Shatter Like Glass-Cinderella Retold

Part Nine

By stroke of luck, Ashen awoke minutes before the dinner. She rushed to stowaway her possessions in her carpet bag. Using a cord she found lying on the floor, she tied back her hair. She shut the door behind her, then crossed the hall to Smiegal's room. Twice she knocked with no answer. Curious, she opened the door.

"Stay where you are!" he called out.

"You are in here," she said.

"Why didn't you just knock?"

"I did; you didn't answer."

"Oh."

"Yes, oh," she replied. "Why didn't you hear it?"

"I was . . . distracted."

"What are you doing?"

"At the moment, I am getting dressed."

"Why were you undressed?"

"I just needed to change my shirt, alright?"

"Desperate to strip down for me?" she teased. Ashen grinned, then frowned, sniffing the air. "Do I smell ink?"

"I was writing."

"Did you spill ink on your shirt?"

"Why do you ask so many questions?"

"It is an Azurian thing."

"You are not an Azure, not really."

Ashen didn't reply. The comment, so offhand, took her by surprise. She always considered herself an Azure. A pirate first, but then an Azure. She had been born there, though she had not visited the kingdom in seventeen years. Did that mean she was no longer an Azure?

Smiegal popped his head from around the corner that obscured the in-room privy.

"Are you alright?"

"Aye," she lied.

Frowning, he said, "I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. I just thought . . .  I didn't think you considered yourself one anymore. You or George. I know I don't consider myself a Viridian."

"Just because we leave doesn't mean the place is not a part of us," Ashen stated. "Azure is not a terrible place. It just has a terrible ruler."

"Do you know that?" he asked. "The ones who wronged your parents are dead."

Sometimes Ashen forgot her grandparents had been murdered. A few months after Arrow died, someone broke into Dorogoyev Manor and stabbed them eleven times each. The word killer had been carved into their necks. No one knew how it happened, though a few suspected the now-present-king Nikolai. Two years after Arrow disappeared—when she could legally be considered dead—he remarried her sister Alena in hopes their children would inherit some of Arrow and Alena's family's raw magic. Descended from some of the first sorcerers, some members of the family were able to draw on pure, unlimited magic when they were in distress. Ashen did not know if Nikolai's wish came true for his and Alena's two daughters, the twin princesses Nadya and Natalya. Ashen did not even know if she had raw magic. She certainly hadn't accessed it when her mother was killed. Arrow hadn't used it either.

Maybe it was just a myth.

"Not all of them," Ashen said at last. "Nikolai kept up the lie. That lie destroyed our lives. He tried to kill George, too, and he blackmailed my mother. He and my grandparents are the reason my mother is dead."

"And he is the reason you would never return?"

"Is any one person the reason you don't want to return to Viridian?"