The Fairest of Them All

  It was torturous, as I moved from sleep to dream to the waking world, and back again. Several times I woke and saw spirits standing over me, watching me, come to punish me—the prophetess, Teresa, Snow White herself, though she was alive and Gilles had betrayed me—and when I tried to scream, they put their hands over my mouth and pushed me back into a dream.

  The next morning, my husband entered the room. Even in my weakened state I could feel every muscle in my body tense.

  He did not look like the king I knew anymore.

  He came to me, sat down on the bed beside me. His face was haggard. His eyes, usually so alert, were red, watery, showing his lack of sleep. A beard had partly grown in, making him look years older. But more than that, it was the way he carried himself, the heaviness with which he came to me, sat on the bed, sighed, and laid a hand on my face.

  “Did you find her?” I asked, trembling.

  He shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, placing my own hand on his.

  What a sight we must have been, me too ill to move, lying on my bed of sweat-soaked hair. Him, beaten and ragged, next to me.

  “I’m sure now that it is the work of our enemies,” he said. “Her mother’s family, tired of peace.”

  “Oh.” I just stared at him. “You think they . . . took her? Would they hurt her?”

  He shook his head. “They won’t harm her. But they want to go to war with us, and they could not do that with her here. They hate our kingdom. They blame me for her mother’s death. They think I killed her, just as they say I killed my father before that . . . Though I would never have hurt either of them.”

  “I know you wouldn’t,” I said. “I know it too well.” And then, though I knew I should keep silent, I asked, “Are you sorry you married me?”

  He looked at me. “No,” he said. “I’ve always been enchanted by you. I would have married you instead of Teresa, had I had the choice.” I felt tears prick at my eyes as he spoke. “But I have suffered for it.”

  I clasped his hand, realized that he was trembling. What a terrible thing it is, to feel your king trembling, even if you know he is only a man, and your husband. “How do you mean?”

  “Because you are a witch.” The word made me flinch, but I saw that he did not mean it unkindly. “They are saying that Snow White disappearing is my punishment.”

  I nodded. “So now,” I asked, “what will you do?”

  He sighed as he ran his palm over my face, wiping away my tears. “We will go to war.”

  When I was feeling strong enough to stand, I wrapped myself in a fur and went out to the mews to confront Gilles.

  He was inside, feeding the hawks.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Where is she?”

  His face registered the barest surprise, but the expression quickly disappeared. “I killed her in the forest, as you asked.”

  I stepped toward him. “That was not her heart. It was something else.”

  “You doubt my loyalty, my queen?”

  I wanted to slap him across the face. “How dare you lie to me!” I said, spitting the words. “What was in that box? Tell me what it was!”

  “A heart.”

  “What heart? She lives! I know that Snow White still lives.”

  He looked around, then strode over to me, placed his hand over my mouth. “Be careful, my queen,” he said into my ear. “You must not let anyone hear you speak of this.”

  I struggled in his arms.

  He continued. “You would have our kingdom go to war over your petty jealousies. She is the heir to the throne! She’s just a child! How could you have asked such a thing, and of me?”

  My hair was tangling around my neck, pulling at my skin. He tightened his arms around me. I continued to struggle against him, furious to feel his love and worry pulsing through.

  “Let me go!” I screamed, biting into his palm, and he released me suddenly, causing me to fall to the floor.

  I stood up, my whole body alive with anger. I might have been a bolt of lightning, a storm.

  “I could not kill her,” he said. “Not even for you.”

  “Then where did you take her? Where is she?”

  “I took her to where she would be safe from you.”

  “In a house full of criminals?” I yelled. As I accused him, I realized how much it pained me, how much I hated the image of her being abused. I had loved Snow White like a mother once and I loved her still, despite everything. “I wanted her dead. I did not want her to be tortured.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She is in the forest, in a house of bandits.”

  He did not seem to understand me. His confusion seemed genuine. “I did not kill her,” he said. “I took her into the forest, but I did not take her to a house of bandits. I made sure she was safe.”

  “Then where is she?”

  The room seemed to be spinning. The falcons and hawks became terrifying in their hoods.

  He paused. “I took her to Mathena. She has promised to protect her.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. And then I knew, suddenly, that I had to find her and fix what I’d done. I felt it, down to my blood and bones, the terrible mistake I’d made. I turned and ran to the stables and demanded a horse, and then I spurred my heels into its side and raced through the palace gates, past the soldiers’ encampments, the streets lined with houses.

  “Go!” I cried, digging my spurs into the horse, and we flew through the kingdom.

  Guards rushed to follow, but I was driven by passion, by magic, and soon I was out of their sight altogether.

  Nothing made sense anymore. All I knew was that Snow White was in the house of bandits, and that Mathena had taken her there. I knew I had been the one to send Snow White to the forest, to ask for her heart, but I’d never meant to make her suffer the way she was suffering now.

  When I was exhausted, I stopped, and made a camp for myself in the leaves. After feeding and watering my horse, I let down my hair and wrapped it around me like a blanket.

  As I began to drift to sleep, I could see Mathena up in the tower, staring at the castle, imagining me as queen within it. She had known how much I would suffer, not being able to give the king an heir. Knew how much I would come to hate the child Snow White.

  Seven years I’d spent in the kingdom, before she saved me. Seven years after my child died, I went back and became a queen. Now eight more years had passed.

  The world was hazy around me.

  I was half sleeping, half awake.

  Suddenly I understood something. She had been lying in wait, hadn’t she, all these years? She’d been a favorite at the court for all that time, and then she was cast out. Her beloved, condemned to death. She’d tried to save him, but ended up giving him a fate that was worse than dying.

  I knew then why she’d taken me into the forest all those years before, and why she’d spent all that time training me to be a witch.

  I sat up, my heart hammering in my chest. All around me the forest moved, shifted, hiding its secrets.

  I was her revenge. The one who would avenge her. I had already done it, hadn’t I? I had managed to marry the king and become his queen. I had tried to kill the kingdom’s sole heir. I had not been able to produce an heir of my own.

  She had foreseen all of it, set all of it into motion.

  At dawn, I rode through the forest, past the ancient trees and the twisted river until I saw the tower stretching through the trees, and soon afterward I reached the cottage.

  The garden was spilling over with rotting vegetables. She had more bounty than she knew what to do with and could not tend to it all alone.

  I pushed open the front door and walked in. My hair seemed to crackle around me as it swept over the dirt floor.

  She sat on the couch by the fireplace, a pile of dried sage in front of her. Brune was perched on the mantel, spreading her wings
. Loup lay curled in a ball in front of the fire. Stew heated over the embers, and I recognized the smell of cooking carrots, gravy, herbs, meat—a concoction I’d eaten countless times in my youth.

  “Rapunzel,” she said, looking up at me, as if she’d been expecting me.

  It was years earlier, suddenly, and nothing else had happened. I might have dreamed everything. She watched me, and I blinked, looked away. She was still a more powerful witch than I’d ever be.

  “Come sit with me,” she said, making her voice warm, inviting.

  I walked over to the chair across from her and sat down like any number of heartbroken souls had before. I had grown more powerful over the years. I could feel those souls, the clamor of their pain, their furtiveness as they entered the dark woods to consult with witches.

  “You look wonderful,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You look just the same.” It was true. Her hair was still deep black, and her face was as I remembered. She had always been a stunning woman. “I could have been gone for one minute.”

  “Perhaps you were,” she said, smiling.

  I had a woozy feeling, wondering if I’d imagined everything. “Stop it.”

  She went back to her sage, sorting it into bundles. “You’ve turned out just as I hoped you would.”

  There was a pain in my gut, a sick feeling taking hold. “You did hope things would happen this way, didn’t you?”

  “What do you mean, child?”

  “You hate the kingdom. You hate everything about it.”

  She looked at me, and her eyes were hard in a way I’d never noticed before. Had they always been that way? “I never pretended to feel otherwise.”

  “But you wanted me to be queen. Why?”

  “You loved a king.”

  “Don’t lie to me,” I said. “You know he wasn’t my true love, that I was just a foolish girl. You did not want me to see him, to go to a ball, to have his child. You only wanted me to be queen.”

  “I wanted a good life for you.”

  I leaned forward. “You sent me to the palace for revenge, didn’t you?”

  She looked at me. Her brown eyes seared into me. “You are queen,” she said, “and you are with the man you wanted. And you are the most beautiful woman in all the kingdom.”

  “Other than her.”

  “Who is to say?”

  “The mirror you gave me,” I said.

  She shook her head. “You cannot blame me for your own thoughts, my child. For the fears that come over you, when you look at yourself in the glass.”

  “Where is she, Mathena?”

  “Who?”

  “Snow White. I know Gilles brought her to you. Why would he do that?”

  “He wanted to save her. He is a good man, Rapunzel. A better man than that ridiculous king.”

  “You took her to the house of the bandits,” I said. “Why would you do that?”

  “Why does it matter? You wanted to eat her heart.”

  “But I . . . ”

  “Stop it!” she said, sharp and bitter. “Do not be weak. Gilles only brought her here because of you.”

  “Why do you hate the kingdom so much?”

  “Because they cast me out,” she spat. “After all I’d done for them.”

  She was shaking with anger. From the mantel, Brune let out a long squawk. The whole room turned black with her rage.

  “Because the king and queen betrayed you?”

  “They all betrayed me. I loved the king and queen, and he forced himself on me, and I was innocent. No one defended me.”

  “King Louis? He forced himself on you?”

  She nodded to me as it sank in.

  “He raped you,” I said. “That is why you sent her to the bandits. So they would do the same to her.”

  “Yes,” she said, through gritted teeth.

  “What happened?”

  I reached over and took her hand. A lock of my hair was caught on my arm. I felt a spark of energy when I touched her, and then all her agony and rage moved into me, in a rush of darkness that nearly knocked me unconscious. She had always been hidden to me, before this moment. Now I understood why.

  “One night, he sent for me. I thought the queen needed me, I rushed to his room. He had had much to drink. I resisted, but it did not matter. He was accustomed to taking whatever he wanted.” Her speech had all the fever of words long held back and being released for the first time. “He was a king. He did not care that I loved another, or that I loved his wife the queen. He took me as if I were a common whore.”

  “And then?” I asked, choking through the blackness of her heart. I had to twist my hand away, for some relief. She barely seemed to notice.

  “Marcus found me that night. I told him what had happened. When he confronted the king, Louis named him a heretic and sentenced him to death. I told the queen what had happened and begged her to intercede, but she blamed me for all of it.”

  I was speechless, watching her.

  “No one interceded. None of my friends at court dared to stand up to the king. When they were leading Marcus to the gibbet, to hang him . . . That is when I turned him into a stag. It was the only way to save him. As they were leading him from his cell to the platform.”

  “And then you couldn’t change him back.”

  “No. I tried but I never could. I tried for nearly twenty years.”

  “Is that when you left the kingdom? After you changed Marcus?”

  “They banished me. I had to leave after performing that kind of magic. That’s when I came here, into the forest.”

  Something seemed off in what she was saying. “To . . . You mean that’s when you came here, to this cottage, this tower?”

  She nodded slowly, watching me intently.

  “But I thought you went with me,” I said. “You lived next door to my parents, my mother who longed for the rapunzel in your garden.”

  “No,” she said. “I came straight here. To leave the kingdom, and be closer to Marcus. I realized I was pregnant with you shortly after that.”

  “But . . . ” I stopped. It was too unthinkable to say out loud.

  She nodded. “I am your mother, Rapunzel.”

  “No. That does not make sense. My mother . . . ” I realized, then, that everything I thought I knew about myself, she had told me. The abusive parents, the rapunzel my father had stolen, the mother wasting away from hunger and need. I looked at her again. “You . . . ?”

  “Yes,” she said. Her eyes grew wet as she watched me. “I thought it was better that you not know.”

  “Is . . . Marcus was my father?” I lowered my voice as a realization of horror descended on me. “Am I the daughter of a stag, as the gossips at court say? Is that why you did not want to tell me?”

  She shook her head sadly. “My daughter,” she said, reaching out to take my hand in her own. “Marcus is not your father.”

  “But then . . . ” The momentary relief was replaced by something worse. A dawning notion that was more horrible. Unthinkable.

  “Not . . . the king?”

  Her eyes did not leave my face. Her hand gripped my own. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, she nodded.

  A dizzy unreality made me numb. It took many moments for me to really understand what she was saying, and what it meant.

  “That would mean . . . ”

  I looked to her, waiting for her to tell me this was all a mistake, but she just sat watching me with those wet, sad eyes.

  “Josef,” I said, finally, verbalizing the terrible thought. “He is my half-brother.”

  “Yes.”

  “I am married to my brother?”

  “Yes. As Hera was to Zeus.”

  I snatched my hands out of hers, and put them on my belly. I was sick. The same sick I’d felt realizing that I’d eaten the heart of an animal. All those years, all that time. Him climbing my hair, coming back for me, making me his wife. My brother. And she had known. My mother.

  I shook my head. “Why wou
ld you—You wanted me to marry him. You killed Teresa so that I could marry him. How could you do that, when you knew?”

  “The prophecy,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The prophecy. An old prophecy, made centuries ago by a very great sorceress. She said that the kingdom will end when a brother and sister lie together on the throne. Now, finally, the prophecy is fulfilled. This kingdom will end with you. Even now the armies are gathering outside the castle gates. The Chauvin pendants are falling. The one heir, Snow White, is gone.”

  “Is this all . . . because of what they did to you? You would destroy the whole kingdom for it?”

  “I loved my king, I loved my queen, I loved the court, more than anything,” she said, with a fury and grief I’d never heard from her before.

  “Is it because of what I did to Marcus?” I asked quietly. “Is that what made you do this?”

  She shook her head. “No. It was done before then, Rapunzel. I hoped you were the child of Marcus and me, that I had something left of him. And then you were born, and I knew you were the child of the king.”

  “How?”

  She reached down and picked up a lock of my hair, which had pooled onto the couch before falling to the floor below. I braced myself for the onslaught of feeling, which came forth with such vehemence I nearly lost my breath. “You had this blond hair, his blue eyes, his pale skin. You were the most uncommonly beautiful child, and I knew it was your royal blood.”

  “You must have hated me,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I have always loved you. I do love you. I gave you this kingdom. I gave you a spectacular life.”

  “I slept with my own brother. My own brother is my husband. It’s an abomination! My child—” I pictured his twisted little body.

  “We are daughters of Artemis, I’ve always told you that. Zeus and Hera were brother and sister, husband and wife, and they ruled over all the other gods. You’re a queen, Rapunzel. The most powerful woman in the kingdom. You were right to ask for the heart of Snow White, to claim what is yours.”

  “What about the rapunzel?” I asked. “Is that . . . ”