The Little Matchgirl Makes Good

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I died at Christmas with my stockings torn and my feet blue-black from frostbite, clutching a handful of matches no one wanted to buy. Fourteen years old and worthless as wet tinder, they said later, those who bothered to say anything at all. The city officers who found me wrote “unknown vagrant” in their ledger, because it was easier than asking my name.

But death, it turns out, isn’t much good at paying debts and keeping accounts, either. The cold of my own death came first. Always the cold, seeping through stone and timber, finding the gaps where mortar had crumbled away. I knew that cold, even danced with it in doorways while gentlefolk hurried past with their coat collars turned high. But this cold was far different from the rest. It was bone-sharp. It bit without the mercy of numbness.

I tried to pull my knees to my chest, but my body moved entirely wrong. The joints had stopped grinding, the muscles no longer cramped into permanent knots. I opened my eyes, expecting eternity.

Instead, I witnessed candle flames wavering in a circle around me, their light catching on wet stone walls that wept with condensation. The air tasted of permanent brine and something else that made my nose wrinkle and my eyes water. This was not the sweet smoke of a proper hearth.

“Finally.” The voice came from the shadows beyond the candles. A girl stepped forward, maybe seventeen, with dark hair pinned severe against her skull and hands stained black to the wrists. Her dress was good wool, but patched in a dozen places with careful stitches. “Thought we’d have to try the salt circle twice.”

I sat up, too quick, and the world tilted sideways. My stomach lurched, empty as always, but something else lurched with it. A jarring blur, like trying to remember a dream that kept slipping away.

“Where—” My throat felt scraped raw. “Where am I?”

“Safe.” Another girl emerged from the darkness, this one younger, maybe twelve, with pale-red burns running up both arms in criss-crossing patterns. She held a clay bowl steaming scents of herbs and copper. “Drink this. It’ll help with the between-sickness.”

I looked down at my hands. They shook, but they were solid and more importantly real. The holes in my dress—where the rats had gotten to me while I lay rotting in the snow—had been mended with black thread.

“I died.” The words came out flat, matter-of-fact. I remembered the windows above me, golden with warmth, and how my fingers had finally stopped hurting when the cold took them completely. “I remember dying.”

The first girl smiled, but it was far from kind. It was the smile of a girl who’d counted coins and found them short, who’d measured promises against their keeping. “Death’s just another sort of business transaction,” she said. “And business has been very good to the Daughters of Ashes, lately.”

A third girl stepped into the circle. Red hair, freckles, shoulders broad as a dock worker’s. She carried a coat over her arm, thick wool the color of charcoal, with brass buttons reflecting the candlelight. “Real question is,” she said sternly, “what are you willing to pay to get out of the debt you now owe us for bringing you back to breath?”

I stared at the coat. Real wool. Good wool. The quality of wool I’d pressed my face against in shop windows, breathing in the smell of lanolin and prosperity through the glass.

“I don’t have any money.” The old shame crept up my throat. “I never had any money.”

“Don’t want money,” said the dark-haired girl. She knelt beside me, close enough that I could see her eyes weren’t brown like I’d thought, but deep green flecked with amber. “Want you to remember something.”

“Remember what?”

“Your sister.”

That word was a sweaty slap to the chest. I jerked back, but the girl’s hand shot out, quick as a snake, and caught my wrist.

“Esterline,” she said, and the sound of it could break glass. “Golden-haired Esterline who braided your hair and sang you lullabies. Who promised you’d always be sisters, no matter what papers said different about your mothers.”

I tried to pull away, but her grip was iron-strong. “Let go.”

“Esterline who married herself a magistrate,” the girl continued, relentless. “Who lives in a fine house on Beacon Hill now, with servants to light her fires and silk dresses in six different colors.”

“Stop.” But my voice came out thin, reedy as winter wind through broken shutters. How did they know any of this? Had they followed me, waited for me to pass before doing whatever they did to bring me back?

“Esterline who saw you in the market square three months ago.” The girl leaned closer, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Who looked right through you like you were smoke. Like you were nothing. We saw it all.”

The memory rose up sharp and sudden, Esterline in her blue velvet coat, her golden hair pinned up proper beneath a hat with real feathers. How I’d called her name, how I’d run after her carriage until my lungs burned and my legs gave out. How she’d never once looked back.

Tears came hot and heaving, running down my cheeks before I could stop them.

The dark-haired girl released my wrist and sat back on her heels. “There,” she said, and now her voice was gentle, almost tender. “That’s exactly what we need. That’s what feeds the flame. That’s how we know you’re one of us. That you can strike a match.”

She nodded to the red-haired girl, who stepped forward and held out the coat. Not offering, but presenting it, like a crown or a sword.

“Put it on,” the dark-haired girl said. “And we will teach you how to make people like your sister remember you. We’ll teach you how to burn their pretty world down until there’s nothing left but ash and the sound of your name on their lips.”

I looked at the coat. At the girls watching me with eyes like banked coals. At my hands, still shaking, still poor, still empty. But not dead. Not anymore.

I reached for the wool.

Three nights hence, I found myself crouched in an alley that knew nothing but misery, where the reek of piss and rotting fish had soaked so deep into the cobblestones that even winter couldn’t freeze the stench out. Above us, the Ashford Cotton Mill squatted like some great beast of bitter brick history, its windows dark as dead eyes save for the night watchman’s lantern, swinging lazy through the ground floor, his pendulum for counting down to judgment.

“Mind this well,” Prudence murmured, her flame-bright hair tucked neat beneath a knit cap that had seen better years. “We’ve not come to spill blood. Only to speak a word through the language of flames.”

I gave her a nod, though my throat had gone tight as a miser’s purse strings. The coat they’d wrapped round my shoulders was fine wool, warm as I’d never known, but still my hands shook something fierce. Not from cold this time, I’d had my fill of cold, thank you kindly. No, this was something else entire. Something that might have been the thrill of the hunt, or perhaps the trembling that comes before you step off a cliff into empty air.

Cordelia had her fingers working round the window latch, patient as a spider with a fly already caught. The metal gave way with no more than a whisper, and she slipped through that gap like smoke through a keyhole, beckoning us to follow with a simple gesture, as if we were entering our own homes.

Inside, the mill stretched before us vast as a cathedral, though it served a vastly different god. The looms and spinning wheels hulked in the darkness like bones picked clean and left to bleach. The air sat heavy on my tongue, thick with cotton dust and machine oil and something underneath that made my belly turn.

“Lord preserve us, what is that smell?” I whispered.

“Hate,” said Verity, youngest of our number, her arms marked with pale-red scars that mixed with the moonlight like the scales of some strange fish. “Seeps into timber and stone when folk spend their days terrified of the next breath they draw.”

We ambled our way through that maze of metal and malice, our feet knowing enough to stay quiet on the worn wooden floor. Back in the cellar, Cordelia had laid it out plain: the Ashford Mill paid wages that wouldn’t keep a roach alive and locked their workers in during shifts like prisoners in a gaol. Come last month, three girls had burned to death when fire took the cotton bales, and the foreman wouldn’t unlock the doors till the work bell rang. “Accidents may happen,” he’d told their mothers at the burying, counting his coins while they counted their tears.

“Here’s where we, the Daughters of Ashes, make our stand,” Cordelia said, stopping beside a pile of cotton white as fresh snow, though there was nothing pure about it. She drew from her coat a bottle no bigger than her fist, its contents sloshing. “Lamp oil and turpentine, mixed right. Burns hot and clean as righteous anger, but won’t spread to the tenements hard by.”

She sprinkled that mixture over the cotton like a priest blessing bread, and I watched the dark stains spread through the white fibers, infecting every dry speck.

“That won’t hurt anyone?” I asked, though I already knew the answer from the careful way she measured each drop.

“Building’s empty as a politician,” Prudence said, drawing her own bottle from her coat’s deep pockets. “Night watchman makes his rounds regular as clockwork, every hour on the hour, and he’s not due back for the best part of forty minutes.”

Verity pressed a bottle into my hands, warm from her body and heavy as a stone. The liquid inside filtered moonlight through the high windows, gleaming quicksilver.

“Just a few drops, mind,” Cordelia warned. “Cotton’s eager to catch, and we want it to burn clean, not blow the whole district to kingdom come.”

I tilted that bottle over a bale of fiber, watching the oil seep into the white fluff the way water invades sand. Such a small thing it seemed, such a nothing sort of gesture. A few drops of oil on some cotton, how could that bring down all this brick and iron?

But I’d learned a thing or two about small gestures and their larger consequences. About matches that could light a fire or leave a girl frozen stiff in the snow when unmet. About sisters who could break your heart with nothing more than a hollow glance right through the heart of you.

By contrast, the oil was rich with possibilities. Of change coming whether you wanted it or not. A justice with its sleeves rolled up and its hands dirty.

“All ready then?” Cordelia asked. We’d spread ourselves through that mill floor like seeds in a field, each tending our own small plot of destruction. She held up a match, a proper sulfur match. But that’s right when the sound came. Footsteps on stairs, thundering certain.

“Someone’s coming up!” I hissed, my heart jumping into my throat.

Cordelia’s head snapped round quick as a whip crack. “Can’t be. The watchman’s not due—”

“Must’ve heard something,” Prudence breathed, her voice tight as a violin string. “Or seen the window standing open.”

The footsteps kept coming, each one a nail in our coffins.

“We need to scarper,” Verity said, but there was something in her voice that sounded like a sob trying to escape.

“Not without finishing what we came for,” Cordelia said, striking her match. The flame bloomed bright as hope in the darkness, casting our shadows long and strange across the walls. “They killed those girls just as others killed us, sure as if they’d put knives in their backs. They deserve what’s coming to them.”

“Cordelia.” Prudence caught her wrist with fingers that knew their business. “We get caught, they’ll slice our necks from the nearest crossbar and we’ll die all over again. All of us.”

The footsteps stopped. Right outside the mill floor door, close enough that we could hear breathing, ragged and harsh.

Cordelia stared at that lit match in her hand, then at the cotton soaked in oil. The flame danced between her fingers with a trickster’s life, like it wanted to leap free and do what fire does best.

For a heartbeat, I thought she might drop it anyway. Let the mill burn while we ran for darkness, let the flames speak the words we could not. There was something hungry in her eyes, a starvation held so long you’d consume anything, even poison.

The door handle turned, making Cordelia’s decision.

We ran like the very devil was behind us, which, truth be told, he might have been. Out through that window, across the alley slick with things best not named, up the fire escape of the building opposite while my throat and heart were at war. The brass buttons on my coat kept catching on the iron rungs, each snag like a hand trying to drag me back. Behind us, the watchman’s lantern light spilled from the mill windows, searching the void in vain.

We didn’t stop our flight till we reached the roof, flat tar and gravel under a sky full of weary stars. I collapsed against a chimney, gulping smoke and air in equal breaths.

“That was closer than I care for,” Prudence said, pulling off her cap and shaking her hair loose.

“Too close by half,” Verity agreed, running her fingers over those pale-red scars on her arms like she was reading words written in her flesh.

But Cordelia stood at the roof’s edge, staring down at the mill with its lit windows and moving shadows. Her hands had made themselves into fists, and I could see the muscles jumping in her jaw.

“We should have let it burn,” she said. “We had them. We could have burned it all to ash and cinders.”

“And gotten ourselves headless for the trouble,” Prudence said, but gentle-like. “What good would that do those poor girls who died?”

Cordelia turned to face us, and in the starlight her eyes were bright with tears that had nothing to do with sorrow. These were tears of rage, pure and simple, burning as they fell.

“You know what that foreman said at their burying?” she asked, her voice getting louder, more dangerous. “Said they should have been more careful. Said if they’d minded their own affairs instead of chattering like magpies, they might have smelled the smoke sooner.”

My stomach dropped. “He blamed them for dying?”

“Blamed them for burning to death in a fire he could have stopped with a key.” Cordelia’s hands were shaking now. “And their families stood there and took it, because they need the work, because there’s nowhere else to go, because that’s how the world works for girls like us. Only we’ve been given another chance to set these affairs in order.”

She pulled another match from her pocket, fresh and unlit, waiting for light. “So tell me, Match,” she said, using the name I’d chosen for myself. “Tell me why we shouldn’t go back down there and light that cotton anyway. Tell me why those girls don’t deserve their justice served in the design of what robbed them of breath.”

I looked at that match in her hand, small and common as dirt. I’d sold thousands just like it, standing in doorways while fine folk walked past like I was made of air. But I knew something about matches that maybe she had forgotten.

“Because,” I said slow and careful, minding my way across thin ice, “once you strike a match, you can’t make it whole again. And fire’s got its own ideas about what deserves burning.”

Cordelia studied my face for a second too long, like she was trying to find the disagreement. Then she smiled. “Maybe that’s exactly what this world needs,” she said, slipping the match back into her pocket like she was saving it for a later occasion. “A fire with its own ideas.”

As we made our way across the rooftops toward whatever passed for home, I found my thoughts turning to Esterline. To the magistrate my sister had wed, with his fine house on Beacon Hill and his carriage with brass fittings. To the laws he probably helped write, the sentences he probably helped pass. To the girls who’d died locked in a mill while men like him ruminated their profits.

Perhaps Cordelia had the right of it. Maybe the point wasn’t to control the fire at all. Maybe the point was to strike the match and let it burn till there was nothing left but god-given truth. The thought should have frightened me right down to my bones and banished itself. Instead, I could feel the heat of it exploding inside of me.

The long months that followed taught me things I’d never thought to learn. How to pick locks with hairpins. How to walk silent through sleeping houses, light as shadow on carpet luxurious enough to mask sound. How to read the faces of men who sold corn stalks in front of starving children, and find the exact spot where their conscience still lived.

We burned the Whitmore Grain Warehouse in Spring, when the wind was just right to carry smoke across the financial district. Cordelia stood in the street afterward, watching flames reach toward heaven, and laughed religiously. “Look at them scatter,” she said, pointing to men in fine coats who’d come running from their clubs. “Like rats when you flood their nests with their own shit.”

But I was watching something else, how the fire caught wooden supports faster than we’d reckoned, then jumped to the tenement next door where dock workers kept their few belongings. I was the one who ran to wake them, who helped the mother carry her baby out while Cordelia “kept watch.”

“You’re getting soft,” she told me later, back in our cellar grown warm with stolen coal. “Fire doesn’t ask permission, Match. It takes what it wants and burns what it will.”

“And innocent folk get charred along with the guilty,” I said, but she’d already turned away, already planning the next blaze.

The Daughters of Ashes had grown in those months. Four became seven became twelve, then twenty. All of them resurrected girls who’d lost brothers to factory accidents, sisters to consumption from mill air, mothers to starvation while warehouses sat full, then their own lives to similar perils. The salt-circles brought them as the one that brought me, hollow-eyed and furious, seeking purpose in the ashes of their old lives.

Most looked to Cordelia, the first of us, drawn by the fierce brightness of her rage like moths to flame. But more and more, they brought their doubts to me. Questions about targets and methods, worries about collateral damage. “Match always sees,” they’d whisper. “Match knows the corners we might miss.”

And I did see them, the corners where regular folk lived, where the poor would suffer most when rich men’s warehouses burned. I’d learned to read a city like scripture, learned to find pressure points that would send the message without the shared torment.

But Cordelia was losing that careful eye, that surgeon’s precision we’d started with. The girl who’d once measured lamp oil by the drop now spoke of burning entire districts. “Let them all choke,” she’d say when I questioned a target. “Good with bad, wheat with chaff. God will sort them out in the after.”

When Prudence tried to argue strategy, Cordelia’s eyes went cold as winter stone. When Verity suggested we might seek justice through other means, Cordelia went jester and asked if perhaps she’d prefer to return to eating slop in stables.

The others began watching me when Cordelia spoke, waiting to see which way I’d lean. And I found myself caught between two fires, the one that wanted to spread, and the one that remembered what it felt like to be kindling.

It would all come to a head on the night of the Governor’s Winter Ball. The day of Christmas, the anniversary of my death.

“The Pemberton Hotel,” Cordelia announced, spreading stolen blueprints across our scarred table. Her hands shook as she traced the lines, whether from excitement or something darker, I could not say. “Five stories of sinful marble, where they’ll all be gathered. Governors and magistrates, factory owners and shipping lords. Every man who’s grown fat on our misery, all in one gilded cage.”

The hotel sat directly across from Beacon Hill’s grandest ballroom, where the city’s finest would be dancing while we worked. They’d have a perfect view when flames reached the windows.

“Someone slips in during evening service,” she continued, “sets bottles in the basement, lights their tips, and walks out while they’re still arguing over wine selection.”

“And the people inside?” I asked careful-like. “Kitchen girls and chambermaids, porters and boot boys?”

“They’ll make it out in time,” Cordelia said, not meeting my eyes.

The room went quiet as a graveyard. Near-twenty pairs of eyes moved between Cordelia and me, waiting to see which fire would burn brighter.

“No,” I said, soft but iron-certain. “It’s too close. We don’t risk working folk just to spook their betters.”

Cordelia’s smile could have cut glass. “Then what do you suggest, dear Match? Politely request justice? Wait for them to grow hearts on trees?”

I studied the blueprints, tracing lines with my finger, thinking of all I’d learned in a year of shadow work. “We don’t need to burn the hotel,” I said finally. “We just need them to think we will.”

The plan that grew from that moment was mine, though I let Cordelia believe she’d birthed a piece of it. A small fire in the hotel’s basement, just enough smoke to send everyone fleeing into streets with their loose diamonds clattering the cobblestones. But the real target would be the empty Fairweather mansion across the square, the one within perfect view of the ballroom windows. We’d gut its foundation to rafters while the city’s finest stood watching their safe world burn.

But to make it work, someone had to be inside that ballroom to rise the panic. Someone to ring the alarm bells at exactly the right moment, when all eyes would turn to windows. Someone had to infiltrate the Governor’s Winter Ball.

“I’ll do it,” I said, though my mouth went dry as sand speaking the words.

Verity shot me a knowing look. “Match, your—”

“My sister, I know.” I could already see her in the ballroom, dancing in silk, golden hair pinned with pearls. “But I know at least a piece of that life, watched it through the eyes of my sister before she threw me to the workhouses as soon as our father perished and she took a husband who simply could not have me, and so yes, I can slip into that world without standing out inside it. Has to be me.”

A week later, I stood before cracked glass in a stolen midnight-blue dress, silver thread worked through the bodice like they could store moonlight. Verity had worked magic with my hair, pinning it in curls I’d never dreamed I could wear again. The shoes pinched something fierce, but they were true leather with honest ribbons.

“You look like proper quality,” Prudence said, adjusting the silver locket at my throat, hollow inside and just big enough for lamp oil and a single match.

“I look like a walking lie,” I said, but couldn’t stop staring at the stranger in the glass. This girl had never stood barefoot in doorways, never felt her stomach gnaw itself empty. This girl belonged in ballrooms and drawing rooms, to the world that had left me cold.

“Sometimes lies are the only truths that walk at all,” Cordelia said from the doorway. She’d grown gaunt in recent days, eyes bright with fever or even madness. “Remember what you’re there for, Match. When that mansion burns, they need to see it. All of them. They need to know their pretty world can be stolen from them just as easy as they stole ours.”

I had to agree.

The Pemberton Hotel rose before me, every window glowing against winter night. Carriages lined the street, brass fittings gleaming, drivers stamping feet against cold while their superiors danced inside.

I walked up marble steps like I belonged, like I’d done it a thousand times because I’d watched my sister from afar a thousand times, studying her every move, obsessing over being the one worthy enough to walk and glide beside her with clarity and poise. The doorman barely glanced at my invitation—swiped from a merchant’s reclusive daughter who’d never miss it—before waving me through into warmth and music and endless light.

The ballroom stretched like something from the fairy tales, crystal chandeliers and golden mirrors, silk-draped walls and glistening floors. Men in tailcoats spun women in gowns worth more than a year’s hunger, their laughter bright as champagne bubbles.

I moved through them with the ease of smoke, nodding and smiling and playing at being a young lady at her first grand ball. No one looked close. Why would they? I wore their clothes, spoke their words, carried myself like I’d been born to ease and plenty. But all the while I was counting. Minutes until the mansion fire would start, seconds until I’d need that alarm bell hidden behind the tapestry near the orchestra. All the while watching for golden hair, for a face I’d know in sleep.

It found me first.

Esterline stood near great windows looking over the square, hair piled high and crowned with her signature pearls, gown a cascade of purple silk waves. She was more beautiful than memory could echo, more elegant, more perfectly at home in this world of crystal faces. And she was laughing at something her companion said, a man with silver temples and kind eyes, wearing wealth like comfortable old clothes. Her husband, the magistrate, the man whose laws allowed discarded girls like me to die in doorways.

I should have looked away, kept moving, kept mind on the task at hand, but the raw humanity of myself refused, drinking in the sight of her, trying to understand how the sister with half my blood who’d braided my hair became this stranger in flesh.

She turned, as if sensing my eyes on her, meeting me. For a moment lasting two or three lifetimes, our eyes met across that glittering ballroom. I saw the recognition flicker in and out, a flash that might have been guilt brewed with genuine lapse in memory. Her lips parted as if to speak a name. Or a guess.

Her husband touched her arm, said something that made her laugh, and she turned away like I was just another face in the crowd. Like I was nothing at all.

The clock chimed. Five minutes until the mansion fire would start. Five minutes to choose between pulling that alarm and letting Cordelia’s madness consume everything. But standing there in that stolen dress, watching Esterline dance with the man who’d helped write my death warrant, I realized the choice was already made. I began walking toward the alarm bell, eyeing damnation.

Let them all burn, said a voice in my head that sounded suspiciously like my own.

The clock’s hand crept toward quarter past, slow as honey. Through those grand windows I could see the first orange tongues licking at the Fairweather mansion’s upper floors, right on schedule as Sunday service. The other Daughters would be perched on rooftops, waiting for my signal, waiting for me to send these silk-wrapped peacocks squawking into the street. Instead, I turned my back on salvation and walked deeper into the glittering crowd.

“Pardon me, miss.”

I turned to find Esterline herself standing at my elbow, still in purple silk that defied gravity when she moved, pearls at her throat like collected stars. Up close, she was lovelier than memory had painted her. Skin soft as cream that had never known the bite of winter wind, golden hair that had never felt workhouse shears or hunger’s greedy fingers. I knew, of course, that wasn’t always the case.

“I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced,” she said, her voice carrying a careful music that could belong to elocution masters and drawing room philosophy. “Mrs. Esterline Whitmore, at your service.”

Whitmore. She’d taken her husband’s name like a new skin, shedding the old one like a snake in springtime. Hearing it was like watching a door swing shut on everything we’d ever been.

“Constance,” I managed, though my throat had gone dry. “Constance Fairweather.” The first part of the name was true. The last was borrowed from a father who did not name me.

Her eyes went bright as candle flames, all delight and surprise. “Fairweather! Well, aren’t you a dear thing. We must be blood, mustn’t we—I was born a Fairweather myself, before marriage took me elsewhere. Though Lord knows the family tree’s got more branches than an old oak, and I’ve never been clever with keeping track of all the cousins and their cousins.” She laughed like silver bells ringing out Christmas morning. “Perhaps we’re thrice removed and twice forgotten, or some such tangle.”

I studied her face like I was reading scripture, hunting for any flicker of knowing, any sign she remembered the girl who’d shared her thin blankets, who’d yawned by stub-candle light while we whispered stories to keep the dark things at bay. But there was nothing in her eyes. Nothing but the polite interest of upward folk meeting distant relations at upward gatherings.

“Perhaps so,” I said, picking my words careful as stepping stones across a swift river. “Your name sits familiar on my tongue.”

“Doesn’t it just!” She clapped her gloved hands together like she’d found treasure in the street. “I do so adore discovering family connections. Makes the world feel snug, don’t you think? More…containable.”

Through the great windows behind her, I could see the fire spreading its hungry wings across the mansion’s bones, painting everything in shades of revoking. The other guests were taking notice now, pressing toward the glass like moths to flame, their murmurs rising like incense.

“Glorious sight, isn’t it?” Esterline said, following my gaze with eyes that sparkled. “All that moldering history going up like Guy Fawkes night. Rather poetic, I’d say, sometimes you must burn the old growth to make room for fresh shoots.”

“Q-quite,” I agreed, watching her face in the fire’s glow. Still nothing. No recognition, no guilt, no acknowledgment of the sacred oaths we’d sworn in darkness.

Then she turned back to me, and for one heartbeat—one breath, one blink—something moved behind those polished blue pupils. Something that might have been knowledge, or the cold satisfaction of accounts settled just so.

Gone quick as summer lightning. But I’d seen it plain. She knew me true as her own heartbeat. My mind went spinning like a child’s top, turning over possibilities till they blurred together. Perhaps she was guarding herself, denying our bond to keep her fine reputation clean. Perhaps years of silk and plenty had addled her memory, made her forget the taste of thin gruel and thinner hope. Perhaps she played some game I could not fathom, some long strategy I was too simple to see.

Or perhaps—and this cut deepest of all—perhaps she simply didn’t care.

Perhaps the girl who’d once woven my hair into plaits and whispered promises of future ballrooms in the small hours had died sure as I had, leaving only this beautiful, terrible stranger dressed in an armor of wealth, guarding her from any chance at feeling the pain of my existence. Perhaps this was how survival looked when you had golden hair and a face men would pay to look upon. You could forget the inconvenient folk, the uncomfortable truths, the sister-hearts who reminded you of everything you’d rather see buried.

The clock struck half past the hour. The mansion was burning root and branch now, flames reaching toward heaven like the prayers of the damned seeking mercy. The wind was up and hungry, carrying sparks toward the quarter where working folk laid their heads, toward homes full of people whose only sin was being in the wrong place when fire came calling. They would have time to escape, but then what?

“Well then,” Esterline said, smoothing her gloves with mechanical grace. “I should return to my husband’s side. He frets when I stray too long from his watchful eye.” She smiled a perfect, empty smile that I had never seen in her. “Such a pleasure meeting you, dear Constance. Do mind yourself in this crowd.”

She turned to glide away, then paused pretty as you please, glancing back with a slow tilt.

“Oh, and Constance, dear?” she said, her voice revealing a lower layer of tone. “Do remember me to all the family when next you see them. All of them, mind. Even the ones who didn’t quite manage to climb as high as they’d hoped.”

Then she was gone, floating back toward her magistrate and her safe harbor, leaving me standing alone with understanding settling on my shoulders heavy as a burial shroud.

Cordelia almost had the right of it.

The alarm bell waited behind its tapestry, twenty steps away through the chattering crowd. Twenty steps to salvation, to playing the good girl who saved innocent folk and punished only the deserving. But standing there in my borrowed finery, watching my sister-heart disappear into that sea of diamonds, I found I’d lost all taste for goodness.

I took champagne from a passing tray and raised it toward those windows, toward the painted fire of an empty mansion.

“To old debts,” I called out, voice carrying clear over music and merriment. “Finally collected in full.”

Esterline turned at my voice, her eyes finding mine across that ballroom sure as compass needles find true north. She raised her own glass. “To old debts,” she agreed, sweet as hemlock wine. “And to fresh accounts just opened.”

We drank deep, and outside those grand windows the fire spread and spread and spread, consuming all it touched without care for guilty or innocent, for good intent or wicked design. It burned because that’s what fire does when you feed it intent. It burned because debts must be paid, and fire never was particular about which purse it emptied.

It burned because sometimes the only justice left in this sorry world is the kind that leaves nothing but ash and the memory of how beautiful the flames could dance.

The clock chimed midnight, marking the anniversary of my first death, and I wondered if any soul would remember my name when the smoke finally cleared. I wondered if it would signify a damn thing in the end. I wondered if, when all accounts were tallied and all books balanced, revenge and justice weren’t just different words for the same blessed thing.

And yes the champagne tasted of bitter truth and sweet endings, and somewhere in the distance I could hear fire bells tolling like the voices of all the nameless dead girls, singing their sorrows to a sky that had never bothered listening and wouldn’t start now.

As they drank themselves to a stupor, I walked to each of the three doors guarding the room, dropping the contents of my locket mixed with the oil of the tapestry candles in small spurts, forming a circle of my own. At the final pass, I lit a match inside that locked, golden ballroom. Settling the last debt on my ledger.

Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more.

Author’s Note

I’ve been thinking a lot about fairy tale endings and how unsatisfying most of them are when you really examine them. The Little Match Girl has always been one of the most heartbreaking fairy tales to me, where this child dies alone in the cold, and we're supposed to find comfort in the idea that she’s gone to heaven with her grandmother. But what about justice? What about accountability for a society that let a child freeze to death while people danced in warm ballrooms?

That’s the point of the story, of course, but I did start wondering. What if death wasn't her ending? What if it was her beginning? And what if she wasn't alone…what if there were others like her, other girls who’d been discarded by a system that valued them as less than nothing?

The Daughters of Ashes came from that idea. They're not heroes in any traditional sense, obviously. They’re a cult of arsonists, they’re agents of revenge, born from trauma and fueled by rage. But they’re also girls who were denied any chance at justice through proper channels. When the system fails you completely, what’s left except to burn it down? I’m not trying to answer that question with any moral authority, but I do want to point to the fact that every day, more people are taking on this mindset.

Also, I was particularly interested in exploring the relationship between the unnamed narrator—who takes the name Match—and her sister Esterline. That moment in the ballroom, where Esterline clearly recognizes her but chooses to pretend she doesn't, felt crucial to me. It’s not just about individual cruelty, after all, it’s really about how people can collaborate in systems of oppression by simply choosing not to see the suffering around them.

The ending is deliberately ambiguous about whether Match has become a monster or achieved something close to justice. I think that’s the most interesting space to explore, the place where righteousness and revenge become indistinguishable, and the victim becomes the victor through methods that might make them indistinguishable from their oppressors.

This is also my love letter to gothic literature and Victorian social criticism, a space I enjoy reading in but don’t always have the confidence to write in. Writers like Charles Dickens understood that sometimes you need to make people uncomfortable with their own comfort, you need to show them the true cost of their prosperity. But I wanted to take that a step further, and explore what happens when the poor don’t just suffer nobly…but fight fire with fire.

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