Cinderella Is Dead(50)

“Unfortunately. It’s been quite a while since I’ve been up with the sun. I have you two chattering away to thank for that.” She climbs off the mattress and stumbles to her feet. “Put the kettle and pot on. We’ll need something to eat. What will it be—eye of newt, tongue of dog?” Amina cackles.

“That’s disgusting,” Constance grumbles.

I push the pot over the fire and move the embers around before throwing another log on.

“We were just about to go over a few things,” I say.

“I’ll need coffee, my pipe, and a moment to wake up before we start on this again,” says Amina. She gathers a clay mug and her little cedar box and plops down in the chair by the fire. She puffs on her pipe, then splays her hand out in front of her. “Go on then.”

“Cinderella got a message to Gabrielle, asking her to meet in secret,” Constance says.

“Is that so?” Amina seems intrigued.

Constance goes to her bag and pulls out her belongings. She unbundles a packet of handwritten notes. Some of them are faded and look too delicate to even touch. She hands them to Amina. “One of Lady Davis’s most brilliant ideas was establishing a network of people willing to pass messages in order to organize their efforts. Over time the network shrank, mostly because the king was increasing his stranglehold on the women of Mersailles. These are some of the communications.”

I peer over Amina’s shoulder.



My skin pricks up. “I saw a note like this at Cinderella’s tomb the night I escaped the ball.”

Constance hangs her head. “I’m not surprised. The tomb would have been a perfect place to leave a message. So many people used to leave little notes there a message like this wouldn’t have been noticed.”

Amina shuffles the remaining messages and peers down at a particularly yellowed and curling slip of paper.



“That one is from Cinderella to Gabrielle five years before Cinderella’s death,” says Constance. “Gabrielle met her, and Cinderella tried to tell her something, but the guards found her and took her away. She risked her life to deliver a message.”

“It’s not as if he kept her in a cell,” Amina says quietly. “She had her own room in the palace. It was quite lovely, actually.”

“A prison is still a prison no matter how pretty the decor,” says Constance. Her patience is already paper thin.

Amina remains silent.

“Does it make you feel better to think of her as some pampered princess?”

Constance can’t keep her emotions in check, and it’s wrong to ask her to. She has a right to everything she feels. I just hope Amina will still be willing to help us.

“Why do you think I’ve spent these last years of my life in these godforsaken woods?” Amina asks. “It’s not for the scenery. I know what I’ve done, and you could just leave me here to rot like I deserve, but no. You traipsed out here to bother me.”

Constance looks at me, and I force a quick smile just to show her I’m not going to stand in her way.

“What happened when the spell wore off?” she asks. “You gave her a love potion. I’m assuming it didn’t last forever, so what happened after it wore off?”

Amina sighs. “What I gave her lasted a full cycle of the moon. The spell lost its potency just after they were married, and she began to feel differently toward him.”

“Being responsible for the death of her parents seems like a good reason to loathe someone,” Constance says.

Amina nods. “He wanted her more than anything. And more important, he wanted her to feel the same way about him. As the potion wore off, it became clear that she would never love him the way he wanted her to, but he couldn’t let it go. His pride was too great to let her walk away. He kept her in the palace until she died.”

“People said she was sick, bedridden in the last years of her life,” I say.

“She was locked away in the palace during the remaining years of her life.” Amina opens herself up again. “No one was allowed to see or speak to her except for one servant, some ancient woman who died just after Cinderella. And Manford himself, of course.” Amina turns to Constance and speaks directly to her. “I don’t know what she intended to tell your Gabrielle. Whatever Cinderella knew, she took to the grave.”

Constance runs her hand over her forehead and slumps down in her seat.

“Maybe you should let it go,” Amina says. “Cinderella lived and died a long time ago, and what’s going on in Mersailles, especially in Lille, is tragic, but what can you do? Nothing has changed in two hundred years. Maybe it never will.”

Constance shakes her head. “Coward.”

Amina raises an eyebrow and then returns to gazing into the fireplace. “All the name-calling in the world doesn’t change the fact that you can’t do a damn thing to stop him.” She goes to the shelf, takes down the strange book I’d seen earlier, and opens it on the table in the kitchen. After running her finger over the words written there, she adds ingredients from the jars on the rear wall to the cauldron.

I watch her carefully. “What are you doing?”

“Making myself invisible so that your friend can’t keep staring at me like she wants to kill me.” She shoots Constance an angry glare.