Imelda’s eyes burned. “If it’s such a freedom, then why did you take it from us all those months ago?”
The witch smiled. “You cannot take a thing like that. You could hide it, certainly, and there’s power in the taking of memories. But if love is there, it will inevitably make itself known. Bit of an attention hog in that way, if you ask me. Tell me, did you find that something had made itself known between you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Imelda snapped.
“No, of course not.”
Imelda paused, exhaling.
“I won’t love anyone who tries to trap me.”
“Is that what he did?”
Imelda brought out the shoes and flung them down before the witch. The parcel opened of its own accord, the glass slippers glinting inside, the moth wings affixed to the heel stirring slightly.
“I saw the proof of it.”
The witch raised an eyebrow. “I see a pair of shoes.”
“Exactly! He knows how I feel about that. He knows how my own father used them to trap me and my sisters.”
“Exactly. He does know.”
Something in the way the witch said it made Imelda pause. She knelt to the ground, peering at the shoes. They looked nothing like the slippers her father had given to her and her sisters. They were too delicate. Not made for dancing to the point of breaking.
Imelda reached out, tracing the outline of the wings. At her touch, the slippers rose into the air, hovering at the height of her eyes. She startled backward, wonder zipping through her. A pair of flying slippers…the very thing she had once demanded, more out of jest than anything else. It was supposed to be impossible, and yet Ambrose had found them for her.
She rocked back on her heels.
Something nudged at the back of her thoughts.
Ambrose’s voice in the moonlit copse of trees when she still held the statue’s form.
“I never want to hold you down, Imelda.”
Imelda shot straight to her feet.
“Oh.”
“Mm-hmm.” The witch sounded a bit bored.
Imelda ran to the window. Ambrose was halfway across the bridge. Silvery snow whipped around his steps, quickly filling in the dips left behind by his boots.
“So what will you choose, Imelda? I can free you of any engagements, relationships, place, and property. Or…”
Imelda whispered, “Or I can free myself.”
She thought of every time she’d felt hemmed in by the world of her father’s kingdom, every moment she’d felt trapped in a marriage of obligation. She had thought love meant control, but a love of her own with no understanding of how its future might play out?Thatwas a choice. A choice she’d never had until now. And she refused to lose it.
“The moment he crosses that bridge, he’ll forget all of this. Even if you run, you won’t make it.”
“I can’t run…but I can fly.”
Chapter 22
AMBROSE
Ambrose looked at the end of the bridge.
