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Read an Excerpt From Cinder House by Freya Marske
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Read an Excerpt From Cinder House by Freya Marske
Murdered at sixteen, Ella’s ghost is furiously trapped in her father’s house, invisible to everyone except her stepmother and stepsisters.
By Freya Marske
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Published on September 18, 2025
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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Cinder House by Freya Marske, a queer Gothic fantasy retelling of Cinderella, out from Tordotcom Publishing on October 7.
Ella is a haunting.Murdered at sixteen, her ghost is furiously trapped in her father’s house, invisible to everyone except her stepmother and stepsisters.Even when she discovers how to untether herself from her prison, there are limits. She cannot be seen or heard by the living people who surround her. Her family must never learn she is able to leave. And at the stroke of every midnight, she finds herself back on the staircase where she died.Until she forges a wary friendship with a fairy charm-seller, and makes a bargain for three nights of almost-living freedom. Freedom that means she can finally be seen. Danced with. Touched.You think you know Ella’s story: the ball, the magical shoes, the handsome prince.You’re halfway right, and all-the-way wrong.
Ella’s father died of the poison in their tea. Ella drank less and so might have lived, and not turned ghost at all, if the house hadn’t shrieked for its master’s murder in the moment she stood, dizzied and weak, at the top of the stairs.
Ella flinched, stumbled, and fell.
There were fifteen stairs; she struck her head on the seventh. The sound of crunching bone was not loud. But the house gave another window-shaking shriek, as the girl who should have inherited it died not two minutes after her father—the blood of his line reduced to a bright smear on the hard wooden edge of that seventh step.
Ella’s stepmother had the stairs carpeted in time for the wake following the double funeral. The carpet was a pretty shade of blue, with brass stair rods, and covered the stain entirely. People trod Ella’s blood unknowingly underfoot, while in the parlour Ella’s stepmother—a pragmatic woman named Patrice—dabbed at her eyes with a pre-dampened handkerchief and nudged her younger daughter whenever the girl looked like she might forget herself enough to smirk.
The house had wanted to apologise for its part in her death, Ella figured. It wanted to give her more existence, if not more life.
By the time of the funeral, the ghost that had been Ella had only just got the hang of consciousness; appearance would be beyond her for some weeks yet. She was too much the houseto be Ella as well. Some unpeeling was yet to happen. Her awareness drifted from floorboard to windowpane to candlesticks to the wide pottery platter with its red border and its painted pattern of pears and rosemary, which Ella’s greataunt had given to Ella’s parents on their wedding day.
At the wake, this platter held fan-shaped cakes made with vanilla and hazelnuts. Ella could feel the delicate scrape of fingers against the glossy surface as the guests took the cakes to eat. It sent a thrill of unfamiliarity through her, all the way up to where the chimneys gasped into the sky.
* * *
Finally she found the look of a person again. It was summer by then. The sun soaked deliriously into the dark red tiles of her roof and Ella’s stepsisters, like most of the cityfolk, pinned up their hair and went swimming in the river on days when the royal sorcerers declared it free of drowning-sprites.
The ghost of Ella looked more or less like Ella had when she died. She was still a sixteen-year-old girl with a strong chin and one foot a size larger than the other. She wore the lavender day-dress with the lace collar that she’d worn on her last day of life; she’d only ever been halfway fond of this dress, but her father had liked it.
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Cinder House
Freya Marske
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Cinder House
Freya Marske
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Where the living Ella had been blue-eyed with hair like a wheatfield touched by sunset, her ghost had eyes the impassive grey of stone bricks, and her hair was the red of roof tiles, streaked with the grey-white of lichen and pigeon droppings.
Ella determined this by looking in the backs of spoons. She did not show up reflected in glass, nor in mirrors. She had read something about ghosts and mirrors, long ago, but couldn’t remember it now.
She only knew she’d become visible to her family when Patrice walked into the upstairs parlour, screamed at the sight of her, and dropped a cup of tea.
Ella winced. The smash of the cup hurt like a hand clenched hard in hair, and the trickle of hot liquid on the floor was an unpleasant itch.
Still she said, “Hello, Stepmother.”
* * *
Patrice adjusted to the idea of a ghost remarkably quickly. They’d known the house was on its way to being properly magical: a valuable, respectable thing to have in the family. Her husband hadn’t changed his will when they married. It still left the house to his daughter, Ella.
Ella didn’t have a will. And with two silent corpses it was easy for the living to dictate the timeline. Ella fell down the stairs, yes, such a terrible accident, and died first. And her father’s heart stopped from grief when it happened.
Everything went to Patrice, by common law.
On the day Ella became visible, Patrice, once she’d regained some colour in her cheeks, looked at the shattered cup and the tea seeping into the edge of the rug.
“Oh, clean that up,” she said.
It might have been automatic. Even before Ella died, everyone assumed that Ella would keep things tidy. Ella cared far more about tidiness than anyone else in the house. She’d always liked things to be clean and neat; always had the urge to move the cushions on the couch so they were evenly spaced.
Ella did not want to obey her stepmother. But at the same time—yes, she did. The first real emotion of Ella’s afterlife was urgency. It took hold of her and moved her before she could think. The teacup was solid when she touched it; or else Ella became exactly as solid as the teacup needed her to be, for exactly as long as was needed to scoop up the pieces and set them on a table. She could feel the rug beneath her knees. It was not like feeling-a-rug had been when she was living. She was the rug. She was the wet tassels at its edge and the soiled woollen pattern, and that urgency would be a knot within her until they were set right.
“Very good, Ella,” said her stepmother. “Perhaps you’ll be worth keeping around after all.”
Ella felt her second emotion.
How does a house, lacking flesh, feel fury? With the fire in its hearth and in the wide black stove. Ella felt anger with her kitchen fires and felt anger with the fifteen stairs, especially the seventh, and she felt anger with the yellow wallpaper that had been half stripped from the walls of her old bedroom and dangled there for weeks while Patrice was in an argument with the decorators. Ella’s stepmother was in no hurry to turn the emptied chamber into a new study. The house had rooms enough. Ella’s bedroom festered like the socket of a pulled tooth. She had been pulled. Violently.
How dare Patrice? How dare she stand there in this place she only owned through murder, and look upon Ella’s ghost and feel no shame—and see nothing but a servant?
The anger surged and whipped through Ella. An awakening. She snarled and launched herself at Patrice with her hands outstretched, meaning to fasten them around her stepmother’s neck.
The two of them, woman and girl-ghost, passed through one another. To Ella it felt like a bucket of steaming suds thrown across a floor.
Anger mixed with growing fear now, Ella raced on her ghost legs downstairs, and before she could stop herself had passed entirely through the maid-of-all-work, Jane—who didn’t look up, didn’t shiver at all. She kept on humming as she ran a damp rag down the side of the grandfather clock, ticklish in all the creases of the wood as she sought out the stubborn traces of dust.
Ella sneezed. Jane didn’t blink or mutter a blessing.
Patrice came down the stairs, watching Ella with wary interest.
It had never occurred to Ella before then to try to leave the house, any more than it occurred to a skeleton to pick itself up and leave its flesh behind. Now that fear—a strange salty ephemeral fear, the only thing that existed untethered from any piece of the house, a fear that was Ella’s alone—drove her to the front door. She took hold of the brass knob and wrenched the door open, dashed down the steps to the gate which opened onto the footpath and the busy street—
And stuck.
She tried again, with more force. No use.
The boundaries of her haunting closed around Ella like a skin sewn from simple knowledge: this fence, the walls shared with the smaller town houses on either side, the kitchen door where the deliveries came. The damp stone floor of the cellar. And the tip of the iron cockerel’s crest up where the weathervane swung in the summer wind at the highest point of the roof.
Ella stood staring out at the world beyond the house, at skirts and feathers and leaves and flags dancing in a breeze she could feel only with wrought black iron. She screamed for help, she screamed the name of Miss Filigree the milliner who walked within two feet of her, and nobody heard. She took hold of the gate and shook it violently, but her efforts out here on the boundary were weaker than they’d been on the teacup and the door. The gate merely wobbled and the hinges creaked. It drew some glances from passers-by.
“Goodness, what a wind we’re having,” said Patrice, from the top of the steps. “It blew our front door wide open. Yes—good day to you.”
And then, quiet with triumph—“Stop behaving like a child and come back inside at once, Ella.”
Ella obeyed.
Excerpted from Cinder House, copyright © 2025 by Freya Marske.
The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Cinder House</i> by Freya Marske appeared first on Reactor.
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