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“his Madeleine.”
    It almost came as an anticlimax when he sickened and died within that year of wedding Madame. She thought, looking back on it, that she had known, deep in her heart, that this was what would happen. Love spells did not last forever, not even powerful ones, and Madame was not the sort to allow her power to ebb away.
    But this was the peculiar thing; Elena had spent her timesince her father’s death wrapped in a growing sense of tension and frustration, as if something was out there, some force that would make all of this better, if only she knew how to invoke it. That there was a way to turn this into a happy ending, and that her life was a coiled spring being wound ever tighter until it would all be released in a burst of wonder and magic that would give her back everything that had been taken, and more. The longer things went on, the more she felt that climax rushing towards her, or she towards it—
    But it never happened. Not on her sixteenth birthday—the primary moment of magical happenings according to every tale that she had ever read or heard—nor on her eighteenth, which was the other possibility. No, things stayed exactly as they had been. No Fairy Godmother appeared, not even Madame Fleur, somehow empowered to take Elena out of her miserable existence. No handsome prince, no prince of any kind, appeared on the doorstep to save her. There was not even a marriage proposal from the blacksmith’s son or the cowherd, both traditional disguises for wandering princes. Nothing. Only more and more back-breaking work, and the certainty that nothing was going to change, that Madame had things arranged precisely as she wanted them, and that Elena would be “Ella Cinders,” the household slave, until she died. And her despair grew until it matched the tension inside, until it overwhelmed the tension inside, and the only escape from either she ever had were a few stolen moments inside the covers of a book.
    For years while she still had hope, she had eased her sadness by telling herself stories like those she read in the booksand heard old women tell their grandchildren. “Once upon a time,” they always began, “there was a poor orphan girl who was forced to slave for her Wicked Stepmother.” And they ended with, “And the orphan girl married the prince—” or the duke, or the earl, or the handsome magician “—and lived happily ever after.”
    Then, gradually, the stories had changed, and the rescuer had not been a prince. By the time she was sixteen and a day, she had abandoned all thoughts of royalty, and instead, prayed and hoped with a clawing despair for romance. Just a little. Just an ordinary love of her own.
    No, the dreams she had told no one were no longer about the unattainable, but about the barely possible—if there were, somewhere in the town, a man willing to brave Madame’s wrath to steal her away.
    Day in, day out, in the market, by the river, or from her garret window, she had watched other girls with envious eyes as they were courted and wooed by young men. They seemed so happy, and as her sixteenth, and then eighteenth birthdays passed, her envy for their lot grew. As did the stirrings in her heart—and elsewhere—as she spied on them from behind her curtains, or while pretending to select produce in the marketplace, when their sweethearts stole kisses and caresses.
    And if only—if only—
    She dreamed of the handsome young men, the jaunty Apprentices, the clever journeymen, the stout and rugged young farmers—then watched them court and marry someone else, time after time, never giving her as much as a glance.
    Then she dreamed of not-so-handsome, not-so-young men, the widower with two children, the storekeeper with an aged mother, the work-weary bachelor farmer—who did exactly the same.
    And when she found herself contemplating with wordless longing the balding, paunchy Town Clerk,