Free Enchanted by Alethea Kontis Page A

lace and a small brooch at the collar.
    Had she been a few years younger still, she would have been the spitting image of Wednesday.
    Sunday had no desire to speak. She let her sour expression introduce her.
    “Well, well,” said the woman. “It seems I have arrived just in time.” She walked up to Sunday, pulled the silk ribbon from around her throat in one clean snap, and tossed it into the fireplace.
    Sunday watched her beautiful gift smolder in the flames. As it burned, the fire around it turned green. Bilious smoke rose from it to hover above the logs. The smoke folded itself into the image of a snake that hissed and spat at them before evaporating up the chimney. What was left of the ribbon fell into ash.
    Sunday turned on the woman. “Who are you?”
    “Of course you don’t recognize me, child. You were too young.” She took Sunday by the arms and kissed her reluctant cheeks. “I’m your Aunt Joy.”

6. Grim Harmony

    I T TOOK RUMBOLD a while to realize that the fire had gone out. After months of greeting the dawn amidst the constant hum and bustle of Wood life, he felt a bit hollow and alone. Odd. He’d never imagined that he would miss anything from that enchanted otherlife. Here in the castle there was no buzz of insects, no hoot of owls about their nightly business, no rustling in the underbrush. No pale glow of moonlight fell from the heavens to light false paths in the darkness. The wind didn’t whisper across the surface of the water as it lapped against the sides of the well.
    But there was whispering.
    A fear from his childhood seized his heart with renewed vigor. The whispers had always lingered in and around his boyhood bedchamber in the witching hours, pestering him, filling his head with susurant syllables. If he stopped up his ears so he couldn’t hear their disembodied chatter, they would hunt him down at the dining table or in the receiving chamber. They had faded with time, or perhaps his memories of them had simply faded with age.
    While a frog, he had learned to survive within the constant conversation of the Wood. There it had guided him, reassured him. Here, the whispers shook him to his core.
    Instinct screamed at him to hide, to pull the sheets over his head and plug his ears. He pretended the strange sounds were simply servants murmuring down the hallway. They were not in the room with him, not mouthless cries from beyond the veil, not long-ago memories soaked in stone and built into the cold, confining walls around him. He told himself stories, imagining the words being spoken in Sunday’s sweet voice as the sun reflected off her golden hair and illuminated his soul. He concentrated on her sun-kissed skin, her lips like rose petals, her eyes like sapphires—
    Alwaysss.
    The drawn-out “s” caught his ear. Had he really heard the word? There had never been words in the whispers before, just an unintelligible mishmash of discordant sounds. Rumbold focused on extracting that one word from the noises in the ether. He was a man now, not a child. Instead of running from the whispers, he tried to listen for them. To them.
    He honed in on a bass line: a low, syncopated thrumming like the beat of a heart. It could have been saying his name:
Rumbold. Rumbold.
    A note above that was the sibilant whisper, the words finally coming together for him in a hushed phrase:
I will always be with you.
    There was a sadness in the message, of lovers torn apart or family separated by time and grief. The lonely ache of it echoed inside him. As he embraced its discovery, he accidentally stumbled upon the next:
Kill me.
    Rumbold’s shivers began again, and he regressed steadily into the fears of his youth. The whispers would no longer fade back into noise for him now. Each of the words was distinct in his mind, and together they haunted him with their grim harmony.
    Rumbold. Rumbold. Rumbold.
    I will always be with you.
    Kill me.
    Free me.
    Over and over and over again ... For all that he had initially