Chapter Nine. Cleo
NINE
Cleo
Cleo can’t sit still in the empty halls of Delphine’s castle.
Does she even know what stillness is? Or rest?
It feels wrong on her skin, like a film she wants to peel off.
For most of her life, she has had things to do and someone to demand she do them.
Now, absent things to do and someone to tell her to do them, there is nothing but this …
the quiet …
the wandering …
the uneasiness.
Energy vibrates up her throat.
Cleo turns the corner down a hallway.
Dust swirls in the flickering candlelight.
Her footsteps echo on the stone walls.
The energy thumps at the back of her throat.
She turns the next corner.
Her ears ring and her eyes burn.
Another corner.
Another.
The pressure in her chest starts to hurt.
Her steps quicken.
Another corner.
She enters a room and freezes.
There’s Delphine’s slippers cast off on the floor, her half-drunk glass of ozrum, a leftover slice of bread.
No. No. Not that room.
Another hallway.
Another room.
Delphine’s silk robe draped over a chair.
Tears blur Cleo’s vision.
A moan escapes her throat.
She goes downstairs. She’s running now.
A breeze steals in through cracks in the stone. The flames of the lantern lights gutter out.
Cleo’s heart is rapping at her eardrums.
She turns into a sitting room.
Delphine is there holding a bottle of ozrum.
“Where have you been?” the witch asks.
Cleo squeezes her eyes shut and screams.
The sound fills the room.
It fills the cracks in the walls.
Cleo sinks to her knees and clamps her mouth shut.
The world grows still again.
Laughter burbles up, chasing the scream, and soon she’s hysterical, sobbing and laughing.
She is terrified and free and she’s terrified of being free.
What now?
When the laughter dies, the stillness floods back in like a tide filling rock pools.
The Witch of the East is dead but she’s everywhere in every corner of the castle, haunting it like a ghost.
Cleo gets up. She steals one of Delphine’s overcoats, one made of black wool with layered lapels of red and white. There’s a deep hood attached and when Cleo pulls it over her head, she feels oddly powerful.
A shiver races across her shoulders.
She ditches her shoes and slips on a pair of Delphine’s silk slippers. Not magical ones, of course. There’s only one pair of those.
“Oh,” she mutters to the quiet upon standing up.
The slippers are thickly padded and fit perfectly. As if they were made for her.
Delphine has a closet full of silk slippers that she hardly ever wore, too afraid to let the magical slippers out of her sight.
The thought that all these comfortable shoes were just gathering dust when Cleo’s shoes were years old and wearing through brings out a rage inside her that makes her eyes burn.
She packs a bag next. Food, an extra layer of clothing, Delphine’s wand, and the one thing Cleo can call her own: a rainbow prism shaped like a cat. It’s the only thing she was given as a child, the one thing she was permitted to keep.
She goes to the castle’s entrance.
She was never allowed to come and go through the front doors unless she was with Delphine.
For one split second, she hesitates, hand hovering over the hammered iron lever, as if waiting for the witch’s shrill voice to shriek from the next room.
But there is nothing. There is no one.
The witch is dead.
Cleo presses the bolt down and the latch thunks open.
She pulls the door open and the fresh air of the East End filters in.
What now?
Now, she is free.