Page 10 of Cinder
“Oh! Can I help?” she asked, and before Cin could stop her, she scooped up the linen from the table and dumped it into the lye bucket.
Cin stared at it in horror as the freshly cleaned sheets sank into the water. “Emma,” he said, his voice flat to cover the anger attempting to take root between his ribs. “Those were the ones that needed to go onto our beds.”
“Oh.” Emma watched the bucket, her eyes widening. She sniffled. Then sniffled again. Her expression broke as she threwherself over Cin’s shoulders, sobbing against him. “I’m so sorry. I’ve ruined it, haven’t I? I’m awful!”
Cin felt so, so very tired suddenly. “No, no.” He bit back the rest of what he wished he could say, patting her shoulder. “It’s fine, I’ll just hang them to dry again, it’ll... it’ll work out. You were only trying to help.”
She had been. Only trying to help. There was no reason for Cin to hate her for this, and yet somehow he did, deep and ugly in the worst, least pious parts of his soul. Slowly, he pushed her away.
She wiped at her tears. “Is there anything I can do...?”
“I’ve got this,” Cin lied. “Really. Go help... Go sweep the kitchen, okay? That would save me so much time.”
“It would?” Emma perked up. “I can do that—I’ll go do that.”
“Good,” Cin said, and it was not.
He carried the now-sopping clean linens out to the garden once more, hanging them again one by one, each stretch toward the line its own tiny agony. And again, his pigeons gathered. He sighed, running a hand through the loose strands of his white-blond locks. “I don’t know what you can do about this one, friends, but if you’re up for it, please try...”
The flock seemed to chatter among themselves. Lacey was the first to move, sweeping down in front of the wet sheets, her wings flapping at a speed Cin had never seen from her before, moving like the shimmer on the road’s horizon during the heat of summer. Slowly, the linen began to dry.
The other birds joined in a whoosh, fluttering and twirling until the whole batch of sheets were dancing lightly in their wind. Like magic. In wonder, Cin yanked them down, the fabric as dry as they’d been before Emma’s disastrous help.
Cin hurried them up to the bedrooms. He avoided his family as he worked, quickly replacing linens and turning down each bed, preparing the hearths for their return that night, andjogging down the stairs two-by-two to put the lunch on the fire, running between stirring it and preparing the horse carriage. Six different apologies to their currently lonely mare later, and Cin was putting the lunch off the stove—remarkably unburnt.
He filled his siblings’ bowls for them, just to be sure they didn’t manage to ruin anything else in the final few moments before leaving, and quickly scrubbed the cook-bowl clean. When Louise called for them to leave, Cin piled out of the house behind Floy, Manfred, and Emma, taking an extra minute to check that everything was locked. He emerged down the front path to find Louise in the driving seat, her heavy riding cloak and gloves over her gown.
Her brows puckered as Cin approached. “Are you not dressed, child?”
He froze, still three steps from the carriage door. Of course he was dressed—simple pants tucked into his only pair of boots, and his ordinary cream tunic beneath the cloak he’d been washing blood from for the last few years. “What is wrong with this?” he asked, dreading the answer.
Louise made a sound, waving defiantly. “Have you not seen us? We are all suitable for presentation at a royal ball. You look like you’ve climbed out of the hearth!”
“I’ve been...” Fixing everyone else’s problems, he wanted to say. But he could have prevented Manfred from spilling the beans, or warned Emma which linen was clean, or told Floy to find their own fucking bugs and feathers. He could have noticed that his family were all wearing their Sunday best by lunch, and he was still in the very clothes he’d spent the whole day lifting and pushing and running about in.
“Busy, yes,” Louise finished for him, dryly. She sighed, shaking her head. “There’s no time; we should have left half an hour ago. Next week, perhaps. We’ll look through your clothes first. Find something... adequate.”
Cin thought of his wardrobe—somewhat cleaner than this, but no less worn from all the work he’d done in them. He’d never bothered to save a specific outfit for anything more formal. It had seemed silly to keep an expensive piece of clothing for the sole purpose of barely wearing it.
As he stood there, the autumn sun heating his cheeks and his siblings complaining in the back of the carriage, Louise seemed to be waiting for something.
“Yes, Mother,” Cin croaked out. “Next week, then.”
And he watched the carriage leave.
Five
Cinder ran. He wasn’t sure where he was going at first: anywhere but that damned front yard, where he’d watched his siblings and stepmother leave for a ball he’d worked so hard—so hard and yet not hard enough—to attend. His feet carried him first toward the front door, tripping over the torn edge of his shoe every few steps. Tears blurred his vision and each attempt to fit the key back into the lock grew worse as his anger rose. Finally he flung himself away, back down the front path and around toward the side of the house. He stumbled past the kitchen—also locked—and across the garden where the drying lines hung empty.
How stupid was he to sob over missing a single night of revelry? Cin sucked in a horrid breath, his ribs aching against his bindings, and wrapped both hands over his mouth like he could strangle the misery out of himself.
It wasn’t the missing that felt like a boiling band in his chest, not just that, anyway, but the trying—the trying, and trying, andfalling short, when two of the people in that fucking god-damned carriage hadn’t had to try at all. To be born entirely mediocre—was that Cinder Szule’s curse? Not good or pious, and not useless or cruel either. Something just a little stained, valuable enough to be measured but always coming up short.
Worse, too, he had seen the embarrassment in Floy’s gaze, the satisfaction in Manfred’s, the pity in Emma’s. He hated them for it. He hated them so much it made him want to tear his own eyes out to stop seeing the memory of them driving away.
Cin tripped over a garden rock, landing on both knees in the grass and dirt. Ash-lover, dirt-wench, cinder-whore—if he could reach between his own ribs, he’d pull the names out, rip free his breasts while he was at it. Above him, a gentle chorus of coos started. Two tiny feet landed on his head, then another two on his shoulders, a final set clinging to the back of his neck as he shook.
Gracelessly, Cin came back to himself. Through the clench and release of his lungs, he managed to wipe one eye, then the next. On the ground in front of him lay his mother’s gravestone. It felt only right. She might have been good and pious enough to have sacrificed for her family’s sake, but she would have mourned this too. As wistful and ridiculous as Cin remembered her to be, he knew that were she alive to take on the responsibility herself, she would have wanted him at that ball, done whatever she could to get him there.
