Cinder House

by Freya Marske

Genres: Romantic Fantasy; LGBT & Pride; Gothic

Synopsis

Sparks fly and lovers dance in this gorgeous, yearning Cinderella retelling from bestselling author Freya Marske—a queer Gothic romance perfect for fans of Naomi Novik and T. Kingfisher.

Ella is a haunting.

Murdered at sixteen, her ghost is furiously trapped in her father's house, invisible to everyone except her stepmother and stepsisters.

Even when she discovers how to untether herself from her prison, there are limits. She cannot be seen or heard by the living people who surround her. Her family must never learn she is able to leave. And at the stroke of every midnight, she finds herself back on the staircase where she died.

Until she forges a wary friendship with a fairy charm-seller, and makes a bargain for three nights of almost-living freedom. Freedom that means she can finally be seen. Danced with. Touched.

You think you know Ella's story: the ball, the magical shoes, the handsome prince.

You're halfway right, and all-the-way wrong.

Rediscover a classic fairy tale in this debut novella from "the queen of romantic fantasy" (Polygon).

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: October 7, 2025

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 144

Sample

Ella’s father died of the poison in their tea. Ella drank less and so might have lived, and not turned ghost at all, if the house hadn’t shrieked for its master’s murder in the moment she stood, dizzied and weak, at the top of the stairs.

Ella flinched, stumbled, and fell.

There were fifteen stairs; she struck her head on the seventh. The sound of crunching bone was not loud. But the house gave another window-shaking shriek, as the girl who should have inherited it died not two minutes after her father—the blood of his line reduced to a bright smear on the hard wooden edge of that seventh step.

Ella’s stepmother had the stairs carpeted in time for the wake following the double funeral. The carpet was a pretty shade of blue, with brass stair rods, and covered the stain entirely. People trod Ella’s blood unknowingly underfoot, while in the parlour Ella’s stepmother—a pragmatic woman named Patrice—dabbed at her eyes with a pre-dampened handkerchief and nudged her younger daughter whenever the girl looked like she might forget herself enough to smirk.

The house had wanted to apologise for its part in her death, Ella figured. It wanted to give her more existence, if not more life.

By the time of the funeral, the ghost that had been Ella had only just got the hang of consciousness; appearance would be beyond her for some weeks yet. She was too much the house to be Ella as well. Some unpeeling was yet to happen. Her awareness drifted from floorboard to windowpane to candlesticks to the wide pottery platter with its red border and its painted pattern of pears and rosemary, which Ella’s great-aunt had given to Ella’s parents on their wedding day.

At the wake, this platter held fan-shaped cakes made with vanilla and hazelnuts. Ella could feel the delicate scrape of fingers against the glossy surface as the guests took the cakes to eat. It sent a thrill of unfamiliarity through her, all the way up to where the chimneys gasped into the sky.

* * *

Finally she found the look of a person again. It was summer by then. The sun soaked deliriously into the dark red tiles of her roof and Ella’s stepsisters, like most of the cityfolk, pinned up their hair and went swimming in the river on days when the royal sorcerers declared it free of drowning-sprites.

The ghost of Ella looked more or less like Ella had when she died. She was still a sixteen-year-old girl with a strong chin and one foot a size larger than the other. She wore the lavender day-dress with the lace collar that she’d worn on her last day of life; she’d only ever been halfway fond of this dress, but her father had liked it.

Where the living Ella had been blue-eyed with hair like a wheatfield touched by sunset, her ghost had eyes the impassive grey of stone bricks, and her hair was the red of roof tiles, streaked with the grey-white of lichen and pigeon droppings.

Ella determined this by looking in the backs of spoons. She did not show up reflected in glass, nor in mirrors. She had read something about ghosts and mirrors, long ago, but couldn’t remember it now.

She only knew she’d become visible to her family when Patrice walked into the upstairs parlour, screamed at the sight of her, and dropped a cup of tea.

Ella winced. The smash of the cup hurt like a hand clenched hard in hair, and the trickle of hot liquid on the floor was an unpleasant itch.

Still she said, “Hello, Stepmother.”

* * *

Patrice adjusted to the idea of a ghost remarkably quickly. They’d known the house was on its way to being properly magical: a valuable, respectable thing to have in the family. Her husband hadn’t changed his will when they married. It still left the house to his daughter, Ella.

Ella didn’t have a will. And with two silent corpses it was easy for the living to dictate the timeline. Ella fell down the stairs, yes, such a terrible accident, and died first. And her father’s heart stopped from grief when it happened.

Everything went to Patrice, by common law.

On the day Ella became visible, Patrice, once she’d regained some colour in her cheeks, looked at the shattered cup and the tea seeping into the edge of the rug.

“Oh, clean that up,” she said.

It might have been automatic. Even before Ella died, everyone assumed that Ella would keep things tidy. Ella cared far more about tidiness than anyone else in the house. She’d always liked things to be clean and neat; always had the urge to move the cushions on the couch so they were evenly spaced.

Ella did not want to obey her stepmother. But at the same time—yes, she did. The first real emotion of Ella’s afterlife was urgency. It took hold of her and moved her before she could think. The teacup was solid when she touched it; or else Ella became exactly as solid as the teacup needed her to be, for exactly as long as was needed to scoop up the pieces and set them on a table. She could feel the rug beneath her knees. It was not like feeling-a-rug had been when she was living. She was the rug. She was the wet tassels at its edge and the soiled woollen pattern, and that urgency would be a knot within her until they were set right.

“Very good, Ella,” said her stepmother. “Perhaps you’ll be worth keeping around after all.”

Ella felt her second emotion.

How does a house, lacking flesh, feel fury? With the fire in its hearth and in the wide black stove. Ella felt anger with her kitchen fires and felt anger with the fifteen stairs, especially the seventh, and she felt anger with the yellow wallpaper that had been half stripped from the walls of her old bedroom and dangled there for weeks while Patrice was in an argument with the decorators. Ella’s stepmother was in no hurry to turn the emptied chamber into a new study. The house had rooms enough. Ella’s bedroom festered like the socket of a pulled tooth. She had been pulled. Violently.

How dare Patrice? How dare she stand there in this place she only owned through murder, and look upon Ella’s ghost and feel no shame—and see nothing but a servant?

The anger surged and whipped through Ella. An awakening. She snarled and launched herself at Patrice with her hands outstretched, meaning to fasten them around her stepmother’s neck.

The two of them, woman and girl-ghost, passed through one another. To Ella it felt like a bucket of steaming suds thrown across a floor.

Anger mixed with growing fear now, Ella raced on her ghost legs downstairs, and before she could stop herself had passed entirely through the maid-of-all-work, Jane—who didn’t look up, didn’t shiver at all. She kept on humming as she ran a damp rag down the side of the grandfather clock, ticklish in all the creases of the wood as she sought out the stubborn traces of dust.

Ella sneezed. Jane didn’t blink or mutter a blessing.

Patrice came down the stairs, watching Ella with wary interest.

It had never occurred to Ella before then to try to leave the house, any more than it occurred to a skeleton to pick itself up and leave its flesh behind. Now that fear—a strange salty ephemeral fear, the only thing that existed untethered from any piece of the house, a fear that was Ella’s alone—drove her to the front door. She took hold of the brass knob and wrenched the door open, dashed down the steps to the gate which opened onto the footpath and the busy street—

And stuck.

She tried again, with more force. No use.

The boundaries of her haunting closed around Ella like a skin sewn from simple knowledge: this fence, the walls shared with the smaller town houses on either side, the kitchen door where the deliveries came. The damp stone floor of the cellar. And the tip of the iron cockerel’s crest up where the weathervane swung in the summer wind at the highest point of the roof.

Ella stood staring out at the world beyond the house, at skirts and feathers and leaves and flags dancing in a breeze she could feel only with wrought black iron. She screamed for help, she screamed the name of Miss Filigree the milliner who walked within two feet of her, and nobody heard. She took hold of the gate and shook it violently, but her efforts out here on the boundary were weaker than they’d been on the teacup and the door. The gate merely wobbled and the hinges creaked. It drew some glances from passers-by.

“Goodness, what a wind we’re having,” said Patrice, from the top of the steps. “It blew our front door wide open. Yes—good day to you.”

And then, quiet with triumph—“Stop behaving like a child and come back inside at once, Ella.”

Ella obeyed.

* * *

Her stepsisters could see her too, but that was all. Anyone who could be said to own the house could perceive the house’s ghost. It wasn’t long before Patrice dismissed Jane; they had Ella, after all. Ella kept the house because the house kept her. Ella kept the house because it was unbearable not to.

“This mantel needs dusting.” Danica lifted a grey-smudged finger. “Look at the state of it.”

And while Ella had not been fully aware of the dust before that moment, the order drew her attention unstoppably. Dust on the grand mantel above the fireplace where they stood. Dust in a tiny layer in front of every book on every shelf in the room. It was worse than inhaling dust had been when she had lungs, because there was no way to cough it out. It was an itch that made her want to writhe, and with every moment she stood there without acting, it worsened.

Ella got to work. The feathery blob of the duster danced on its own in the gilt-edged mirror on the opposite wall.

And so it went. Any orders to improve the state of the house—fix that shutter, oil that hinge, sweep that floor, strip the old yellow wallpaper and paint the room afresh—could not be denied. Greta and Danica spent a week in gleeful competition, interrupting Ella with tasks half done to issue new commands of their own, yanking her between two pains until she sobbed and the house groaned around them.

Patrice put an irritable stop to it in the end—a servant, she said, was only useful if you let them work. But before she stepped in, she watched with her sharp brown eyes, filing Ella’s suffering away in a corner of herself. She’d never been the warm, compassionate stepmother Ella had once hoped for, though neither was she warm with her own daughters. Patrice was made of tough, cool cloth—the kind of pristine cloth, Ella’s father once said to a friend, that made one think of spilling things across it.

Not every order had to be obeyed. The house did not care overmuch if the pork and flour and lard and vegetables in the kitchen ever became a pie for dinner. Neither did it care if Greta trod on her dress and a ruffle needed mending. Ella heard those orders and felt nothing at all.

“No,” she said. Exhilaration gusted up the largest of her chimneys. “Mend it yourself.”

Greta looked at her as one looked at a puppy who had stopped midway through a walk and was refusing to be tugged along. Ella’s younger stepsister had an uneasy amount of presence for a girl still a month off sixteen; it was something Ella had admired in her when they first met. The dress was a heap of taffeta and goldcloth in Greta’s arms, and her hundred-strokes hair was a paler gold again.

“What are you going to do? You can’t force me, and you can’t hit me,” said Ella. Greta would find another tedious chore to punish her with, no doubt, but it felt so good to deny Greta something she wanted. A heady squeeze of satisfaction that Ella felt with the casks and bottles in her cellars.

Greta’s prettiness squished into a snarl of annoyance. She marched across to the window-seat, dumping the dress onto the floor and snatching up her hairbrush from the dresser as she went.

She swung the silver-backed brush and smashed one of the tall, narrow windowpanes. She kept her eyes on Ella as she did it.

The shock was worse than the hurt at first. Then the pain bloomed, cold and hot both at once, and Ella swayed with it, groaning.

“Thought so,” said Greta. “I can’t hit you, but I can hit your home.”

“It’s your home, too.”

Swing, smash. Another stinging piece of destruction. Blood crept unnoticed down one of Greta’s wrists like a bracelet of scarlet thread. A drop fell to stain Greta’s linen skirt. Someone would have to wash that out.

“I can’t fix that.” Ella’s voice was scraping on twenty jagged tips of glass. “I’m a ghost, not a sorcerer. I can’t magic a window back together. Stepmother will have to send for a glazier, now, and you’ll be in trouble for it.”

She saw the answer in Greta’s smile before it was spoken.

“Why would I be in trouble? You broke the windows in a tantrum when I asked you to do this simple bit of mending.”

In life Ella had never been particularly stubborn. But a house was a strong and unmoving thing. She had roots and she had bricks, and she’d stood for years and would continue to do so. She could put up with a few smashed windows. The air that slid into this bedroom tonight would make Greta cold, not her. She would not spend her death as a drudge.

She hissed, “Mend your own damned dress.”

Greta blinked once. Still unheeding of the blood on her wrist, she stormed from the room. She was gone long enough for Ella to begin to savour the unfamiliar triumph. When Greta returned, the silver brush had been replaced in her hand by another object.

All three girls, when Ella was living, had spent a winter on the fashionable hobby of jigsaw puzzles: painting a scene onto a thin piece of board, then cutting it into fanciful shapes, to be pieced back together on long candlelit evenings.

The jigsaw itself was a small thing with a blade no wider than Ella’s smallest fingernail. Designed for delicate work.

A few specks of broken glass still glinted on the window-frame. Greta brushed them away with a fold of her skirt before she began. The frame was white-painted, a thin layer only above the wood beneath.

Greta took her time. The teeth of the saw scraped thoughtfully back and forth a few times before they took a proper bite. Her first cut was shallow, slow, flaying away a long sliver of tender wood.

Ella screamed outright. It was worse than the shock of the glass; it was far, far worse than the itch of dust. If she’d had a girl’s body and not a house she couldn’t imagine the same action could have hurt any more, not even with blood and nerves and all the things that made up a girl.

She took a few stumbling steps and made a grab for the saw, but physical objects preferred to be in the hands of the living. Ella’s fingers passed through Greta’s and the saw alike. Meanwhile the saw scraped inexorably back and forth in Ella’s window frame, and her scream turned to sobs as she hugged her own arms, vainly squeezing.

“Stop!” she gasped. “All right, stop, please stop.”

Greta finished the curve with a flourish, bringing the saw-teeth back up to that skin of paint. A long piece of wood came away in her hand. She held it up between her fingers until Ella, as the pain began to settle—as the house adjusted itself to this minor variation in its form—went and picked up the dress.

“So,” said Greta.

So. So the ghost of Ella now really was a maid-of-all-work: making meals, darning socks. She could brush and comb her stepsisters’ hair as long as they sat primly still, though she couldn’t plait it or dress it; hair was not an object while it grew from someone’s head. The rules for people remained the same. Ella could touch nobody and nobody could touch her.

Patrice was brusque and practical. Danica, who’d shown the most friendliness toward Ella in life, now treated her as a mobile piece of furniture. Sometimes she would watch Ella from the corners of her eyes, discomfort nestling like a smaller ghost in her expression. Then she would look back at her book: a door being deliberately closed. Ella had the sense that quiet, thoughtful Danica would have preferred a living maid and not a dead stepsister, no matter how much they saved on wages.

Greta, with her jigsaw, was creative.

Her favourite game when Ella lost her temper was to fetch a bag of lentils from the pantry and walk through the house flinging handfuls of them everywhere. The first time this happened Ella lost control of herself with sheer rage, her legs wavering, the image of her beginning to melt into the carpet. After a minute she solidified again, glaring, aching. If she were a better and more dangerous ghost, she’d be able to grind every lentil into dust and then grind her walls together too, bringing them close on tender flesh.

The fire gave a sideways lurch in the parlour grate and Greta’s smile widened. She tossed the empty bag to the ground and looked around, considering. The corners of her eyes spoke of fine serrated blades and there was smoke in the curl of her mouth. A shiver ran through the floorboards and up the walls.

Ella choked out, “I’m sorry I spoke back to you, Greta.”

“That’s better.” Greta nudged the bag with an embroidered house-slipper. “Go on, then. I can’t believe you’ve let the house get into this state. It’s embarrassing.”

Ella picked up the bag and began.

* * *

If asked on the morning of her death, Ella would have confidently claimed that of course she knew the house—every inch of it! She was born there, she grew up there. Nowhere else had ever been her home.

She’d known almost nothing. There was so much more to a house; and still so much less, once it had been learned in its entirety, than Ella would ever be satisfied with. She knew now all the poky storage cupboards in empty servants’ quarters and the half-finished racks for wine in the cellars. Never in life had she bothered to spend time in the attic full of broken chairs and boxes of old clothes. She had never passed through the raw attic ceiling to spend time up on the roof with its tiles the colour of her hair, staring out over the town: at clouds, at the occasional silhouette of a chimney sweep, or the specks of birds and bats against a flowing sunset river of orange and pink.

Most often it was late at night when Ella sat on the roof. Ghosts didn’t need to sleep. Once the kitchen was cleaned and any tasks left over from the day were completed, she had nothing to do.

For the first hour she would revel in the undemanding silence of the family sleeping. Then she might dance, alone in front of a mirror that couldn’t see her, pretending she had a partner, and missing her father. It had been one of her favourite things about him: if she watched him closely for the signs of the right mood, and asked in the right way, sometimes he’d smile and dance with her.

Or she might read a book from the collection in Danica’s room, or the library that had been her father’s study.

And then she would, again, have nothing but time.

At least on the roof the world opened up into miles of air, even if she couldn’t explore it. She tried to pretend, like a much smaller child, that she could make an imaginary friend of the cockerel on the weathervane; but he was as much a part of Ella as the brick chimney-stack. She couldn’t have any decent conversations with black iron that spoke only in creaks as it swung in the wind. Conversation with a friendly face was what Ella thought she might dream of, if she were still able to dream.

After some time she discovered that with sheer boredom she could fade herself out of her girl-shape and further into the house, becoming only the sense of the breeze against the shutters or the scuttling of mice in the walls. It was not sleep. But it was the closest she could come.

It was from one of those fades that she woke up, one night, in a place she had never been before.

She did think it a dream at first. How else could she have found somewhere unfamiliar, within the house she knew so well? A narrow space with a steeply slanted ceiling, perhaps two feet wide, dark and closed up.

She was, she realised slowly, in a boarded-up corner of the attic. It would have been easy enough for her to move out of it again: up to the roof, down through the floor to her own former bedroom.

And she might have, if it weren’t for the skeleton.

What had once been a human woman lay on its side on a thrice-folded rug which was stained in unspeakable ways—as was the dress that encased the bones and a few dried strips that could no longer be called flesh. The hair was faded and light, worn loose. Around the dead neck was a gold chain with a tiny golden heart, and the corpse was strewn with sprays of withered, brittle lavender.

Ella waited to feel an urge to tidy up. None came. There was a finality to the undisturbed air that was close to tidiness, as if everything here was exactly as it should be.

Another of Ella’s imaginings, since she turned ghost, had been that the house would show its magic in other ways, too. That a door might one day suddenly lead to another, larger world, somewhere she could explore without breaking the barrier-rules of her haunting.

No. There was only this: a small crumb of possibility that there could still be new things to discover even in the prison of her afterlife.

Now that she was in it, this attic space became part of her. Despite her gratitude for the novelty it was still unsettling, like discovering she had been growing an extra set of ears in the small of her back.

Ella dropped to her knees and reached out a tentative hand. After all this time—how much time? She had no way to know, or even guess—the dead woman was a thing-of-the-house and not a person. Ella could make firm contact with the rough knob of bone that had been a shoulder. She looked again at the gold pendant and some thought or emotion tried to rise uneasily to the surface; and then sank away, as if weighed down by something heavier.

“Hello,” she whispered. And then louder, “Hello? Will you—could you—wake up and talk to me?”

Silence from the bones. If they’d gathered themselves and sat up, Ella might have screamed. What she wanted was for another ghost to form itself from the rug, the walls, the cold dark, whatever fade it might have been not-really-sleeping in, and to reach out a hand that could grasp Ella’s own.

Nothing happened. Still, Ella stayed in the attic until the sun rose and breathed morning onto the roof tiles—her prompt to begin the morning chores.

She thought of the skeleton often, after that, though she was careful not to let her thoughts gather too much weight. She handled them as lightly as she handled the best glassware. It was so obviously a secret. Houses, with their great potential for hidden spaces, were naturally secretive.

If any part of the house’s own personality had merged with Ella’s, perhaps it was that.

* * *

“Hello? Delivery!”

The errand girl came through the kitchen door pulling the small wagon of groceries behind her. As usual, she pushed her glasses up her nose in order to read the note set on the table next to a small purse.

Here is the list for next week. Leave the receipts. Thank you.

The girl was always polite enough to knock and call out before entering, but she was also incurious enough not to comment on the fact that there was never a cook working in the kitchen, nor even a maid to take the deliveries and transfer them to the icebox. Today she contented herself with a glance through the doorway leading to the rest of the house. Through Ella, where she stood.

“There’s no one else home at the moment,” Ella said. “It’s just me.”

She might have gone on to say, How was the market? Does the cheesemonger still wear that absurd red hat, and wave it cursing at the stray cats when they get too close? Were the dancers from the ballet there to advertise the new season? Did they take hands with little girls in the crowd, and spin them until they giggled? Describe it to me. Every detail.

Tell me your name. Please.

But there was something distinctly horrible about speaking aloud and not being heard. So Ella held her tongue.

The girl unpacked parcels of meat and dairy and vegetables. Ella came and perched on the edge of the huge kitchen table and watched her.

This delivery was a highlight of Ella’s week. Just as Ella could be hungry with her eaves and the plaster between her tiles, and she could be angry with all the fires of her candelabras and hearths—so too could she yearn for any of the young, vividly alive strangers who crossed her threshold, especially if they returned on a regular basis, and she did it with all the longing of her windowpanes.

Ella had been just starting to wake up in her body when she was killed. She’d found herself stumbling over her words in front of prettier girls, and had lain in bed and touched herself, first shyly then frantically, at the thought of bare muscled boy-backs swimming in the river in summer.

As she was now, ghost and house, now that she sometimes found herself wishing in miserable frustration that Patrice or Greta really could hit her, if only for the brief contact of human skin against skin—now, how did she want the people she wanted?

However she could.

Ella thought about what she could do next time, if she dared. A note inviting the girl to sit down for a while and have a cup of tea. Arrows in chalk luring her deeper and farther into the house, until the street air in her lungs had been entirely replaced by Ella’s air. With her poor eyesight this girl might take a firm grip on the stair banister. It would fit in her palm, be squeezed by her fingers.

She imagined more. That sensible bun of dark hair unpinned, dimpled legs stepping free of plain skirt and petticoat, the girl walking naked and unafraid through all of Ella’s rooms. Her bare feet buried in the most expensive rugs, rubbing up heat, until she was driven to cool herself by stretching out on the bare wood of the dining room floor.

Ella shuddered. Two of the ladles rattled on their hooks and the errand girl jumped at the noise. She quickly unpacked the rest of the groceries, exchanged a handful of small coins for the purse and shopping list, and hurried to let herself out.

“Thank you,” said Ella. “Please stay longer next time.”

The back door swung closed.

And so it went. Visitors to the house had no claim on it and so no eyes and ears for its ghost. Beyond the hunger for touch, which left Ella feeling like a pumpkin being idly hollowed of flesh with a sharp metal scoop, there was the hunger for conversation with someone who did not despise her, and whom she did not despise in return. The hate she had for Patrice and Danica and Greta was a nurtured, flowering thing. She wished down to her skirting boards that they weren’t there at all; that one of these days they would leave for a shopping expedition or a dinner with Patrice’s investing partners and simply never come back.

One day, unexpectedly, Ella had her wish. Patrice announced they were going on a month-long visit to some cousins, and bundled her daughters into a hired coach along with parcels of gifts carefully chosen to impress. And then they were gone.

It was wonderful for five whole shimmering days.

But all the deliveries were held, as there was nobody to cook for and no orders coming in from the shops. The front gate did not click open to announce callers. There were no knocks on the kitchen door, even though Ella left it invitingly unlocked.

When Ella vindictively snipped one of Danica’s coral-and-ebony necklaces and let the beads go clattering across the floor—half for the noise and half to give herself something to do when the urge rose to gather them all up again—she sensed it for the first time: the downhill road between a house with a ghost and a true haunted house.

A house was made to have people in it. It wanted them there, even if it hated them. Without inhabitants she was only walls around an increasing, echoing wrongness. She was poised at the beginning of the road. By the end it would tighten her into knots, and then into something else entirely, something all of her shied away from sensing.

Ella looked down at her lavender dress and thought firm real thoughts. She was a girl, she was Ella, she was not just the potential for horror. She ran up through the house instead of floating through ceilings, trying to remember how footfalls felt to the feet and not to the carpeted stairs.

Finally she found herself in front of the flimsy board-wall in the attic. There she had no choice but to pass through, so that she could slide down and sit with the skeleton, who was a dead thing but was not iron, nor wood, nor mouse nor cockroach nor moth.

It was very quiet. Ella missed her heartbeat. Perhaps the skeleton missed hers, too.

Again she wondered why it was she who’d turned ghost and not this woman; if the woman had died here or died somewhere else first; if she had been a ghost, and if so how she’d managed to stop. Ella wanted to shake her awake so they could be trapped together, so she could have someone to share things with who might understand.

She let herself fade a little so that her mismatched ghost feet in her neat pretty house-shoes could sink through and overlap the dusty leather shoes on the bones. To let an object exist in the same space as her was the closest thing Ella had to intimacy.

She stayed there.

After a long, long time a key rattled in the front door and Greta’s voice—complaining, already—rang out dimly and Ella tumbled back to her normal existence, so relieved that it almost felt, for a while, like not being lonely at all.

 

Months passed, and seasons, and years. Ella’s family grew older. And Ella grew to understand all three of them far better than she had when she was a living tapestry of self-absorption and anxiety to be liked, as most sixteen-year-olds are.

Patrice had come from no money and was terrified of tipping back there. She’d married cleverly and murdered cleverly, and had a sound head for managing wealth. She didn’t waste Ella’s inheritance on fripperies and ribbons. She sent it out into the world, well supervised, so that it could grow.

When she spoke with men about investments, or entertained them socially, she was gracious and charming, always letting them know her to be clever but believe themselves to be cleverer. But she also held one hand folded over her other wrist in a way that might as well have been a hedge of thorns: this far, thank you, and no farther. Tough-fabricked Patrice had house and fortune and no need to marry again, and indeed showed absolutely no inclination to do so.

Her daughters were another story.

Danica at least had harmless passions to keep her busy and give her depth and colour. She’d always been an avid reader—Ella had hoped they might bond over it, when they were living girls sizing one another up under their parents’ supervision. She also enjoyed riding in the fields and forest trails outside the city, and Patrice paid the stabling fees because it threw Danica into the company of the right people.

In death Ella clung to some of her hopes. If not a sister or a friend, perhaps Danica could become at least a casual confidant, or a source of information about the changing outside world. But there was too much working against Danica’s personality for that. Even the best seeds struggled in poor soil and poor water.

When Danica was cruel it was because she was afraid of her mother and sister. Knowing where it came from didn’t make the cruelty any easier to bear, and Ella was the only one in the house whom Danica could force to bear it without consequence. Ella abandoned all hope of extricating Danica from the others like a snail winkled from its shell with a two-tined fork. Marriage would one day winkle Danica from the house entirely.

Though Ella was in no great hurry for this to happen, because that would leave her alone with Patrice and Greta.

Oh, Greta. The girl grew into a young woman, blond and plump and beautiful, with a tilted nose and bright brown eyes. She would not be thrown into anyone’s company; she believed they should come to her, and so they did. Like her mother, Greta could be very charming when it suited her. She charmed the sons of merchants to bring her pretty things; most of all she enjoyed butterflies in jars, the more uncommon the better. The first of any new kind, or with novel and striking patterns on the wings, would make her smile the sweetest. She would kill the insect with ether and pin it into place in her collection.

Sometimes she wouldn’t bother with the ether.

The sons of merchants only had so much time and money to spend on rare butterflies. Before long their gifts, no matter how pretty, were duplicates.

“Thank you,” Greta said anyway, but her smile was not sweet.

When the suitor of the day had been discouraged out the door, Greta picked up the domed glass case containing several gold-winged insects.

“Open the window, Ella,” she said.

The curtains drew back and the window cracked wide. Some days Ella, still determined to be as much a person as possible, might walk across the room and do it with her hands. Today she had an instinct not to move much within Greta’s view.

Greta lifted the glass from the base. The released butterflies were like scraps of goldcloth caught in a breeze, their gleam flashing greenish as they flittered into patches of sunlight. One of them passed through Ella, who wrinkled her nose. It was a still, cool day. They watched as the butterflies sensed the invitation of fresh air coming through the window.

The first one caught fire a few inches from freedom.

It shrivelled up almost at once: a flare of panicked, darting ember, and then nothing but a dead eye of red quickly fading to a piece of dull black ash. Then the next was alight.

It took Ella four butterflies to realise what it was she was feeling in her walls and, startlingly, in the brass of the lamp brackets and the gold inlay of the best porcelain. Only the household silver in the mahogany cabinet refused to hum in response to Greta’s small sorcery.

When the last butterfly was specks of ash drifting down to the rug, Greta looked at Ella, who was motionless in something that wasn’t really shock. A thud of revelation, perhaps. A piece of a jigsaw puzzle settling into place.

“How long have you been able to do that?” Ella blurted.

“Not long,” said Greta, careless. “It comes on one like the monthly courses, I’m told. Some get it younger or older than others.”

“Told? By who?”

She’d said it too quickly. Greta had a nose for interest and a better one for weakness; a smile spread on her lips.

“Oh, Mama found a tutor for me. Very discreet. We haven’t moved on to the ghosts part of magic lessons yet, but…” She let her brown gaze fall to the small piles of ashes on the floor. That smile gave a satisfied ripple. “You can fly, Ella, can’t you?”

Ella wanted to say that floating was not flying. She wanted to say that she could not be smothered, or pinned. But she knew better than to put the image of a sharp object into Greta’s fancy.

“I’ll sweep up,” she said quietly, and went to fetch a brush and pan.

No, Greta would not be pushed by anyone, least of all her mother. She simmered in magic and read the social columns of the newspapers, her fingernails tapping on the names of counts and marquises and princes. Greta’s ambition had nothing to do with beauty and little to do with money. Her flirtations were rehearsal for what she believed, unshakably, was a higher destiny.

Ella understood why Patrice was anxious to marry them both off. Danica first, to protect her. And so that, eldest safely disposed of, Patrice could then find someone to marry Greta before her younger daughter became too openly monstrous or the small animals which occasionally disappeared in this part of town could be traced to their house.

Ella, who couldn’t be married off, grew older, too. At least in appearance.

She didn’t know if this was normal for a ghost, if it was part and parcel of being a house—which, after all, gathered rust and peeled paint and cracks in its wood like any aging thing—or if it was driven by her own vague sense that she should be older. She was pleased. She had never wanted to be sixteen forever.

The day-dress grew with her; even when Ella looked eighteen, or nineteen, she also looked like a girl dressed younger and hopelessly out-of-mode. Ella grew to hate the dress as much as she hated anything, and to look away if she caught a flash of lavender in any piece of polished silver.

Sometimes she preferred not to be seen by anyone—and she could do that too, if she wished, simply shed her visible self and exist anywhere in the house. Her family didn’t seem to care or notice, so long as she did the tasks they demanded of her.

What a perfect sort of servant she was, Ella thought sourly, and dug letter paper and envelope and stamp book out of her stepmother’s study drawers. She dipped pen in ink and wrote out an order for some books which had appeared in that month’s postal catalogue. Romances, mostly. Ella was going through a mood of wanting to devour stories of bodily lusts and joys, eating up the pages with wild envy.

She enclosed payment for the books and went to coax a bathroom tap to drip, so she could run the envelope edge and stamp across the moisture. A ghost might tear a stamp, but she couldn’t lick it.

She laid it out to join the next morning’s mail. Ella had been doing the household’s ordering and managing their deliveries for years, and Patrice only inspected the occasional receipt now. And they were all used to new books sprouting in corners thanks to Danica’s own purchases and the borrowing library.

So Ella existed, if not lived, and let words expand her world when no amount of magic seemed likely to do so. And for a while that was enough.

No. Not enough. But something.

* * *

Everything changed the night Ella fell off the roof.

It was a clear and freezing night just past midwinter. There had been a violent thunderstorm earlier, but the clouds had packed up their blankets and gone home. Ella’s bricks felt brittle and her iron tight and shrunken, and the grass of her front lawn anticipated the clinging frost of the small hours before dawn. Downstairs in Ella’s hall the grandfather clock struck quarter past eleven.

Ella sat gazing up at the perfect half-a-pie of the moon, her thoughts leaping idly through stories she’d recently read. On the very edge of the roof were a few oddly nocturnal pigeons, shuffling sleepily back and forth.

Several roof tiles were loose from the storm and needed mending. She should tell Patrice to send for a roofer. Or perhaps there were books she could order, which would tell Ella how to do it herself. Any skill which fixed or improved the house came easily to her.

She was wiggling the nearest tile idly with her outstretched hand, enjoying it like the discomfort of a loose tooth, when a piece broke off in her grip: perhaps half the size of her palm, rough-smooth and red. The severing didn’t really hurt.

Ella tossed the chunk in her hand a few times and then threw it over the heads of the pigeons, who startled indignantly and took flight.

She expected the tile to stop at the boundary of the roof edge, just as she herself would have been forced to.

It didn’t.

Instead the tile kept falling, as rocks did when thrown—and the swoop of surprise in Ella twisted into a strange wrenching not dissimilar to when she was sweeping upstairs and Greta demanded something of her down in the kitchen—and then Ella was the roof tile, she was the inexorable arc toward the ground, over the front garden and over the gate and falling to where it would land with a clack in the street.

But there was no clack, because Ella was again holding the piece of tile in her hand.

Her feet, when she looked frantically down, were on the cobblestones.

She didn’t have a heart to beat but she remembered how it felt, the sudden thud like a brass doorknocker, and the memory was almost the feeling itself. It overtook Ella all at once: the dizzying promise of freedom. She was aware of the house standing close behind her; but less aware than usual. She was so aware of the tile in her hand that there was only a faint scrap left over for everything else.

Part of her howled to go back through the gate and reassure herself that she was still attached. That the house was still hers to haunt.

Most of her knew that after all these trapped years she would prefer to haunt only a piece of broken rock than the grandest palace in existence, if it meant she could leave.

Away, she thought, the word filling her like the incoherent jangling of bells.

That word took her for miles. To the end of the street and past it, onto a larger street leading to a larger one again. Outside the house, she could not pass effortlessly from one point to another. She could move only at the speed a girl could walk, one step after another, not breathing, not tiring, at first barely thinking. Away.

The city was different to how she remembered it: taller buildings, altered shopfronts, a grander sense of sprawl. It was hard to tell if the change was truly in the place, or in her. Or if the streetlamps were playing tricks with arching shadows.

The main bridge over the river was the same, lined with frozen statues. Ella did not stop to lean over the stone railing and see her own lack of reflection in the moonlit water.

It was very late and very cold, and so very quiet. Ella encountered few people in the streets. Only after the first trudging man had passed within an arm’s span of her, his eyes never so much as twitching to the side, did she think the rules might be different out here. It seemed, however, that she was just as invisible; and even more intangible, as she discovered when she paused to pluck a leaf from the inky mass of a tree’s dangling branches. Nothing came away in her fingers. There was an unpleasant emptiness to it all, a sense that the magic was only allowing this because its gaze was sleepily averted. At any moment she could dissolve. The house, left behind, was still holding her leash.

She shook herself and kept walking. Away.

She had reached the outskirts of town and was still going when the elastic feeling took hold of her again, and in the next moment Ella found herself sprawled on the seventh step of her main staircase, the walls of the house firm around her once more and the grandfather clock shivering with the death throes of midnight’s last strike.

The tile was still clutched tight in her hand. Ella pushed herself to sitting and drew her knees up and hugged them. Indescribable emotion rippled up and down the blue-carpeted stairs, stoking Ella higher every time it passed through her, until the sheer shock of it—both this newfound freedom and its limits—broke in Ella and she sobbed, long and violently and in bewilderment.

She cried with the whole house. Water wept from taps and speckled the basins. Windows shuddered in their frames and every floor shook with tremors as floorboards pressed at their seams.

Unsurprisingly, it woke the house’s inhabitants. Alarmed voices in the upstairs hallway asked one another about broken pipes or rogue earth-sprites; Danica, who knew her sister’s power by then, was loudly blaming her, and Greta was hot and withering in return.

Patrice appeared at the top of the staircase, candle aloft in one hand. She had a poker in the other, which she let drop when she was close enough to realise it was Ella curled up on the stair.

“Saints’ teeth,” she said, hoarse with sleep and relief. “Stop that nonsense at once.”

Ella hiccupped. The nearest framed picture gave a leap on its hook, but didn’t fall. She was all but cried out by then, the house drained and tired. Everything settled.

Patrice regarded Ella like a clock with a spring out of place. Ella had never pretended to be anything but angry about her circumstances. Obeying domestic orders was enough; they couldn’t expect her to do it with a smile. But never since Greta and the lentils had she raised her voice, or tried to strangle them, or given them the pleasure of seeing her emotions as clearly as she saw and understood theirs.

Patrice stood there a while. She had a tempestuous daughter and a sullen one, and her own ways of dealing with them.

Ella was not surprised when Patrice simply said, “Now that we’ve been so rudely awakened, Ella, you can bring us all some warm milk with brandy,” and lifted the hem of her dressing-gown as she climbed back up the stairs to her chamber.

* * *

This newfound ability to leave was a secret that Ella would never, ever tell her family. It helped that they were used to not seeing her during the nighttime hours between dinner and midnight. Mostly they took themselves to bed, and Ella made sure the sheets were warmed and the water glasses full, so that she would not be needed before sunrise.

Her days became easier to bear because she knew the nights awaited. With the roof in her pocket she went walking, and was returned to the house at midnight.

Ella didn’t know why it was midnight, only that there was a palpable finality to that last strike of the clock, as constricting and possessive and immutable as the physical boundaries of Ella’s haunting. The house might doze and allow Ella to roam, but it did not want her gone.

Knowing her time limit, Ella didn’t venture outside the city again. She wandered through parks deep in shadow and busy with the piercing sounds of night-birds, and discovered ponds symphonic with frogs. She returned to places she remembered, and sought out corners of the city she’d never been allowed to visit as a girl.

She stood on the bridges watching the purple mage-lights of the royal sorcerers hanging at the sterns of the official skiffs on the water, as their night patrol cleared the river of drowning-sprites and encouraged other watery fae to move along. Her father had once told her they were stringing up nets to catch mermaids. She still didn’t know if he had been mocking her or in earnest.

For the most part Ella was able to avoid having to touch or not-touch the living. No matter how dark the alleyway or unsavoury the neighbourhood, she was safe and unseen.

One bold night she followed some gilded carriages beneath the archway of a house so large it was almost a palace, and found herself at a masquerade in a private garden. Lanterns illuminated gowns sewn with seed-pearls and glass beads, and men whose coats sang with metallic braid, and mask after mask after mask: leather and brocade and silk, feathers and shells, monkeys and peacocks and sea-queens and cats and twisted, compelling imps.

It would have taken Ella’s breath if she had any.

Instead, after a few minutes of amazed staring, she found it too busy to stay. Too many people were walking unpleasantly through her, and an old fear of being lost and stifled in a crowd of impatient adults was dredged up from her childhood. Ella clutched the roof tile and fled back through the archway to a place where she could watch the arrivals descending from their carriages and lifting their masked faces, painted lips parting with anticipation, to the party.

She didn’t even consider entering the house itself. It wasn’t hers.

She’d tried that once: slipping through a wide-open door behind a man burdened with bags. But it had felt vastly impolite, and the piece-of-house in her pocket went hot and strange before she’d had a chance to do more than glance curiously around the entrance hall. It seemed she was allowed to haunt her own house and also to exist in public spaces intended for all citizens, but not the spaces between other people’s walls.

An ideal place to linger was the night market. This was sprawled across the square before the old town hall, and its stalls opened at sunset. It was never too crowded for comfort, and on busy nights she would slip into a space between stalls and sit on the ground, and simply enjoy watching and listening to people. If a good conversation walked by she could always spring to her feet and shadow it.

“—even more expensive! But what choice do we have? That fool Mikeyla muttered about reporting the stallholder for smuggled goods, but I told her to keep her mouth shut if she wanted any spices in her food this winter.”

“It’s all about the Turnish Pass,” another woman said knowledgeably. “Some traders won’t risk it if they might get stuck in a skirmish. My Kurt’s brother in the army says they’re being squeezed up there on both sides. They’re expecting a bad late-winter freeze and it’s the only trade route that stands a chance of being kept clear before the thaw. If one side makes a grab to control the Pass…”

Ella dodged a group of young people walking inconsiderately three abreast in order to keep up with the women. She was happy to learn about anything, but chatter like this made her world feel large again. Even if she would never see them herself, there were other cities than this, and trade routes which cut through moors and forests and snow-capped mountains, and people whose lives depended on the weather and the decisions of kings and the grit of armies.

“Oh, Leife,” said Kurt’s wife, as her friend slowed to a halt. “You promised me. No more pennies tossed away on this fanciful stuff.”

“Just a look,” said Leife.

The squat woman behind the stall tucked away a bundle of what looked like complicated mossy crochet. She flashed a wide, crooked smile of surprisingly sharp white teeth and surprisingly green eyes, both of which shone in the light from the huge twin candles that bracketed her stall. Ella thought again of mermaid nets.

“Fanciful they may be, but my humble wares will guarantee results,” said the stallholder. Her voice purred with a faint, unfamiliar accent. “What are you seeking, milady? Cantrip, charm, or potion?”

That caught Ella, who was on the verge of drifting off in search of other conversations. She stood at the opposite corner of the table and peered over the wares as Leife hastily denied looking for anything in particular—well perhaps if she had anything for good fortune on a journey—yes, and how much was it, did she say? Ah, thank you kindly, but not today, they’re really just looking.

“Nobody wants to pay for good work these days,” the stallholder sighed as the two women took their leave. “And I suppose you’re just looking as well?”

Ella admired the gleam of river-polished rocks in a bag made of that same mossy crochet, and wished she could nudge the items on the messily arranged stall into a neater pattern. She drew back her hand before it passed through a spiky bundle of twigs and shells held together with silver thread and—was that hair?

“I said, are you just looking? Little ghost,” said the woman, “I asked you a question.”

Ella jerked her head up.

The woman’s gaze met Ella’s own with precision. Her eyes sat like green spiders in a cobweb of fine lines, sharp and curious, and in the candlelight there was an eerie seeking quality to them which made the roof tile shiver in the same way that Ella’s wallpaper had shivered as the butterflies died.

“I,” said Ella. And was promptly silenced by the importance of these, the first words since her death that might be heard by someone other than her family. Nothing profound came to mind. She resorted to: “How is it you can see me?”

The cobweb tightened with a smile.

“What’s your name, my dear? Your full name. You seem in need of someone to give it to.”

The muddle of possibility was still crowding Ella’s tongue. It was the only reason she didn’t blurt her name out eagerly in the sheer pleasure of being asked a friendly question with an easy answer.

But … those eyes were very seeking, and Ella had not lost all her instincts in death. In fact, she had acquired some. She looked again at the stall full of magic and let the wording of the question play through her mind.

“My name’s Ella, and that’s as much of it as I can afford to give away to a fairy, I think,” she said.

That got her a laugh, rich and hoarse. Ella didn’t look to see if anyone was glancing at this woman laughing to herself and talking to the air. She was afraid that if she turned away, the fairy and her stall would vanish in the instant before she turned back.

“Business is slow, you can’t blame me for trying.” The fairy’s hand lifted ruefully from a small blue-glazed pot, and Ella thought about the stories she’d read of sprites trapped in jugs and oil lamps. “We can stick to fair exchange. You can call me Quaint. How did you know?”

“You feel magical,” said Ella. On her guard now, she didn’t say she’d only met one sorcerer that she knew of, and Quaint’s magic felt different to Greta’s: more diffuse and more ingrained. “And it’s fairies rather than sorcerers who want your name to do things with.” She dared a smile, as Quaint looked more amused than annoyed. “I’ve read enough books to know that.”

“You’d be surprised how many people don’t learn the lessons they should,” said Quaint. “And those who forget their lessons when they’re surprised. You certainly surprised me.”

“Do you see others like me, around in the city?” Ella asked. “Other ghosts?”

“You’re the first I’ve seen untethered in thirty years,” said Quaint. The sudden leap of eagerness in Ella was quenched before it had time to rise. It hadn’t been much, anyway. She was still too delighted at having anyone to talk to for an extra dollop of hope to make a difference at that moment.

“Could you—” No; that was too close to a request. “Do you know of any that haunt public buildings?”

“None as sociable as you, Miss Ella,” said Quaint. “You mustn’t have been dead long.”

“It’ll be four years, this spring.” Long belated, Ella remembered her manners. Even if you couldn’t trust a fairy, it was worth being polite to them. She spread her lavender skirts and dropped a curtsey. “A pleasure to meet you, Mistress Quaint. Even if you would like to trap me in a pot.”

“Ah, none of that, my dear.” Quaint grinned. “It was habit. Fairy magic is mostly harmless to ghosts anyway.”

Mostly wasn’t the same as completely, Ella noted. But she still grinned back.

* * *

Fairy magic was different to sorcery, and ghost-lore was different again.

“Why can’t I stay out past midnight?” Ella asked Quaint one evening, but the fairy only shrugged.

“Though if your real question is whether you can untether yourself entirely,” Quaint said, “I’d say I doubt it. Ghosts are spirits of physical space. You need your house, Miss Ella. Or something like it.”

Still—Ella, with a house’s stubbornness, wasn’t going to accept one fairy’s word. Could she push the limit past midnight? Could a human sorcerer manage it for her? And—thinking uneasily of Greta’s butterflies—what else could a sorcerer do that might affect a ghost, if that sorcerer had a nimble mind and a malicious spindle in place of a heart?

It took all her nerve to approach the largest of the city’s magical academies, and she fell back with mingled relief and disappointment when she first attempted to enter the main building and was repelled by a pulse of magic. Above the doors a sigil appeared and shone, warning red, for a brief moment.

Ella had no idea if the university’s wards were against ghosts specifically, any whiff of uninvited magic, or simply anyone not a student or staff member. The effect was the same.

So she went instead to the city university, where night classes were held in a brick building at the river edge of campus. It was easy for a ghost to sit in the back corner of lecture theatres and lap up learning. The only outright mention of magic was in a history course called An Overview of Magical Geopolitics, which sounded … dull.

It wasn’t. Ella returned week after week, even when it became obvious that she wasn’t going to learn much relevant to herself. She was startled to realise how enjoyable it could be to be taught by experts with interest in the subject matter and an assumption that their audience could keep up. It was stretching further the muscle that had awakened with her eavesdropping in the market.

She learned more about the two nations—ancient Drogow and empire-hungry Cajar—whose borders squeezed Ella’s small kingdom perilously thin on the map. They’d been at war with both of these nations at various times; most recently, with their western Cajarac neighbours. It wasn’t all to do with trade routes. Last century the Cajar had banished all their fairies and magical beings, after a bloody feud between two houses warring for control of the imperium got even bloodier with the use of magic.

Even now, their mistrust of magic continued. It was a great awkwardness that one of the Cajarac princesses was known to be a sorcerer, and she was lucky that it was only awkward. Some factions still believed it was their duty to wipe out magical beings everywhere; though others claimed these parties only wanted an excuse to declare war on their more tolerant neighbours. Think back to last semester, everyone—what might some other reasons be? No, the Turnish Pass is too obvious. What else?

Ella leaned forward to listen. Near the front of the room a few hands went up and had answers wrangled out of them. Dispute over who had the best claim to a port on the northwestern coast. Retribution for atrocities committed by mercenaries unfortunately attached to their own army in the last war, yes—and no, they weren’t going to debate the morality of war today.

In Cajar, the lecturer said, magic was considered something that would never be practised by civilised folk. It could be studied only academically, as one studied a venomous beast trapped safely in a cage.

* * *

The other place which Ella allowed herself to rediscover, with the sort of joy she was used to feeling only about summer-sparkling windows or a perfectly regular table setting, was the royal theatre. She remembered being taken by her father, once: laced into a white dress and tiny silver slippers, anxious that she’d dirty them and be punished for it. And then the ballet had started, and all her anxiety had fled for two magical hours.

In the few years before she died she’d hardly gone at all. Her father claimed it now reminded him too painfully of her mother, and Patrice called it a waste of money. So to be able to go whenever she wanted—that was a rare thing Ella could point to and say this, this is a reason I’m glad to have died.

If she went midweek and stuck to the back of the highest balcony, there were always empty seats. Ella still flinched when strangers passed close to or through her invisible self, and relaxed in the shadowed corners of otherwise deserted rows.

She found the plays interesting and the operas impressive, but it was the ballet she returned to again and again. There was something about the way the dancers inhabited their bodies and the music and the stage all at once, as if they too had a skin of constraint which began at the backdrop and ended at the footlights, and they wanted nothing more than to be a frenzied and beautiful haunting of the space between.

It hurt exquisitely to witness this without a body of her own.

It hurt and it was perfect.

Ella went often enough to grow opinions. She learned the names of her favourite dancers, learned the stories, learned the music, and learned to recognise the other regular inhabitants of the cheap seats. She had favourites there, too. There was a blunt-featured young woman with short hair who sat sprawled in her seat and brought along a constant rotation of sweethearts, around whose shoulders her arm lay with equal sprawling comfort.

There was the elderly man who snored through every first act, startled awake to the intermission applause, and spent the second act alert and pleased, cheering as loud as anyone at the end.

There were the two even older women who might have been sisters or friends or lovers; they sat with heads huddled and talked quietly and ceaselessly through the ballet, detailed and well-informed criticism of the dancers’ technique.

And there was the thin young man who must have felt the cold easily, as he wore an oversized old coat and a knitted grey cap no matter how mild the weather. He watched every ballet with a yearning, ravenous expression, and tapped his feet or swayed to the music. His long, pale fingers would creep out from his coat cuffs, like the questing noses of underground creatures, to clutch the chair in front of him whenever a dancer haunted the stage with particular grace.

Of all the people she’d seen, more than errand girls or beautiful masked strangers or clever lecturers, Ella wished she could speak to this one and be heard.

What is it that you’re seeing in the dance? she would ask. Does it hurt you the same way it hurts me?

And does that hurt feel so sublime that it keeps drawing you back, like the opposite of a warding?

Sometimes he cried when the curtain fell, and Ella, who hadn’t cried since she first discovered how to leave her house behind, would find herself touching her own cheeks and swimming with an emotion difficult to name.

* * *

Ella and Quaint became friends.

It was inevitable. Ella would have befriended a hostile ogre or a wicked sorcerer if they would see her, and hear her, and speak to her. She spent her days obeying the instructions of her murderer. Her standards for company were not high.

“I can’t have you shying away every time someone steps up to the stall,” said Quaint. “It’s distracting. Come and sit here with me.”

She indicated a new stool placed beside her own. Ella leaned over a velvet cloth, spread with bone pendants and dried herbs trapped in glass, to get a better look. Then she stepped to the side of the stall and inspected the ground as well. The market square was paved in flat grey stones.

“Very kind of you,” Ella said. “But I’m comfortable where I am.”

Quaint sent her a long look. “Been doing some more reading?” When annoyed, the fairy’s voice gained notes of the wind in trees.

Ella smiled. She hadn’t been able to see her own reflection in detail since she died, but she’d had this particular smile since she was tiny. She assumed it still pulled dimples into her cheeks.

Grumbling, Quaint kicked to break the stalks and caps of the moon-pale mushrooms which had grown up between the stones, forming a circle around the new stool. There was only one trick, usually. Ella didn’t begrudge Quaint for trying, and Quaint had a great capacity to laugh at herself. Last week she had tried to get Ella to promise her a favour; the week before that, it had been a bauble made of hair and amber, with an unfamiliar symbol carved into it. It probably irritated her that ghosts couldn’t be tempted with steaming syrups or fantastical foods.

Ella still made sure to examine the stool itself before she sat down, pulling the lavender folds of her dress neatly close. She envied Quaint’s buttercup-yellow skirt with flowers and bees embroidered around the hem, in keeping with the folksy air that Quaint donned for herself and her stall.

“Meeting expectations,” Quaint explained, of this. “City people want to buy their magic from an old woman who looks like she climbed off the back of a cow-cart just that morning. They expect a bit of odd, but not too much odd.”

“Is that why your teeth…?”

“Most people don’t see those.” Quaint grinned wide, showing them off. The more of her teeth you saw the less human she looked. “I keep a few illusions on, in case of fairy hunters. But illusions are like curses and wards. Fairy magic with a specific object but a nonspecific subject doesn’t work on ghosts. Slides off somehow.”

Ella puzzled that one out: the object was what the magic was cast on—in this case, Quaint’s teeth—and the subject was simply “anyone who looked.” But a mushroom trap set specifically for Ella-the-ghost was clearly a different story, or Quaint wouldn’t have bothered to try it at all.

Ella sat thinking about this as Quaint served a harried-looking man trailed by three excitable children. He looked as though he dearly wanted to beg for a trio of magical leashes, but instead asked Quaint about the merits of different woods for charms against disease, as he’d heard talk about pestilence breaking out in the poor quarters. Quaint spun a fanciful tale about the far-off Cajarac forest of her home village, and the various magical trees tended there in secret by dryads, keeping potent power in their heartwoods. Quaint herself had fled the country years ago, preferring self-imposed banishment to that enforced by mobs or the military, but had managed to bring a modest supply of precious magical wood with her.

This impressive story sold the man a pinewood knocker carved in the shape of slender hands, and some screws to attach it to the door, and three bluish riverstones which the youngest girl was fondling in boredom—the bowl was placed strategically to tempt small fingers. He then rounded up his children and told them firmly that there’d be no hot apple pastries unless they behaved while he finished his errands.

“See?” Quaint murmured. “Just enough foreign, just enough odd.”

“Magical trees?” said Ella.

“Oh, that part’s true. But he wouldn’t have been able to afford anything truly made of fairy heartwood. I bought that knocker and dressed it with one of my own oils. It’ll work well enough that they’ll have fewer fevers than the house next door.”

Ella watched as the inquisitive young girl escaped her father’s hand and ran to hurl herself at a nearby stall of knives and sharp tools. Not motivated enough by hot pastries, that one.

“Are you really Cajarac?” Ella asked.

Quaint looked tempted to wriggle away from the question, but she shrugged. “Yes. Once.”

Was it really as dangerous for magic users as they say? Ella wanted to know, but Quaint had the hardiness of stubborn trees, and someone like that wouldn’t leave their home behind if they had any choice.

Traps were one thing, but Ella didn’t mind a fair exchange. Truth for truth.

She said, “I was an odd little girl. My father always told me so. And I’d been looking forward to being an odd young woman, except now I’m a haunting. I’m a ghost and a house and there’s no room for anything else. Of all the things I lost when I died, perhaps it’s silly I mourn that, but … I do. I hate that my oddness got chosen for me.”

She kept back the worst of it, which was: I feel flattened. On some days I would commit outright murder for the ability to touch your velvet cloth and know what it feels like, or remember how apple pastries taste. I can look older but I can’t change. Something’s always going to be missing and I’ll never, ever get it back.

Quaint’s laugh crackled. “Don’t worry, my dear. There’s always room to choose more odd.”

* * *

If Quaint did know about the rules—midnight-based or otherwise—that governed ghosts, she was keeping it to herself in case it became useful later.

What Ella needed was an expert.

A polite letter sent to the Professor of Political and Magical History, posing as an undergraduate looking for input on a thesis topic, quickly won her a letter in reply with an initial book list, but also suggesting she try the Lecturer in Intangibility at Ruby Hall, the newest magical academy in the city. Ella did some more purloining of Patrice’s stationery, and waited for the push-and-slide of the mail slot every day so she could be sure of picking up the mail from the mat herself. Letters addressed to Ella by name would surely invite not only comment but punishment.

The next letter took longer to arrive. When it did, it came folded in a slim monograph of case studies on local hauntings. The Lecturer in Intangibility expressed delight at a nonmagical student’s interest in his unpopular field of study. He’d ventured to include the address of a true expert in the field, a brilliant scholar living in Cajar, who had published extensively on the known mechanics of haunted objects and locales, but who’d never appeared at any convocations. Not that one could blame them, what with the woeful Cajarac attitudes to magic. Sorcerers living in that nation were forced to hide their experience under a heavy veil of theory, and Scholar Mazamire was widely suspected to be such a one.

By now Ella was used to mixing truth with caution when asking favours from powerful beings. Scholar Mazamire might be a fairy-in-hiding themself, if they were so reclusive and careful.

She wrote, My interest in this topic isn’t only academic. A house belonging to my family is known to be haunted by a ghost.

With a mixture of true things drawn from her own experience, and those based on the readings she’d dutifully been doing in between letters, Ella asked questions. Which of the usual tricks that fairies might use on a human might also apply to ghosts? What could the scholar tell her about the subject and object distinction of a fairy curse?

And, thinking again of Greta: What could a human sorcerer do to a ghost, if they wanted?

This time the reply took nearly two months; long enough that Ella had persuaded herself the mail had been lost, or that the scholar had been affronted at being pestered from a distance.

And then it arrived, a battered but heavy envelope, adorned with a row of yellow stamps and ink-marked with the symbols of an unfamiliar place. The letter inside was in a beautiful hand, the words arranged with the care of someone writing with academic fluency in a language not their first.

It began, Greetings in knowledge, Ella.

Never in her life or her death had anyone considered Ella worth valuing for her mind, her knowledge, or her seeking after knowledge. She wanted more of this feeling at once.

Scholar Mazamire outlined an impressive array of uses a fairy might have for a ghost, once it had trapped one to its will. A hot-cold feeling buzzed in Ella’s grates and the empty spaces beneath her floorboards as she read.

And for certain, the scholar wrote, human sorcerers had a greater range of power here because a ghost was once human, too. But it was a fertile field for study, and equally fertile for disagreements.

Scholar Mazamire was very interested to hear more about this house and ghost belonging to Ella’s family, and of any personal experience that Ella had with fairies. As you are doubtless aware, Cajar revoked the habitation rights of all fairies some time ago. My personal experience there is thus sorely limited—an unfortunate hindrance in the pursuit of true scholarship.

The letter finished, In anticipation of the pleasure of your reply.

Ella, on the roof, stretched out with the letter clutched to her chest. A flock of swallows passed across the sky and all of her red roof tiles longed to swoop joyously with them.

Anticipation became a feeling Ella had with the mail slot of her front door. The brass learned to ache. There was pleasure in the slide of letters through it. There was even pleasure in the acute pain of leaving another task interrupted so that Ella could be first, always, to pick up and sort through the letters, famished for the sight of those yellow stamps.

Ella wrote, Why would a ghost, once able to roam outside its haunting, be bound to return at midnight? Could such a limitation be changed?

The scholar replied with characteristic precision. They had consulted the rare written records of such cases, and found two: one in Cajar where the ghost’s time limit appeared to be noon, and one from Ella’s own kingdom where it was, indeed, midnight.

A previous scholar had put forward a theory which Mazamire themself found plausible, because it explained the variance. In Cajar a house’s main kitchen hearth was traditionally kept alight all night, for warmth in their freezing nights, and quenched at noon before the household slept through the hottest part of the day.

Any long-standing human custom could become a law that bent human magic around itself. So house-magic, ghostly or otherwise, had a tendency to end or reset itself at these transitional hours: noon, or midnight, depending on where one found oneself.

And now Ella had another friend.

Perhaps Scholar Mazamire wouldn’t have thought in such terms. Then again, perhaps they did. With time and a steady exchange of letters, they began to include anecdotes about their spoiled elderly dog, and their family pestering them to go out and develop healthy hobbies like riding or archery instead of spending all their time locked away with old papers, and the books they read for pure entertainment. Their tone was always polite, sometimes dryly funny, but loneliness shone through like a candle glimpsed behind a moth-holed curtain.

Ella filled nearly two sheets of paper recommending romances in return. She wrote about the ballet. She included a newspaper column describing the ill-fated demonstration of a flying machine, supposedly powered half by a willing air-sprite and half by the winching power of two men’s legs, which had ended with the inventors and their contraption all being fished out of the river.

She even put in a few daring complaints about her dreadful sisters, before hastily bringing the letter back to the exchange they’d been having on the nature of ghosts and the various theories put forward over the years—none substantially proven— as to why a ghost might arise in a specific place.

Scholar Mazamire’s own theory was that a ghost was how a building held a grudge, because it was not human enough to do it on its own.

Ella read that sitting on the roof, and felt a throb of harsh contentment that went all the way down the main chimney and glowed in the ashes of the hearth like anger—her own anger, the house’s anger, yes, which remembered her death and her father’s, and would never be quenched. She wished she dared to tell this far-off lonely friend the truth of herself, just as she wished that one day the boy at the ballet would look up and see on Ella’s face the same excitement and hunger that dwelled on his own.

* * *

And then, one day—

“Girls!”

Patrice burst into the room when normally she would simply step. Her daughters looked up from their teacups and biscuits, and Ella let herself appear in one of the chairs as well.

“What is it?” said Greta.

The newspaper in Patrice’s hand was folded back to an announcement that began in large decorative letters: FESTIVAL BALLS—CROWN PRINCE TO CHOOSE A BRIDE!

The heir to the throne, His Highness Prince Jule, had declared his intention to become betrothed. A festival would take place at the end of the following month, with the centrepiece of celebration being the traditional three nights of dancing that accompanied any royal birth, engagement, or wedding, held in the enormous ballroom at the Royal Palace.

“As well as the summons already issued to ladies of noble birth and delegations of other nations,” Patrice read aloud, “Their Majesties are pleased to extend an invitation to these balls to every unattached young woman in their own royal city.”

Unattached—what a word that was. Not quite untethered. A frisson of excitement went through the upholstery of Ella’s chair.

“Well, now,” said Danica. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of young men disappointed by that.”

Patrice swatted her arm with the newspaper. “Danica.”

“There have always been rumours.” Danica hadn’t quite the ability to toss her head that Greta had perfected, but she did a good uncaring shrug. “He’s waited this long without giving any girl any sign or hope—the society pages would have seized on it if he did. They say he’s not bothered to take advantage of the fairy gift that made him charming, and so it’s all but worn off by now. Wasn’t he once supposed to be the best dancer in the kingdom?”

“Is that so? I heard he was simply a talented amateur, but the court was expected to pretend otherwise,” said Patrice dryly.

In the version passed between girls at Ella’s school, the fairy who’d bestowed the gift at the prince’s naming had said he would sing to charm fish from the river, and dance so well it would make dryads wilt with envy. There had been a hopscotch rhyme about it.

“Either way,” said Danica. “They say he’s, you know. A bit odd.”

“We will not call His Highness the Crown Prince odd,” said Patrice. “At most he is reserved.”

“Reserving himself for the muscular sons of farmers,” said Greta with a laugh. But she was sitting very straight, teacup abandoned and eyes alight.

“Nevertheless,” said Patrice. “Royalty has a duty. He must produce an heir no matter his personal tastes, which means he must marry someone capable of it. And for such an invitation to be sent, he must be open to a … wider choice.”

“Rubbish. Five hundred crowns say it’s his duty to marry a highborn lady no matter what the invitation says,” said Danica. “But I’ve always wanted to see inside the palace.”

“If I can dance with him, I can win him,” said Greta. “Mama, I’ll need a new dress.”

Patrice gave her younger daughter an assessing look; perhaps taking in all the beauty on the surface, all the promise of her ambition and spark, and calculating their chances of remaining an intact illusion for long enough to ensnare a prince. When Greta was motivated, a great deal was possible.

“Yes,” said Patrice finally. “New gowns for you both. We’ll call at Gillespie’s tomorrow.”

A ball. A dance, where the whole point was to do it with other people.

Ella bundled up her feelings about this and took them to the ballet that night. It was one of her favourites: the story of the doll brought to life by a sorcerer. The doll falls in love, of course. Depending on the season the ballet company chose the tragic ending or the happy one, and Ella liked to try to guess which during the first act, by how the dancers were interpreting the steps.

The elderly man was there, sleeping; the chatty old women were not. The boy in the grey hat had nearly the whole back row to himself. Ella did something she’d never dared before, and took the seat next to him. He was not a sprawler; his concentration was that of being folded breathlessly forward. There was little chance he’d fling out an arm which would pass through her. Sitting next to him, Ella could see how the skin of his cheeks tightened and flushed and his lips parted when he was caught up in the music.

Ella pretended, in a way she didn’t usually let herself pretend, that they were friends come to the ballet together; that at any moment he would turn his excitement to her and insist that this was going to be the tragic ending, just look at how they were staging the trio dance; that afterward they would go out and continue to dissect it over cups of spiced wine.

The tile in her pocket gave a chill throb.

On the stage, the doll dancer trailed her hand across her lover’s chest as if she wanted to carve the feeling of it into her animated wooden limbs. The inevitability of the second act was clear in the curl of her wrist and the arch of her back. And yet she raised her face to his, as he took her hands and they swayed into the steps of the dance, with a smile that made Ella long to believe otherwise.

* * *

“The ball begins at sundown,” Ella said to Quaint, later that week. “So they’ll all be out of the house from then until midnight at least.”

“I’ll be at the palace grounds like the rest of this crowd,” said Quaint, indicating the other night market stallholders. “Nothing’s on except for the festival. Oh, I daresay the drinking houses will be open as usual. But the market’s been moved to the eastern palace fields, and there’ll be barges on the river, too. I think they’re expecting most of the city to turn up and party while their unmarried daughters are waltzing with the prince. And I intend to be there to sell them things.”

“Any cantrips against inconvenient rain under that table of yours?” teased Ella. “And I … I do want to go to the balls. I mightn’t get another chance to see inside the palace, and see the courtiers in all their finery. The invitation was to all young women of the city.”

And the wording of invitations, she’d learned, was important when it came to magic. Ella should be able to pass within the palace walls without that itch of unbelonging. The temptation of the idea had been unfolding in her mind for days.

“It’ll be so crowded that I can avoid my family easily. And nobody else will be able to see me at all.” Ella indicated the lavender dress and sighed. “So it won’t matter that I’m dressed like a dowdy child.”

Quaint folded her hands in a way Ella recognised from when she was about to bring out the really powerful charms from under the stall to sell for an outrageous price, because she’d judged the customer able to afford it. Light gleamed on her teeth.

She said, “What if they could see you?”

Copyright © 2025 by Freya Marske