Cinderella's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Cinderella walked back to her stepmother's house with the locket clutched in her fist. The metal warmed against her skin, but it didn't ease the hollow feeling in her chest. She'd chosen her mother's memory over the prince's search, and now she had neither the slipper nor a plan. But two days later, she stood outside the palace gates watching guards arrange tables beneath an ornate podium carved with gold vines and royal crests. A crowd had already gathered, women in silk and women in wool, all waiting beside smaller tables set with teacups and pastries. The guards hung a banner across the podium that read: By order of His Highness, the maiden whose foot fits the glass slipper shall be his bride. One guard carried a velvet cushion to a chair with carved wooden panels and cream upholstery. On the cushion sat her slipper. The mysterious woman stood nearby, arms crossed, watching the guards arrange everything exactly as she directed. She'd brought the slipper here herself and claimed it proved she'd danced with the prince. Cinderella's throat went tight. The woman was going to try it on in front of everyone. Cinderella pushed through the crowd before she could think better of it. She reached the ornate chair just as the woman lifted the slipper from its cushion. "That's mine," Cinderella said. Her voice came out rougher than she meant it to. The woman turned, eyebrow raised, and the guards stepped forward. Cinderella pulled the locket from her pocket and held it up. "She stole the slipper from me. I traded it to get this back, but I'm the one who left it at the ball. Ask her what the prince wore. Ask her what we talked about." The woman's smile didn't falter. She slipped her foot into the glass slipper, and it slid on perfectly. The crowd gasped. The guards looked at each other, then at Cinderella, uncertain. Cinderella stared at the slipper on the woman's foot, her chest hollow and burning at once. She'd lost. The woman had won by wearing the proof Cinderella had surrendered. But then Cinderella looked down at the locket in her hand, at the engraving of her mother's initials, and something shifted inside her. She'd spent two days ashamed of the choice she'd made, but standing here now, she wasn't sorry. The slipper had been borrowed magic. The locket was the truth of who she'd been before the ball and who she still was after it. She closed her fist around the silver heart and met the woman's eyes. "Keep it," she said. "It never fit me the way I thought it did." She turned and walked back through the crowd, and this time she didn't look back. The prince could find her or he couldn't, but she wouldn't build herself around someone else's search anymore.