the book she had given me. It was slow going. I knew how to read, of course, Mathena had taught me that, but I had not done very much book learning before then. Now I welcomed the relief the words offered me, the opportunity they gave me to disappear, at least a little, the promise they gave me of forgetting everything altogether.
I came upon spells I had not encountered before in our practice. Spells to change the color of one’s eyes, to call forth a storm, to enter someone’s dreams, to transform a stone into gold, a leaf into a feather, a rose into a bird. There were endless spells, and the more they meddled with the substance of a thing, or sought to change a human fate or heart, the more difficult they were to decipher. Warnings abounded, scribbled throughout.
It was something I saw in one of those spells that first made me suspicious of Mathena, and the teas she had fed me while I was pregnant. When women came to see us desperate to end their pregnancy, we’d always given them pennyroyal and mugwort, with their distinctive, sharp scents. In the book, I saw herbs like tansy, parsley, cotton root bark, and had a visceral memory, the spice of parsley on my tongue. She would have been very careful, wouldn’t she? Feeding me herbs I did not know, in small amounts. Would she have done that to me? I knew I had had parsley, and the more I read about tansy and cotton root bark, the more I suspected that these were the herbs I’d been given. I stole into the root cellar and sifted carefully through the baskets of dried herbs we kept there. But I did not find what I was looking for.
When I confronted her, she denied it.
“Why would I want to harm you, Rapunzel?” she asked, looking at me. “When I have given up my whole life for you?”
I remained silent after that.
As spring shifted to summer, our garden became more and more lush, filled with vegetables and fruits so large and bright they were almost obscene. We kept the garden watered and fed and were able to start harvesting, filling baskets with bright vegetables and storing them for colder months.
And every day I visited my baby’s grave. Soon enough, a twisting, green-leafed plant grew from that spot, with beautiful crimson flowers bursting from it, like hearts. I stroked its leaves and petals, whispered into its roots, watered it with my tears.
In the fine weather, women started appearing at the house regularly again. We were constantly working to tend to them as well as the garden, which everyone who came to us whispered had to be the work of pure magic. No one could imagine vegetables like that growing from the earth on their own.
I threw myself into my work. What else was there for me to do? I knew now the grief of those women, with their unrequited loves, their fatherless children, their falls in fortune, their barren gardens and fields.
It occurred to me one day to take down a lock of my hair and brush it along the arm of a woman sitting in front of us, her sick child on her lap. I moved my hair from her to her child, and it happened just as it had happened with the prince and the man in the forest: I could feel them. The woman, who until that moment had been like any other woman from one of the kingdom’s villages, now had a life and soul to her as vivid as Mathena’s or my own. I could see her memories, the years she’d spent caring for her sick mother, her sick children, her husband who’d gone into the king’s army and never come home. I could feel their hot, wet foreheads under her palms, under
Without even thinking I told her what to do. “Wash him with vinegar and rosewater,” I said, momentarily possessed. “And burn rosemary as an incense around his bed. Also, you must roast eggshells and grind them into a powder. Add the powder and chopped rosehips into a pot of ale, warm the mixture, and let the child drink it.”
“I will get you the rosewater, incense, and flowers,” Mathena said, her face registering her deep shock, and she quickly left the room.
“Could you get some angelica as well?” I called out after her. I turned back to the woman. “You will weave the leaves into necklaces, for protection. Let everyone in your household wear one.”
She nodded. The boy moaned and shifted in her arms.
“You will be well again,” I said softly, taking her hand, as Mathena had so often taken mine.
When the woman and child left, I was exhausted. Her sadness had latched onto my own.
Mathena was uncharacteristically quiet as we ate our stew and prepared for bed that night.
“Your hair is a great gift,” she said, finally. “I didn’t realize how great. You can be more powerful than me, or any of my teachers.”
“You believe that?” I asked, taken aback.
“Yes.”
“Did you always know what it could do?”
“I suspected,” she said. “When you were . . . a child, I saw the way feelings came to you, through your hair. You were so sensitive. I thought it was safer for you to keep it up.”
“Have you hidden yourself from it?” I asked. “I cannot feel anything when you touch me, the way I can with others.”
“Yes,” she said softly.
“I thought Josef was special,” I said. “I thought it was only him I could feel that way. But I suppose it is most everyone, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry I did not warn you. You might have seen him differently.”
I nodded, and remained quiet.
Over the next day, and all the days to follow, I focused on this gift that I’d been given, and took solace in it. If I couldn’t have Josef or my baby or any other happiness in the world, then through my gift and through my own suffering, I could help others. If I couldn’t redeem myself by giving my son a beautiful life, loving him more than any child had ever been loved before, I could do this.
Between the garden and the ladies who came to see us, and the work that was so much more exhausting for me now, we were so busy that I almost managed to forget the king and queen. I even began to imagine that I would be all right living my whole life in the forest, taking over for Mathena one day, spending all my days helping those who needed help, healing, relief.
And then came more news from the palace. “Isn’t it wonderful?” a peasant woman asked. She had come to us because her family’s crop was failing and her children were starving. I was packing a basket of vegetables and meat for her to take home when her voice shifted, the way everyone’s did when there was news like this to share. “About the new princess?”
“The new what?” I stopped, my hand clasped around a cucumber.
“The queen has had a child. A perfect pale baby with a tuft of black hair. The very image of her mother.”
“Wonderful,” I said. My knees nearly buckled under me. “Yes.”
In all my own grief, I’d forgotten about this other child.
“What’s her name?” I asked, my heart twisting in my chest.
“They call the child Snow White.”
We were told that the infant’s christening was a great event. Queen Teresa’s father and mother—the king and queen of the East—came with their entire court to celebrate the result of the union of kingdoms, and there were celebrations for days.
As woman after woman told us about the festivities, I listened without saying a word.
They told us how beautiful the infant was, with jet-black hair, skin as white as snow, lips as red as cherries in the height of summer.
Sometimes, in those moments, I was sure it was my own child in the palace, that there was some mistake.
