Chapter Text
“First,” said the Faerie Queen, “a knight to do thy bidding and slay thine enemies.”
Ella scoffed, bitter as blood and pitch. “I have seen what passes for a knight in this kingdom,” she retorted. “There is no man I would trust.”
In another world, a frog suddenly appeared out of that dark and damp, a kindness rewarded in turn. But this is not that tale. Instead the Faerie Queen graced Ella with an expression both cruel and playful, a light like a dying star twinkling in her eye. “Then trust no man,” she told her. “Only yourself.”
She was dying, again. Blood rose like ink to the back of her throat, filling up her ribs and her lungs and her heart. It tasted like soot, and somewhere in her tired mind, she wanted to laugh—no matter how many times they jumped worlds, no matter how much armor she donned or shining weaponry she carried, the ash of that lonely cellar would never leave her. Perhaps it had left a stain too great to blot out. Perhaps it was as much a part of her as her bone and breath.
Snow White, weaving her magicks, looked down at her. She did not blink at the sight of the arrow, nor at the fact that its point had been meant for her. This was how it went, most times.
The expression on her face—this version of her face—was how it went most times, too. She looked gentle. Regretful. Disappointed. “We’re very close,” she murmured. (She did not lean down and stroke her friend’s hair, did not waste her magic on the ruined flesh. They had grown out of such things long ago—or had she done them at all? She couldn’t quite remember, though perhaps it was the blood loss.) “The next one, I think. You’ll find me, won’t you?”
Yes, she opened her mouth to croak, tearing the wound further. It was not really an answer Snow White needed, mostly because it had never been a question. But she liked feeling like there was a choice in it, sometimes. Maybe that had been written into her story, too—a desperate yearning for the illusion of choice, of freedom, of love.
“Good,” said Snow White. Her eyes softened, as much as anything about her could. Then, like the deft, merciful flick of her daggers: “Go then, Cinderella. Die now.”
Cinderella obeyed.
This Cinderella—for that was the only name she knew, after all this time—was no shining knight of honor. She had no eager squire to attend her. But she had a spear of glass and the hands that carried them, and she had learned death the likes of which our poor, dear Ella could not fathom. And never wished to—or so she told herself.
Was that why, when Ella saw her glass knight, her mirror-sword, open her eyes in the gravebed of the Faerie Queen, she tried to turn away?
This was not how it went most times.
Cinderella was used to resurfacing in the cellar, or the woods, or even—in the worst retellings—at her mother’s bedside, watching the last bit of life leave her. She had never awoken beneath the earth itself. And this was not—she could feel it within her, in all the many places which should have scarred or never healed at all—the earth of Neverafter.
(She inhaled sharply, despite herself. Had she—did she dare to hope that she’d escaped, somehow?)
“Who are you?” demanded a voice as sharp as starlight.
Cinderella blinked, and the world not her own came into focus: the ancient roots of an oak, stretched above like veins in a dark sky. A creature fair and terrible floated among them, the magic that had summoned her wisping from her fingers like lace and smoke. Some part of Cinderella’s soul knew her already, immediately. It was the part of her that had always known when her opponents would strike: her battle instinct on the field, her useless fear of her stepmother’s fists.
Godmother, it whispered.
“Who are you?” the question came again.
Cinderella finally saw her, and even the fear of the godmother, risen again, did not come close to what pierced her heart then. A girl in a bloodstained dress stood before her, her hands covered in soil and viscera. Her eyes burned with furious suspicion.
Oh, that part of Cinderella whispered.
So she had not escaped her story after all.
“This is your knight,” said this version of the fairy godmother. “Another daughter of fire, from another realm of death. Her spear will soak the soil in blood to match your innocents’ a thousand times over.”
“No,” snapped the girl, though her eyes remained fixed on Cinderella. Her voice wavered, and she swallowed hard. “That won’t be necessary. I do not want to match the deaths of Lucy, and—and Justine, I do not want a slaughter—”
“It is rude to reject the gifts of a faerie,” the godmother said mildly. “And she is my gift to you. You desired vengeance, did you not?”
The girl’s face twisted in a complicated mix of want and bitterness; it ached in Cinderella’s own chest. This version of her had friends, remembered a life outside of the cellar. When was the last time Cinderella had found herself in a retelling like that?
Not in an age and an age. She hardly recalled the face of her father, much less her noble friends. When she thought of her companions, she could only muster up one of Snow White’s faces—as pale as a corpse, with apple-red lips and hair black as seed pits—and even then Snow White in her memory did not look upon her in friendliness. A general was not a friend to her soldier.
And wasn’t that the more merciful way of it, Cinderella thought. At least as a soldier, she had nothing to lose but the battle. The girl, though—she had everything, and she would feel every loss.
(Sometimes, when Cinderella remembered a rose blooming from a pink and bloody mouth, or the lilt of a wry, reproachful voice—do you know my prince?--she wondered whether Snow White had really thought through all the options. If maybe there was still some light to be gleaned from life in the Neverafter.
Now, she did not question. If she could have, she would have killed this version of herself here and now, one quick, clean blow. It would be a kindness.)
“Yes,” the girl finally said, grudging, exhausted.
The fairy godmother blinked with two sets of eyelids. It seemed to take an eternity, as if in the opening and closing of her eye a whole universe had bloomed and extinguished. “She is your sword. She is your vengeance. She is yours.”
No, Cinderella wanted to protest. It would not come, and she didn’t know whether to blame the ancient magic of the fairy godmother, the mortal arrow that had sliced her vocal cords through, or her own wretched sense of obedience, curled up in the bones of her body like a dog.
Maybe it was all of those things. Maybe it was none of them, and this fairy godmother had only done what she always had done: spoken the cruel and incontrovertible truth.
“She shall accompany you to the ball, Ella, my child of ash,” said the fairy godmother. The girl bowed her head, and Cinderella exhaled, like a thin dying gasp through the phantom wound in her throat. Even in another world, she knew how this would end.
And so the Faerie Queen wrought that mote of starlight into Ella’s garments. Cinderella’s glass armor remained untouched, a small kindness from a goddess who, though Green and Good, was rarely kind.
She watched that goddess transform Ella into a radiant and glowing creature. Many would call it beautiful, but she saw death in it: shrouding the girl in a mantle of duty and blood. It pained her. But there was no glass armor to make this invisible.
And when it was done, the Faerie Queen waved her hand, and the very ground that had swallowed them spat them out again.
“I still have to dig the graves.”
Ella’s voice broke through the hush of the woods, gone eerily still in the wake of the goddess’ presence. Cinderella could almost believe it hadn’t happened, if not for the softly glowing gown draping Ella’s form, and the flickering half-memories of standing here in a thousand other lifetimes.
“You’ll be late for the ball,” Cinderella remarked. From experience, she bit back.
“So you do speak!” Ella said, looking a little startled. Cinderella smirked.
“Did you think me incapable?”
Ella blushed, then shook her head, an awkward sort of authority settling on her shoulders. “I thought—well, it doesn’t matter. I must lay Lucy and Justine to rest. I cannot bear the thought of—” she tightened her jaw, and Cinderella heard the unspoken words well. After all, she had once held them inside her own body: The flesh of my stepsisters rotting. The vultures descending on the carrion. The only things left of them the bones and gristle Stepmother could not digest.
“It wouldn’t be wise to soil the godmother’s gift,” Cinderella said quietly. “I’ll do it, then.”
Ella’s face darkened. “They were my friends. It is my responsibility—”
“You cannot win your prince covered in bloodstains, unless he is unlike any other prince I know.” Cinderella’s mouth quirked, and she could not help the wryness that leaked into her voice: “And I have known many princes.”
“You—” Ella’s fury burned, towered, quavered, and fell away, and her shoulders slumped. For a moment, even within the godmother’s trappings, she looked very young. And a little bedraggled, still. “You are a very contrary knight.”
You worthless, contrary child! a hundred versions of her stepmother shrieked in Cinderella’s mind, and she winced. “Perhaps,” Cinderella said, to stop the I’m sorry from stumbling out.
Ella’s eyes searched hers, and she had the horrible feeling she had heard it anyway. Maybe the knowing went both ways, even if this version of her was a child, a pawn, a little doll in a dress-up play. “Sorry,” Ella murmured. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.”
“You didn’t ask to be dragged into the center of this…evil.” Ella shook her head, looking directly at the sad lump of gore and burlap on the moss below. “What is your name, sir knight?”
Cinderella shrugged and reached for the shovel. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.”
“Well, you have bigger things to worry about.” The moonlight sliced through the trees, illuminating Ella like the cast of a blade. “A ball to attend, a prince to seduce. Plans to foil. You don’t need to know my name for me to do my job.”
“Which is?” Ella said, arching an eyebrow. “I thought your job was to obey my commands.”
Cinderella sighed. The magic was there, certainly; she had fought alongside the Daughters of the Crown long enough to know the touch of a spell on her soul. It bound her like a latticework of lace and iron. But she could see in her—her own? her younger self’s? her alternate path’s?--eyes that she lacked the ruthlessness to use it. She would not force obedience by yanking on her dog’s chain. “Do you want these graves dug or not?”
An imperious tilt of the chin. “I want it done respectfully.”
“I will be gentle.”
“Will you?” Ella glanced dubiously at the sword sheathed across Cinderella’s back, and the shadow of a sneer, like the stinging point of a thorn, passed across her face. Cinderella winced. Inclined her head.
“If that is what you wish.”
There was a still, cold moment, long as winter, that stretched between them. Again, Cinderella almost felt sorry for this version of herself; she had stood in this position a thousand times before. Crowned over decaying flesh, made anew in the mire of death. There was no more that Ella could be to surprise her.
“Fine,” Ella yielded at last. “Dig their graves. Properly. They deserve…every honor.”
Then she bent over the remains, a curve of silver in the darkness, and touched what might have once been a head. Tender. Like brushing back a lock of hair instead of letting blood soak through the covering onto her fingertips.
“Goodbye, my friends,” Ella whispered. “I will make this right, so you can go in peace. I swear it.”
Unbidden, in the dark, Cinderella’s heart stumbled.
Thus did Ella Ashmore’s mysterious knight fulfill her first command: attending to the last rites of the Grizzwald girls. It was not quick, and it was not graceful. The knight’s hands had been made for the killing, not for all that came after. And Ella had been made for the ball; she looked strange and half-formed lingering there, far past when her tale should have spun on.
And it would, soon. Although, as both Ella and her knight should have known, sometimes people do not see the tales spinning right before their eyes.
(“Thank you,” Ella murmured after it was done. She sounded sincere, though as if it might have cost her some dear part of her soul to get out. She turned toward the window before Cinderella could respond.
Cinderella didn’t mind; it had felt good to bury someone. To tend to the bodies, instead of carving them up and leaving them strewn across fields, across worlds. It felt like it mattered again.
Cinderella flexed her fingers, working out the ache, the unused muscle of her tenderness. She would not use it again here. She knew that, just as she knew all the other things that could not last: the fungal ribcage of this carriage, the starlit princess pulsing within it.
The ball. The prince. The story.
But it had felt good, for a moment. Maybe she did have something to thank this version of herself for, a softer memory. She would try to hold onto it when she died again.)