Cinderella- Fairytale Retold

Chapter 18

In the darkness, Ash pressed her bruised face against the back of the cellar door, feeling the wood smooth and cold against her skin: such a thin and porous gatekeeper between herself and the outside world. She moved away from the door and felt her way across the cellar until she came to her father's trunks pushed against the far wall. She sat down, leaning against one of them, wrapping her arms around her knees. The cellar smelled of dirt and musty air and this year's apples.

She was finally beginning to feel the sting of her stepmother's slap across her cheek, and when she prodded at the corner of her lip with a careful tongue, she winced. Her stepmother had never locked her in the cellar for more than one night, for she needed Ash to work. But she was especially angry this time, and Ash was not sure how long she would be left there. She put a hand up to her hair and touched it gingerly; her head felt much lighter now. She ran her fingers through the uneven remains of her hair and noticed that she was still wearing the moonstone ring; Ana must not have noticed it. Turning the ring around on her finger, Ash decided that when she was out of the cellar she would finish what her stepmother had begun and cut the rest of her hair off. She felt buoyed by this thought, and wondered why she did not feel angry at her stepmother. She felt, instead, strangely indifferent. Her life upstairs did not matter anymore. It wasn't real to her. It wasn't what she had ever wanted.

Her mind was racing with memories of that night, and she did not expect to become tired. But eventually she grew drowsy, and she did not know she had nodded off until she awoke to the sound of the cellar door opening. She scrambled up in alarm, thinking it was her stepmother. But the doorway was empty, and moonlight spilled down the steps and flung a rectangle of watery white light on the cellar floor. She got up and went to the door, wondering if this were a dream, and when she stood in the doorway she saw a path laid out in moonlight, glowing, up the steps and across the kitchen garden and out into the meadow. She decided to follow it.

It led her into the Wood, and she saw the path winking far ahead of her like crushed diamonds. It wound through the trees and did not follow any ordinary trail that had been broken in by hunters or the deer they chased. This path meandered like a river of light, and as she walked, her feet kicked up tiny flecks of silver dust that hovered in the air. The path came to an end in a circular clearing, where she saw a crystal fountain in which a hawthorn tree made of diamonds rained clear water. Standing by the fountain was Sidhean.

He came toward her and lifted her chin in his hand, and she was reminded, painfully, of Kaisa. He said, "She has hurt you." At first she did not know who he was talking about, and she wanted to say, no, she would never hurt me. But then she realized he was only referring to her stepmother.

"It is nothing," she said shortly. "It will heal."

He seemed to be somewhat surprised by the tone in her voice, but he only said, "Come and eat, for I know that you are hungry."

He gestured behind him to a small round table and a comfortable round chair —they looked like they had been carved whole out of ancient tree trunks—and on the table was laid out a feast for one. There was bread and cheese and fruits that looked so ripe they might be bursting with juice, and what looked like dark sweet cakes laced with cobwebs of sugar. She asked, "If I eat that food, will I die?"

"No," said Sidhean. "That is not my wish."

So she sat down at the table and picked up the crystal goblet and drank; it tasted like wine, but it was sweeter and lighter than any wine she had ever drunk before. She took a piece of bread from a loaf shaped like a clover leaf, and it was salty and rich and studded with nuts. There was a sharp, pungent cheese that crumbled when she bit into it, and there was a soft, creamy one that she spread over the bread. There was a knife with a smooth wooden handle, and she used it to peel the skin of a round, red fruit; inside was juicy orange flesh that tasted both sweet and tart. The cakes were light as air, with a heady, liquid center that stuck to her fingers so that she had to lick them clean, and when she had finished eating there was a bowl of water and a cloth at her side with which to wash her hands.

"This is fairy food," she finally said, after she had dried her hands.

"Yes," he agreed, and now he was sitting in a similar chair across from her.

"Is it real?" she asked.

His face was in shadow, but she saw his lips curve as he smiled at her. "Of course it is real.
We are real, you know. We simply do not live in your world."

"Am I no longer in my world?"

"Not right now, no. When you took the moonlight path you came to my world."

"You brought me here," said Ash. "Why?"

"You told me a fairy tale once," he said, "and now I have one to tell you." He flexed his fingers and folded them on his knee before continuing. "Once, a long time ago, when magic was stronger in this land, our two races were much closer than they are now. In those days, there was a reason for us to take humans into our fold, because together we created a kind of balance that was good and necessary. But over the centuries, almost all the magic within your people has disappeared. We do not know why. At the same time, your people often chose to ignore their mortality. No one is more impressionable than young humans. They are fooled into thinking they can live forever, when in fact they are about to die."

"I am not fooled," Ash said.

"No," he agreed. "You are not. And once there was another girl who was not fooled. She was no ordinary girl; she knew all the old stories. I could feel her more clearly than any other girl I had encountered in many years, for the old magic was alive in her. It was slight, but it was enough to awaken my interest. I have taken countless human girls, but not for many of your lifetimes. There has been no reason, for your kind does nothing for my people anymore, and my people are reaching the end of our own time. I cannot deny that we are not what we once were.

"Nevertheless, there was an opportunity in this girl. I sent her many dreams to lure her into the Wood at night, but she did not come. Finally, on Midsummer's Eve, when our magic is strongest, I went to her home and called to her. She came to her window then, and when I asked her to come down, she did. I
thought that she would fold easily, but when she came outside she did not follow me. Instead, she cursed me. Such a small, brittle girl—I did not expect it."

"How did she curse you?" Ash asked when he did not go on.

He did not look at her when he said, "She cursed me to fall in love with a human girl, because she believed that might cause me to understand why what I have done over the course of many hundreds of years is wrong." His voice carried a tinge of bitterness. "Her curse did not seem to work at first. I did not think she was powerful enough of a witch to make the curse stick; whatever magic she had in her was tiny, compared to what I could hold in my hand. After all, I have lived for centuries, and she was nothing but a girl."

"Why are you telling me this?" Ash asked.

He said softly, "She was your mother." When their eyes met, she saw that he looked at her with something like pain. "And the first time I saw you, I knew that her curse would hold. But I do not think she knew that her daughter would be the girl caught in her spell."

After everything that had happened that night, his words sank like stones in a still pond. She felt numb; this last revelation was too much, right now, to absorb. Finally she asked, "Is it such a bad curse?"

"It is agony," said Sidhean.

"It is not real," she protested.

"It is as real as I am," he claimed. And then he lifted her up out of her chair and he was holding her hands in his as they stood together, and she felt him press her hands to his chest, where his heartbeat thudded insistently against her fingertips. She would not look up at him, and because he was taller than her by a head, she found herself staring stubbornly at the embroidery on his waistcoat—it was a pattern of leaves and vines and perhaps roses in silver thread on silk of pearl gray, finer than any cloth she had ever seen. She had never been aware of such detail before: Had he never worn anything so beautiful? Or had she simply never opened her eyes? They stood together for what seemed to be an hour, or several, and she wondered if the world were spinning around her, for she felt dizzy. When he let her go she stumbled and nearly fell, but she caught herself on the edge of the chair and sat down again, hard, breathless.

"Something has changed within you," he said accusingly.

She could not deny it.

But the force of him was still all around her and she could not see clearly. He drew a deep breath and said, "You are not ready. Do not return here until you are, but do not delay for too long. I will not wait much longer."

His words lifted her up from her seat, and at the edge of the clearing the moonlight path still floated. His face was turned away from her, and though she wanted to go to him, she could not. Her legs moved her against her will down the path, and then she was running through the Wood, crashing over the undergrowth and sending up waves of fairy light as she fled. She could not stop herself, even as she stumbled over tree roots, but at last she broke free of the Wood and began to cross the meadow. The pushing at her back was less intense now, but she could still feel it—as if there were hands on her shoulders, pressing her forward—and it directed her back through the kitchen garden and down the steps into the cellar. She pulled the door shut, and then a great, whistling wind came and shot the bolt home.

At first she stood, bewildered, in the dark. But as reality crept back into her consciousness— the chill of the cellar, the smell of it—she felt her way back to the trunks against the far wall. She unlatched one and fumbled around inside until she found something that would substitute for a blanket. Feeling drained, she lay down on the hard-packed dirt floor, and she slept.

She dreamed that she was running through the tallest, darkest trees of the Wood, her feet slamming into the uneven ground as she raced toward her goal.

At last the trees parted and she found herself by the hawthorn tree in Rook Hill, and there was the grave of her mother, and beside the grave a young girl sat all in white, reading a book of fairy tales.

When Ash crashed into the clearing the girl turned to look up at her, and Ash saw that the girl's eyes were empty, and her skin was so pale it looked as if she were dead, and when the girl's mouth opened no words came out but Ash knew she was saying her name: Ashiyaana. Ash backed away from the ghost girl, but the girl stood up and came toward her, her hands outstretched, and mouthed her name again. Ash did not know what to do, for she recognized the dress the girl was wearing—it was her work dress that she had worn while cleaning the parlor the other day—and that meant the girl must be herself. But the girl looked like a specter, and if she were Ash, then Ash knew she had died as well.

She tried to run away, but she tripped on the root of the hawthorn tree and fell onto the grave, and the earth was heaving and warm beneath her, a monster rising out of the dark, and Ash wept, for she wanted to live.