Glass Slippers by Leah Cypess

Author:Leah Cypess [Cypess, Leah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2022-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

The glass slippers filled me with energy—that same fizzy, tingling energy I had felt before, only now it was flowing through my blood instead of scratching at my skin. I ran over the moonlit water, my legs stretching longer and higher with each stride, until I felt like I was flying. The power from the slippers sizzled through me like lightning, as if it would escape my body and rip through the air. But the sky was black and clear, the moon untouched by clouds. The dark ripples and white-tipped waves flew past much faster than it normally would have been possible to run.

Which was a good thing, because the peninsula was very far away.

Also, running over the ocean was harder than I would have thought. (Not that I had ever given the subject much thought.) Waves kept coming at me, swelling beneath my feet and throwing me off-balance. I managed all right until I paused and glanced back at the castle rising like a shadow against the sky. I couldn’t see the king and queen.

I turned back toward the peninsula just in time to see a wave rearing over me, its green underbelly surging up inches from my face. Before I had time to react, water crashed over my head with such force that it knocked me backward. Briny spray swept over me, going up my nose and stinging my eyes, and I thrashed helplessly.

But the slippers’ magic seemed to extend to my whole body, keeping me from being swept under. I was able to scramble to my feet on the receding water left behind by the wave, coughing and spluttering and soaked.

After that, I learned to keep an eye on the horizon and watch for the telltale rise of oncoming waves. The trick was to rush forward and catch them early, so they met me when they were still gathering power and were merely swells I could easily step on. If I couldn’t do that, I tried to meet them late enough that they had already crashed into sprays of white foam, wet but harmless. They mostly came in diagonally, so sometimes I could rush sideways and jump over a wave at its edge. It was like a dance through an unpredictable obstacle course, and it took up every bit of my concentration.

By the time the peninsula’s cliffs loomed over my head, my calves felt like someone had threaded lines of fire through my muscles. But my feet, clad in the sparkling slippers, felt fine.

The slippers urged me to keep running, to move. But I made myself slow down, putting one foot carefully in front of the other, trying to give myself time to think.

The coast of the peninsula was ahead and slightly to my right, made up of steep, jagged cliffs that rose starkly from the black water. The waves beat loudly against their stony sides before falling back into the sea with roars of white fury. I had no idea how I was going to get up those cliffs.

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