Cinderella Must Die, page 1
Cinderella Must Die
W.R. Gingell
Copyright © 2022 by W.R. Gingell
Cover by Merry-Book-Round
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Created with Vellum
For all the awful boys who are hard to love,
but are trying so hard.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter One
“I’m no good at washing. I’ve never been good at washing.”
“Then consider it a chance to practise,” Jane said. “Nobody is good at washing. It’s not a talent you’re born with; you have to learn how things work.”
“I don’t want to learn how things work.”
“I know, darling. It’s one of the reasons we’re in this mess.”
“Jane, if you’re going to blame me for what happened with Cinders Ellen—”
“No, no, nothing like that. I just think it may have influenced the punishment she chose for us.”
“Punishment! The punitive little beast might call it that, but we did nothing wrong! Nothing!”
“You put pinching spells in her glass slippers, Charlie.”
“She tore my best dress to ribbons and said that mice did it! Mice! If she was going to go to the ball in a gorgeous frock when I couldn’t, the least she could do is suffer for what she did. Why are we the ones suffering?”
“Because Ellen is significantly better at telling lies than we are,” said Jane bluntly, rubbing the two sides of a stain together. Goodness knew how Ellen had managed to work jam so deeply into her neck warmer—it had certainly been an act of deliberation, since there was no reason for her to be wearing a neck warmer in the dining hall or her vast bedroom suite.
Just like most things that Ellen did, it had been an act not only of deliberation, but of precision and malice aforethought.
“It wouldn’t be so bad if we could only use magic,” grumbled Charlie.
“You can’t even light a candle, Charlie.”
“Well! You’re the one who said it’s all about practise! It’s not like we don’t have enough time to practise in here!”
“That’s very true,” said Jane, giving up on the jam stain. It would add time onto their sentence if she couldn’t get it clean, but if she was honest with herself, there was no chance that either she or Charlie would get out of this situation before they were roughly fifty. Ellen had made very sure of that.
The original sentence had been ten years, but Ellen had made a big point of their slothfulness and laziness, and the decision had been made that to rehabilitate Jane and Charlie, the sentence would be a fluid one. For every act of slovenliness or laziness, their sentence would lengthen by a day. For every act of service or goodness, a reprieve.
That, of course, might have been perfectly reasonable if the standard by which those acts had been judged was itself reasonable.
Ellen, of course, had made sure it was not. No magic was permitted in performing tasks, and any failure to perfectly clean every item that passed through the spell in which they were imprisoned was punished by a further day on their sentence. Not content with giving them the whole of the castle laundry to clean, their stepsister had made sure that her own clothing was included in the work—and that it always was a great deal of work. Jane wasn’t sure exactly how many extra days they had had tacked onto their sentence for “incorrigibility”, but she knew that those days collectively numbered in the range of two to three extra years already. As for acts of service—such things had to be toward people other than each other, and apart from Harvey, she and Charlie saw no one.
Trapped in this little bubble of reality, far away from the rest of the world, their sentence lengthened by the week, while an endless continuity of the same weather and surroundings made it hard to tell when one week ended and another began.
“Jane, I can’t get this stain out! I’m certain Cinders Ellen has been rolling in the fireplace again, because this is more like a scorch. Look, the fabric is all pulled and shrunken.”
“It is,” Jane said, after leaning over to look. “It’s no good trying to fix it. You’ll have to patch it.”
“It’ll add another day anyway,” Charlie said. “Why bother?”
“Because then she’ll have us for not doing our best as well: another day, I should think.”
Charlie opened her mouth to reply, but there was the distinct tightening of magic around them, a drawing in of the threads that made up the pocket of reality in which they were imprisoned.
“What now?” she snarled.
“Harvey, I should think,” Jane said. “Darling, I know you’re cross, but must you spit in my face every time the portal opens?”
“Oh, sorry,” said Charlie, apologetic at once. Her emotions might be volatile, but if you waited a moment, they were always sure to change, and she was as quick to forgive as she was to blow up. “Have a hanky.”
“No thanks; I’ll use my own.”
“Rude,” Charlie said, but she grinned and shoved the grimy piece of cotton back in her pocket. Back in their other life they’d had muslin and silk for handkerchiefs, but Charlie’s had never been any cleaner for their finery. “Jane, I do think that of all the punishments Cinders Ellen inflicted on us, Harvey may be the worst.”
“You only say that because he points out whenever you get a spot.”
“And that’s another thing!” Charlie said in indignation. “With the pox all over his face, I don’t see how he can point out a single spot of mine with a straight face, I really don’t.”
“It’s hardly the pox,” protested Jane. Harvey was certainly a pox on existence, but his face, like Charlie’s, had begun to clear of its youthful spots. His tending-to-lantern jaw still had a remaining redness to it here and there, but it wasn’t the bumpy, all-consuming rash it had been when they had first seen him at fourteen, raging across his chin and cheeks and right up to his greasy-golden hairline. Now at nineteen, he was beginning to look quite fresh-faced.
“He’s got more than I have, at any rate,” Charlie said, still prepared to argue the point. “And for him to be pointing out the one that came up because I had to use goose grease on my chest and touched my face in my sleep afterward—!”
“It’s gone away now,” said Jane. It had been a very small spot, but Charlie’s face had been very much like Harvey’s for too many years to count, and she was still very conscious of each and every spot that came up. Harvey, apparently careless of his own spots and likewise careless of the feelings of anyone else who had the affliction, helpfully pointed them out whenever he saw them in either of the sisters.
Jane was quite well aware that it was a flaw in his understanding, not his personality: she was convinced that the rest of his behaviour, on the other hand, was deliberately calibrated to cause as much annoyance and offence as possible.
She was also guiltily aware that at least a part of the behaviour levelled at them by Harvey was perhaps her own fault. She had once, in a fit of kindness that had backfired spectacularly, tried to warn Harvey about Ellen. At that stage, Jane had been seventeen, very much in love with the prince and sure that he was at least passingly interested in her. Ellen had been inclined to consider the favours of every male nearby her own to command and had been very cleverly undermining that interest by employing the pawns she already had in play. Harvey, still just fifteen, awkward, disorienting, and sometimes very bright, was a dangerous piece for her to play. He was not yet quite caught, and he was still independent enough to break away if he could be made to see sense when it came to Ellen.
His father, one of the king’s officials, owned the only other manor nearby; Jane had tried gently, as a good neighbour and a friend, to help Harvey to that sense. He had gone away thoughtful and bright-eyed, and Jane had congratulated herself on doing the difficult, and Harvey on having better sense than she had quite expected of him.
The next day, he had returned, absolutely convinced of Jane’s romantic interest in him, and equally determined to see her to the prince’s ball that night. She had had to disabuse him of that notion, rather flushed and annoyed to think that she might have to deal with the overtures of a boy two years younger than herself when she was hoping to be courting those of a man five years her senior. Harvey had taken her annoyance in very bad part. He had also thereafter, if Jane wasn’t very much mistaken, allowed Ellen to fill his ears with exactly the kind of toxic thing that she was so good at spreading and that Jane had been trying to prevent.
The result had been to make him more than ever Ellen’s pawn, and he had remained so even after she married the prince; his sole delight apparently in making sure that Ellen’s two stepsisters found life as difficult and irritating as humanly possible in their imprisonment.
Jane sighed. “You finish the rest of the washing. I’ll take the dry clothes back to the cottage and go over the check-list with Harvey—and see what fresh atrocities they’ve sent over to feed us this time.”
She left Charlie at the water-smoothed laundry stone, making patterns on the sun-warmed rock with her wet fingers, and went in search of the tightening to the pocket. Harvey had a habit of appearing in a different place every time he visited, but if one knew how magic worked, one could follow the reaction to its source and arrive just before Harvey did. Jane did know; she had always been very good at magical theory, and she was just intuitive enough to be able to understand magic while being practical enough to make good headway in use of it.
She knew better than to be so quickly on the spot, however; it would almost certainly make Harvey think she was up to something. So Jane strolled across the warm, green grass, the pretend sun above that she could never quite see shining down on her head, not too hot and not too cool, and didn’t increase her speed even when she saw the tell-tale pink glow up ahead around the side of the cottage.
That was the transportation spell interacting with the interior of the reality bubble, tainting the colour. Within that spell would be a pink-toned Harvey, cautiously waiting until the pink faded to begin moving again, his golden hair spiked pink at the tips.
Jane rounded the corner of the cottage, sighing faintly once again, and stopped short in shock, her fingers suddenly gripping tightly to the laundry basket.
It wasn’t Harvey.
Instead of broad shoulders and hands shoved into pockets, a slight slouch belying its true height, the figure that stood before her was slender and aristocratic, perfectly straight and true, its ink-black hair short and neat.
Unnervingly matched to cobalt blue eyes was a military frockcoat of the same blue, beneath it riding trousers of an unsullied egg-shell hue and covered almost to the knee by impeccably shining riding boots.
Jane saw her reflection in them, and thought it conferred no great dignity to either herself or the boots: certainly her skirt was damp here and there around the knees from washing, and her fine, brown hair with the faint touch of early white was wisping around her face, but the boots oughtn’t to be as polished as they were. It was obvious that they had not been used for riding at all. Were riding boots really riding boots if one didn’t use them for riding?
Were people really people if they didn’t live in the real world?
Was a prince really a prince if he falsely imprisoned his subjects?
Beside that point was another: what was the prince doing here, of all places? What was he doing here, looking at her once again with wounded blue eyes and an uncertain air?
Had he—could he possibly—have come to apologise? wondered Jane, with a quickening of her heartbeat.
She had always known that Alaric was intelligent. Too intelligent, she would have said, to fall for Ellen’s kind of lies; but she had been proved quite wrong there. He was, at any rate, too intelligent to have been married to Ellen for the past two years without finding out exactly who it was that he’d married.
Perhaps by now he’d also come to the conclusion that the crimes for which he’d had a part in condemning Jane and Charlie had either been greatly exaggerated or not taken place at all. Her heart hardening, Jane reminded herself that if he had done so, it was by far too late now.
Feeling heat at the back of her eyes, she put her washing down very carefully then straightened, setting her chin and shoulders both.
When it came out, her voice was politely cold. “Why are you here?”
“Jane—”
“I think,” said Jane carefully, “under the circumstances, that you ought to go back to calling me Miss Tellington. Your highness.”
He took in a breath when she added the last two words of formal greeting, as if the speaking of them had stabbed him unexpectedly in the chest, and Jane felt again the same bewildered pain she had felt that night at the ball when Alaric, glittering in blue and diamonds, had released her hand and gone to stand by the side of the light-pink, frothy Ellen with her golden hair and blue eyes all luminous with tears. He had looked back at Jane once, with sad, angry eyes, and had looked only at Ellen thereafter.
As if she instead of he had been the betrayer.
“Why are you here?” she asked again. When Harvey had gone from professing love to happily doing Ellen’s bidding, Jane hadn’t felt betrayed: just sorry for his sake. Alaric was different. She had thought he knew her well enough to understand that she wouldn’t do the things Ellen claimed—or that he had at least liked her well enough to give her the benefit of the doubt until he knew better—and his betrayal had very nearly gutted her right there in the ballroom, leaving her panting and leaning on Charlie’s shoulder for the strength to stand.
“I wanted to say—I wanted to check—Jane, where are your shoes?”
There was that hurt bewilderment again. As if he hadn’t been a part of the proceedings that had led to Jane and Charlie being shut up in this tiny bubble of existence without recourse to anything except what they were given or could garden for themselves.
“Shoes cost money, your highness,” she said, with a brief look down at her bare feet. She had worn holes in the soles of her shoes quite some time ago, and since either the provision of things with which she could fix them or shoes themselves would have cost another year or so of sentence, she and Charlie had elected to go without. Life in the bubble had no seasons; it was a continuity of sameness that was somehow worse than the biting cold of winter and the soggy heat of summer outside. Jane felt her chin tremble slightly, but her voice stayed clear and cold, and that was enough. She added, “Or time, which is more important to us.”
“I didn’t—” he began, and Jane wondered if he was really going to say that he hadn’t known. He shut his mouth, then tried again, jerkily. “I didn’t realise that shoes were included in extra comforts.”
“I see,” said Jane. She would have felt angry if she could, but all she could feel was weariness. She asked, once again, “Why are you here, your highness?”
And why now? she could have added. She and Charlie had been imprisoned for close to two years now. If he had felt guilty, or if he had come to understand that Ellen wasn’t the most conversant with the truth, wouldn’t he have come earlier?
“There have been…problems in the castle,” Alaric said.
There would be, with Ellen living there, Jane thought. She knew Ellen too well to think that even rising as high as princess would be enough to sate her.
Unsurprised, she said, “Yes, I suppose so.”
Alaric studied her for a perplexed moment, and said, “It started three months ago; first there was a dead rat beneath Ellen’s bed, then a drowned one in a barrel of her favourite wine. Someone tore one of her favourite gowns to pieces and ruined the official portrait in the grand hall. Soon after that, she started getting notes—nasty things. She only showed me after the third one arrived. They were threats to tell me something she’d supposedly done before we married, threats to ruin her life—even to kill her.”
“I beg your pardon?” Jane asked, shocked almost to speechlessness. “You came to find out if we were likely to be threatening Ellen? From in here?”
Alaric tumbled into speech. “I’m sorry, Jane! I didn’t know—my father and Ellen have been discussing it between them, and they came up with the conclusion that you were likely to be responsible because of your—you know, magic.”
Jane very carefully repressed a frustrated sigh. The fact that she was capable of doing magic was the only one of Ellen’s lies that actually had some truth to it. Of course, of all the trouble around their manor and the castle over Ellen’s pursuit of the prince, exactly none had been Jane’s handiwork: Ellen was herself an extremely practised magician with the added benefit of a fairy godmother at her shoulder. In fact, she was so good that if Jane hadn’t once heard her calling on the godmother and seen the intensely pink haze of magic seeping under the door of Ellen’s room, she would have thought that her stepsister was simply a first-rate practitioner.
