The Fairest of Them All (7 page)

The stag’s eyes never left mine.

It staggered, blinking, and let out a terrible bleat.

And then it turned and ran, and I took
off after it, my fur-lined shoes pounding over earth and snow. I raced through the trees, Brune following in the sky, the scent of blood and death and dying all around me.

I was surprised at how much life the animal still had in it, and I was forced to slow down, my body more lumbering than usual. But I was fleet and strong still, a daughter of Artemis, intent on my prey. Already I could taste
the meat roasted over the fire.

I ran through leaves and over tree trunks, past the great oak that had been split in a storm, along the river, following the animal’s tracks and blood, the sounds of it stumbling through the wood.

And then I heard it falling, and I raced forward, toward the sound. I pushed through a cluster of trees, and found myself stepping into a small clearing.

The tree branches
swayed overhead. Brune landed in one of them, waiting for her reward.

The wounded creature lay there, twisted in the snow, the arrow jutting from its neck straight into the air. I pulled my knife from my boot, ready to slit its throat, and moved forward. The stag shifted its head and looked up at me. I could see its anguish, hear its ragged breath, and then something pulled me up short.

At first
I thought I was seeing things. There was a glow around the animal’s body, the way it began to shimmer and shift. The antlers seemed to twist down, melt, just as everything on its body was transforming, like a tree throwing off ice and snow and sprouting green leaves. Its body was shrinking, its fur disappearing, until all that was left was pale skin.

Human skin.

I blinked, disoriented, wondering
if I was imagining what was in front of me.

There was a young man lying there now. Naked, wounded, blood streaming from his mouth, my arrow in his neck.

For a moment I stood frozen, and then I ran to his side and collapsed on the ground next to him.

His eyes were now a deep dark green, the color of leaves in summer. I placed my palms on his skin, half expecting him to disappear and for my hands
to move right through him. But he was real, solid flesh, still warm. I moved my hands away.

I knew there was magic in the forest, but I had never seen anything like this. His torso and legs were bare and muscled, his sex dangling down between his strong thighs. The only other man I’d seen naked—or even this close—was the prince, and I’d barely looked at his body, not like this, not in the sunlight,
stretched out before me.

The man’s face moved in pain, and I was disgusted with myself for caring about his nakedness.

“I’m sorry,” I said, conquering my initial fears and taking his hand in mine. Liquid ran down his skin and I realized it was my tears. “You were . . . were you not a stag, just before? I did not know . . . ” The words felt ridiculous, even as I said them.

He was trying to speak,
and I bent my head down to hear
him. I noticed how his face was starting to line, his hair beginning to gray. He was becoming a middle-aged man before my eyes.

“Cursed,” he breathed.

“Cursed?” I couldn’t be quite sure what he was saying. “What curse?”

He struggled to form the word. “Mathena . . . ”

“Mathena?” I tilted my head.

But I could not stop to think; he was dying, the arrow lodged
in his throat, the blood spilling out of him. Desperately, I tried to remember my craft, the spellwork I’d done. I called to the four winds, raising my hands, and tried to channel their power into him. “Help him!”

I focused all my desire and need into him, to restoring him, and yet I knew there was no way to save him, not with that wound, not even with all the magic I’d learned. Mathena could
have saved him, but not me. Still, I focused my heart and mind on him, clasping his hands in my own.

“Mathena Gothel,” he said, so faintly I might have imagined it.

“She . . . did this?”

He watched me. His mouth forming over words. I remained close, to hear.

“Tell me,” I said.

He was struggling to breathe now and I strained to hear his words. But then he stopped moving, and I was positive
I saw his spirit slipping from him. A shimmering sliver of light that moved up into the forest canopy, toward the sun. And the whole time a feeling of love—what else could it have been? A warmth, magic, desire, and need—cascaded through me, moving from me to him.

The snow hit my face as I squinted to the sky, watching his spirit drift away. I turned to him, and he was silent, still.

At that
moment, Brune left the tree and came down to me, landing on my shoulder. To comfort me.

Irrationally, I thought how cold the man must be. Bare, in the snow! His skin was already blue from it.

I took down my hair, let it unspool all around me, like a golden blanket. Brune flitted from my shoulder as my hair cascaded around her, and landed on the ground next to me. I covered his body with my hair
and lay down, curling beside him.

At first I couldn’t tell if it was the strange mood of the forest right then, the pale light, the remnants of the magic that had just taken place . . . But my hair came alive the way it had before, with the prince, and I could feel something coming from the man’s body to me. Sparkling, faint images, an old, old sorrow as soft as the feel of air on skin. I could
see the man, a crowd of people, a woman screaming into the air, enacting an ancient spell, and when she turned I saw it was Mathena, but years younger, her black curls tumbling around her face.

As quickly as the images came, they went away, and then a great calm came over me, and I knew it was the feeling of dying. I looked up, and his spirit was gone now.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered again,
stretching my hand over his chest.

I don’t know how long I lay there in the snow, curled up next to him, holding on to him, with Brune as witness, but it was only the fading light and the shivering that overtook me, as the air grew more and more cold, that warned me to head home.

If I could have, I would have carried him. If I had not had a child inside me, I might have stayed there with him
indefinitely,
letting my grief cover us both. But something lifted me from the ground, made me pull the arrow from his neck and cover him in leaves and snow. The ground was too frozen to bury him properly.

I let my hair drag behind me. Clutching the arrow in my hand, I marked my way by the sun, and headed home. Brune did her best to guide me, moving from tree to tree to show me the way. I stumbled
through the snow. Images rose up to me from the ground, of forest animals, travelers, bandits, but I just let them pass over me, numb to everything. The arrows rattled as they clicked against each other in my quiver.

I felt like I’d walked for days in the dark, though it could not have been more than a few hours. I walked along the river, whispering protection spells in the air. All around me,
I heard the sounds of forest animals and thought I saw shapes hiding behind the trees, watching me. The trees had eyes, the branches were arms reaching out for me. I thought of the bandits on their great horses, preying on unsuspecting travelers, tales of the house on the other side of the river where they lived together. Were my own spells strong enough to hide me? Could they see me now? Were they
out roaming through the forest? Dark eyes shone out at me. The cold bit through my furs, to my skin.

I had killed a man. Perhaps I deserved to have the bandits find me.

By the time I arrived at the cottage, I could barely feel any part of my body. My hands were numb as I pushed through the front door.

The fire was crackling, meat cooking on top of it, and I collapsed on the couch. Brune flew
inside and found her way to the mantel, squawking a warning.

Mathena rushed into the main room, carrying a basket of dried rose petals. Her face registered her shock as soon as she saw me. She dropped the basket, and the petals scattered on the dirt floor beneath her.

“My god, what has happened? You’re covered in blood! Your hair!”

I looked down. I hadn’t even realized that I was soiled. My
hair trailed out behind me, full of the forest. The arrow in my hand was still bloody.

She ran over to me, moving around me to grab my hair in bundles so she could shut the door.

“Your hair is stained with blood,” she said. I could hear the terror in her voice. “Are you hurt? The baby . . . ? You know better than to wander through the woods at night!”

“There was a man,” I said, “in the forest.
I killed him.”

“You what?”

I knelt on the floor and let my body give way to sobs. She was next to me then, on the floor, carefully taking the arrow from my hand and placing it on the table.

“He was . . . a stag. I hit it with my arrow, I followed it, and when he fell . . . he was a man. I saw it. I saw him change.”

“Oh,” she said, leaning back on her heels. She looked at me sharply. The fire
flared up in front of us. Outside, the snow drifted down like tiny feathers. She nodded to my hair, the arrow. “This is his blood, not yours?”

I nodded. “I had no idea I was killing a man. I saw the stag, his antlers, and my arrow hit him in the throat. I killed him. Mathena, I watched him die!”

I was consumed by my own pain and guilt, but I could feel the room change. Something in her change.

She stood and lifted me by the shoulders. And then I was on the couch, and she heated the kettle and started carefully washing the blood off of me with a wet cloth.

“Did he say anything?” she asked, after a while. Her voice was uncharacteristically quiet.

I lifted my head. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten to tell her. “Your name,” I said. “He said your name as he was dying.”

She stopped, the
cloth wet on my forearm, under her hand. Something new flashed in her eyes, a pain I hadn’t seen before.

“Do you know who he was?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

I waited for her to tell me, but she stayed silent and did not move. I glanced up, saw Brune perched on the mantel now, watching me.

“Did you . . . curse him?” I asked.

Slowly, she nodded. “It was not a curse, or at least I did not intend
it to be. But I changed him, yes,” she said. “A long time ago.”

“Who was he?” I asked.

“Someone I loved once,” she said. To my surprise, she started crying. She was not making a sound. The tears ran down her cheeks, and she wiped them with the back of her hand. I had never in my life seen her cry.

I watched her in horror, knowing I’d caused her this grief. That it was my fault. I was a terrible,
hateful person, I thought then. There was a reason my real parents had neglected and beaten me, let another woman come in and take me away. Even as a child I’d been all wrong. It was a thought that had come to me before, but always as a tiny fear, a sense of hollow dread. Never as a full-blown truth, the way it came now.

“I’m so sorry, Mathena,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

“It’s not your fault,
Rapunzel,” she said, looking up at me with wet eyes. “Please don’t think it’s your fault. I didn’t realize he was so close by, or I would have warned you. You didn’t know it was a man.”

Loup appeared and curled into my lap, purring. I stroked her behind her ears, cupped her face in my hand.

“Who was he?” I whispered.

Slowly, she picked up the arrow and began turning it around and around in
her fingers. “When I lived at court, he was a knight in the king’s army. His name was Marcus. He was a powerful magician. I was in love with him, and he taught me many things.”

“Why did you change him?” I asked.

She looked down at her hands, and the arrow she was gripping between them. Her hands were wrinkled, run through with veins. I hadn’t noticed how old she’d become.

“He was condemned
to die,” she said. “I changed him so that he could escape. I thought I’d be able to change him back. I tried every spell I could find, but I couldn’t change him. I’ve never stopped trying.” She sighed. “Perhaps you gave him the relief I couldn’t.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said again.

Her grief overwhelmed me, and I could not bring myself to say anything else. We sat in silence. She traced the arrow’s
tip with her fingertips, and then tossed the weapon into the fire.

Sparks flickered from the flames for several moments before the fire calmed down again.

“When the snow melts,” she said, finally, “we will go back and bury him.”

B
ut the snow would not melt for many weeks yet. The trees stretched blackly into the sky, which we could barely see for the snow that kept falling,
covering everything, hiding every sin except for those I was forced to remember. Whether I slept or lay awake at night staring at the dark room, the man I’d killed haunted me, his green eyes looking up at me, full of pain and surprise. Those few moments when he became a man again, his skin pink, alive, naked, beautiful, the fleeting joy he must have felt as he returned to his own body though
he was already dying, me standing over him with my bow in my hands. I was possessed by the idea that I might have saved him, had I had more knowledge.