1416934715(FY) by Cameron Dokey Read Free Book Online Page B

dark. Her eyes were the same deep blue as the hood which framed them. At their expression, I felt a strange feeling in my chest, as if a great hand was squeezing it, tight. So tight I couldn’t quite get a full breath of air.
    So beautiful and so unhappy,
I realized. And absolutely determined not to give way to what she felt. Gazing at my new stepmother’s face, I had a sudden vision of a stream in early spring, just before the final thaw. On the surface, a thin sheet of ice. But beneath the surface, the current was racing, swift and strong. Where it might carry us, I could not say. Perhaps not even Chantal de Saint-Andre herself could say.
    “My lady,” Niccolo said, just as my stepmother’s foot touched the cobblestones. “Welcome to the end of your long journey, and your new home.”
    “Thank you, Niccolo,” she said, and at the sound of her voice, I felt a shiver move down my spine. There was absolutely no expression in it, no hint of what she might be feeling at all. “You have cared for us well and I am grateful for it.”
    She cocked her head then, as if she saw something unexpected in his face. “You are happy to beback in this place, I think,” she said, her voice warming ever so slightly.
    “Lady, I am,” Niccolo said. “In this place I found . . . a surprise. I hope that you may do the same.”
    “I have no doubt I will,” my new stepmother replied, and now her voice was dry. I saw her blue eyes sweep up and outward to take in the great stone house. If she thought it beautiful and was surprised by this, she gave no sign. I knew the moment she spotted Old Mathilde and me, for at last Chantal de Saint-Andre’s lips curved in something that might have wished to be a smile.
    “We have some welcome, I see,” she said.
    “A small one, as yet,” Old Mathilde said, and she descended the steps, her hold on my arm pulling me along beside her. At the bottom of the steps, she stopped and bobbed a curtsy, once again obliging me to follow suit.
    “We are not many here, and we had no word of your arrival till Niccolo came to tell us the news himself, just now. Still, we know what we are about. I am Old Mathilde. And this is Cendrillon.”
    “Cendrillon,” my stepmother echoed, and I felt her gaze on me, and me alone, for the very first time. Not unfriendly, but cool and remote. And suddenly I knew the truth, knew what it was that Niccolo had been trying to tell me when the arrival of the carriage had interrupted him. My stepmother had no idea that her new husband had a child of his own. No idea that I was now her stepdaughter.
    “I have never heard such a name before,” Chantal de Saint-Andre went on.
    “I don’t think anyone else has it,” I somehow managed to reply.
Fool, idiot, nincompoop,
I thought.
Your father has never acknowledged you, not once in all these years. Why did you think he would do so now?
    But still, I felt the pain of his denial slice straight through my heart. In my simple, homespun dress, my stepmother had mistaken me for a serving girl. And who could blame her? When my own father denied me, who was I to tell Chantal de Saint-Andre the truth of who and what I was?
    “The villagers say that, because I am called the child of cinders, the fires in our house will always start, and never go out until I give them leave to do so,” I went on.
    All of a sudden, my stepmother smiled. A real one this time. “That’s the best news I have heard since we set out,” she said. “We have been traveling for more hours than I care to count, and all of them cold ones.”
    “Then you must come inside and warm your selves at once,” Old Mathilde said. “We will have your rooms prepared before you know it.”
    “Thank you,” Chantal de Saint-Andre replied. “I believe that is as warm a welcome as any stranger could wish for.”
    “Oh, but you are not a stranger anymore, my lady,” Old Mathilde said, her voice soft but as unyielding as the stones upon which we stood. “You are now