The Fairest of Them All (12 page)

He might have lived.

And all this time, Mathena had known that this chance would come, had been waiting for it.

Already, it felt like something I was destined for.

In the end, I did not go to the tower. I stood there wrapped in furs, staring up at the night sky with all its stories, and decided to let fate run its course. I turned around, slipped back into the bed, and though I did not sleep at all that night, I did not venture out of bed again.

The next morning, I stood at the door with Mathena and watched
Clareta ride off into the snowy forest, back to the palace, the herbs we’d given her tucked into her bag.

“Godspeed,” I said, and I meant it.

T
he next few weeks passed in a tense state of waiting. I told myself that I had waited for seven years and I could wait a few days, or weeks, or months, longer. Whatever it had to be.

It did not take months or even many weeks, however,
before word of the queen’s death came to us. The news came as all news did: first from one woman, and then from every other woman who visited us.

The queen had taken ill one night and slipped into a violent fever. The next day she died in her bed, with her husband and daughter by her side.

“It was terrible,” we heard. “One day she was the vision of health and the next she was gone.”

There was
talk of poison, just as there had been with Josef’s father. The maid who’d actually served the queen her tea had been executed the same day, though she’d denied any wrongdoing. I listened to the reports with horror. I couldn’t even imagine it: two lives, extinguished in a day. I moved from guilt and shame to relief, excitement, and then the feeling that none of it could be real. How could it be
real? How could all these distant horrors be of our making?

Everyone spoke of the queen’s sudden death, in the days that followed. For a while our work became harder, because the spells needed to be stronger to cut through all the pain and sadness that had spread throughout the kingdom. The queen had been beloved. She had brought peace and prosperity to the kingdom, the light of God and all His
fortune. Now everyone was bereft, from the king himself down to the lowliest servant. It was a terrible omen, we heard, again and again, that she had died so suddenly, having borne only one child, and a girl at that.

Talk started right away, of what the king would do next. Who would bear him a male heir? What would the fate of the kingdom be, now that the queen, who had aligned our kingdom with
the East, our longtime enemy, was gone?

The whole kingdom seemed to have a new energy crackling through it. We could even feel it in the forest. Whenever I could, I escaped to my tower and stared at those glittering spires in the far distance, waiting.

If I had learned anything in the forest, from tending the garden every year, from filling the soil with crushed bones and dead things, from eating
the flower that bloomed from the midst of the rapunzel, and from being raised by Mathena, who had bigger plans for me than I could have ever imagined, it was this: that out of death comes life.

Always.

W
inter turned to spring. The air smelled of perfume, and the plants burst from the earth. I’d worked
in the garden all morning, lunched with Mathena on vegetable stew, and taken a nap, and now I was standing in the tower window, looking out over the bountiful forest, the trees full of singing birds and flowering branches. I’d painted my lips with berries, and was wearing the prettiest dress I had. I knew he might appear at any moment.

And then, before I heard the sound of the horse’s hooves,
I saw him, winding his way underneath the trees, on the forest floor, the silver reins and the jewels on his clothing radiant in the sunlight. It might have been a group of fairies out exploring, the way the vision shimmered.

He looked up at me, leaving me breathless. I wanted to turn and run down to him, but I did not want to stop watching him, afraid he might disappear.

“Rapunzel!” he said,
as he pulled those elaborate reins and his horse, black and shining, stopped.

If he had been impressive before, now he was like something that had dropped from the sky, like a god from the stories Mathena had told me, of men who rode chariots that carried the
sun. He was covered in jewels, his clothes were even more fine, and though he still had the look of a beautiful boy about him, his face
suffused with a sweet impishness, he seemed to take up more space in the world. He was a king now. A widower, a father. There was a regalness to him that had not been there before.

I breathed in.

He dismounted the horse, the sun hitting his boots, the silver looping around them.

“Josef,” I said. I loved the way his name felt in my mouth, like a whisper.

“Rapunzel,” he repeated, gazing up at
me. He smiled with joy, and it washed over his face, illuminating him utterly. “Let down your hair.”

I couldn’t even think to answer him. Or let him know how easily I could have walked down to him, to the garden.

Instead, with shaking hands, I removed the cloth that covered my head, and let my hair drop to the ground, all of it streaming out the window, catching the light. I steeled myself against
the stone as the weight of it threatened to pull me down, too. It was longer than it had been before, and as it hit the ground it formed brilliant heaps. His face turned golden as the light gleamed from my hair and reflected off of him.

He wrapped his hands around the locks in front of him, moved his face into my hair as he watched me with those gray-blue cat’s eyes, the rest of his face buried
in gold.

I felt it, that touch, those eyes, as if he’d slipped his hand down my spine, tracing the path with his fingertips. I knew, as soon as he touched me, that what Mathena had said was true: He’d never forgotten me. He’d tried to come back for me.

All those days and months and years working in the forest, and this was my fate, right here.

He hoisted himself up and began to climb.

It seemed
fitting, though he was king now, for him to climb my hair once again. I laughed out loud, at the absurdity of it, his face as he climbed—he was
enjoying
it, he liked having to climb to his lady, it was the troubadour in him.

His thoughts and memories rushed up to me, through each strand, the way they had before. By now I’d learned to absorb the energy that came to me that way, take it into me
and let it pass through me, all that love, that longing for me, the grief he felt over the death of his parents, of his wife, and his great love for his daughter, the kingdom that blazed in his mind and heart. And I could feel his grief. I could see him running to Teresa’s room when news came that she was dying. Feel his heartbreak as he took her hand in his, as he watched her writhe in the bed,
as he held his daughter afterward and tried to explain to her that her mother was gone. Feel, before then, his anguish at having to marry her when he only dreamed of me, the slow giving over of his heart as he came to know her, love her, see her features in the face of his child.

It was surprising, overwhelming, being in his mind and heart, feeling them roil over me. My own guilt and angst and
happiness, all mixed together, were buried in the onslaught of his feelings.

He climbed my hair easily. And then there he was, pulling himself into the tower, standing before me, and once again we were grabbing my hair in bundles through the window as if we were weaving it on a loom.

I wondered if I should curtsy, as Mathena had the day I met
him. I was sure it was mandatory to curtsy in front
of the king, or at the very least to kiss his ring. He had several rings now, one circling each finger, studded with gems. Instead, I just stood and stared at him.

He was nearly in tears as he gazed at me.

“You have come,” I said, and I smiled to reassure him.

He continued to stare at me, stricken. “I can’t believe you’re in front of me. I searched for you, and I could never find you. The tower,
it disappeared.” He reached out and touched my face, cupping my cheek in his warm palm.

“I was right here,” I said.

I could feel his awe, his awareness of all the time that had passed. For me it was different—it was as if the last seven years had never happened, as if time had gone backward for us and given us this moment again. Another chance.

“You have not been locked in this tower all this
time, have you?”

I laughed. “No.”

“Well, now that I’ve finally found you, I will have to make sure you cannot disappear again.”

“How will you do that?”

He smiled, put his hand on his heart, and dropped down to one knee. “I thought I would ask you to marry me,” he said.

I looked down at his handsome face, his eyes, which slanted up slightly on the sides like almonds. I glanced up, saw my own
face staring back at me in the mirror.

For a moment, the past weighed on me, and I had a terrible urge to tell him that it had been a mistake, to have married someone else at all. I wanted to tell him about his son in the ground. That the result of the time he’d spent with me was a
dead, buried child with limbs as twisted as the plant that grew above it.

But I couldn’t say any of that. It was
not his fault he had been forced to marry another, not his fault she’d been fated to die, not his fault Mathena had hidden me from him until this day.

“Will you marry me?” he asked again.

I did not hesitate. “Yes,” I said.

Of course I said yes.

Yes.

W
e ran down the steps together, to Mathena. We did not act like a king and soon-to-be queen, that day
and all those first days to follow. We ran down the steps like children, and he pulled me into his arms and swung me around, my dress flying, my hair swirling around us, gathering grass and flowers, and even bits of horsehair as it swiped the waiting animal.

“Mathena!” I called out, and she appeared instantly, from the back of the house, her dark dress stained with mud and earth.

“We are to
be married!” I said.

She looked at me and smiled. “What wonderful news.” She bowed down in front of us. “It is a great, great day for all of us.”

I unlatched myself from him, and rushed over to her, wrapping my arms around her. Brune flew out just then, landing on Mathena’s shoulder, and I somehow managed to kiss the bird, too, who looked at me with disgust as she let out a horrified squawk.

It hit me in that moment that I would really be leaving—leaving the forest and Mathena and starting a brand-new life without them.

“Let me have a few days,” I said, turning to the king. “I need a few days to prepare myself.”

“I will have your chambers prepared for you, ladies ready to serve you. Are you sure you will not disappear again?”

“I promise I will not,” I said.

“I’ll send my men to
get you, and then we’ll be married.”

“Yes,” I said again. “Yes.”

He slipped his arms around me, nuzzled my neck.

“We will be so happy,” he said. “We will have many children. Among them, a king.”

A sliver of pain moved through my happiness, but I did not let him see. I vowed, right then, that he never would.