The Fairest of Them All

3

Over the rest of that winter, darkness seemed to envelop us, so thick it was like a physical thing. The rush of women who came to us slowed down to a faint trickle of the truly desperate. The daylight, when it came, was ghostly, pale. All that mattered was keeping the fire lit, keeping food in our stomachs, making sure the child inside me survived. We spent most of our days with dried herbs spread around us, making potions and poultices for every kind of ailment, ripping pieces of cloth to wrap around particularly potent mixtures.

My hunger did not abate. I wanted to eat everything, to lock myself in the cellar and devour every herb, every vegetable, every dried piece of meat. No matter how much we carried up and roasted in the hearth, it never seemed to be enough to fill me. Mathena even began locking the cellar at night, so that I would not run down in my half sleep and gorge myself.

The days passed slowly. To distract me, Mathena told me stories of the old goddesses—Artemis turning Daphne slowly into a tree, limb by limb, Aphrodite rising from foam and sea, Hera ruling over all of them at the side of her brother Zeus, who was also her husband—and of the days when the queen consulted her on everything from what to eat for breakfast to which of her husband’s advisors would betray him. I loved her stories. Sometimes I would get so lost in them that I’d look down at the cloth and stalks and seeds in my hands and forget what they were, why I was holding them.

At times, when I was restless and burning, I would take to the woods in the pure light of the afternoon with a fur wrap, often just with a bow and arrow, to hunt.

Which was how I found myself outside one afternoon, stalking through the forest with Brune flying above me and my bow at my side, several arrows sticking out of the quiver on my back. I scanned the trees, the ground, but I was distracted, consumed as always by thoughts of what would happen, once I had brought his child into the world.

What I would do then.

And so I didn’t hear the swishing of branches, the light step of hooves, the way I might have normally, and did not sense the stag until it was right there in front of me.

It stood in my path. I stopped, astonished. It stared back at me, and was unlike any deer I’d ever seen. It looked as bewildered as I did, and for a moment we both stood there in the snow, frozen. Antlers twisted from its skull like tree branches, a crown. Its eyes were big and black and round, soft. Beautiful.

I was mesmerized.

And then everything came into focus. I remembered why I was there, and could not believe my good fortune. Hunting was difficult in the winter, even when I was not with child, and at best I would return home with several squirrels or rabbits.

I lifted my bow and aimed.

“Stay,” I whispered.

My heart pounded. I kept my fingers perfectly still.

I released my hand and let the arrow loose. It flew through the air, and those moments seemed to stretch out and become hours, days, until the arrow landed, right in the animal’s throat. I could feel the arrow entering. I heard the wet, hard sound of it breaking the skin, entering blood and bone.

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.”

But 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.

I wanted to learn everything, the spells that could change the order of things. Not just the salves or teas that could mend hearts or make a man desire you or ease the ache of a sore shoulder. Not just the bewitching that had made a prince come to me in the tower, or the spells that could make a garden flourish. I wanted to alter lives, and history. With knowledge like that, I might one day have the power to change a man into a stag, a stag into a man, a child into a king.

A murderess back into a woman who could win the love of a prince.

One day I asked Mathena to scry my future, the way she sometimes did, scattering the tea leaves and seeing what stories they shaped themselves into. As she did, her brows furrowed and I could see that something was wrong.

“What is it?” I asked.

She passed her hand over the leaves, gathering them up, and tossed them into the fire. They hissed slightly, and glittered as the flames consumed them.

“What did you see?”

“There will be great changes,” she said, watching me with a strange mix of sadness and something else, something I could not pinpoint. “Things are happening now . . . that were not destined to happen before.”

“Is that good?” I asked.

“You have changed your future.”

“How?”

“By killing the stag and breaking the spell. There was powerful magic at work. Interfering with it always comes with some cost, but I can’t tell yet if it will benefit or harm you. Either way, you need to be ready.”

“For what?”

Mathena did not answer. She brought out an old book of spells, which I’d seen her consult for as long as I could remember. An ancient, crumbling thing she’d inherited from the line of women who had preceded her. I had never before wanted to read it myself. I’d never thought I needed to.

“Take this,” she said.

And I did, with trembling fingers. The grief emanating from the book almost suffocated me. Not only Mathena’s, but that of all the women who’d consulted it, their longings, their pain and anger and sorrow, their dark, bitter hearts.

A few days later we had news from the kingdom. We were resting, having tea by the fire, when a woman told us that the king, Josef’s father, had died unexpectedly and that Josef had ascended to the throne.

“So he is king now,” I said. “And she is queen.”

“People think King Louis might have been poisoned,” the woman told us, leaning in to whisper.

“I would not doubt it,” Mathena said. The sharp tone in her voice surprised me. She had known this king, of course. I sensed that she had not liked him. “Though whenever a king dies before his time, people talk of murder.”

“He was fine when he went to sleep,” the woman said, “and the next morning, he was gone. People say that King Louis and his son never took to each other much.” The woman crossed herself. “God rest his soul.”

“He was a difficult man,” Mathena said.

She did not say any more, but I knew he had changed during his reign, when the new priest came, and that people no longer spoke openly about magic afterward. I knew that her lover couldn’t have been sentenced to die without this king’s approval. It made sense that news of his death did not come hard to her.

Over the coming days, we heard all the stories and gossip, and I saw a bitterness in Mathena that I had not seen before, as she listened. But she did not say any more about it.

I did not press. My main thought, which I kept to myself, was of my child, and I ran my palms over my swollen belly. It was a thrilling idea: that I was carrying the child not of a prince now, but of a king.