Archive of Our Own

Magic follows her all the way home.

Rain sputters on the ground. Her beautiful clothes have long since turned back into rags, muddying as she walks through the gentle storm. She's stepped out of a dream and back into the dark-soil earth of her home, but her eyes have come apart and been knitted back together with shimmering new threads. The world is not magical, but she has been touched.

The prince's eyes are blue as silk. They had been on her alone. How can she not float, knowing what she does?

Carriage wheels sound behind her, and she breaks into a run. Still, she can't stop smiling. She holds her glass slipper in her hand and it feels like victory, unbreakable as diamond.

The carriage passes her. Albedo's eyes catch against hers, and a secret smile passes between them before their stepsister can see.

It takes a long while for Signora to vent her rage against the mysterious princess who appeared at the ball— we are all doomed now, don't you see, we'll live in debt forever— but when she storms upstairs, Albedo stays behind. "It worked?" he asks. A small muted smile pulls at him, like dampened sunlight.

"It did," Lisa responds. She digs the glass slipper out from the ashes of the fireplace and puts it on the table. "Only these held past midnight, but it was more than enough time. I met my… friend again."

"Good," Albedo responds. He takes it and turns it in his hands a moment, and his brow furrows. "Where is the other one?"

"I lost it, I'm afraid."

"Hmm." He's not pleased about that, and neither is she— the only excuse she has is that when it's half past eleven and you're racing home in a carriage that will turn into a pumpkin at midnight, you must allow a certain margin of error. He doesn't comment on the little failure, though. "Congratulations on a successful experiment," he says instead. "And on your meeting with your… friend ." They both know it’s more than that, but Lisa for once in her life doesn’t have the words to describe it— the way Jean’s eyes looked into hers, the way each word was worth a thousand.

Lisa smiles to herself. Who would have known, all those months ago, that the dashing woman on the horse— her Jean— was really Prince Gunnhildr of Mondstadt? "Thank you, Albedo," she says softly. "It was a wonderful night."

He gets up with one last nod at her, and she waits until he is out of sight to go down to her basement sanctuary and dream.

Across the country, Prince Jean Gunnhildr paces in front of her mother's bedroom door.

"Jean, please sit down," says Barbara softly. "Worrying over her will only make things worse. You know how she hates when you worry." When Jean turns around and paces past her again, she reaches out and catches her hand. "Please, Jean? You're making me worry."

At that, she has to relent. "I'm sorry, Barbara. It's just— once she's gone, then I'll be king, and…" And then. Endless, endless weights upon her shoulders. Before that meeting in the woods, she was ready to give her life to her duty as the crown prince, but now her heart has been tangled with summer-green eyes and a laugh that feels like velvet.

"And you'll need a queen," Barbara finishes. She looks at her sadly. "And forest girls don't make queens."

Jean sits down hard next to her. "And forest girls don't make queens," she echoes miserably. "But she was so brilliant, Barbara. She seemed to know me, just from a few words."

Barbara pats her on the hand. "Princess Ayaka will be a good match for you," she says, a consolation. "She's very wise, and very beautiful. And our relations with Inazuma will improve."

"I know," Jean says. Her shoulders loosen, resigned. "I'll live with it."

The door opens, and everything else is forgotten as the doctor comes out of the room, grim-faced. "She doesn't have long," they say, and Jean's heart drops into her stomach. "You should go in and make your peace."

Night falls, and Barbara falls asleep with her head in her arms, resting on the royal deathbed. Their mother hasn't woken. Jean is starting to drift, too, when in the low lamplight her mother's eyes open.

"Mother," she says, reaching out to take her hand.

Frederica looks kinder now than she has in a decade, as if the afterlife already passes through her to soften her edges. She takes Jean’s hand in her weak fingers and smiles. “Jean,” she says. “There’s not much time left.”

“I know, Mother,” Jean murmurs. With every beat of her mother’s slowing heart, the burden atop her shoulders grows heavier. She should grieve, she thinks, but she was born to take her mother’s place. She has lived under the shadow of this moment her whole life. “I’ll do my duty. I know you worried when we were at the ball.”

“That young woman,” her mother rasps, “the one with the gown, the lavender gown— and the glass slippers.”

Jean’s eyes sting. “I’ll forget her. I’ll marry Princess Ayaka, just as you have told me to.”

“Don’t.”

Her mother looks at her with love, not pride, not pragmatism.

“Don’t?” Jean whispers. Hope against hope. “But our relations with Inazuma—”

“They’ll survive.” Her mother lifts her hand, brushing it along Jean’s cheek. The flesh is already cooling. “For once, Jean, follow your heart. Let me be the mother you deserved.”

A childhood at distance, with tutors more present than mothers: an idol she could never reach, a heart she could never enter. Jean’s eyes well with tears, and she curls into her mother’s side, fighting to keep the outburst down. Her mother strokes along her back and for an instant she’s a child, not a prince, not an heir.

“Marry the girl from the forest,” her mother says, “and love her better than I loved you.”

Jean lets out a sob loud enough that Barbara stirs awake, and from there it is all goodbyes.

The bell tolls across the kingdom when their monarch dies. Lisa’s heart aches for Jean. She allows herself a few minutes to listen to it, to think of how they are now both orphaned, to swear to herself that she’ll find her again, before she returns to the endless work of a house too big for just three people. It sounds every day for two weeks, until on the fifteenth day after the King Gunnhildr’s death, it is silent.

They are meant to stay still for the grieving, and so, bound by propriety and tradition, they do. Signora paces more every day. It has been seventeen days since the King died, and finally she can no longer bear it. “Cinders, take the horse into town,” she says, taking her gun from the mantle with a hand more reverent than it is with any living thing. “Albedo, mind the house. I need to shoot.”

Cinders. She hasn’t stopped calling Lisa that since she found her with a face sooty from failed experiments. It’s meant as an insult, but it just makes Lisa smile, remembering all the hours spent in her tiny hidden workshop, away from the eyes of her stepsister. Signora brushes past her with a hard shoulder and a cold glance.

“Take care,” Albedo says, not looking up from his book. “And don’t forget to buy new ingredients for the workshop, please.”

“I’ve never forgotten to buy workshop ingredients in my life,” Lisa responds, feigning offense, but she can’t help and laugh a moment after. “I’ll be home by dark. Be careful; Signora looks like she could bite somebody’s head off if they displease her.”

“I never displease her,” Albedo says. He enunciates the neutrality in his voice, slowing down his words, his trusted old secret to keeping in his sister’s good graces. “Now go, before she realizes she’s forgotten her hunting coat. God save whatever poor creature she’s going to bring home.”

She hurries out the door with that reminder and is on horseback, cloak tugged over her shoulders, before she can be caught in the wicked crime of staying a moment too long. The ride to town is long and hard, but at least she can pretend to be free on these roads, riding with the wind in her hair and the sweet smell of eucalyptus tangled in the wind, biting-cold.

When she arrives in town, she’s as mussed as it is. The people tumble about their tasks, rushing from store to store and home to home like some grand, frenzied chemical reaction, and in the midst of it all, perhaps its catalyst, there is a brightly-painted officer and a squadron of soldiers behind him. Around them is the only silence in the square. “The King has selected her bride!” he calls. Lisa dismounts her horse, patting some of the dust away from his mane, and smiles. “She begs that the mysterious princess, who wore glass slippers, whoever she may be, come forward! If she reveals herself with sufficient proof of her identity, the King will, with her consent, take her hand in marriage, and make her Queen of Mondstadt!”

Lisa’s heart stumbles. Marrying Jean is well and good, but Queen of Mondstadt? She’s only Cinders, a parentless little slip of a thing with the eyes of a chemist and the hands of a witch. What sort of queen would she make?

Jean’s queen, apparently. She’s well aware of her own wisdom, the greatest gift her mother left her. She can learn. She can do this. To be at Jean’s side, she could do anything.

The glass slipper is sitting on the table of her workshop, a trophy of her great success. That will suffice for proof of her identity. Lisa sets off about her tasks quickly and with a pounding heart: soon, it will all be over. She’ll never have to face Signora’s wrath again. She’ll have a life at last, a life beyond the confines of her childhood home. And best of all, she will have Jean. Jean— unbending honor, unknown tenderness, chivalry and soft nervousness in one, ocean eyes and tenuous smile.

The ride back home, weighed down by saddlebags, goes by as though she’s flying. Lisa unties her hair from the braid she’d put it in and lets it whip free into the wind, lets the wind slash across her cheeks until she is blushing like a maiden and sharp-eyed and overwhelmed with the joy of an impossible future. It’s the best she’s ever felt.

She does not even stop to say hello to Albedo before she’s stumbling down the stairs to her workshop, hands aching for the touch of the cool glass slipper which will see her to her future. She left it on the mantle of the fireplace.

Lisa careens into her sanctuary, her paradise, and turns a full round, gaze glossing over sepia books and delicate glass contraptions and drawers stuffed with reagents. Something sparkles on the mantelpiece. A smile bursts over her mouth like a sweet berry bitten into on a hot day. But it isn’t translucent— it’s silver. It’s just the candlestick.

Her gaze steadies and her heart slows. There is no slipper.

“So this is where you’ve been disappearing to all these years.”

Lisa’s heart would beat in reverse if it could. Her blood turns to ice at the cadence of a familiar, scorning drawl. She’d missed her in the exuberance of charging in, but there is Signora like a marble statue, standing draped against the edge of a bookshelf, artfully posed, a predator waiting to play with its quarry. “I’m impressed,” she says, blue eyes narrow and frozen. “You’ve kept it a secret from me for how long now? But then again, there are so many secrets you’ve kept from me. You’re a talented little deceiver.”

From behind her back she produces the glass slipper. “Like this,” she says, conversationally, as if she’s not holding the most sacred artifact in Lisa’s miserable world in her hands. “What a secret it must be, hmm? Do tell me, Cinders. What’s a useless, ragged servant girl doing with this ?”

“I don’t believe it’s any of your business,” Lisa returns.

“You—!” Signora’s cool facade shatters at a touch, and she surges forward, her hand clamping around Lisa’s throat. It’s not a hard enough grip to choke, but the threat of it sets Lisa’s heart pounding butterfly-weak against her pulse point, lightheaded with sudden fear for her life. “You are alive because I agreed to shelter you, you ungrateful, pathetic little beast. You are the reason we are embroiled in this debt to begin with, and you dare to hide something like this from me?”

Lisa glares at her, and Signora remembers herself, letting her go. She grips the slipper so tightly that her fingers shake with effort. “Tell me where you got it,” she says, “or I burn this miserable house to the ground with you in it.”

The most terrifying thing about Signora is that when she threatens things like this, she actually means them. “I’ll tell you nothing.” Her voice does not shake. All she has to her name are the memories of that night, and she won’t despoil them by speaking them aloud for Signora to grasp and pick apart.

Signora’s face twists, a hideous mask of rage and hatred, and with one apocalyptic motion she smashes the slipper on the floor.

“ No! ” Lisa doesn’t mean to cry out, but the sound is wrenched out of her with the crash of glass into stone. Every shard of the slipper reflects her desperate face, and she falls to her knees as though she might be able to patch it back together, but it’s too far gone. Glass slips through her fingers like ash.

“Now stay in here until I decide what to do with you,” Signora snaps. The door slams behind her, and there’s the sound of a lock sliding shut, but Lisa doesn’t look up. All her dreams have already been shattered. If Signora makes good on her promise, it will change nothing.

She crushes the broken glass in her hand, the sharp pain affirming what cries out inside of her, and weeps.

Jean paces the length of the throne room. The one lonely slipper is held in her hands, the only key to her beloved’s identity. Two meetings and she hadn’t learned her name— how clumsy, how badly mannered! “Why hasn’t she come forward? Has something prevented her? Has the news not reached her somehow?”

“Queenship is a heavy burden, Your Majesty. Perhaps she is unwilling to take it,” Kaeya supplies. “If she really is just a girl from the forest, it seems excessive to expect her to just… come around to this.” He adjusts his cup of wine, a permanent companion even in this most professional of places, and looks pensively into it. “The wise thing to do would be to go through with the engagement to Princess Ayaka. For the good of the Kingdom. If this girl really is being prevented from coming forward, like you suggest, then when she finally does, you can take her as your mistress.”

“That’s not how I want to do things,” Jean immediately responds. “My mother has given me this last gift, Kaeya. I will not…” Her throat tightens. “I only want to honor what she did for me.”

“And I understand that.” He sets down his cup and takes Jean’s hand gently. “But your mother was dying, Jean, and may not have realized the implications. If the Ayaka girl is the problem, then we could accept Lady Ningguang of Liyue. The proposal has not yet been officially accepted.”

She remains silent. There is no one in the world she wants but Lisa. Kaeya’s voice softens. “Or, if you are determined to be foolhardy and lovesick—” and selfish, she thinks, thank God he doesn’t say selfish or else she would marry Ayaka despite it all— “then I could take my horsemen and scour the length and breadth of the kingdom for this mystery girl. But once I have done it, there can be no more excuses. The people want a Queen, the nobles want a marriage, the succession wants an heir. You will have to take someone as your bride by the end of the month.”

“I will take those odds.” Relief floods up her spine, and she presses the slipper into his hands like a promise. “Find her, Kaeya. Swear to me you’ll try.”

“Anything for your Majesty,” he says with a cheeky grin, the kind that treads just on the side of teasing, and with a swirl of his white fur-lined cape he disappears out of the throne room doors, all of Jean’s hopes and dreams in the slipper in his hands.

The search flows through the kingdom, a languid spiraling parade of hope that wilts when one week turns to two turns to three. Every last eligible maiden is tested with the glass slipper: a penniless astronomer, a shy apothecary, even the cold heir to a noble family who live in exile on the outskirts of the kingdom. Every last one tries as best they can, knowing that this little trial could mean queenship.

Every last one fails.

Kaeya’s notes become more vague and shorter, and Jean’s heart sinks a little more each day. On the twenty-ninth day of the search, she can’t bear it anymore. “Barbara,” she calls into her sister’s room, “would you make an excuse for me?”

There is no answer. Jean peers around in the chamber, only to find that her sister is gone. In the distance, a horse gallops across green meadows, and Jean stares at it in open-mouthed shock before racing to the stables.

Signora lets her out eventually, but she’s kept under a hawk’s eye. Lisa’s despair evaporates, with time, into amusement. Of course she couldn’t have the one thing she ever dared to want. Of course! Why would she, a servant girl with nobody who loves her, be allowed even a moment of happiness?

Eventually amusement twists back into grief, and then into something softer, gilded around the sides like the pumpkin carriage she’d crafted that night. She had never intended a great escape. She had never even intended to meet the prince. All she had wanted was one night, to find the only friend she’d ever known. She can’t stop herself from dreaming about whatever may have come, to be the wife of Jean, to be the Queen of Mondstadt, so close to a charmed story that her fingers tingle when she thinks too much about it— but this is acceptable, too, this is what she’ll learn to live with, these golden memories.

When the knock comes at the door, and Signora locks her away in her workshop again, it’s nothing new. She’s not allowed the sight of strangers anymore. She sits in front of the fireplace and reads through an old spellbook, and thinks, for a moment, that maybe she’ll be happy anyway.

The shoe doesn’t fit Lady Signora, even though she tries to force it.

“Madam, please,” Kaeya insists, half-amused. Two great things battle on his expression: humor, because here is a fully grown woman contorting her entire body trying to put on a shoe that won’t fit, and resignation, because this is the last eligible woman in the kingdom and it means Jean’s beloved is truly nowhere to be found. “Is there no other maiden in your house?”

“None,” Signora insists, kicking off the shoe as if she never really wanted it anyway. Her brother, behind her, coughs. He’s holding something behind his back.

Barbara makes eye contact with him, still on horseback, and dismounts smoothly. Kaeya looks at her incredulously. She offers him a sheepish smile: you taught me these tricks, and I’m using them. Signora drops to her knees, but her brother, blue eyes cool and impassive, remains standing, and he brushes up against Barbara’s side as he slips out the door. A heavy metallic shape drops into her hand. “Look again,” he murmurs, and then he's gone.

“This is such a lovely house,” Barbara says to the woman once she’s risen from the floor. “Would you mind showing me around, just for a moment?” She turns to a still-bewildered Kaeya and takes the slipper from his hands.

“It would be my honor and pleasure, Your Highness,” Signora simpers, and then with a fashionable whisk of her dress she’s taking Barbara down the hallways of a home that has clearly seen better days. This woman doesn’t do housework, clearly, but nothing is dusty or unkempt, just worn from time. She prattles about decoration, but none of the history. This is an old estate.

This isn’t her home. Things start clicking into place.

“Do you have a maid?” Barbara asks, innocent as she can be. “May I see those quarters?”

It is not a question. Signora turns on her heel, slowly, mechanically. “I don’t see why you would want to,” she says. Barbara fixes her with a look that says I am the Princess of Mondstadt and you will listen to me. She quails immediately, and is silent while she guides her down to a locked, heavy door, below the main house. “See? Nothing of note,” she says.

“I’ll see about that.” Barbara slides the key into the lock and watches as all the blood in Signora’s face drains away.

It’s a workshop; a laboratory of sorts, given the reagents studded along the walls. There’s a woman in front of the fireplace, looking up with startled green eyes at the intrusion.

Barbara smiles. “Miss, would you mind sparing me a moment of your time?”

The woman’s mouth opens to respond when there’s a sudden commotion at the entrance. There are cries of Your Majesty! and have you seen my sister? and Jean, what in the name of God are you doing out here, who’s minding the castle, and Barbara cringes. Footsteps resound down the halls, until her harried older sister skids to a stop in front of her, looks through the door, and stops breathing for a good few moments.

Jean looks between her and the woman by the fireplace. The woman stands slowly, brushing off soot-stained, ragged skirts. “Barbara,” she says after a breathless moment, “would you give me that slipper?”

Barbara disappears with a quiet smile and a slipper dropped into Jean's waiting hand. Jean’s going to have to give her a stern speech later about not taking things into her own hands, but then again, that’s what led her here: to this impossible, beautiful place, looking the woman she loves in the eye. “It’s you,” she says, a revelation so grand it can’t be contained in anything more than a whisper.

“You’ve found me out,” says the love of her life with a sad smile.

“What do you mean?”

“I am—” She gestures around herself half-heartedly, eyes dark. “I am nothing like you thought I was,” she murmurs. Her voice is velvet. “I am not a woman of means. This little witch’s laboratory is all I have to my name. I have no family, no parents, no dowry. I’m a servant girl who gave herself one night of magic and snared the Prince’s heart. I am an illusion.”

Jean steps closer. There is one chair in the room, moth-bitten and faded. “Sit for me,” she says softly, and her beloved does, although the look in her eyes is still disbelieving and vulnerable. “May I?” She nods, and Jean lowers herself to one knee, baring the woman’s foot. It has only a thin, torn sock to protect it. She pushes the slipper forward, heart beating through her chest.

The woman pulls her foot back a little, and Jean matches eyes with her. “What if it doesn’t fit?” she asks, voice shivering.

“Then I’ll marry you regardless,” Jean responds in an instant. Damn tradition, damn the slipper. This woman is hers.

The shoe slides on effortlessly. Jean’s stomach soars. “There you are,” she murmurs, looking up, and the woman looks down at her with tears pearling in her eyes and laughs a brilliant, beautiful laugh.

The ecstasy lasts only a moment, though. She looks at Jean like she still can’t have her. “I have nothing to offer you but myself,” she says. “I don’t know the first thing about queenship. I can learn, but I’ll never be noble-born. I’ll never be—” her breath catches— “your equal.”

“Tell me your name,” Jean says suddenly, softly, the desire to know unbearable.

“Lisa,” the woman responds, “though mostly, I’m called Cinders.”

Jean senses the pain in Cinders , and drops Lisa’s foot to the ground, still ensconced in that magical glass slipper. “Lisa,” she murmurs, taking both of her hands in hers and kissing them with a mouth honeyed by adoration, “you have always been my equal.”

Lisa’s lip trembles even though she smiles. It’s a miracle-witnessed kind of smile, a dreams-into-reality smile, so delicate it could shatter if brushed against. “You’ll take me as I am?” she asks, as if it’s some great burden, as if it’s not what Jean wants too.

“As you are,” Jean affirms, kissing her hands again. “As you are, as you have been, as you will be— I will take all of you, Lisa, exactly as you come.”

Lisa blinks once, and then twice, and then falls into Jean’s arms to kiss her.

The wedding ceremony is long, and the reception longer. Every subject wants a look at them. Lisa looks not quite herself, draped in silk finery, but she feels more herself than ever: Jean has not stopped touching her since the day began, hands in hands, lips on her cheek, head on her shoulder, and it is like the world has come full circle. She is not Cinders. Signora is nowhere to be seen. She is loved, and not just loved but adored.

At last, the festivities are winding down. Jean leads Lisa up the steps to the castle, but pauses just before the doors, turning to Lisa as lovestruck as ever.

“What is it?” Lisa asks with a shy laugh. Shy— her! She’s never had occasion to be shy before. It’s exhilarating.

“My Queen,” is all Jean says, leaning in to press their foreheads together. Her hands cup Lisa’s face, gentle as the wind.

Warmth burns in her chest. “My Jean,” she responds, teasing at first before it's swept away in her heartbeat, and then Jean comes forward to kiss her again. Each one is sweeter than the last, an assurance that this is here to stay. She cannot wait for the years to come.

This, Lisa thinks: This is magic.