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.
4
Spring finally came, as it always did, and the forest awakened slowly. The snow melted into little rivers. By then, I was heavy with child, and I was soothed by the notion that I could redeem myself through this new life. My own parents had mistreated me, given me away, and now I would bear an infant I would love in a way my parents had never loved me. It filled something broken and black inside me, and this was not something I could explain, especially to Mathena. We went back to the garden, to tend the soil, loosen it for the planting. The flowers burst open around the house and along the edges of our garden, long before they would anywhere else, in the forest or kingdom.
We waited for the soil to warm, and then one morning we went back to the clearing to bury what was left of the man I’d killed.
We measured our movements by the sun. Brune flew alongside us. The forest felt like a graveyard, despite the life everywhere, which seemed only to be paying homage to the dead.
“Was he the reason you left the kingdom?” I asked.
“I left for you,” she said. “To save you.”
“But why did you have to leave and come to the forest? Was it Marcus? The king?”
“I’ve told you, Rapunzel. We came to the forest so you would be safe.”
She strode in front of me, though I had not told her where we were going. Her black hair was a mass of curls behind her. She stepped quickly over brush and branches, as if she knew exactly where each one was located. The forest floor was a map of roots, veins, bones, and all of it seemed to speak of my own grief. We passed the split oak tree, moved along the riverbank. I moved awkwardly compared to her—and now even more so—though I was a daughter of the forest, too.
Eventually, the clearing opened up before us. I braced myself for what we’d find there.
The light poured down through the tree branches, illuminating the massive, dark green plant that was growing there, its zigzag edges. It was the length of a man, with leaves spilling in all directions, like hundreds of flailing limbs.
Mathena gasped next to me. “Rapunzel,” she said.
I turned to her. “What is it?”
“Rapunzel,” she repeated. “The plant I used to grow, that your father stole from my garden. The plant you’re named after.”
“This?” I leaned in. She’d told me it would not grow in the forest, and I looked up at her, waiting for an explanation.
The scent wafted over to me then. Sweet, slightly spicy. I breathed in and a series of images passed before my eyes, making me dizzy. A girl running through the forest, a knife flashing in the moonlight.
I blinked.
Mathena stepped forward. The breeze fluttered through her hair, her dress, as she walked to the plant and knelt down next to it. I moved to her side, and sat on the grass next to her, inhaling the scent of the plant. All kinds of words pressed against my tongue, questions, but I stayed silent and waited.
I watched her inhale the scent, which I swear came off the rapunzel in whiffs of glittering smoke. I saw it, and then it disappeared. I looked up overhead, just as Brune passed over us. A nest of birds twittered from one of the tree branches.
I reached for a leaf, shining and green.
“Don’t,” she said, snatching my hand back.
I stared at the leaf in my hand, shocked. I had been about to eat it. I tossed it back onto the plant, nearly gagging. “This is him, isn’t it?” I asked. “This . . . plant?”
She nodded. Gently, she ran her fingers across the rapunzel, the leaves shooting out in every direction, a bright red flower bursting from its center. I hadn’t seen it at first, that blooming scarlet thing, right where his heart would be. As I watched, she reached in and—to my horror—she plucked it out, in one quick movement.
Mathena whispered words into the leaves and then stood up, holding the flower out in front of her, clasped
