The Fairest of Them All

2

When Mathena returned that day, just as the sun was dropping in the sky and melting over the mountains, she could sense immediately that something had happened. Brune got to me first, landing on my shoulder and nuzzling me with her beak. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor in a pool of hair and my own tears, sobbing with grief. Moments later, I heard the great door creaking open, and Mathena’s footsteps as she raced up the stairs to me. What she’d tried to protect me from had happened despite her efforts, and now her sole concern was to see that I was all right.

I was not.

“My child,” she said simply, over and over, stroking my hair back from my face. “Shhhh.”

Even in my sorry state, I noticed that her touch had no effect on me, and that I could not feel anything of her in it the way I had with the prince. It only made me feel more bereft. She seemed so distant after the kind of closeness I’d felt with him. Only his touch, it seemed, could awaken all the magic within me.

She led me out of the tower and to our little house, where she sat me in front of the fire and served me tea and stew. She heated water on the fire and washed me, rinsed the tears and dirt out of my hair, the imprint of his lips, and slipped a clean dress over my head. She wrapped up my hair and covered it with cloth. I sat, silent. Neither of us spoke about what had happened. Her magic sometimes was a convenient thing; she already knew.

In the following days, we found out all the details from the women who visited us: that Josef was marrying a princess from the East to strengthen a still-shaky alliance his father had made the year before, and that his bride was a pale, dark-haired beauty with eyes like the sea. She was named Teresa, after the saint. She would not only ensure peace between our kingdom and the East, but bring us all closer to God. This was what we heard, over and over: that the new queen would bring happiness, peace, and God’s favor to the kingdom, which had been ravaged by failing crops, illness, hunger, the threat of war.

I listened bitterly. All those spells I had watched Mathena cast for women over the years, she cast for me then, because I had forgotten them. All those teas and baths and potions, she made for me. “Bite down on this,” she said, handing me a stick of wood she’d boiled with hemlock root. “Close your eyes,” she said, handing me a steaming bowl, “imagine him, and drink this all at once, to flush him from your body.” She put elderberry bark around my neck, so that it hung next to my heart. She rummaged through my room and when she found the sachet I’d made, she burned it, then swept every bit of earth and herb from my hearth, down the stairs, and onto the forest floor. But I was committed to my suffering and nothing worked to rid me of it. It was the first rule of witchery, at least the kind she practiced on me then. One had to be open to it. Changing hearts was something else altogether.

Still, I could not wallow for long, even as the prince’s wedding approached. The days grew shorter, leaves began to cover the ground, and we had much work to do to prepare for the long winter, which would not wait for any human grief. We had a root cellar to fill with vegetables and meats, a garden to harvest and cover before the snow came, firewood and wild herbs to gather, birds and animals to hunt and butcher. It seemed fitting, the earth dying, the plants going to seed, all the leaves gathering on the ground and rotting there. I liked stalking through the dead forest with my bow and arrow, searching for prey. In a perverse way, I delighted in it. If my heart was going to be broken, the earth might as well be, too, and there we were, scavenging from it before it retreated under ice and snow.

So, slowly, we filled the root cellar with beets and carrots and turnips and onions and garlic, and prepared the soil to turn back into itself.

At the same time, I began to eat. More than I ever had. I craved meat and attacked the store of it in the root cellar, to the point that Mathena began to worry about having enough food for the winter, despite the abundance of our garden and the heaping bags we carried down each day. I promised her I would continue to hunt, that I did not care about the cold or the snow. We would be fine. At the very least, we would survive. In the meantime, I took hunks of venison and pheasant to the tower, gnawed them down to bone.

And then the swelling came, and the sickness in the mornings, and the strange shiftings in mood that left me in fits of giggles one hour, and wailing the next, as we worked. Through all of it she watched me, and brewed me special teas that, considering what happened, I’m not sure were for my benefit. But that is something I do not like to think about.

Josef’s wedding day came on one of those last days of autumn, after the leaves had all fallen and our garden had been harvested and covered for winter. For us, it was a regular day, or so we pretended, and we did not speak of the royal marriage. We sat by the fire, repairing some clothes. It was good for me, watching clothes mend under my hands, seeing how broken things can be fixed, that with each pull of thread the world kept moving, healing itself, becoming something new.

Brune walked back and forth across the mantel while Loup slept in Mathena’s lap. Outside, the wind rattled through the trees, carrying the faint scent of rot.

“Rapunzel,” Mathena said.

I looked up.

“I know you’ve been feeling strange lately, have you not?”

I shrugged. “It’s the season,” I said.

“No.” She shook her head. Her face was pained, which was unusual for her. “It’s because you are with child.”

“What?” I dropped the shift in my hands. I looked down at my belly, under the thick wool shift I was wearing. The slight swelling there I had attributed to my recent appetite, which I was sure derived from grief. “How do you know?”

“I’ve been watching you,” she said. “You have all the signs of it, and your cycle has not come, has it?”

“No,” I admitted. I had not given much mind to that, either. I did not expect my body to function the same way it had before, after all that had happened.

“Have you lain with anyone besides the prince?”

“Of course not!” I said. My face reddened with embarrassment. We had never spoken about my lying with Josef in the tower, and how foolish I’d felt afterward.

“I just wanted to make sure,” she said. “There are some ardent poets around these parts at times.”

“Mathena!” I said, blushing. “Don’t be horrible.” I felt my belly again, the swelling that seemed to have doubled in the last few minutes, and looked up at her. “Do you really think I’m pregnant?”

“Yes,” she said. “Can you not feel it yourself?”

Even as she answered, this new knowledge was moving through me, taking up residency in my blood and bones. The idea that a child could be growing inside me . . . in the midst of all that sadness and loss, autumn and death. It was unthinkable. A miracle.

A gift.

“So we will have to do something, then,” she said, matter-of-fact, as if we were talking about a bad harvest.

I narrowed my eyes. “Do something, how?”

“What we have done countless times, Rapunzel, for the women who come to us,” she said. “Do you want to have the child of a man who belongs to another?”

The fire sputtered and crackled. Outside, the wind swept about the house, bending the trees.

“No,” I said. “I want this baby.” And the moment I said it, I knew it to be true. I wanted this child, born of him and me.

“There are ways to remedy this. It will be as if it never happened at all, you know that, and then you can be pure for the man that you will marry.”

“No,” I said. “I want this child!”

For the first time in weeks, something like joy entered me, and it started to sink into me, the miracle happening just below my skin. There was a child inside of me. Already I loved it. I knew it was a boy. I could see his gold hair, his bright eyes.

I looked up at her and laughed, and it was a laugh that came from pure happiness. The way I sometimes felt watching the flowers and plants come back to life every spring, when it had seemed impossible only days before, when the world was covered in snow and ice and frost. The natural world was full of miracles. This body of mine was a miracle.

She watched me, worried, as I leapt up from my seat and spun around, right there in the little room, in front of the fire, with our sewing strewn around us and batches of dried sage hanging from every window and doorway.

“A child, Mathena!” I said.

I imagined myself happy, glowing, my son against my breast, swathed in my hair. It was the warmest image I could conjure, perhaps because my own mother was lost to me. This would be a child born of love. It did not matter that his father was, that very day, wedding another. I would love our child enough for both of us.

I danced over to Mathena, grabbed her hand, and pulled her to her feet. Brune and Loup just watched suspiciously, most likely wondering if I’d gone mad. “Be happy for me!” I said. “Think how beautiful a child it will be. How much life he’ll bring to this house.”

Perhaps it was in my mind or perhaps the child reached to me, in that moment, unfurling his fist like a flower, uncoiling himself, pressing himself into my heart and making me whole again.

“Please,” I said, gripping her hands in mine, “help me bring this child into the world. Help me be a good mother to him, as you have been to me.” I looked into her dark eyes, inhaled the comforting scent of spices and bark that clung to her all the time.

She did not answer me, not then, but when she took me into her arms and passed her hand over my face, stroking my cheek, I thought it was her way of saying yes. That she loved me and would love my child, no matter what.

And for the first time in weeks, I felt entirely at peace.

It changed everything, knowing that I would be a mother. My whole life seemed to shift into focus. Even when reports came of the extravagant royal wedding, how beautiful the bride was, how happy the couple seemed, I thought only of my child. My body suddenly was an alien, wonderful thing, and now that the garden was ready for winter, I spent hours up in my tower alone, my hair strewn around me, watching my shape in the mirror, looking for every little change. I rubbed oil on my belly to help prepare it for what was coming. I asked Mathena to teach me every spell she could, to make my child strong, handsome, a warrior. A king.

I asked her, too, about what life had been like, for her, at court, now that I was carrying the child of a prince.

“What did you do there?” I asked one evening, as we drank tea together next to the fire. “What is it like to live in a great palace?”

“I spent much time with the queen,” she said. The flames threw shadows across her face. Outside, the air was crisp and clear, the world bracing itself for the first snow.

“You mean . . . his mother?” I was surprised she had not mentioned such a thing before.

“Yes,” she said. “Queen Anne.”

“I didn’t know you were so important!”

She laughed at my enthusiasm. “I gave her advice. Spells. Like what we do now for the women who come see us, I did that for her then. She was a great believer in the stars. I expect she still is.”

“You read the stars for her?”

Our work suddenly had a glamour to it that hadn’t been there before. I imagined myself, sitting beside the queen—I pictured a stunning woman draped in jewels—reading her cards, her stars, her tea leaves.

“She wouldn’t do anything without checking the sky. People used to be like that then.”

“At court? I thought magic wasn’t allowed there. That’s why we can’t call ourselves witches.”

She looked at me sharply. “Don’t ever use that word, Rapunzel. Not even here. Do you understand? People can be hanged for that now.”

I sat back, reprimanded, but her words were hard to understand when such terrors seemed so far away. I set my tea down on the floor.

“Things were different then,” she said, leaning back on the couch. “It wasn’t a bad thing to be known as . . . an enchantress.” She smiled at the word. “People believed in magic. They still do, obviously, but things changed in the palace before I left. A new priest came. The king reformed, and it became a crime to talk openly about such things.”

I nodded, but I was already far away, imagining Mathena and the queen sitting side by side, the queen’s jewel-covered hand upturned on a table between them.

I wanted a life like that. I wanted to have more in my life than this cottage in the forest.

“Here,” Mathena said, setting down her tea and grabbing my wrist, “let’s go outside.” She dropped the branch she’d been holding. In front of us, the fire leapt up as if to grab it.

We walked outside, the sky black and clear above us, scattered with thousands of stars. The garden squatted down next to us. Above us, the tower seemed to stretch indefinitely.

She sat, cross-legged, on the grass, gathering her long skirt into her lap. I sat next to her, despite the cold. Breathing in, I smelled smoke and rotting leaves.

“I spent a lot of time at court just staring at the sky,” she said.

I stared up with her, wondering at the mysteries embedded with it. Already I could make out the characters in the great stories she’d told me. Pegasus. Orion, Artemis’s lover, with his bright sword. Scorpio, who killed him, stretching his tail across the sky.

“Can you see anything about my son?” I asked.

She hesitated. “I think he will be born in Cancer,” she said. “Do you see it up there, the crab?”

I followed her finger to the faint spots in the northern sky, the line of stars splitting into thin claws. “Yes! Hercules kicked the crab into the sky, right, after Hera sent it to him? While he was battling the Hydra?”

She smiled. “You remember. It’s been years since I told you those stories.”

“I remember all of them,” I said.

“He will be strong and gifted,” she said. “Like his mother.”

We lay back, side by side, watching the stories in the sky. I imagined my own body being placed in the heavens, outlined by diamonds.

I felt a rumbling through the earth before I heard it. I sat up, instinctively placing my palms over my belly. It sounded as if a whole army were heading toward us, with hundreds of horses storming over the ground, their massive hooves shod with iron.

Mathena sat up and put her hand on my shoulder, keeping me seated. “It’s all right,” she said. “Stay where you are.”

The hooves got louder. Leaves shook on the trees around us, rattling together, and then I saw several figures—five, I counted—men with sacks raised up in their arms, knives and crossbows strapped to their sides, approaching through the woods. In the dark, their bodies were hulking shadows and it was impossible to tell where man and horse divided, so that it seemed as if great mythic beasts were bearing down on us.

Bandits.

My heart hammered in my chest. They came right toward us. I ignored Mathena and scraped at the ground, trying to move out of their way, but I felt as if my own feet were covered in iron. The sound deafened me, the earth shook beneath me. All the while, Mathena sat calmly watching.

And then they were upon us, we were right in their path and there was no way to move. I bunched myself into a ball, tears streaming down my face, waiting to be run down.

The sound, the smell of horse and man passed over me. The horses ran right through me as if I were not even there. I twisted my neck and watched their shadows disappearing into the woods on the other side of us.

For a moment, I wasn’t sure what had just happened. If it weren’t for the taste of dirt in my mouth, the overturned earth all around us, I might have thought I’d imagined it.

I looked over at Mathena, who was steadily watching me.

“What . . . ?” I began, not sure what to say.

“You’re safe,” she said.

“Those were bandits, weren’t they?” I’d heard stories about them for as long as I could remember—how they lived in a house by the river, outside the kingdom’s rule, preying on those who entered the forest.

She nodded. “Yes, but they cannot hurt us. Not here.”

I looked at her, amazed, this woman who’d read the stars for a queen.

It was the first time I had seen one of Mathena’s protection spells at work.

That night I slept in the tower and was plagued by strange dreams, in which my son was alive and whole, come to see me. His blue eyes stared up at me, his fists unfolded and became massive. Antlers rose from his skull, twisting like branches into the air, puncturing the clouds.

I woke up with my palms under my belly, cradling him, on my side on the stone floor, clutching my stomach. I was so ravenous I couldn’t make it to the house and the cupboards there. I wrapped myself in furs and flew down the winding stairs and out into the winter frost and I dropped onto the ground, shoving leaves and dirt into my mouth. My child wailed inside me. I could hear him, blending in with the wind that whipped my hair into a storm around and above me. I wished I had two mouths, three mouths, to take it all in, to eat the earth, the leaves and grass, the acorns that tasted as marvelous as cream.

After, I hauled myself back up the stairs, shaking from the cold, crawling on my hands and knees up the stone.

I dropped the fur from my shoulders and looked in the mirror, and what I saw seared itself into my memory: I was reflected in the mad light of the roaring fire, half in shadows and smeared in dirt. My slight, rounded belly. My hair like a wild robe hanging to the floor and swirling on the stone, scattered through with leaves and bark and frost. My breasts, too, were becoming rounder, and my nipples were black with dirt. Earth pushing through my body, tangling around my stomach, entering my womb.

Outside the wind howled. The moon cast its eye on everything. The fire crackled, devouring the wood. Inside me, he was screaming, and the world turned feral.

The mirror seemed to ripple, like water, as I peered into it.

This is who I am, I thought.

The woman in the glass. Wild and broken.

I thought of the stories Mathena had told me of my real mother, who craved rapunzel and wasted away without it, because she could not stand to eat anything else. She could not grow it in her own garden, apparently, which was as barren as Mathena’s was lush and full. I imagined my mother standing at the window, growing thin from hunger, longing, that inexpressible need for something just beyond her reach to fill the dark space inside, even after she’d birthed me. And me, wailing beside her until she was forced to make me stop.

Something blasted up inside me, a memory or not-memory, a banshee cry, a feeling that there was a dark force nearby wanting to harm me and that I would fight and die to protect myself, my child, from it. And then it seemed that this darkness was inside of me. Passed down from my mother to me.

Winter came quickly and buried us in snow, and we sewed, mended, embroidered, ate the food and burned the wood we had gathered during the vibrant summer months and the bountiful fall. Mathena made me teas to keep me strong and healthy. The occasional woman came and went, the more desperate ones willing to march through drifts that came up to their thighs to see us—sometimes they complained of love, sometimes of hunger and bare pantries, not enough food to last through the winter. I knew these women’s desperation now, and became a better practitioner for it.

Occasionally, we heard word from court, usually half rumors and gossip that came to us third- or fourth-hand. I was always eager to hear of it. Of him, his wife, the palace.

One day a young woman came to our door, an already small girl thinning from disease. I was stirring a stew over the stove. Mathena was spreading salve on the girl’s back when the girl told us the news.

“The new princess is pregnant,” she said. “People say it’s a good sign, that things will be better for us now.”

I dropped the spoon I was holding. “The wife of Prince Josef is with child?”

“What wonderful news,” Mathena said quickly. “That we will have an heir.”

“Yes,” the girl said, her feverish face shining with hope. “They say the princess has already taken to her bed. She doesn’t want to take any chances.”

“It is a good sign indeed,” Mathena said, placing her hand on the girl’s shoulder. When the girl bent over in pain a moment later, Mathena looked over at me worriedly. Worried more for me than the girl, I realized.

I stood there in stunned silence. I don’t know why I was so surprised by the news, but I was. Teresa was his wife, her main purpose was to bear him heirs. Yet somehow it had felt like what had happened in that tower was special, mine alone. Maybe she could have him, but only I could have his child.

Mathena focused back on the girl. “Breathe this in,” she said, holding a packet of lemon balm and lavender to the girl’s face, “until it passes.”

The girl breathed in. She sat back up, clearly exhausted.

With shaking hands, I wrapped various treatments for the girl to take with her—salves and teas, special incense and potion—as Mathena helped the girl back into her dress. My shock shifted to anger, sorrow. Teresa’s child would be born in the palace, become a prince or princess, have everything in the world laid out for it, while my own son would have nothing at all.

Mathena wove protection spells for the girl as she left, to protect her from bandits if not from the disease.

“Do you really believe what you said?” I asked, after the girl disappeared from sight. “That it is a good sign?” My voice was hurt, accusing.

“No,” she said, giving me a surprised look. “Of course not.”

I nodded, blinking back tears.

“Rapunzel,” Mathena said, sitting next to me. “You must forget him. For now.”

The way she was watching me scared me. I could feel myself weaken, feel her magic at work. She was trying to make me tired and relaxed enough that I might not care what she did, or might find it easier to listen to her than to my own heart. I blinked, to stop it.

“I have forgotten,” I lied.

She sighed, not even bothering to acknowledge my statement. “It is the duty of his wife, to bear him children.” She hesitated, put her hand on my arm soothingly. “Not yours. It’s still not too late to be rid of it.”

“Of what?”

She gestured to my belly. “It’s more difficult now, but possible.”

“No,” I said, gaping at her. How could she suggest such a thing?

“You are destined for great things, Rapunzel,” she said. “You’ve become a powerful practitioner, and your beauty is a gift. A great gift that gives you strength and increases your magic. You’ll have many more gifts in this world. A child will only hinder you.”

“Mathena! You’re speaking about my son.”

“In the world, he’ll be a bastard. The queen’s child will have everything your own son will be denied. Don’t you want those things?”

She continued to watch me in that same intent way.

Her words confused me. “Yes, but . . . what can I do? I cannot have those things. It’s too late.”

“Be patient,” she said. “Haven’t I taught you that the world can change in an instant?”