1. JANE
Outside the walls of the castle, standing before the moat, looking out at the stream that separates us from our subjects, there is a woman in a box. She is tall and blond. She has an ivory dress and pale skin and a shock of a red mouth. She doesn’t move. Not even when the townspeople wave and clamor for her attention. Not even now, when I am looking into her unblinking eyes. She doesn’t move. She can’t.
The woman is my mother.
I tell myself these facts every day, a story I repeat in my head. A true story that can feel untrue, which is why I find myself saying it over and over. My mother, the queen, is frozen in a box. We have to break the spell.
“What’d you say?” Olive says, pulling on one side of my dress, then the other, as if there is a perfect way to wear it, but my body isn’t cooperating. I must have said the words out loud. Years of hunger have broken down my defenses, and thoughts slip out too often now, forgetting to ask my permission first.
“We’re going to break the spell today,” I say, testing out the words for my attendant. They sound true enough. They sound possible, at least.
Olive pauses. Her hands are on my back, pulling and stitching fabric that was meant for someone softer, someone fuller, someone fed. It’s her job to make my dresses fit me, and that means her fingers are always calloused from the needle, her eyes always squinting from the delicacy of the work, the impossibility of making my body look anything but Spellbound. “I hope that’s true,” she says at last.
There’s a clatter from the dining room, one floor below us. I used to like this part of the castle. It always smells like whatever is cooking. And whatever is cooking is always delicious. Now it’s a pointed kind of torture, to smell everything I haven’t been able to eat for five years.
Dad’s offered to move me into a different room a hundred times, but it feels like admitting defeat, so I stay. “Queens don’t complain,” I’ve reminded him more than once. A lesson my mother taught me, when she was out here and not in that box.
“They’re having scones,” I say now, smelling the air. “Cherry.”
“Chocolate cherry,” Olive says before shaking her head and correcting herself. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. You don’t need to know that.”
“Chocolate-cherry scones,” I say. “Don’t know that I’ve ever had them.”
“For Eden’s birthday, whatever she requests is what gets made,” Olive says, repeating the rules to me as if they aren’t my own, as if I don’t live with them every day. Across the generations many things have happened on Thirteenth Birthdays. Engagements. Weddings. Treaties between nations. And of course, eighty years ago, a kidnapped princess, the start of the biggest War. The War We Won.
I’m begging tonight to matter the way so many other Thirteenth Birthdays have.
Downstairs, my sisters are laughing at something. I can practically hear their tongues in their mouths, their hands wiping their lips, their throats swallowing. It’s not just food I miss. It’s everything that comes with food. The way my father used to spread the butter on my bread for me, always caking on extra. The jokes at the table. The loveliness of a heavy silver fork in my hand. Even the way meals mark the passing of time, giving a long day balance and breaks.
Now a day is just an endless stretch of hunger that goes from dawn until dusk without a single breath of relief.
Even today.
“I think you’ll be able to break the spell,” Olive says, working on fitting the sleeves of my gown around my wrists. This dress fit fine a month ago, but it’s now swallowing me whole. The Slow Spell is Quickening. Time is running out.
Ever since the spell was cast, I’ve been counting down to Eden’s Thirteenth Birthday, when the witch promised she’d return to tell us how to break the spell before it turns True.
I wonder if the people of Ever have been thinking about it too. They cried the day the spell was cast. They watched from the other side of the moat when the witch appeared on the Grand Yard, arms raised, a cape flying out behind her. She was a young witch. My age. Her voice was thin as it recited a magical chant. She called out our fates one by one, telling us what malady would befall us on our Thirteenth Birthdays. “When you each reach my age,” she said, “that’s when the spell will bind you. On your Thirteenth Birthday. When it binds the last of you, in five years’ time on Princess Eden’s birthday, I’ll return. I’ll give you one chance to break the spell.”
I waited for Dad to react, to boom out a hundred questions. Most importantly, Why are you doing this? and Don’t you know what our agreement is? and maybe also Do the older witches know you’re here; are you confused; can someone fetch this young, unhinged witch and return her to her Home on the Hill?
Instead, he was quiet. We were all in shock. Witches were our partners in keeping Ever safe. We protected them. They protected us. Perfect symbiosis. Everything about this witch, from her age to her words to the spell itself, was wrong. More than wrong. Impossible.
I was shaking from the impossibility of it.
Mom was quiet too. Queens are quiet, and she was always, always a queen first.
I stayed quiet for as long as I could, because I wanted to be queen. But as long as I could turned out to be twenty-two seconds.
“Why would you do this?” I said. My voice was small at first, then louder, because she didn’t answer, and her face only got harder, more sure. “This is— What are you doing? We’re princesses, and you’re… We don’t do this to each other! Why would you do this?”
Mom had told me a hundred times that silence is more meaningful than words. I was failing at following Mom’s rules, but I didn’t know how to be quiet in the face of this witch.
The witch kept her mouth closed. She wouldn’t look at me. She looked everywhere else, though. She looked at the castle—its stone, its turrets, its incredible size.
I tried to say only the most important thing in the enormous valley of my parents’ silence. “Please,” I said. “No.”
“I have to,” she said. She looked a little sad saying it. Or maybe I’m just remembering it that way.
I was the oldest, three days from my Thirteenth Birthday. The rest of my sisters would have more time to prepare for the spell. Nora would have over a year. Alice another year beyond that. Grace would have nearly four years to think it all through. And Eden would have the whole five years. I had three days. My heart beat out the number. Three. Three. Three.
“Please,” I said again. “No.” Thirteenth Birthdays are celebrated with enormous royal balls, a feast, a dance, silk dresses, a silver crown. Not with curses. Mine was already all planned. “No,” I said again, trying to make it sound royal and right. “No.”
I looked at my mother. She would know how to fix it. My whole life, she’d solved every problem that had come my way.
There hadn’t been many.
I watched her body lean forward a little, her mouth form an O shape, about to say something wise and true to this young witch, ready to finally break her queenly silence. But before a word came out, before she could stitch things back together, make our world right again, she froze. A glass box appeared around her, trapping her inside.