The Stepsister Scheme

do to keep from grabbing a bucket and rags from the closet and scouring the filth from her home.
    The rest of the house was the same. Danielle wanted to weep. How had they done dryad such damage in so little time? Her former home was like a hollow tree, rotten and empty. She hurried into her father’s workshop.
    Gone were the fine tools that had hung along the walls, no doubt sold off for a fraction of their worth. Gone were the enormous bellows and the stacks of wood. Only the great fireplace remained, the tin hood dark with old soot. Glass crunched as Talia crossed the workshop, moving toward the front of the house.
    “Someone was here recently,” she said. “Footprints in the dust and debris.” She pointed her knife at the floor, where a fragment of green glass had been crushed into smaller pebbles. “Looks like both stepsisters.”
    “How do you know?” Danielle asked.
    “From the limps,” said Talia. “Charlotte maimed her heel. Stacia lost a toe. They walk differently.”
    Danielle knelt to pick up a curved shard of blue-and-white rippled glass. This had been one of her stepmother’s favorite vases. One of Danielle’s daily errands had been to run to the city wall and gather fresh wildflowers. She had hated this vase.
    “Upstairs,” said Talia. “Erik said the attic was haunted.”
    Danielle and Snow followed her up the stairs, past the second floor where Danielle’s stepsisters and stepmother used to sleep. Danielle peeked into her stepmother’s bedroom. Old bandages littered the floor, brown and yellow with dried blood and other fluids. She averted her eyes.
    Talia was already climbing the ladder to the attic.
    “Wait,” said Snow. She gestured for Talia to move, then hopped up and placed her hand against the trapdoor. “Your stepsisters have been practicing,” she said.
    She shoved open the door and pulled herself inside. Her choker began to glow with a warm, orange light.
    “What is it?” Talia asked.
    “Nothing dangerous,” said Snow. “Old magic.”
    Danielle followed, automatically ducking her head to avoid the rafters. Cracks of light from the shuttered window drew white lines across the floor. Over the years, Danielle had marked the floor to track the time of day. Twelve sets of lines tracked the time, one for each month. This was mid-May, and the uppermost light was a finger’s width short of the lunchtime mark. Past time for her to be down in the kitchen, preparing the meal.
    “Over here,” said Snow. Blobs of black melted wax had seeped into the cracks between the floorboards. Snow drew her knife. The blade was short, straight, and sharp. The only decoration was an oval of gold, engraved with a snowflake, mounted in the center of the crossguard.
    Snow used the tip to break a chunk of wax from the floor. “Plain beeswax works just as well, but they all want black candles. Or blood red. My mother was the same way. Fat black candles, cobwebs thick enough to catch a stag. I think she raised the spiders herself, just to make the place more scary.”
    “What were they doing?” asked Danielle.
    Snow pointed the knife at the ceiling. Smoke had darkened the wood, except for a circular area above the candles, as if the smoke had been unable to pass into the ring. “Looks like a summoning. They trapped something here.”
    “Can you tell us what they summoned?” Talia asked.
    “Sorry.” Snow sheathed her knife. “They cleaned up pretty well.”
    Danielle stared. “My stepsisters... cleaned?”
    Talia walked to the window. Old boards split apart as she wrenched the shutters open. For the first time since the death of Danielle’s father, sunlight streamed into the attic.
    “Thanks,” said Snow.
    Talia looked around the room, then shook her head. “There’s nothing here. Let’s check the bedrooms.”
    Danielle was already climbing down the ladder. She ignored her stepsisters’ rooms, heading for the ground floor.
    “Where are you going?” Talia asked.
    “To find Charlotte and Stacia.”
    Snow cocked her head. “How?”
    “I’m going to ask my mother.”

    Danielle rounded the back of the house when shock froze her in place. She had expected to find the garden in similar disarray to the rest of the house. Weeds overshadowed what crops her stepsisters had bothered to plant, and she could see slugs on some of the leaves from here. But where neglect had begun to reclaim most of the garden, the hazel tree in the corner—her mother’s tree—had been deliberately