Chapter 2

Elena paused at the gate to take a good long look at the house she had lived in all of her life, seeing it, really seeing it, for the first time in a very long time. She tried to look at it as if she was a stranger. It was a handsome place, which Jacques had miraculously kept in good repair—but then, since it was made of the same beautiful golden-grey stone as the wall around it, and had a stout slate roof, perhaps that hadn't been all that difficult a proposition. Once in a great while, a slate would slip and need to be replaced, or a windowpane crack, but that was all.

The lack of cloth fluttering at them told Elena that the creditors had taken all of the curtains.

And the urns with their little rosemary bushes that had stood on either side of the front door.

And the statue of Venus that had held pride-of-place in the center of the flower-bed in this, the front garden. The bills must have been very large indeed, for creditors to take the garden statuary.

At least they hadn't taken the glass out of the windows. But perhaps they couldn't—the glass was part of the house, and as yet, they could make no claim on the house itself. They would have to go before a magistrate, and Elena could plead her cause there, and possibly even win. And even if she didn't, she could take her cause to the King at his weekly audience, and probably win. They said that the King had a notoriously soft spot for orphans, having been left one himself, but that might just be a bit of idle gossip.

She lingered for a moment, steeling herself for the inevitable, then walked up the path. The door had been imperfectly closed, and opened with a touch. It creaked on its iron hinges, and for a moment, Elena winced, expecting Madame to shriek a complaint.

But no. Madame was no longer here to complain. She relaxed again.

Madame had taken as much as she could, but most of the downstairs rooms still had been furnished before the creditors had arrived. Even Madame Klovis could not manage to carry off an entire household of furnishings in a carriage and a hired cart. Most of what Madame had added in the way of decoration to the public rooms of the house had been in soft goods—rugs, tapestries, cushions. Those she had taken with her, leaving the heavy pieces behind. Now the morning light shining through the open windows showed nothing but bare walls with paler patches showing where the tapestries had been, and bare wood floors, marred with deep scratches where the heavy furniture had been dragged out. Elena began wandering through the rooms, taking inventory of what was lost.

The sitting room; here there had been a fine, heavy settle beneath the window, a handsome cabinet made for displaying the family silver (Madame had taken the silver), a table and chairs at the fireplace, a second settle against the wall opposite the window. All of the furniture had been made of dark walnut, lovingly rubbed and waxed until it glowed. The only thing left now was the inglenook seat built into the fireplace itself.

The dining room, where the furniture had been made of the same oak as the beds upstairs; table, twelve chairs, sideboard. All gone.

Her father's office; desk, chair, cabinet where he had kept his records. Now a mere memory.

The tiny room seemed much bigger now.

The library—she opened the door and stepped into the room, and stifled a hurt gasp at the sight of all the empty shelves. It had not been a large room, no bigger than the dining room, but it had been her favorite in all the house. This was, perhaps, the greatest loss for Elena, for not only were the stout chairs and desk gone, and the huge, framed map of the Five Hundred Kingdoms that had hung over the door, but so were all the books and ornaments that had stood between them. The ornaments had never interested her a great deal, but the books—those books had been the consolation of lonely hours, the things that took her away when she was unhappy.

Madame had not taken any of the books; she had no use for such things, and had not seen their value.

But to Elena, who had hoped that the creditors would not see the value either, the loss of each book was as if she had lost a friend. She had known each of them, read them all countless times, knew every foxed page, every scar on every binding. Tears sprang into her eyes, her throat closed, and she jammed the side of her hand into her mouth to keep from sobbing aloud.

Blinded by her tears, she turned away, quickly.

The pantry had already been empty, every bit of food loaded into the carriage, and she did not pause to examine it. Nor would she trouble to go down to the cellar; there was nothing there, either, and for the same reason. Madame never stinted herself on fine wines, and what she didn't drink, without a doubt, Jacques would. The kitchen, however, had still been furnished—

Madame did not intend to have to cook for herself, and had no need of kitchenware. Only the fine china had been packed away and taken. But now it, too, was bare, stripped as completely as any other room, every knife, every pot and pan, excepting only the dishrags she had washed and left to dry, two heavy, brown-glazed dishes and three mugs made of the commonest clay, all of them chipped and worn, and two pots made of the same substance. So, she could cook. But otherwise, even the spit, the crane, and the pothook in the fireplace had been taken.

No need to took in the stillroom. What Madame didn't take, they'll have now.

She went upstairs, and did not bother to check the bedrooms on the second floor. If the creditors had been so thorough down below, she doubted that they would have left anything other than dust. Instead, she climbed the stairs to the attic, and her garret room, to see if anything at all had been left there.

She opened the door to her own room and for a moment, she felt frozen with shock. Her few belongings had been tossed about the room as if a mad dog had been playing with them. Her poor, flat little pillow was gone. Her ragged blankets were thrown into the corner. Her other change of clothing wadded up and tossed into the opposite corner. The box that held her few little treasures had been upended, and the comb with teeth missing, the bit of broken mirror, the feathers, bits of pretty stone, and dried flowers kicked everywhere, the string of beads broken and scattered. Her pallet of straw-stuffed canvas had been torn open, the straw scattered about the room. The place was a shambles.

For a second time she fought back tears, but she truly wanted to fall to her knees and weep at the thoughtless cruelty of it. Why? Why tear her poor things to bits? Could they possibly imagine that there had been anything of value hidden up here? How could they even think that she would have been allowed to keep anything? Hadn't the entire town been aware of her shabby state? Why, the town beggars went better clothed than she!

Perhaps another girl would have been paralyzed with the grief that shook her—but Elena had learned to work even while her heart was breaking and her eyes overflowing a long time ago.

And if her hands shook as she carefully picked up and shook out her spare skirt, bodice, and blouse, her worn-out shawl and kerchief, and folded them up to set them in the window-seat, what was left of her bits and souvenirs in a mound atop them, well, there was no one to see. And if she sprinkled the straw she regathered from the floor with her tears, there was no one to mock her grief. But it was hard, hard, to have the little she had saved of her past life ground into dust as those poor flowers had been. At least she was wearing the locket with her mother's portrait in it around her neck on a ribbon—Daphne had stolen the chain long ago.

She sobbed quietly as she collected every bit of straw; she would need something to sleep on tonight. It had to be done, and no one would do it for her.

She stuffed it all back into the empty canvas sack that had been her bed. And at least there was one small blessing; she always kept her needlecase in the pocket of her apron, and had they found that, they probably would have taken it as well. So she was able to stitch the mattress back up again, sitting cross-legged on the bare floor. They had torn the seams open, rather than ripping up the canvas, and although she had to remake it a little smaller, when she finished it was not in much worse shape than it had been before it had been torn apart. It was a hard thing, though—to find that men whom she had never harmed, who should realize that she had been just as ill-treated as they, should take out their anger on her.

And when she thought about how the flowers from her mother's grave had been crushed, the few things she could call her own left in ruins, her eyes burned and new sobs choked her—

"Ahem."

She squeaked and jumped, and cast startled eyes on the open doorway.

There was a man standing there. He stepped into the light, and she saw that it was Monsieur Rabellet. He carried a bundle under one arm, and his face was suffused with guilt.

"I am sorry, Ella," he said, flushing with shame when he caught sight of her tear-streaked face.

"They were looking for valuables, and they started in on your room before I could stop them. It was the latecomers, you see, the ones who got nothing because—"

She sniffed, and wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, but said nothing; she just stared at him, and let the tears come, weeping silently. She was not going to make this easy on him. If he'd cared to, he could have stopped them. He was a big man, only the blacksmith was bigger.

"At least I kept them from tearing up your clothes!" he protested, and flushed again. "At least—no more than they already were...." He coughed, and swallowed audibly as she fixed him with a look that she hoped would stab him to the heart and double his guilt. "The wife gave me a piece of her mind when she found out."

Well, Madame Rabellet had always been kind to Elena, who had given her the respect due to a fine craftswoman, and always been ready to lend a hand at the fittings, proving herself so useful that Madame Rabellet had never needed to bring her Apprentice-girl with her.

"Anyway, when she found out, she sent me back here with this—" The man took two steps forward into the room and thrust the bundle at Elena, who automatically put out her hands to take it from him. "She said it wasn't fair—said God gives blessings to the charitable—said—" He was backing up as he babbled, as if the accusations in her eyes were arrows, wounding him, and when he reached the door, he whirled, and fled, leaving her alone as his hasty footsteps on the floor and the staircase echoed through the empty rooms. She sat there, unmoving, until the slamming of the front door woke her from her shock.

She looked at the bundle in her hands. It was fabric—it was woolen, dyed a golden-brown.

Not new, but sound, in good condition, and so far as she could tell, not stained, either. She unfolded it, to find that it was a large, plain shawl, and it was only the covering for a bundle of clothing.

A skirt, a blouse, and a bodice; like the shawl, the fabric was not new and the skirt and bodice had been re-dyed. The skirt was a heavy twilled linen, and there was a kerchief that matched, dyed a dark brown, the bodice was black, and the blouse a pale color that was not quite white. They all looked to have been made from much larger garments, cut down when the seams were too worn to hold, but the fabric itself was still good.

They were not patched, not torn, not darned. In fact, they were stoutly-sewn and well re-dyed. These were the sorts of things that a dressmaker assigned to a new Apprentice to make, simple garments to teach her to sew a "fine seam."

They were the best pieces of clothing that Elena had owned since her father had died. They were also exactly what she needed to carry out her plan.

When the rest of the town discovered—as it must, given that Madame Blanche and Madame Fleur were two of the most inveterate gossips in the Kingdom—that Elena had been left behind to live as best she could in the empty house, a few of the more guilt-stricken arrived to leave small offerings at her doorstep. Most she never saw; she heard footsteps on the path, and by the time she got to the front door, the gate was swinging shut and there was a basket or a bundle on the doorstep. In fact, except for Monsieur Rabellet, she didn't get much more than a glimpse of a skirt or a pair of legs.

But the offerings were welcome—indeed, desperately needed. A warm woolen shawl, a kitchen knife and a very old and very small frying pan, a loaf of bread, a ball of cheese, a blanket, a pat of butter, a pannikin of salt and a twist of tea. So she wouldn't go hungry tonight, nor cold. Madame Blanche completed the offerings in person, delivering a half dozen eggs and some bacon just as the sun began to set.

She found Elena on her knees at the hearth in the kitchen, getting the fire going again, and ready to toast some bread and cheese for her supper.

"Well!" she said, looking with approval at the food. "I was hoping someone would have a guilty conscience! Good." Her mouth firmed with satisfaction. "So, now the robbers have taken care of what you need for now, but have you thought about what you're going to do?"

Elena sat back on her heels and looked up at her kindly old neighbor. "I have, actually—I thought it up the day Madame told me that she and the girls were going. I just—" She shook her head. "I wanted to tell you, but Madame swore me to secrecy.

She told me that she was going to leave me here to look after the house, and that was when I made up my mind what I was going to do when she was truly gone."

"You did? Well, good for you!" Madame Blanche went out into the kitchen garden and came back with some bits of herbage pinched off the new growth in the herb bed. "Here you are, dear.

Those will go nicely in coddled eggs. So, what are you going to do?"

She took a deep breath. "I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave here and never come back."

Madame Blanche blinked, as if she could not quite believe what she had just heard. "I don't suppose you would care to explain that?"

"Tomorrow is the Mop Fair," Elena elaborated. "Anyone who is looking for a servant is going to be there. And you said yourself that everyone in the town knows that I've done every bit of cleaning, mending and tending in this house for—years, anyway. I'm only a plain cook, but anything else, I can do."

"But—but you're not a servant!" Madame Blanche said, looking blank. "You're from a good family, Elena! Your poor mother—if she knew, she'd be weeping at the thought. It's one thing for me to do my own cooking, but—"

"I may not have been born a servant, but that's what I am now," Elena said firmly. "I'm too old to become an Apprentice in any decent trade even if I had the fee, so that is what I am good for now." She bit her lip, and continued, bitterly, "You know that's the truth, that it's all I'm good for, now. Madame Klovis saw to that; I have no dowry, no prospects, nothing to offer a young man but myself, and what young man would marry an old maid of twenty-one who brings him nothing but her two hands and a few housekeeping skills? Unless I dispute it, within days, the magistrates will turn this very house over to the creditors. Even if I do dispute it and win, what am I to do? It won't be long before Madame Klovis returns—for you surely don't think that she'll have any better luck elsewhere in her fortune hunting any more than I do—and I will be back to being her unpaid slave."

"Well," Madame Blanche said, blankly, "I suppose that all of that is true...."

"So there you are," Elena said, trying to sound determined, and not bleak. "This is my only chance to get away from her. And if I am going to have to spend the rest of my life, mending and tending and cleaning, then I am—by Heaven!—going to be paid for it!"

And at least I'll have three meals a day and two suits of clothing a year as well, she reminded herself. Every servant, no matter how lowly, was entitled to that and her bed and board and pay. It would be more than she had ever gotten out of Madame Klovis.

Madame Blanche took a deep breath, as if she was about to dispute Elena's view of the situation, then let it all out in a tremendous sigh. "I am afraid, my dear," she said sadly, "that you are correct. And you are a very brave girl."

Elena shook her head. "I am not brave at all," she replied, and a little of her despair crept into her voice, despite her attempts to keep it out. "I am terrified, Madame Blanche. If I were brave, I would go to the King and find some way to get everything back again. If I were brave, I would reclaim this house at least, and sell it, and use the money to set myself up in a little cottage somewhere, with a cow, and some chickens and geese, and a little garden of my own. But I am not brave. I am afraid to face all of the creditors and the magistrate, I am too terrified to even think seriously of going to the King. I am running away, Madame Blanche, and I was not even brave enough to face my stepmother and tell her what I am going to do. When she returns, she will find the house has been sold and I am gone, and if I am working for some family here in town, I will hide until she goes again."

Madame Blanche regarded her gravely for a long moment, the light from the fireplace casting strange shadows on her face. "You may be right, Elena, in saying that this is the only thing you can do. But I think you are wrong in saying that you are not brave." She paused. " May I tell Fleur what you have told me?"

"Of course!" Elena replied. "I would be happy to have—" now it was her turn to pause, to choose the right phrase "—her kindly thoughts."

"And I am sure you will have them, my dear," Madame Blanche said warmly. "Well, I will leave you to make your supper in peace."

And she bowed a little, before she turned and left.

Elena sighed, and put a pat of butter in the skillet to melt. After everything had been taken, there were two things left; there had been wood in the woodshed, and a bucket on the pump.

She made and ate her dinner—eggs and bread and a little tea. She cleaned the dishes in the light from the fire. Then she banked the fire until morning, washed her face and hands, and, for lack of anything else to do, went up to bed.

There were no candles, of course, for even if her stepmother had left any, the creditors would have taken them, so Elena climbed the stairs to her room in the dark, and made up her bed (with the new shawl bundled around her old clothing for a pillow, and the new blanket over the old, tattered ones) by the light of the moon coming in her window. She carefully took off her outer clothing and slid into the bed in her shift, and if the pallet was a little lumpier than it had been, it was also warmer beneath the new blanket.

And this was the earliest she had been able to go to sleep in as long as she could recall.

Usually she was awake until after midnight with all of the tasks she had to finish—later than that, if the Horrids had been to a ball or a party, and she had to stay up to help them undress. She usually didn't get to go to sleep on a full stomach, either.

It had been a very long day, nevertheless, and an emotional one. She was tired, as tired as she ever had been.

And no one is going to wake me with a scream for something, she realized, as she felt her muscles relaxing in the unaccustomed warmth. The empty house felt—odd. There was a hollowness to it. There were no little sounds below her, of people moving about or making noises in their sleep.

Through her open window, which overlooked the kitchen-garden, she heard voices coming from the house next door. Not loud enough to make out what was being said, but loud enough to know that it was Blanche and Fleur, and a third, unfamiliar voice.

She smiled a little. It was probably a client of Fleur's; someone like Fleur usually saw a lot of clients after dark. Few people wanted to be seen patronizing a Witch, even if that Witch was someone who had a heart full of only good, true as a priest, and honest as a magistrate.

Everyone knew that Fleur was a Witch of course, and had been since she was very small indeed, though no one every actually said the word aloud. This was why they called her

"Madame," although, unlike her sister, she had never had a husband. You just called a Witch

"Madame"—it was respectful, and it didn't do to treat a Witch with disrespect. That was why Elena had chosen her words so carefully when she'd asked for Fleur's "good wishes," and why Blanche had asked so carefully if she could "tell Fleur." Words took on extra weight, and extra potency, when there was a Witch involved. You were careful about words around Witches.

Not that Fleur had a great deal of magic of the sort that tales were made of. No, Fleur's power lay in healing and herbs; she was a very small Witch, as Witches went. Ask her to cure your child or get your dry cow to give milk again, and there was no problem. Ask her to cast a love spell or break a curse, and she would look at you helplessly, and shrug.

As she had the day that Elena, weeping after having had yet another possession appropriated by one of the Horrids, had come running into the neighbor's garden and begged Fleur to make Madame go away.

Fleur had only looked at her, sadly. "I cannot, dear," she said, slowly. "I am bound to tell you the truth, my pet. Somewhere, Madame obtained a very powerful love spell, and your father is entrapped in it. I cannot break it, though I wish with all my heart that I could. I could not even begin to guess how to break it, in fact."

Elena stared at the moon framed in her window as she remembered that dreadful moment. It had been an epiphany of sorts. Until that moment, she had believed that all endings were happy ones, that all good adults could help children, if only the children asked, and that good things happened to good people, if only they were brave enough. In that moment, she had learned that sometimes good people were helpless, that terrible things happened to good people, that there were sad endings as well as happy ones.

Worst of all, she had learned that no matter how brave and good you were, bad people often won, and that her father was lost to her forever.

From that moment, she mourned him as if he was dead—and indeed, for all intents and purposes, he might just as well have died. He came less and less to protect her from her stepmother and stepsisters, until at last he did nothing at all. He scarcely seemed to realize that she existed. He totally forgot that he had ever been married to anyone else, and spent his every waking moment trying to find some new means of pleasing "his Madeleine."

It almost came as an anticlimax when he sickened and died within that year of wedding Madame. She thought, looking back on it, that she had known, deep in her heart, that this was what would happen. Love spells did not last forever, not even powerful ones, and Madame was not the sort to allow her power to ebb away.

But this was the peculiar thing; Elena had spent her time since her father's death wrapped in a growing sense of tension and frustration, as if something was out there, some force that would make all of this better, if only she knew how to invoke it. That there was a way to turn this into a happy ending, and that her life was a coiled spring being wound ever tighter until it would all be released in a burst of wonder and magic that would give her back everything that had been taken, and more. The longer things went on, the more she felt that climax rushing towards her, or she towards it—

But it never happened. Not on her sixteenth birthday—the primary moment of magical happenings according to every tale that she had ever read or heard—nor on her eighteenth, which was the other possibility. No, things stayed exactly as they had been. No Fairy Godmother appeared, not even Madame Fleur, somehow empowered to take Elena out of her miserable existence. No handsome prince, no prince of any kind, appeared on the doorstep to save her. There was not even a marriage proposal from the blacksmith's son or the cowherd, both traditional disguises for wandering princes. Nothing. Only more and more back-breaking work, and the certainty that nothing was going to change, that Madame had things arranged precisely as she wanted them, and that Elena would be "Ella Cinders," the household slave, until she died. And her despair grew until it matched the tension inside, until it overwhelmed the tension inside, and the only escape from either she ever had were a few stolen moments inside the covers of a book.

For years while she still had hope, she had eased her sadness by telling herself stories like those she read in the books and heard old women tell their grandchildren. "Once upon a time,"

they always began, "there was a poor orphan girl who was forced to slave for her Wicked Stepmother." And they ended with, "And the orphan girl married the prince—" or the duke, or the earl, or the handsome magician "—and lived happily ever after."

Then, gradually, the stories had changed, and the rescuer had not been a prince. By the time she was sixteen and a day, she had abandoned all thoughts of royalty, and instead, prayed and hoped with a clawing despair for romance. Just a little. Just an ordinary love of her own.

No, the dreams she had told no one were no longer about the unattainable, but about the barely possible—if there were, somewhere in the town, a man willing to brave Madame's wrath to steal her away.

Day in, day out, in the market, by the river, or from her garret window, she had watched other girls with envious eyes as they were courted and wooed by young men. They seemed so happy, and as her sixteenth, and then eighteenth birthdays passed, her envy for their lot grew. As did the stirrings in her heart—and elsewhere—as she spied on them from behind her curtains, or while pretending to select produce in the marketplace, when their sweethearts stole kisses and caresses.

And if only—if only—

She dreamed of the handsome young men, the jaunty Apprentices, the clever journeymen, the stout and rugged young farmers—then watched them court and marry someone else, time after time, never giving her as much as a glance.

Then she dreamed of not-so-handsome, not-so-young men, the widower with two children, the storekeeper with an aged mother, the work-weary bachelor farmer—who did exactly the same.

And when she found herself contemplating with wordless longing the balding, paunchy Town Clerk, who at least had kind eyes, only to weep in her pillow with despair when he married the cross-eyed daughter of the miller, she knew that she had reached the end of dreams.

At least, those sorts of dreams.

All that had been left her was a single, simple longing. Let me get away. Dearest Father in Heaven, let me get away!

And finally, at long last, this one little prayer had been answered. Well, now that she had a chance to get away, she was going to seize it with both hands. She would dream of getting a decent place, then working her way up with hard work and cleverness, becoming a cook, or a housekeeper. That was real; that was attainable. Not some feeling that her life was a tightly-coiled spring that would shoot her into a life of ease and a path strewn with stars. Feelings were nothing; the only thing that counted was what was in front of your eyes, what you could hold in your hands.

Tomorrow was the Mop Fair; that was what it was called here, in Otraria. Other places called them Hiring Fairs, she had heard, but here the occasion was named for the mops that women wishing to be hired as servants carried with them into the town square. In fact, it wasn't just women who presented themselves to be hired, it was men, too; the women would line up on one side of the square, the men on the other. Each of them would have some token of his or her skills about them. A maid-of-all-work would have a mop or a dust rag, a cook would bring a pan, a shepherd would have his crook, of course, a farmhand a twist of wheat in his hat, a drover a whip in his hand or a twist of whipcord in his hat. Each of them would have his or her belongings bundled up at his feet, and those who needed servants would come and examine them, make an offer, and be accepted or refused. That wasn't the only thing that would happen tomorrow, of course— it was a Fair, after all, and all of the booths and games, the displays and amusements typical of a Fair would be going on in the center of the square as well. It was a very large town square, with more than enough room for a lively Fair with space left to spare.

But the hiring was the chief thing, and tomorrow she would be ready for it. She would wear her new clothing, with the frying pan in her hand and a dust rag tucked into the band of her skirt, showing that she was an all-around servant. And she would take the first offer that came from anyone who looked kind. That was all she wanted; kindness, and a good master or mistress.

But she still had hopes, even if they were much reduced, and when the moon had left her window, she fell asleep, thinking of them. A kind old priest, whose housekeeper has gone to live on the generous pension he granted her. A busy scholar, absentminded, who needs looking after. A large family, with a dozen children, happy and easy-natured. A great lord, whose housekeeper is looking for maids who can be trusted....

And so at last, her hopes became dreams, and her treacherous dreams sent her down paths she had given up, or thought she had—into stories—

— and the handsome son of the great lord fell ill, and no one would tend him but the brave little scullery maid, who nursed him back to health at the risk of her life. And when he came to himself, and looked into her pale, grave face, and knew what she had done, he fell in love—

She awoke at dawn, with Fleur's roosters telling the whole world that it was more than time to be up and about. And if there were tears soaking her makeshift pillow, there was, at least, no one to see.