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
