The Fairest of Them All

15

Over the next several years I was, for the most part, happy. King Josef continued to love me and to fill my life with delights, constantly—new delicacies, otherworldly art and poetry. I loved him and was faithful to him, I loved Snow White, and I grew closer to Gilles, my one great friend and confidant at court. My ladies continued to try to comfort and please me, though I spent more and more time away from them. Most often, I passed my days hawking or riding through the countryside or walking through the palace gardens. Snow White and I continued to ride the gardens and fields and to dispense help where we could, though our kingdom was thriving—thriving everywhere, that is, but in the king’s own chambers.

I continued to try every spell I could find, every combination of plants, to conceive. I prayed to Artemis and Zeus and Hera, as well as to the god the priest spoke about. But as the months became years, no one believed that I would ever carry an heir. I became known, throughout the court and no doubt the kingdom, as deeply unlucky. I could feel it, through courtiers who brushed against stray strands of my hair, through Clareta and Josef, who never would have voiced the thoughts they carried inside them. That I was unlucky, a witch queen from the forest.

One day Yolande came up behind me, her hand grazing my hair as she touched my shoulder, and I could feel the thought that was buried in her mind: that she would have made a better wife to Josef than me. Her blood was more royal, her womb more fertile. I wanted to turn and smack the insolence out of her, but there was no use. She was not the only one who had such thoughts.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” I began asking every morning, my own ritual, “who’s the fairest of them all?”

The mirror comforted me, let me take refuge in my own beauty, though that beauty seemed more and more useless to me as time went by.

Josef’s advisors urged him to take another wife, but he refused. Father Martin made clear that he thought God was punishing us. Everyone knew what he meant but was forbidden to say it openly: that God was punishing the kingdom for letting a witch sit on the throne.

Even Snow White began pulling away from me as she grew older. It was only natural, I suppose, that she would become more interested in her peers than in her stepmother, but it stung me nonetheless. I watched her at feasts as she danced and laughed with her friends, the fine-boned children of nobles. It didn’t help that by the time she was fourteen, she looked even more like Teresa than she had before. More than once I caught a glimpse of her around a corner and was sure it was the dead queen’s ghost returning to me. Mocking me, and punishing me, for what I’d done.

It became clear that Snow White was—and would remain—the sole heir to the kingdom. I tried to tamp down my darkest thoughts, but could not help feeling that it should have been my son. That somehow, she had wrested away what should have been his.

That autumn, I found a new spell in Mathena’s book. One that was technically for husbandry but that I thought might work on me. I infused each herb with intent, and whispered over them before downing them all in a tea.

The night of the harvest ball, Clareta prepared my hair and painted my face, and I wore a new dress, a shimmering pale blue, the color of a robin’s egg. I was pleased with my reflection, though I missed the laughter of my ladies and Snow White scurrying around me. Now Snow White prepared herself in her own chambers, surrounded by her ladies. My own ladies were silent, giving each other secret looks, and I could feel their disapproval as if it were rain.

I stepped into the ballroom and stood framed by the golden doorway, as my ladies arranged my hair around me. I braced myself for their judgments and dark thoughts. Snow White was there already, sitting with a young nobleman and his sister, both from a prominent family. Her eyes flashed up as I entered, and then she quickly looked away. The king sat at our raised table, dressed in rich, jeweled robes. He was laughing, surrounded by lords and ladies.

When he turned to face me, I could feel the blood rushing to my face, under his gaze. The rest of the court was silent now, watching me, but I cared only for what he thought.

His face lit up when he saw me, as if a torch had been set ablaze within him. He smiled. “Rapunzel,” he called.

As I approached the dais, one of the ladies gathered around him met my eye. She was red-haired, someone I’d never seen before, dressed in a pale pink dress that nipped in at the waist and exaggerated the span of her hips. She had hair stuck through with diamond pins and hanging down to her elbows. Her hand, I realized, was on my husband’s shoulder.

I glared at her, whispered a quick spell, and she snatched her hand away as if she’d been burned.

“My queen,” he said, as affectionately as he ever had.

I forced myself to smile.

He leapt from the table, came around, and swept me out to the marble floor. Everyone moved aside. I looked up, caught sight of the redhead watching us, envy animating all her perfect features.

We moved around and around. I leaned into him, let him guide us both, as above us the chandeliers seemed to drip ice.

“I love you,” I said, into his skin, over and over.

That night, I waited for him to come to my room. I lay on my bed with my gown unlaced and pulled down over my shoulders, my hair unfurling to the floor. Around me, the torches flickered along the walls and through the diaphanous curtains that dropped around me. I could feel the magic working. Tonight, I hoped, we would finally make another child.

My skin was warm, soft. I ran my palm down my thigh, pulled up the crisp fabric.

I concentrated, reciting additional spells under my breath. For fertility, for love, to make him come to me.

I rose from the bed and looked out of the window, up at the star-strewn sky. Surely he had left the ballroom and prepared himself for me by now.

I went back to bed and struggled not to fall asleep, though the mattress felt so comfortable, the fire so warm, the wine had made me so relaxed . . .

I wasn’t sure how much time had passed when I woke, but the night was quiet now. I listened, but did not hear even the faintest music from the ballroom, or any sound of carriages leaving from the front of the castle.

I left my room and stepped into the outer chambers, where a guard stood staring into the fire. He turned quickly at my approach. “Your Highness?”

“Has the king come to visit?” I asked, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice.

“No, my lady,” he said, bowing to me. But he did not seem to want to meet my eye.

“He has not sent for me, either?”

“No, my lady. Not that I have been told.”

“Do you need something, Your Highness?” another voice asked. I turned as Clareta entered the room.

“Lace me,” I said. “I will go to see the king myself.”

Her eyes darted to the guard and then back to me. Then she nodded, and moved quickly behind me to move my hair and lace me into the dress. I’d wanted him to see me lying half in it, with the flames reflecting off the stones, before I slipped out of it.

As she touched me, I could feel her pity moving through me. She believed the king had rejected me. I was furious at him for letting someone like her think such a thing, and gritted my teeth until she finished.

“Shall I accompany you, Your Highness?” the guard asked. “And announce you to the king?”

“Yes,” I said, lifting my chin. I knew he would follow me, regardless.

The palace seemed deserted, full of ghosts and secrets. As we passed the portrait of Queen Teresa, I did not look up, afraid to see her face staring down at me in the dark.

Behind me, my hair made a rustling sound as it swept over the floor. A terrible premonition pulsed up through it, from the stone itself.

Torches cast shadows, stretched my body into something monstrous and long on the floors and walls.

“Your Highness!” a guard said, as I approached the king’s chambers.

“I am here to see my husband,” I said.

“I believe he is sleeping,” the guard replied, visibly uncomfortable. I studied him for a moment and then realized, in one sharp flash, that something was wrong.

I walked straight to the door then, before he could stop me.

“Wait!” he said, as I pushed into the king’s chambers and made my way to his room. I could hear the guard storming after me. In front of me, I heard muted sounds from the king’s bedroom. A cry, a laugh.

I threw open the door.

He looked up.

He was spread out over his massive, fur-covered bed. On top of him the red-haired woman from dinner moved, her sweat-covered body glistening in the firelight, her neck stretched back, face turned to the ceiling. Even more shocking was the second woman—stretched out next to Josef, fully undressed, her hands sliding over his chest and her face buried in his neck. When she lifted her head and looked straight at me, I gasped out loud. It was Yolande.

“Rapunzel!” he said, scrambling now to sit up, pushing the red-haired woman off of him. Yolande jumped up and began searching frantically for her clothes.

I stood there, not believing the scene in front of me. The room smelled like musk, sweat, sex.

Josef rushed up to me, a horrified look on his face, and the two women moved behind him.

“Forgive me, my queen,” he said, reaching for me.

“Don’t touch me!” I spat.

I forced myself to look at Yolande, who was awkwardly trying to slip her thin body into her complicated, multilayered dress.

“I want her banned from this palace,” I said, without even thinking. The words were flames leaving my mouth. “I want both of them gone immediately.”

“Rapunzel—” he began.

“Both of them!” I said.

Already there were several guards at the door.

I turned to them. “As your queen, I command you to take these women from the castle.”

They looked from me to him, unsure how they should proceed. I turned back to the king and he seemed to recoil from my gaze, my anger like a fist in front of him.

Yolande was suddenly at my feet, on her knees. “Please, my queen, do not send me away!” And then, to him: “I implore you!”

She could have said anything at all to me then. I didn’t care. All the pain and worry I’d felt since coming to the palace seven long years before, feeling all their judgments and disapproval every day, every month, every year—all of it gathered together into one tight knot.

Another moment more and I would have used magic to cast her out of that room. With rage like that, I could have done anything, I was sure of it. But then Josef nodded to the guards. “Take them from the palace,” he said. “Obey your queen.”

They had tears streaming down their faces, the two women, both barely dressed, and never in my life had I felt hatred the way I did then.

“Please, my queen,” Yolande said again.

“Take them!” I said, and suddenly I was the wild creature from the mirror, my shadow self. I could feel the reddening of my body, the dirt in my mouth and twigs in my hair. I was so close at that moment to destroying all of them. I could have pointed at each one of them and turned them to flame. “Take them away!”

He stood next to me as the guards took the two women from the room, crying and pleading for mercy. I remained unmoved. I had killed for this man, this king.

A moment later they were gone.

“Rapunzel,” he said, turning to me, once we were alone. “I love only you. I—”

“Don’t speak to me,” I hissed.

Shock and fear entered his face. He’d never seen me like this. No one had ever been angry at him like this. He was a spoiled king who could have anything he wanted.

But he couldn’t have me. Not now. Not anymore.

“Good night, my king,” I snapped.

I stepped away from him and moved toward the door.

“Rapunzel,” he said. “It is you that I love. You who are my queen.”

I’m surprised I did not turn him to stone when I looked at him. He meant it, I realized. But it didn’t matter.

And then I turned and left the room, walking as calmly as I could back to my own chambers.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” I whispered, in the faint light of the fire, after I’d calmed down and let my rage melt into sorrow. “Who is the fairest of them all?”

I wiped tears from my face, and peered in to see. In the glass, I saw Yolande and her thin, tall body, the pale freckles sprinkled over her shoulders. Kissing his neck. I blinked and saw my own tear-stained face, my eyes huge and full of pain, fury.

“Rapunzel is the fairest,” the voice said.

I focused all my desire, my pain and rage, my humiliation, down into a point of light, but now there was nowhere to go. What else was there, beyond this?

“Then why did he bring them to his bed and not me?” I asked, staring at my own face. “Why, if I’m the fairest in the land? When he knows how much I want to give him a child?”

But the mirror had no answer for me.

Just my own wild face, staring back.