Free Ash by Malinda Lo

away, and then the kitchen door slammed. At last the steps came down to the cellar door, and a key rattled in the lock. She scurried away from the door and was standing when it opened. She blinked in the sudden glare at the wide, dark shadow looming outside.
    A key ring dangled from the woman’s hand, and when she spoke, Ash realized that it was Beatrice.
    “It’s time to make breakfast,” Beatrice said, as if she were accustomed to letting Ash out of the cel ar every morning.
    “Come outside; there’s work to do.”
    Ash followed her back into the world.

    For months afterward, Lady Isobel did not al ow her to leave the house unaccompanied; she could not even go to the market without Beatrice keeping a hawk eye on her. At night, her stepmother followed her to her room and locked her in from the outside, and in the morning Beatrice let her out so that she could lay the fires and set the table for breakfast. At the end of the day, she would sit at her window and stare out at the Wood until the daylight was gone. She couldn’t stop thinking about 73

    Ash

    the path she had taken to Rook Hil . She often thought of the grave that waited at the end of it, and if she closed her eyes she could remember the smell of the earth there. She also remembered the fairy who had been waiting for her—for surely he could not have been human, could he? In al the fairy tales she had read, the fairies were described as unnatural y beautiful, and now Ash knew what that meant. There had been more to his beauty than perfect features: He radiated an al ure that would be nearly impossible to resist.
    Each night before she went to sleep, she chose one fairy tale to read until the light of her candle stub died. Her favorite story was about Kathleen, a pretty girl of sixteen who was betrothed to the vil age baker’s son, a handsome young man with jet-black hair and smiling brown eyes. On her way home from his family’s house one warm summer night, Kathleen, full of the heady rush of first love, lost herself in the Wood. In the distance she saw the twinkling of lights and mistakenly thought that it marked a vil ager’s house but it marked the edge of a fairy ring. That night, the story goes, the fairies were dressed in their finest, for it was Midsummer’s Eve. The young Kathleen knew that she should not enter the ring, but there was a fairy prince there with eyes as bril iant as sapphires and a smile that drove away al thoughts of the baker’s son. This fairy prince, who saw Kathleen standing outside the ring, took her hand and pul ed her in, and then she was truly lost, for once anyone experiences a fairy’s charm, nothing else, they say, wil ever be enough.
    Kathleen awoke the next morning in her own bed in her ordinary house, and she longed to be back in that fairy ring so 74

    MALINDA LO
    much that her body ached with the memory of it. She ran to the vil age greenwitch and begged for something to help her find that place again, and the greenwitch—who was old enough to know better—gave Kathleen a wreath of mugwort and told her to burn three leaves every night before she went to bed so that she might dream of that land. Kathleen waited breathlessly al day for night to fal , and when darkness came she plucked the leaves from the wreath and set them afire in a smal dish at the foot of her bed. The smoke curled up with a bittersweet odor, and soon she fel asleep and dreamt that she was back in the fairy ring. In her dreams she danced with the beautiful prince, who fed her the most delicious foods she had ever tasted and bestowed one kiss upon her lips every night.
    As the days went by, Kathleen began to waste away, for she only truly lived when she slept at night, entombed in the prison of smoke from the magical wreath. Although the baker’s son tried to woo her, she was no longer interested. Her mother plied her with the best food she could make, but Kathleen would not eat. Her friends tried to amuse her with funny tales, but she did