Cinderella Dressed in Ashes

She walked down three wooden steps on the porch, flapping her eerie chicken legs as the children’s heads thudded against the floor.

Baba Yaga seemed more comfortable with pulling the sack behind her when she got to the grass. As she walked, she smoked a cigar.

“You want to know what the cigar’s tobacco is made of?” Cerene said. “It’s Rapunzel ashes!”

Shew shook her head and listened to Baba Yaga sing as she pulled the sack down the hill:

Hush little children, don't say a word.

Baba’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.

And if that mockingbird won't sing.

Baba's gonna cut and slice its wings.

The birds in the trees fluttered away immediately. Her voice made the squirrels run; abandoning their precious nuts, and it made snakes come crawling out of the trees. The witch took another drag from the cigar and sang again:

Hush little girls, don't you cry.

Baba’s just sacked you and you don’t know why.

Hush little girls, now say goodbye

Baba’s gonna eat ya, ’n tonight you’ll die.

“Sometimes when she needs more money, she sends some of the boys to Georgie Porgie, the Boogeyman,” Cerene added. “He likes to make children cry, and he pays well for the children’s tears.”

They watched as Baba Yaga disappear in the dark, then Cerene and Shew dashed into Candy House and closed the door behind them.

“You’re sure she’s not coming back now?” Shew said.

“No, it’ll take her some time to reach the castle,” Cerene said, hiking the stairs down to the basement.

Wherever Cerene went, Shew followed, even if it was into Hell itself.

Cerene, still holding her glass urn against her chest and her broom in one hand, ushered Shew through a maze of candle lit corridors in the cellar, which looked like a small dungeon. They passed through rooms that had bars like jails where Baba Yaga kept the children. The prison-like rooms were empty now that she had the children in her sack outside.

“Come on, hurry,” Cerene demanded. “Don’t act like a princess walking on eggshells. It doesn’t suit you.”

“This place looks like Hell,” Shew commented.

Cerene crouched under a lower ceiling leading to a bigger room. Finally, she stopped and pointed at a furnace in the middle of the space. She looked excited.

Shew couldn’t believe Cerene was happy about this place. The smell was unbearable. Something had been burning recently, probably the children Baba Yaga ate. She wondered about the people in the Waking World who thought fairy tales were fluffy stories that made children sleep and what they would do if they knew the Brothers Grimm forged the happy stories.

Cerene patted the furnace gently then looked back at Shew, “beautiful, isn’t it?”

The furnace was rusty, brown, and covered with green sticky vines that snaked slowly around it. It had dead frogs plastered to it like stickers on a refrigerator. Its door had two holes that looked like eyes staring back at Shew. Behind the eyes, she only saw the blackness left from burning children.

Shew wanted to play along and pretend it was beautiful, but she couldn’t do it. The cellar of Candy House was the scariest place she had seen.

“I guess it’s time to show me your magic, Cerene,” Shew sighed, praying Cerene’s magic would not turn out to be something wicked. She hoped it was as fascinating as she’d claimed it to be after all they’d been through. It would be painful to discover that Cerene was just another lunatic stained by evil.

She is just like you, Chosen One. You are made from evil clay, designed to fight your own kind. In a world so bleak like Sorrow, who do you think can face the darkness and lead people to the light? Cerene with her naivety and hurt she’s suffered? Axel and Fable, two teenagers still trapped in the paradise of childhood?

 “Aren’t you excited to finally see my Art?” Cerene knelt down and lay her heavy broom aside. She opened her glass urn and smelled it as if it were an exotic perfume. “Do you still remember the elements needed to conjure the Art?”

“Heart, Brain, and Soul,” Shew showed her she was paying attention. “The Heart is ashes from a Rapunzel plant, the sand is from the eyes of one of the sleeping beauties in the Field of Dreams which is property of the Sandman himself, and the lime is just chalk from school.”

“Toothpaste!” Cerene celebrated while mixing the ingredients together in the urn. She watched them glow slightly purple as Cerene decided to wipe her teeth again with some ‘toothpaste’ she’d saved.

“Now what?” Shew was curious.

“Now this,” Cerene held the iron broomstick. “You think it’s a broomstick, right?”

“It is a broomstick,” Shew dared her.

“Nah. I just had to fool the Queen of Sorrow and all the other servants into thinking it’s a broomstick,” Cerene smiled proudly. “And it’s not a witch’s broomstick either—”

“What is it then?”

Cerene cleaned the iron broom with the tip of the red dress Shew had dressed her with in the Field of Dreams—she was wearing a ragged blue servant’s dress Tabula had given her today.

After cleaning it, Cerene pulled the broom up to her mouth and blew into it, producing a sound like a heavy fart. She blew into it one more time then peeked with one eye into the hole of her tool. “You still don’t know what it is?”

Impatiently, Shew shook her head into a no.

“A blowpipe,” Cerene whispered. “The first part of the tool, the Brains, is the furnace we came all the way for. The second part is the blowpipe, a magical one, in fact.”

“What does a blowpipe do?” Shew said.

“It’s better than a magic wand!”

14 A Breath of Magic

“Better than a magic wand?” Shew wondered.

“A blowpipe is even better than a magic wand. I’ll show you in a minute,” Cerene held the blowpipe underneath her armpit and clapped her hands together three times. The furnace lit up. “This isn’t my magic by the way. I saw Baba Yaga do it.”

“At least she didn’t say ‘Open Sesame,’” Shew mumbled—another thing she’d read in one of her victims’ books. Cerene didn’t quite get what she was talking about.

Under the shimmering fire of the furnace, Cerene smeared one end of the pipe with the Heart’s purple and sticky mix. It stuck to it looking like a liquid lump. She gazed one last time toward Shew, winked at her, and pushed the sticky end of the blow pipe into the furnace, holding the other end with the two folded layers of the red dress.

Swoosh went the mixture once it met with the fire from the furnace. Slowly, it turned into a molten concoction, and the purple color turned into a hellish orange like the surface of coals on fire.

“Beware!” Shew warned Cerene as the fire flickered.

Although the blowpipe was too long and a bit heavy for Cerene, she titled her head back, smiling with a sweaty face at Shew.

“Why are you smiling in God’s name?” Shew’s face knotted.