The Fairest of Them All

She looked up at me and I was struck by how lovely her eyes were, wide and gray. “My horse,” she said weakly.

  “I’ll take him to the stable and make sure he is tended,” Mathena said, grabbing her own skins and moving outside.

  I looked at the girl more closely, and was surprised to see that her face was marked with tears, which had frozen on her skin in tiny crystals. What a beautiful effect, I thought—it was as if her skin were covered in jewels. She stepped inside, shivering.

  Underneath her furs, which I helped her take off and then hung by the fire to dry, she was dressed richly, in silk and velvet.

  “Come and sit,” I said. I led her to the far side of the couch, next to the fire, where she could warm herself, and put the kettle to heat with herbs for a nice tea. I watched, transfixed, as her tears melted and ran down her face.

  Mathena returned a few minutes later, her face red from the cold.

  “How far did you travel?” I asked.

  “I came from the palace,” the girl said, her voice cracking, and I looked at her in surprise.

  Aside from the prince, no one from the court itself had ever come to us, in all this time.

  The fire crackled, kicking up shadows over her face. She had a small red heart-shaped mouth, auburn hair twisted in braids around her face. And on her face, a faint black marking, next to her right eye.

  “My name is Clareta,” she said.

  I handed her the cup and her hands trembled as she took it. As I did, a few loose strands of my hair must have brushed her skin, because I could feel, suddenly, her guilt and longing, as if they’d smacked me. A moment later, I knew what she’d done. I could see it.

  “Do you serve the queen?” Mathena asked, sitting next to her on the couch.

  “Yes,” she said. “No one must know I have come here.”

  “Of course.” Mathena glanced up at me, watched me as I sat in a chair across from them.

  “I am her favorite lady-in-waiting,” she whispered. “I have heard that you can be trusted, and that you know how to heal . . . how to do things. That you know magic.”

  “Where do you hear this?”

  “The queen mother,” she whispered, “before she died last year.”

  Mathena nodded. “She was a good friend to me once. Do not worry. You can trust us. I know it’s a crime for you to come here.”

  “Thank you,” Clareta said. “I love my lady truly, but of late I have been . . . ” Her eyes welled up, and she was having difficulty speaking.

  “Been what?” I asked, impatient. The fire roared, thunderous. Above it, Brune stretched her wings.

  “I have done wrong by her.”

  “You have lain with the king,” I heard myself saying.

  The girl gasped, looking at me. Tears streamed down her face. “How do you know that?”

  “I can see it,” I said. And I could: see his arms encircling her, that hair of hers unbraided, dropping down her back, into his palms.

  Half of me wanted to soothe her, the other half wanted to smack her wet face. How could she think he would ever love her, if he wasn’t able to love me? I knew, suddenly, that he had been with many women. He was a king, after all. I must have been one of countless lovers. The knowledge leaked through me like a poison.

  “What happened?” Mathena asked, making her voice soothing and low. She shot me a warning look and I leaned back, but did not take my focus off Clareta.

  “I lay with him,” she said. “I knew I was doing wrong, and yet he called me to him and I . . . I went with him. I don’t know why I did it, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice, when it happened.”

  “And now?”

  “And now he does not look at me.”

  Mathena held the girl’s hand. “I know how painful that must be.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And the way she looks at me, I’m afraid that she knows. My heart is broken already, but I do not want to break hers, too.”

  “Why not?” I asked, leaning in. “Why do you love her so much?”

  “She is kind,” she said, “and beautiful. She is a good woman, too, and is always saying her devotions. My family was starving and she took me in, made me one of her ladies. I don’t know if you know how hard it is now, in the kingdom, for those not favored by the court. My family has nothing. If she finds out, if I lose my position, they will starve. And she and the king, together—it is what we all long for. The way the king looks at her! For one day he looked at me like that and I couldn’t resist it. I know it was not my place, I’m not a princess or a queen, I’m not his, and yet . . . ”

  Mathena put her hand on my shoulder, and I brushed it off.

  “For a moment,” she said, “I felt like I was her. Someone like her.”

  “You liked lying with the king?” I asked softly, letting my voice wash over her, like a soothing hand.

  “I liked the person I became when I was with him. I am someone who is never happy.”

  I tilted my head, watching her. “Does he love his wife?”

  She nodded.

  “You want him to love you, the way he loves her?”

  “I did, yes.”

  “You want to be sure that she never knows what you’ve done,” Mathena said.

  She nodded. “Please help me.”

  “Rapunzel,” Mathena said, “can you get some arrowroot and dandelion from the cellar?”

  I looked sharply at her, then realized that I was shaking, barely breathing. I stood and went down to the root cellar, where we kept the dried herbs and potions along with our food. The scent of earth overwhelmed me, as always. It was like being buried alive.

  Mathena was right to give me a moment alone, I realized. I leaned against the wall, crouched down onto the dirt floor.

  Everything came back to me. The wounds so fresh it seemed as if no time had passed at all. I wanted to scream with frustration. What good was our craft if I could end up like this, mourning a moment that had long passed? Surely Mathena’s powers extended past this. Surely mine did.

  I felt something land on my shoulder, shocking me back to the present. Brune had flown downstairs and was rubbing her beak against my face. I laughed, cooed to her. It was odd behavior for such a ferocious predator, but I was used to it. I’d watched Brune rip apart animals limb to limb, and had turned away so I wouldn’t retch. I’d watched her race through the air more quickly than one of my own arrows, right to her target.

  “Let’s go,” I said, quickly gathering the dandelion and arrowroot. As an afterthought, I grabbed some dragon’s root and stuffed it in my pocket.

  When I returned, Clareta was at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of stew Mathena had set before her.

  I spread out the arrowroot and dandelion on the counter, and began to mix them together into a piece of cloth. As I did, Mathena stood and left the room. I watched her step down to the root cellar.

  “Thank you,” Clareta said, pausing from her meal and looking up at me. Of course, she must have been famished, unused to such hard travel. “Thank you for helping me.”

  I did not respond, but focused on my work. I added in the bit of dragon’s root, too, infusing it with intent. There was no harm in making her more unappealing to the king. More ugly than a snake, I mouthed.

  When I held the bundle under her face, finally, and asked her to breathe in, I could feel the pain easing in her. The whole house became lighter, instantly. Even the fire seemed to shift color, becoming more brilliant.

  I could not help but think how weak she was. The magic worked on her so quickly.

  “Now that is better, isn’t it?” I asked softly.

  Mathena reappeared and walked over slowly, a strange look on her face. She handed Clareta a small, cloth-wrapped package.

  “Here is something else,” she said, “because I’ve taken pity on you.”

  “What is it?” Clareta asked.

  I looked at Mathena, trying to catch her eye. I’d never seen her do anything like this before. Her face was bright, alive. Only I would
have seen how carefully she was watching the girl. The package bulged and I thought I saw a faint glimmer come from inside of it. I blinked and shook my head.

  “I’ve gathered some special charms for you,” Mathena said. “Brew this into a tea for your queen. It will ensure that she will never know what you have done. No one else should drink it. Only her.”

  Clareta took the package and clutched it in her hands, as if Mathena had handed her a bag of jewels. Her eyes were wet with pain, with gratitude.

  After, I led her to the tower. She was still exhausted from her travel, and from the magic working to calm her. There was no way she could return home tonight.

  We crunched over snow. The torch in my hands flickered in the night air. I was thinking only about the packages she was holding.

  “How strange that there is a tower, in the forest,” she said dreamily. The moon shone down, making the snow sparkle. The tower loomed up in front of us. I was so used to it, I could forget how it looked to strangers, the way it reached up into the stars as if it were stabbing them.

  “There was a castle here once, is all,” I said. “Our house is built from the ruins. They’re all around.” I pointed to the piles of stones sticking out of the snow, the top of an old wall just past the garden, still visible.

  “I feel like I’m going to be locked up,” she said, laughing nervously.

  I looked up at the window, imagined myself leaning out of it, my hair stretching down to where we stood now.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, more harshly than I intended.

  I pushed open the heavy door, and began walking up the winding stairs, holding the torch in front of me. She followed closely behind and I had the wicked thought that I could kick my foot back, drop her down the stairs.

  I pushed such thoughts away and led her up to my room. What had happened was not her fault.

  “I will light you a fire,” I said, throwing new wood and leaves into the hearth and carefully lighting them with the torch.

  In the mirror, I watched her set the packages on the bed. She moved about the room, touching the walls with her palms.

  I had a sudden flash of anger. My eyes shifted to my own face, and I was the same woman the troubadours sang about. Could he have loved this girl, with the marking on her face? Could he love his wife, more than me? Had I not been the most beautiful, of the three of us? Was I not still?

  I walked over to the window and looked out into the snowy night.

  “Is that the palace?” she asked, appearing next to me, her voice full of wonder. In the distance, the palace glittered in the dark.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  For a moment we stood next to each other, staring out over the forest to the palace. I imagined how we looked from the ground, our two pale faces in the moonlight. She was my height, my stature. So close to me I could hear her breathing, feel the slight warmth from her body.

  I turned to her, studied her auburn hair and delicate features, her moony, sad eyes gazing out at the world she’d left behind.

  “It must be so peaceful out here,” she said, sighing.

  I thought of the wild howling, myself in the mirror feral and strewn through with leaves and dirt, Brune ripping apart everything in her path. The bandits racing in the dark woods. Plants in the root cellar that could make a woman lose her mind, her heart, her child.

  I thought of the world she was comparing it to. What was it like? Right now in that palace, what hearts were being torn to pieces?

  “Peaceful,” I said. “Yes.”

  I moved down the stairway alone, back out into the snowy night and to the cottage, where Mathena sat on the couch, waiting.

  She looked at me, an intense, impassioned expression on her face.

  Something was happening, I realized. Something new.

  “What did you give her?” I asked.

  “Medicine for the queen.”

  “But what? Is it the forgetting potion?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?” I asked more loudly then, my heart hammering in my chest.

  Still staring at me intently, she said, “It’s time, Rapunzel. We have been waiting a long time for this.”

  “For what?”

  I backed away, toward the door. She was scaring me.

  “Your chance to have what you always wanted.”

  “How? What do you mean?”

  “Clareta will give the packet I gave her to the queen. The girl is desperate, Rapunzel,” she said calmly. “She will do anything to secure her place at court, to protect herself from the queen’s wrath. She will serve this tea to the queen because she believes it will save her.”

  She was so warm, Mathena, her voice rasping, soothing. She could have been talking to a sick child.

  “And then, my dear,” she said, placing her hands over my own with such tenderness I wanted to weep, “you can have him. You can be queen in her place.”

  “But . . . ” Nothing she was saying made sense to me. “The queen . . . I don’t understand . . . ?”

  “This is your destiny, Rapunzel.”

  “What is?”

  “To be queen.”

  The words were horrible, strange, exhilarating as she said them. I looked at her, beginning to understand. “What is in the package you gave her?”

  “Dried juniper, nettle, wild cherry, nightshade.”

  “Nightshade?”

  “Just a touch,” she said. “A few leaves and berries, ground up.”

  “But that’s . . . ”

  “Yes. Enough to kill her.”

  I sat back. In front of us, the fire roared. Outside, snow was just beginning to fall, lit up by the faint, silvery moonlight.

  “But, even if . . . ” I grasped for words, not believing what we were saying. “He hasn’t returned to me, Mathena, in all this time.”

  “He did come back,” she said. “He could not find you.”

  “Of course he could have found me. He could have found me whenever he pleased. He came here twice!”

  And then I looked at her more closely, as a new realization began to dawn. “Why could he not find me . . . ?” I asked.

  Her expression did not change. She might have been telling me the stew was ready. “Because I hid the cottage and the tower from him.”

  “You mean, he came back? Looking for me?”

  “Yes. He tried to find you, Rapunzel. I did not let him. He’s come back several times over the years.”

  I reeled from her words. The room seemed to spin around me, take on new shapes.

  “Why would you do that?” I whispered. A fury and a grief welled up in me. She had betrayed me. She had kept him from me, let me think for years that he did not care whether he ever saw me again. But he had.

  He had come back.

  “I wanted you to become his queen, Rapunzel. I knew all we had to do was wait. You were not meant to be one of the women he keeps around for his pleasure, like the girl sleeping in the tower right now.”

  I stared at her, stunned, as it sank into me. What she had done. What I could let happen.

  I could be queen.

  If what Mathena said was true, I would be queen.

  “It’s not too late to take the package back from her,” she said. “If you do not want this.”

  “No!” I said too quickly.

  She smiled slightly, but did not say a word.

  The words rushed out of me: “What happens when the queen dies?” I asked. “Shall we go to the palace, show ourselves to him?”

  “We will wait, the way we have all this time.”

  “For what?”

  “For him to come to you.”

  “How do you know he will do that?”

  “He thinks of you, Rapunzel. He’s heard stories that your beauty is greater than ever. I have made sure of it. It maddens him that others can see you, but he cannot. He suspects you are under a spell. He will keep looking. Once his queen is dead, nothing will stop him.”

  I did not sleep that night, l
ying on the bed next to Mathena and thinking about the girl in the tower with the nightshade tea. Aghast at what Mathena had said to me, what she was suggesting, and yet filled with hope and possibility. Could we change everything, just like that? I thought, too, of the man I’d killed. That had been an accident; this would be deliberate. I would be killing someone on purpose, and not just anyone, the queen. Several times I rose from the mattress and paced about the room while Mathena slept soundly, her face more peaceful than I’d ever seen it.

  At one point, I threw back the covers, wrapped myself in furs, and strode outside with every intention of grabbing the package from Clareta and giving her a mild protection tea in its place.

  I stopped. I stood under the night sky, shivering in my furs as snow whirled and fell around me. Above me, the girl slept.

  My heart was torn. This was what I wanted. All I had ever wanted. I’d suppressed it for all this time, content enough to be a healer in the forest, intent on redeeming myself, devoting myself to the women who sought us out, letting my old dreams slip into long-ago memories that had nothing to do with my life now. Now I thought of Mathena’s stories about reading stars for the queen, about the prince climbing my hair and entering the tower, all those memories that had flowed from him to me. Such riches! Even now I was breathless thinking of it. I was the same girl who’d raged in that tower, imagining the ball going on without her. But between then and now I’d had a son who’d died inside of me, and if it had not been for the queen, I might have lived in the palace, away from the herbs and the backbreaking work and Mathena, and my son might have lived. He might have grown strong and bright!

  He might have lived.

  And all this time, Mathena had known that this chance would come, had been waiting for it.

  Already, it felt like something I was destined for.

  In the end, I did not go to the tower. I stood there wrapped in furs, staring up at the night sky with all its stories, and decided to let fate run its course. I turned around, slipped back into the bed, and though I did not sleep at all that night, I did not venture out of bed again.

  The next morning, I stood at the door with Mathena and watched Clareta ride off into the snowy forest, back to the palace, the herbs we’d given her tucked into her bag.