Page 134 of Of Curses and Courtship

“The light won’t last long.” Helena pants. “We must?—”

She freezes. I do, too, and it’s no choice of our own toremain so still. We’re stuck in place, trapped again. All I can move are my eyes, which dart around, searching for an answer.

Lady Ashbridge appears in a puff of dark smoke. Tears fall from her bloodshot eyes, and her irises flash red. She holds an amulet above her head. That gaudy necklace she has always worn is clenched in her bony fingers. I’ve never liked the thing, but it makes me sick now. It turns my blood to ice. It turns my body into ash.

I’m nothing, as she always intended me to be.

Heavens. Why can’t I move?

“You thought you could run from me,” she says. “But the fae’s magic is no match for a sorceress’s. Did witnessing the curse I put on that land teach you nothing, child?”

I can barely let out a squeak.

“There you go.” A slow smile appears on her face. “Finally, you’ve caught up. I am the one who cursed your precious prince. I am the one that the wretched king betrayed. I am the one who wrote the prophecy and forced you into hiding before you were ever born. And I will be the one to tear down the Sun Palace and all others, once and for all. A new reign of magic will begin undermycrown.”

All I can do is weep.

“Ophelia?”A faint voice whispers on the other side of the wooden door. “Please. Don’t panic. It is us.”

Us. I recognize Elisa’s voice, gentle and sweet compared to her mother’s harsh tones. The whispered words are the first I’ve heard from my stepsisters in months, and it does little to set me at ease. No matter how upset I am with them, I’m worried.

They are still here when their mother has gone mad. They’re in as much danger as I am.

“Who is that?” Helena asks, sitting upright.

I shuffle to the door and kneel by it, pressing my hands against the weathered wood. “It’s my stepsister—or perhaps both of them.”

“Yes,” Raia says. “I’m here as well.”

Raia is the reason I was exiled from my home, but despite our current situation, I hold no ill will for my younger stepsister. Perhaps anger will come later, but I don’t have the energy for such hatred when there’s a bigger threat in the home. Raia was naive; she didn’t know what she was doing.

None of us could have guessed it would turn out this way… unless…

“Do you know what’s happening?” I ask. “Why does your mother have me locked away?”

“We don’t,” Raia whispers. “Nor do we know how to help. Mother has been behaving strangely since you left.”

Strange does not begin to cover how their mother has behaved, but Lady Ashbridge has always coddled her daughters. They likely don’t know what their mother truly is.

I exchange a weary look with Helena. “In what way has she been strange?”

“She’s been disappearing for weeks at a time,” Elisa says. “She hardly eats, barely sleeps, and when she’s home, she seldom speaks to us. The house has become a mess.”

Now that I’m not around to clean, I suppose my bedchamberisdustier. I assumed the mess was only in my room, but if what Elisa says is true, Lady Ashbridge has been neglecting our once beautiful home.

“She took down your father’s portrait,” Raia says. “Replaced it with one of her own.”

My heart drops into my stomach, and my lower lip trembles.

My father. That portrait, one I’ve not seen in months, was all I had to remember my father by. Where is it? If there is any way to find it before I leave this place, I must. I will.

“Perhaps she’s finally done mourning him,” I say, bitterness seeping into my tone.

One of them wiggles the door, but it does not budge.

“I can’t believe she has locked you in there,” Elisa says. “She’s always been a cold woman, but I thought there was an end to her cruelty. This… this is…”

Raia sobs. I hardly hear the sound through the thick wood, but it’s almost certainly her. “Forgive me. I should not have?—”