We left them behind,” Cinderella said breathlessly as we found ourselves in the barn. Her concern for Hodder, Wendell, and Perdi were her first thoughts after our narrow escape. I felt a pang of guilt for leaving them there.
“Wish them home,” I said, fervently hoping that no harm befell them and that no one witnessed their transformation.
A few seconds and wishes later, Hodder, Perdi, and Wendell were back with us in their animal forms.
“Thank you,” I whispered to them.
“I’m sorry.” Cinderella purred apologies, nuzzling her head against the horse.
All the magic had worn off, but when I looked down at my feet the other glass shoe was still there. Had I blinked too fast? Was my power already fading? How was this shoe still here? And where was the other one?
Cinderella looked down as I took off the shoe and examined it.
She exclaimed, “Oh no!”
“Was it the wish? I wasn’t specific enough,” she supposed, blaming herself.
I shook my head—it wasn’t the wish’s fault. My dress had transformed back into its original form. But the shoe remained. I wondered about its mate. I had left it on the stairs.
“Do you want me to wish the other one home?”
“And raise more suspicion . . . ? I think it’s best we leave it alone.”
Cinderella accepted this, but she wasn’t ready to let it go.
“But that still doesn’t explain how the shoe outlasted the spell. Mine are gone,” she said, pointing down to her own shoes, which were indeed moccasins again.
“When magic lasts longer than its spell, it’s usually because of intense emotion, or at least that’s what I think happened with Hecate still being here as ash and with South’s wings . . .”
“So that means . . . you love the prince.”
“No . . . I . . .” I opened my mouth to protest, but I closed it again. It couldn’t be.
I was Entente. We were not supposed to love. Especially not humans. The old rules don’t apply anymore. Galatea’s words came back to me. She was talking about revenge, not love. But that didn’t mean they weren’t true.
Cinderella was still blinking her big eyes at me, waiting for a response.
“Is there another explanation?”
“All my emotions were heightened. I am sure that fear could do the exact same thing.”
“When you were in the prince’s arms, you didn’t look scared to me . . .”
“There is no room for love in this plot . . .”
“Tell that to your heart. And your shoe.”
“We don’t have time for this. You should go to your room. Get in your nightclothes. Galatea, Amantha, and Bari will be here momentarily,” I ordered, and Cinderella dutifully raced off.
I was still thinking of the single shoe without a mate and Cinderella’s belief that it was still here because of love.
When I opened the door, I found that the noise outside wasn’t the arrival of my sisters. It was South. He was climbing the trellis outside that would lead to my bedroom.
“Farrow.” He was calling up to the window.
“What the hells are you doing out there?” I asked.
South turned around, and I waved him in through the front door.
“They’re not home yet. But you need to get to your room and get dressed for bed. Why didn’t you blink yourself back into your room?”
“Galatea would see the Past. This way, without using my magic, there’s a chance she wouldn’t bother to look.”
“How is it that I underestimated you all my life?” I asked.
“I have a way of sneaking up on people,” he said with a smile.
“I told you to stay home.”
“And if I had, you and Cinderella wouldn’t be here now.”
“We would have improvised,” I defended, but I smiled at him. His distraction had helped us get away.
“I had to go. I needed to help you. I had to see for myself.”
“See what?”
Just then I could hear the sound of my sisters arriving home. South slipped back up the stairs, and I braced myself.
“How was the ball?” I asked when Bari, Amantha, and Galatea actually got inside. They had taken their carriage instead of returning by magical means. I had slipped into one of the chairs in the sitting room and put the shoe in my pocket.
“Where is she? Ella, get down here!” Galatea screamed with a wild look on her face.
I rose, feigning innocence.
“Ella,” she called again. She stared at me a beat. She drew her wand from her pocket. I wondered if she was preparing to look into my Past or Cinderella’s.
I hoped that I had not miscalculated. I hoped that Galatea would not look into Cinderella’s Past because she assumed that it was, as always, uneventful. Amantha and Bari comically fought to get through the door with their competing dresses. A frustrated Amantha disappeared and reappeared across the sitting room. This time she appeared with hibiscus nectar and glasses. Galatea, meanwhile, approached the stairs.
“Where is that girl?”
“It was a nightmare,” Bari said dramatically, reaching for a glass.
“What happened?” I asked her.
The glass slipped to the ground with a crash as Amantha flickered beside her, still pouring where her glass should have been.
“There was another girl, and she hijacked the prince’s attention all night,” Bari continued, unbothered.
“Cinderella!” Amantha called, looking down at the spilled glass and champagne.
Cinderella appeared at the top of the stairs, stretching for effect.
“What do you need, Mother?” she asked.
“Never mind. I just wanted to see that you were here,” Galatea said, looking relieved.
“Where else would I be?” Cinderella asked innocently.
“Don’t be insolent, Ella. Back to bed,” Galatea barked.
“Galatea, I need her to clean this up,” Amantha protested.
Cinderella bowed and turned without making eye contact with me. When she disappeared into her room again, I had to hold in a sigh of relief.
But then Galatea returned her attention to me and my sisters.
“I need to think,” Galatea said with a furrowed brow.
“We should run,” Bari said in a whisper.
“Why would we run? You’re scaring me. What happened at the ball?”
“You don’t know?”
“How would I know?” I asked.
“I assumed that South would have told you every moment of the ball,” Galatea said.
“He was sleeping. I couldn’t wake him.”
“It was awful. You should have been there. Maybe I could have wished her to implode, and you could have granted it,” Bari said with a loud sigh.
Amantha laughed, but added, “Her dress was pretty magnificent though. So much so it made me positively angry.”
“Who was she? I don’t understand. Did the spell not work? Did he pick the princess of Garbon?”
“There was another girl. She called herself Marrow. What kind of insipid name is that? He danced every dance with her,” Amantha said, despaired.
“Well, the Queen won’t let that stand. Surely there will be another ball and you can reenact your plan there,” I consoled.
“The people have fallen in love with the idea of a people’s princess. And the Queen will have no choice but to go along with it. It is just as we planned, only some other girl enacted our plot.”
“But who the hells was she?” I asked, pretending to match their fervor.
When Amantha gave me a sharp look, I wondered if I had overacted. But instead she just joined in. “If I didn’t know better, I would think she had magic.”
“And you couldn’t use your magical wiles to split them up?”
“It was too much of a risk to use the spell more than once. If we couldn’t get close enough, then it was not worth being exposed.”
“There will be other chances.”
“You don’t understand. You were right—Magrit knew we were there—she could somehow sense magic. She stopped the ball and started searching every guest. My guess is she will start searching every house.”
“But we’re cloaked.”
“We are, and we were tonight. But somehow she knew.”
“The bigger question is, what are we going to do now?”
“She didn’t identify us. I say we stay. We’ll take another crack at the prince,” Amantha said.
“She’s never going to hold another ball. We’ll be lucky if the prince ever leaves the palace again,” Bari added with a sigh.
“Then we’ll think of something else. There has to be another way, Galatea. If not the prince, then something else. We’ll find it in time,” I said gently.
Galatea sank into a chair, unsure.
We had come so close to what I wanted: a stop to all this. But at least the prince was safe tonight.
I returned to my room and placed the shoe on the bed. I released Hecate from the pouch. The shoe stared up at both of us.
“I know, I should throw it away, Hecate. I can’t be in love—there’s no place for love in all this. And of beings in all the Queendoms . . . how could it be him? Did you see all this, Hecate? Did you see him? Can you tell me what’s going to happen with us—with my sisters?”
Hecate didn’t respond. She just took a seat on the bed.
I slipped the shoe into a drawer and piled some underthings on top of it.
I knew I should smash it into a million pieces. But I couldn’t bear it. I wanted to keep it, since I could not keep him. It was a souvenir—a memento of love that could not be.
Hecate curled up in her ash form beside me. It wasn’t a “yes.” But it was something. Hecate could not give me the answer I wanted—but she was giving me comfort. As she always had.
“Are you even a little proud of me?” I wanted and needed to know.
Everyone was still alive, and my sisters were none the wiser . . .
Hecate snuggled a little closer to me.