The Fairest of Them All

Tears stung my eyes and I turned away. We worked quietly together after that, the way we’d done forever, our hands in the soil. I’d always loved these moments with her, surrounded by vegetables and fruits and flowers, being able to feel a plant’s roots moving into the earth, knowing from a touch what it needed to thrive.

Mathena’s hands were defter than mine would ever be, as she packed the soil with bark.

While I worked, I imagined him at the ball, watching for me, waiting for me. I touched my dress, feeling for the sachet underneath, filled with the earth and herbs that connected me to him. I kept him around my neck. I did not want to take any chances.

A few days later I stole into Mathena’s room, when she was out hunting with Brune. I dragged her trunks from below her bed, and opened them until I found the one I was looking for. Inside were gowns in rich colors, corsets, and gems. I breathed out a sigh of relief. She’d cut up many of her old clothes to make curtains and blankets, which decorated the house in fine fabrics—swaths of night-blue damask, crimson taffeta, gold brocade on purple silk—but there were several gowns still stored away. They were covered in dust, but they were finery nonetheless, clothes I could wear to a palace ball. I sifted through until I found a red silk dress that I knew would suit me, with its jewel tone and simple, striking design. Carefully, I spread it on Mathena’s bed and returned the trunks to their places. I draped the gown over my arm and rushed to the tower, terrified that Mathena would discover what I was doing.

Breathless, I slipped on the gown. It clung to my body perfectly, though now Mathena was rounder and thicker than I. I imagined what she might have been like twenty years before, when she was my age now. Even as a woman nearing forty she was stunning. How slender she would have been before, how striking her dark hair must have been against this deep red. And I let down my own hair, and turned to face myself in the mirror. The color made my skin look like the whitest cream, my hair shine like spun gold. If I stood on my toes, I could see the way it swept down to the floor. I trembled as I watched myself, afraid that the image would vanish.

The morning of the ball, I woke up full of excitement. I planned to work with Mathena all morning as usual, and then grab my bow and arrow and pretend I was going off to hunt on horseback. Instead, I would ride to the palace, and let Brune help guide me.

I raced down the stairs that twisted the length of the tower, and pushed against the great wooden door to get out.

It did not budge.

I pushed again.

At first I thought it was stuck, and I used all my weight to press against it.

And then to my right, against the wall, I saw wine, bread, and water, enough for several days.

I screamed with rage. My scream echoed against the walls in the tower, blasted up to my room, into the sky through the only window. Never in my life had I felt the kind of fury I did then.

She had locked me in.

I pounded on the door, kicked at it, sobbing with frustration. After some time passed, I called out to Mathena, begging her to let me out, but she did not answer. I tried spells to open the door, tried to fashion a key from air as I knew she could, but my magic was no match for hers. Finally, I gave up and sulked back up the stairs. I paced furiously around the small room, stood at the window, and stared at the glittering spires, as if I could will myself to them. The hours slipped past. Throughout the day I called out to her, but she did not appear. When evening came, I could feel the king’s palace filling with wine and candles and diamonds, lords and ladies whirling about, all that life pressed in together; it was torture.

For hours I seethed and cried and called to her. Finally, I slept. When I woke the next day, I had a new resolve.

One thing I knew, from all my years of working with Mathena: it was in the focusing, and the wanting, the fashioning one’s desire into a point of light, that the magic took place. I’d called him to me before, hadn’t I? Now, for the first time, I took everything I had learned and felt and I pressed it together inside me, filled it with my own longing and need until I could see it, feel it like a blade, and turned it into that light.

“Come back,” I whispered, clutching the sachet around my neck.

She thought she could keep me away from him by locking me in a tower. But I could bring him to me. He was already tied to me, through magic, through the earth, and now I would make him return.

I looked at myself in the mirror the way he would look at me. I could hear his heartbeat, his breath, in and out, and I slipped into his mind and heart as if my whole body, my very being now, had turned to spirit.

After that, I waited. I used the water she’d left me sparingly, to keep myself washed for him, and I dressed carefully in front of the mirror, and brushed and brushed my hair, using the bit of potion I had left. To make it strong.

It would need to be. When he came, it wouldn’t matter that I was locked in a tower.

I had my hair.

The next day, I watched her working in the garden, chopping tree trunks and carrying firewood into the house, heading out into the forest to collect mushrooms and wild raspberries. I watched women come and go, into the house. I watched the candles flare up as evening came, watched the lights flame out when she was going to bed.

She called up to me a few times, but I did not answer her.

And then the next day, when she was out hunting with Brune—as I had willed her to be, when the time was right—I heard the horse’s hooves, and I knew he had returned.

I went to the window and let down my hair, let it fall from my head and out of the window, where it stretched down and tapped the ground, like a flag waving from the mast of a ship.

He rode into view just as the sun caught my hair and turned it to fire. He looked up at me, a dazed expression on his face. Never in my life had I felt the kind of power I felt right then. I was young and beautiful. I had all the magic of the forest at my fingertips. I was foolish, too; I understand this now, after so many years have passed, how I confused infatuation for true love, the power of beauty for real power in the world.

“You came back,” I said. I whispered the words, and let the wind carry them to him. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“You were not at the ball.”

“She locked me in this tower, to keep me away.”

He left his horse, walked toward the tower.

“You have to climb up here,” I said.

“What?”

He looked around, and then headed for the great wooden door. I could hear him struggling, just out of my vision. A moment later, he was standing again under the window.

“I’m locked in,” I said.

“I’ll get the key from her.”

“No. She is not here. Climb.”

He tilted his head, not understanding. “There’s no rope or ladder.”

“Climb my hair.”

“How . . . ?”

“You won’t hurt me,” I said.

Tentatively, he reached out and touched my hair, grasped it in his fist. I could feel that touch. My hair was as alive as skin, as blood. I reeled back from the force of the feeling that spread through me. I could feel him. I knew him.

“Climb,” I said again, holding on to the windowsill and bracing myself for the pain in my scalp. But no pain came. Instead, images flashed through my mind: a bed covered in furs, a heavy manuscript scattered across a desk, bright colors blotted across stone. They were all images from his life, I realized with surprise, flowing from him to me. I’d never felt anything like it before. Of course, outside the tower Mathena always made me keep my hair tied back, hidden under cloth. Was this why? Did she know what it could do?

He hoisted himself up and I could feel his full weight, as I braced myself against the window.