcerer and fiancée as she came down to stand next to her mother. She gave a laugh like glass winking in the sun.
“And what did she look like, this mysterious woman? A pair of shoes isn’t much to go on. Shall I try them on for you?”
“They won’t fit you,” Ella said. “One of my feet is larger than the other.”
Greta’s glance promised more damage once this was over. Ella shivered and looked at where Nadya stood. The house, disjointed and betrayed, knew Nadya for a sorcerer and wanted to beg her for guardianship. Ella herself wanted to go over and lean on Nadya’s shoulder, or unbind her extraordinary hair and pull a comb through it as if to find strength in the strands. None of that was possible.
And this time there really was no point in crying the alarm. Only Greta would hear her; and Greta would use it as further fuel, if she had any inkling that Ella’s feelings were less selfish than her own.
Maybe they weren’t. Ella had known Jule wasn’t hers, and kissed him anyway.
“Perhaps,” said Greta, “she looked like this?”
Greta had learned more from this tutor of hers than Ella had ever suspected. Upward from her feet crept a fair approximation of the willow gown, tendrils and all, and when the magic settled it was a version of Ella standing there: brown-haired, with Ella’s firm chin.
The eyes, Greta had not been close enough to get right. They were the familiar grey of building stones.
“That’s a remarkable illusion,” said Nadya. Her tone had the warning politeness of steel held half drawn from a scabbard. “You must have had a good look at this woman. Are you sure you can’t tell us where we might find her?”
The vision that wasn’t quite Ella widened her eyes. “Are you sure I wasn’t attending the ball in this disguise?”
“Perhaps we should try the shoes after all—” an attendant started.
“This woman was very badly hurt. On the verge of death.” Jule looked Greta up and down. “And I can see you’re a skilled sorcerer, so you might have managed to heal yourself.” He gave a brief, damning bow. “But I already knew that about you, from our dance.”
An expression that was purely Greta passed over Ella’s face: triumph stalked and overtaken by wariness. Then Greta laughed and the illusion dissolved.
“As you say, I’m very skilled. You can’t blame a girl for wanting to show it off, Your Highness.”
“What can you be blamed for,” Jule said, holding her gaze, “I wonder?”
The attendant cleared his throat. “And is this your entire household, madam?”
“My daughter Danica has recently left our household,” said Patrice. “We expect her to be married soon. And I can assure Your Highness that although she was present at the ball last night, she left entirely unharmed.”
“And she’s not the sort to throw herself in front of knives,” said Greta. A fissure had formed in her voice.
“And nobody else lives in this house?” said Jule.
“Nobody else,” said Patrice, glancing at Greta. “We wish you luck in your search, Your Highnesses.”
“Nobody else,” said Nadya.
“No,” snapped Greta.
Nadya reached out a hand; another of the attendants passed her a stamped, opened envelope. That envelope had been in this house before. Had come from this house. A trembling of disbelief ran through the plaster moulding.
“Strange, then, that I have been corresponding for months with someone named Ella who resides at this exact address.”
“You have?” Patrice said, bewildered. “How could—”
“I am Nadya Odetta Mazamire si-Cajar, scholar of magic and princess of the Imperial House.” The name had a honeyed sound to it. Ella, giddy with elation, wanted her to say it again; to put her mouth to all the keyholes of the house and whisper it like the gift it was. Scholar Mazamire, here in her house. “I didn’t know Ella was a ghost herself, but in retrospect it’s not a surprise.”
“I’m here,” said Ella. She tried harder than she’d ever tried before. She thought about real and solid things; how it had felt to have Jule grip her hand and Nadya touch her chin; the briskness of cobblestones underfoot. She even tried to grasp the shoes where Jule held them, but their magic had been used up. Her fingers passed through.
“And I know her presence now. This place has the feel of her.” Nadya’s hair didn’t move, but a mist of magic shone at her fingertips and pulsed there: a wordless whisper of power that invited Ella closer.
Nadya turned her head and looked right at where Ella was.
“Please,” said Ella. “Please say you can see me.”
“There’s something . . .” A frown. “It’s all right, Ella. I know it’s you.”
“Here?” Jule turned as well, and gave a sweeping bow. He really did move elegantly when his legs were free. “Ella,” he said to the air near Ella’s ear. “I am Crown Prince of this realm and I owe you my life.” The small, real Jule-smile appeared. “Anything that you want is yours, if we can find a way to give it to you.”
“No,” snarled Greta, and exploded.
That was how it felt, at least. It was not how it would have looked.
She lost control, Patrice had said last night, but it had sounded like a comforting lie. And now was the same. Truly lost to herself, Greta might have shot furious flames at Ella, uncaring or even spitefully hoping that she might catch Nadya or Jule in the fire. Out of control, one might endanger royalty without considering the consequences.
Instead Greta put her palm to the panels of wood on the wall, which had never held dust or lacked for wax shine since Ella had died. She gave the small hard quirk of her mouth which meant: Clean this up, Ella.
And she gathered her magic and sent fire snaking deep and far and fast into the walls of the house.
In one of the lurid adventures Ella had read, the dastardly alchemist villain injected the hero with experimental potions to make him talk. Reading that passage had been one of the few times Ella was glad to no longer have a real body, because at least she would never have magical acid searing itself down every inch of her veins, sizzling her flesh from the inside.
Or so she’d thought at the time.
Greta’s fire gushed through the plaster spaces and beneath the floorboards and even within the pipes; every vessel, every connection, the whole strange skeleton of Ella’s house flooded with heat like blood set on a stove and brought to boil.
The house shrieked.
Ella shrieked. Only Patrice flinched when she did so.
Nadya looked sharply at Greta. Everyone else looked uneasily at the upward-snaking line of black char which now scarred the wall.
“Saints’ teeth—” began one of the guards, and then sniffed the air. “Your Highness! Fire!”
