The Fairest of Them All (27 page)

“I don’t . . . ” I stopped. I did not know how to explain things to a child, how to tell her that the king had been unfaithful to me, humiliated me with my own lady. That it was not my fault.
That she would do and feel the same in my position. How could I explain any of that, about her own father?

“Your father has hurt me,” I said simply.

She was furious, shaking with rage. My own ladies stood back, and just watched in shock. “My mother would never treat him that way! You have driven him away from you. You don’t deserve to be married to a king! You, the daughter of a stag.”

It felt
as if she’d punched me. “Snow White! Do not say these things to me. I love you as if I were your mother.”

I stepped forward and reached out my hand to touch her face. She swung her arm to push me away and her fingers brushed against my hair as she did. The jolt that went through me stunned me. All her rage and hurt, streaming into me. I could see, feel, her ferocious love for her father, her
fierce loyalty, the way her heart had slowly turned against me as she watched me reject him. How betrayed she felt by me, when she’d loved me so much.

There was nothing I could do.

“You are not my mother,” she said. “Don’t compare yourself to her! She was a princess. Not a witch like you.”

I breathed in. “I only mean to love you,” I said. “I would never do anything to hurt you.”

But she stalked
away from me.

I
t was a terrible winter, being locked in that palace, the hatred as present as marble and stone. It was too cold to hawk, or to ride on horseback, and, just like that, my few solaces were taken away from me.

Josef left me more and more alone, realizing that he could
not sway me. At every meal and every dance, Snow White was surrounded by admirers. When she
was forced to be in my presence, she refused to look at me.

It seemed my only friend was my mirror.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” I’d ask, “who’s the fairest of them all?”

“Rapunzel is the fairest,” it would reply, every time.

T
here came a night, finally, late that winter, when the inevitable happened. The king took another lover. I did not know who it was and did not
want to know, but I could feel it every time my hair brushed a person or even the walls, my bed, the rim of the bath. Clareta came and told me herself, begged me to fight for him, but I would not. I could not.

Instead, that night, when everyone was asleep, I ran to the kitchen,

I took a knife and sawed off my hair, letting it drop to the floor. Each cut was like a blade going into skin, but
I kept going, I couldn’t bear it anymore, this hair that forced me to feel everything everyone was feeling, all the time. Their hatred for me. My husband’s betrayal. Snow White’s disdain.

I sawed it off in great hunks, let it slither onto the floor, golden and shining. Alive. I took it and tossed it into the fire, setting it all aflame.

I fell into bed, exhausted. My hair hung ragged to my shoulders,
and it ached like a wound.

I slept.

When I woke the next morning, it had all grown back.

T
here was only one person left who loved me. When the snow finally melted, I went to the mews.

“My queen,” Gilles said, turning around as I approached, a falcon preening on his wrist.

I saw in his face what had always been there. That burning in his eyes, when he looked at me.

“I want to ride into the woods,” I said.

“Now?”

“Now.”

“Do you need guards to come with us?”

“No.”

We raced to the forest. My hair flying out behind us, snaking through the trees, a flag and a sail. We passed the inn and kept going.

The wildness of the woods was the only thing that could soothe me, finding my shadow self that lived there, that girl with her hair filled with forest. As night
fell, I called out to the four winds, the corners of the earth. The falcons soared above us and it was like my spirit, my soul, was careening through the air and ripping into the star-strewn sky.

We entered the woods and I screamed out into the air. We stopped the horses and ran to get water.

I turned to Gilles.

With him, I did not need magic, did not need to enchant him or call him to me.

The next thing I knew, he was pressing me against a tree, his arms around me, his palm on my face, my neck, running down my breast.

I ached all over. From the center of my body. My hair flew
all around us, in the wind. I slid down the tree, the bark scraping through my hair, pulling him with me. My body wrapped around his, and my hair cradled us. He was so thick, strong, pushing me down into the
leaves.

I was shameless, pressing myself into him.

“Rapunzel,” he said into my ear. His mouth was right against me, so that I could feel his hot breath.

I hadn’t realized how trapped I felt in the palace. I sat on top of him, maneuvered him into me. I couldn’t take him deep enough into me.

It had never felt this way before, with Josef. This felt as natural as the blossoms preparing themselves
to come to life once more. Death moving into life and back again.

My body was strong, open, powerful. I felt like if I concentrated, I, too, could hurl myself into the air the way the birds could, rip apart whole animals with my teeth and claws.

We lay on the earth, my body loose and warm, and my hair wrapped around us. His heart pounded underneath my palm, pulsing up to me. I could see the
way he’d dreamt of me every night after those long days of riding through the countryside. The way he’d desired me as Snow White petted the falcon on his wrist, as Mathena hugged him in the garden, as he stood in the tower and looked down to the house where I myself was sleeping, watching me slip out into the moonlight to cry over my son’s grave.

I could feel, too, his own heart: his love of
wildness, of beast, of bird. His longing to leave this kingdom one day and make a home for himself outside its excesses, its privileging of the court above all things.

He looked at me. He put his hand against my face and it
made me feel warm, protected. I felt safer here than in those castle walls with the moats and ramparts.

He pressed his mouth against mine. His eyes flicked past me. “Look,”
he said.

I twisted my head and saw, in the moonlight, three silver foxes, sleek and beautiful like something from a dream.

“Are they really foxes?” I imagined three cursed men moving through the woods. For a moment I was sure I knew exactly what it felt like. As if I were a wild thing, cursed to live inside the body of a human woman.

“Yes, they’re real,” he said, laughing at me.

“It’s hard
to know.”

“Know what?”

“If they’re real.”

“There are ways to tell,” he said.

“I killed a man once,” I said. “Because I didn’t know.” I was surprised at how easily I could tell him this.

“What happened?”

“I thought it was a stag. I was hunting with my bow, and hit it right in the neck. And when it died, it turned into a man. I watched him die.”

He moved his hand through my hair, sending
shivers throughout my body. “I’m sorry for that,” he said. “She should have taught you how to recognize an enchanted human.”

“He told me that Mathena had cursed him. As he was dying, he said that.”

“I am sure she has cursed more than one man in her time.”

I stiffened for a moment. Immediately, he reacted.

“Does that bother you?”

I wasn’t used to someone paying close attention to me. “No,”
I said, lying. “But she did not curse him. She wanted to save him, and then change him back.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “She is a powerful witch, Rapunzel. She was powerful back then. I can only imagine what she’s capable of now.”

“I owe her my life,” I said. “I used to miss her so much, when I first came to the palace.”

“I’m sure she’ll stay well away.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she was banished.
She cannot return.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Mathena was banished from the palace.”

“But . . . no one has ever told me that.”

“No one dares tell you, I expect. You are the queen. She raised you. I thought you knew this.”

“But Josef . . . he invited her to come live in the palace when we were married.”

He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Rapunzel,” he said. “They would have
killed her, had she come.”

I shifted, moving my hands over his chest, twisting to push my back against him. He wrapped himself around me, like a lettuce leaf. One hand on my breast, another on my belly.

“She left the kingdom to take care of me,” I said, my voice small. “To save me.”

He was quiet. “Is that what she told you?”

The trees swayed back and forth, the night wild and open. Above us,
I saw a million stars through the branches that laced the sky, like pieces of thread.

I did not answer him. I reached out my hand, traced the ground, the leaves, acorns, pinecones, needles, bits of bark.

His hand moved down, pressed between my legs. I opened them, let his hand move inside me.

My hair glittered in the moonlight, and a swath of starlight spread across the black earth. In the
distance, wolves howled, and my heart with them.

I
t was a gorgeous spring day when I asked the mirror the question I’d been asking it for years. I wasn’t
even paying attention, I was so anxious to get to the mews, to Gilles. I’d thought that it would be difficult to return to the castle, after what had happened, but instead I felt more powerful, more free. Habit, more than anything, was what drove me.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who is the fairest of them all?”

“She is.”

I stopped and wondered if I was hearing things. I peered inside. The
mirror like water, like something I could slip into.

“Who is the fairest of them all?” I repeated.

I waited, and for a moment there was nothing, no response. And then two words rumbled out of the mirror, moved into me like arrows.

“Snow White.”

“What?”

“You may be the fairest in this room, but Snow White is a thousand times more fair.”

I stared at my face in the glass. Didn’t I look the
same as I always did? My hair golden, the color of wheat and sun and
daffodils, my eyes bright blue, like sapphires. I was a bit older, yes, I was over thirty now, but I had been careful. My figure was long and slender, my waist nipped in, my breasts high.