The Fairest of Them All

and listen to me,” she said. She reached up and pulled the cloth back down to my forehead. “You must forget that the prince ever came here. I cannot let you go to court, Rapunzel, not yet. The palace will ruin you.”

What she didn’t see was that I was already ruined.

“But he is a prince,” I said, clutching at the words. They floated in front of me, like pieces of a shipwreck. “He . . . invited me. How can I not go?” I imagined running to the stable and untying our own horse, and following after him. But I was not yet that brave, and so I burst into tears instead. “He came here looking for me. It was like something out of a fairy story!”

“Only the kind where the maiden’s hands get chopped off.”

I had rarely seen her so upset, and she flashed and sparked with it, her brown eyes glittering. She stood and stalked over to the fireplace, stoking it with a branch. I watched her as she stabbed at the flames. Her hair whirled about her face, hung down in curls along her cheeks.

“It’s not fair,” I said. “I’ve been cooped up in the forest for so long. Why can’t I see what life is like at court?”

She turned to me. “Someday, Rapunzel, you will have the life you long for. But not yet.”

“Why not yet? He came here looking for me! I’ve been invited to a ball!”

“Because he is promised to someone else.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said. A terrible burst of pride moved through me. I was young and beautiful. I had hair like sunlight. I had heard passing minstrels composing songs to my beauty, at the tower window as I sang. “You just want to keep me here,” I said. “I will go to the ball and make him forget anyone else.”

“No,” she said. “I forbid you to go.”

I stared at her in shock. We had never argued before, and she had never forbidden me something I wanted.

But I’d never wanted this.

“You can’t do that,” I said.

“I already have.”

She stood over me, looking right into me. I looked away, but could still feel her eyes burning through me. Already I could feel myself waffling, my heart softening. Mathena was a witch—I had lied before, to him, when I said she was not, to protect the both of us—and for the first time she was turning her powers against me.

I leapt up. “You cannot control me,” I cried. “You can’t forbid me to go!”

I strode to the door, then turned back to her. She was so beautiful and majestic, even when I hated her.

For a moment we just eyed each other. I knew that something was changing between us then, and was tempted to go back and throw my arms around her.

Instead, like the child I was, I slammed the door behind me.

I stormed to the tower, stomped up the many curving stairs to my room. Until the year before, I’d lived with Mathena in the main house, but on my sixteenth birthday she’d let me move into my own little room in the crumbling tower with vines climbing up the side. She’d helped me make a colorful quilt for the bed, and given me one of her tapestries to hang on the wall, next to the old, oval-shaped mirror that hung by the hearth. I’d always loved that tower, where I spent many happy hours playing, sticking my head out of the window and letting my hair hang to the ground as if I were a girl in a storybook.

Little did I know then that it would become my prison.

I lay on my bed and stared at the stone walls, the tapestry with its images of peacocks and castles, the light that poured in through the one window and illuminated the late summer air. Outside, branches laced over each other like fingers. I caught a glimpse of my face in the looking glass and realized I was crying.

I thought back to all the ladies who’d sat in front of Mathena over the years, sobbing as they relayed their heartbreaks, and me watching them, fetching teas and dried herbs for Mathena while despising the women for their weakness. The peasant woman who was having an affair with her lord, the lady who was certain her husband no longer loved her, the rejected and weak and aching. I had not known any better. I was beginning to understand, now, the passions that had moved them.

I would go to the prince’s ball, I decided, no matter what Mathena said. I would take the horse and go. All I needed was a gown. I marked the equinox on the stone wall, with the bit of rock lying on the trunk beside me: I had fourteen days. I would steal into Mathena’s room and find something to wear. After she took me from my parents, she had packed everything she owned into trunks. These were my first memories: the two of us coming together to the forest and finding the old tower, the crumbling remains of a castle, her moving the trunks into her room, remnants from her other lives, her past selves. I’d sifted through her things—the fine gowns, the corsets and ribbons—with fascination. She had been at court once, and yet now, like mothers and would-be mothers everywhere, wanted to protect me from her own mistakes.

It was not fair.

All I knew was this, this stone cottage and this crumbling tower. My memory began in the forest: the call of birds, the howling of wolves, the way the wind rustled through the trees. The forgetting potion had erased all memory of what came before, the life I’d had in the kingdom. I remember how we came upon the ruins of the castle, the magical stone tower thrusting through the forest canopy. How I raced up the crumbling stairs and into the round room at the top, twirling around with delight. There’d been a girl in the room with me, with hair like sunlight, and I’d moved toward her, moved away, delighted by this fantastical creature who mimicked my own movements in the piece of glass propped up on the floor. It was Mathena who first showed me how a mirror worked, and who hung it from the wall like a painting.

Now I watched the sun dropping in the sky, dusk filtering through the forest. In the distance, the spires of the palace glittered. The world was so alive and open. I was meant to be out in that world, beyond the woods. Otherwise, why would I have been made the way I was, with hair like the sun?

Sleep was impossible. Once the sky was dark, and the moon and stars bathed the forest in silver, I stole out and gathered fresh thyme, lavender, and rue from the garden, along with a pile of soil from where his horse had stood, then returned to the tower. I lit a fire in the small hearth and carefully scattered the mixture in a half circle around me. I pressed my palms into it, sifted it through my fingers. The earth remembered him, kept something of him in itself. I just had to let it work its magic.

I stood and stared at myself in the mirror, flame shadows playing against my face. My eyes were huge, blue, like pools of water. My cheeks flushed. I let my hair stream down like a river along the floor behind me. I looked different, I was certain of it. My body felt lush and soft, touchable. Womanly. I was ready for a man like this.

“Love me,” I whispered. I used my fingertip to draw the words into the mixture. “Love me.”

Outside, I could hear the sounds of the forest: the wolves and owls, the wind moving through the branches and leaves, the rush of river, the sound of the moon scraping across the sky.

I slipped off my shift, and imagined him in the room beside me, that my hands were his hands, traveling the length of my body.

The half circle glittered in the moonlight, from the stone floor. The mirror moved in and out, watching.

Love me.

The next morning I gathered the mixture from the stone floor and filled a sachet with it that I wore around my neck, against my heart. It was basic magic, using the land around us, the energy of growing, living things, the mystery of plant and earth, to link one soul to another.

I acted as if everything were normal, dressed in a high-necked gown to cover the talisman I wore, and joined Mathena in the garden. I could feel her watching me as I knelt down, but I did not look up. There was work to do, as we prepared for autumn. The air was just beginning to crisp, and though it was still summer, the trees were already changing color.

“Are you all right, Rapunzel?” she asked finally, leaning back on her haunches.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“You know I only want to protect you.”

“Yes.”