Cinderella Is Dead(65)

I shake my head. “We have to try. The cotillion is our way in.”

“And what will you do then?” Amina asks. There’s a solemn tone to her voice again. I worry there is something she’s not telling us.

Constance straightens up. “We’ll kill him. That’s what we’ll do.”

Amina sits back, sighing heavily, but says nothing.





30





We spend each night leading up to the cotillion in the parlor over a pot of stew and a kettle of strong black tea, reviewing every aspect of what we know so far about the king, about the palace. We make plans, scratching out the details on parchment, but each one of these plans turns to kindling in the bottom of the fireplace when a flaw is noticed. There will be little room for error, and nothing we come up with seems good enough.

Amina has taken several more trips into town and heard a rumor that the king has increased security at the border because of an uptick in disruptive incidents. Constance thought they may have been staged by the other escapees she’d spoken of, but she had little hope that enough of them remained to pull off an uprising. Amina thought they might be people who were still trapped under the king’s thumb, resisting because of my escape. I can’t imagine how angry that must have made him.

In addition to making the cotillion mandatory, King Manford has made it clear that anyone who willfully disobeys his orders will be considered a forfeit, their property seized and their family members executed. They are the words of a desperate man.

Our planning comes to a grinding halt when we try to figure out what will happen once we’re inside the palace.

“We’ve come to the most important part and still nothing,” I say one evening as we sit racking our brains. We’re running out of time.

“We know we can get in,” says Constance. “But once he realizes who you are, that you’re the one who escaped, you’ll be a target.”

The visions I had in the pond haven’t stopped since we came to our new residence. I still dream almost every night of the king and the light. “I need to find Cinderella’s journal. That is the key. I just know it.”

Amina rifles through her belongings and pulls out a book I recognize immediately. It’s the palace-approved version of the Cinderella story.

“I don’t even want to look at that right now,” I say.

She flips through the pages and then stops abruptly, looking up. “Constance, I’d like to have another look at that book of fairy tales, the one you said was passed down to you.”

Constance rolls her eyes and goes to get the book, handing it to Amina.

“Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?” Amina asks.

“We don’t have time for this,” I say.

Amina ignores my protests and opens Constance’s book, running her hand over the first page, a scene of Cinderella as a toddler, standing on the front step of her house and holding her father’s hand. Amina glances back and forth between the two versions of Cinderella’s tale.

“Exactly like the palace-approved version,” I say.

Amina shakes her head. “Look again.”

I lean in. She’s right. The larger drawing is the same, but in the backdrop there is something on the ground, a heap that almost bleeds into the intricate rendering of the foliage that lines the pathway to the house.

A shiver runs up my back.

“Didn’t you say Cinderella’s mother was executed in the driveway?” I ask Constance.

She only nods. The little heap of ink looks like a person slumped on the ground.

I take the book from Amina and lay it on the floor, setting the palace-approved version right next to it. “The next drawing should be one of an older Cinderella bowing in front of her new stepmother.”

It is, but in Constance’s version, Lady Davis is leaning forward, her hand extended, her face gentle, her eyes full of sorrow, and Cinderella isn’t bowing as much as she is kneeling, like she’s just collapsed, her fingers rigid against the floor.

“Her father’s imprisonment and execution,” Constance says. She glances up at me. “What is going on here?”

“I think this book may be closer to the truth than anything I’ve ever seen,” says Amina. “Whoever recorded it this way, with the drawings telling the real story, would have put themselves at great risk by doing so.”

We flip through, and I spot another difference. “In the palace version, it says that after Cinderella’s wedding, Gabrielle’s and her younger sister Isla’s eyes were pecked out while their mother was forced to watch, and then they were sent into the woods to remain in exile until they died. In Constance’s book, they are exiled without all the gory details.”

“They were left out there to rot, but they didn’t,” Constance says. “They got away.”

I read over the words. “The color of the dress is different in your version, Constance. Also, it says that the stepsisters simply tried fitting the glass shoe, but in the palace text it says they cut off their own toes to try to make it fit.” I glance up at Constance. “People hate them. I saw a little girl at the bicentennial celebration break down in tears at the thought of being like them.”

Constance draws her mouth into a hard line. “He made them monsters to keep the attention off him. He is the real monster.”