Free Princess of Glass by Jessica Day George

carefully made a fist with the other, as Galen and Heinrich had taught her. She didn't want to break any fingers when she punched the intruder.
    "I said, 'Hello?'" She was pleased that her voice was firmer now.
    There was a faint cough, and then someone stepped into the light of one of the candles.
    It was Ellen, and she was covered in black soot. Poppy stared at her in astonishment. Had she tried to sweep out one of the chimneys herself?
    "What in heaven's name have you been doing?" Poppy only remembered to whisper at the last moment. They were just a few yards from the Seadowns' bedchamber.
    83
    "Nothing," Ellen said, but a mysterious smile crept onto her black-smeared face.
    Poppy had had enough. First the nightmare, now Ellen wandering around in the night, shedding cinders on the carpets and acting as though she had some wonderful secret. The princess dragged Ellen down the hall into her room.
    "Whatever do you think you're doing?" Poppy found it hard to berate the girl in a whisper, but she made do. "The Seadowns take you in, give you a job when no one else would, offer you gowns to attend the royal balls, and you--you--" She threw her hands in the air and then tried again. "You still break everything you touch, scorch the ironing--and why was there sand in my pillowcase last night? Is it really that hard to be a maid?" She stared at Ellen by the light of the candles she had lit in her room to chase away the shadows of the nightmare.
    Ellen gazed down at the filthy toes of her shoes, peeping out from her sooty hem. When she at last looked at Poppy, instead of being ashamed or even sulky, her face was blazing with rage. Poppy took a step back in shock.
    "Yes!" Ellen spat the word at Poppy. "Yes, it is that hard to be a maid, as you would know if you had ever lifted your little finger to do one simple thing for yourself, Your Highness!' She sneered as she said the other girl's title. "Do you know how to make up a featherbed? To iron lace? To serve milady's tea just so?" Ellen was panting with the force of her emotions.
    "N-no," Poppy stammered, still taken aback. "Well, I do know how to serve tea without breaking the--," she began, but Ellen interrupted her.
    84
    "And do you know what's it like to feel a tray of heirloom china leap from your hands and crash to the floor? To feel the iron suddenly go red hot even though it's not on the stove, and smell linen scorching? To find towels that you just folded in disarray even though no one has touched them? There is something horribly wrong with me. I wasn't meant to be a maid. And I just. Can't. Do it."
    "You're not burning things on purpose?" This surprised Poppy as much as anything else Ellen had said. She and Marianne had assumed that Ellen was protesting her "fallen state" by wrecking the clothing and making the beds uncomfortable.
    "Of course not!"
    Tears started to spill from Ellen's eyes, and Poppy suppressed a groan. She never could stand to see anyone crying.
    "Sometimes it's like something has taken over my body," Ellen sniffled. "I know what my hands should be doing, but I can't make them work right. Or I'll do something correctly, and then it undoes itself as soon as I turn my back." She shuddered. "It's a horrible feeling. I think my father's ill-luck cursed me."
    Poppy knew that Ellen was probably speaking in the metaphorical sense, or at least being histrionic, but the words chilled her. Cursed. Poppy knew all about being cursed, at finding your body doing things you didn't want it to do. Like dance all night, even though your feet were bleeding inside your worn-out slippers.
    She narrowed her eyes and studied the other girl. Perhaps Ellen was cursed, but why and by whom? Her life was already
    85
    in tatters, what good would it do to ruin her career as a maidservant?
    There were, of course, no outward signs that Ellen was cursed. What there was instead was a great deal of ash and soot drifting down on Poppy's carpet.
    "But why are you so filthy? Did Mrs. Hanks