“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, lying 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.
“Godspeed,” I said, and I meant it.
The next few weeks passed in a tense state of waiting. I told myself that I had waited for seven years and I could wait a few days, or weeks, or months, longer. Whatever it had to be.
It did not take months or even many weeks, however, before word of the queen’s death came to us. The news came as all news did: first from one woman, and then from every other woman who visited us.
The queen had taken ill one night and slipped into a violent fever. The next day she died in her bed, with her husband and daughter by her side.
“It was terrible,” we heard. “One day she was the vision of health and the next she was gone.”
There was talk of poison, just as there had been with Josef’s father. The maid who’d actually served the queen her tea had been executed the same day, though she’d denied any wrongdoing. I listened to the reports with horror. I couldn’t even imagine it: two lives, extinguished in a day. I moved from guilt and shame to relief, excitement, and then the feeling that none of it could be real. How could it be real? How could all these distant horrors be of our making?
Everyone spoke of the queen’s sudden death, in the days that followed. For a while our work became harder, because the spells needed to be stronger to cut through all the pain and sadness that had spread throughout the kingdom. The queen had been beloved. She had brought peace and prosperity to the kingdom, the light of God and all His fortune. Now everyone was bereft, from the king himself down to the lowliest servant. It was a terrible omen, we heard, again and again, that she had died so suddenly, having borne only one child, and a
