hugged him in the garden, as he stood in the tower and looked down to the house where I myself was sleeping, watching me slip out into the moonlight to cry over my son’s grave.
I could feel, too, his own heart: his love of wildness, of beast, of bird. His longing to leave this kingdom one day and make a home for himself outside its excesses, its privileging of the court above all things.
He looked at me. He put his hand against my face and it made me feel warm, protected. I felt safer here than in those castle walls with the moats and ramparts.
He pressed his mouth against mine. His eyes flicked past me. “Look,” he said.
I twisted my head and saw, in the moonlight, three silver foxes, sleek and beautiful like something from a dream.
“Are they really foxes?” I imagined three cursed men moving through the woods. For a moment I was sure I knew exactly what it felt like. As if I were a wild thing, cursed to live inside the body of a human woman.
“Yes, they’re real,” he said, laughing at me.
“It’s hard to know.”
“Know what?”
“If they’re real.”
“There are ways to tell,” he said.
“I killed a man once,” I said. “Because I didn’t know.” I was surprised at how easily I could tell him this.
“What happened?”
“I thought it was a stag. I was hunting with my bow, and hit it right in the neck. And when it died, it turned into a man. I watched him die.”
He moved his hand through my hair, sending shivers throughout my body. “I’m sorry for that,” he said. “She should have taught you how to recognize an enchanted human.”
“He told me that Mathena had cursed him. As he was dying, he said that.”
“I am sure she has cursed more than one man in her time.”
I stiffened for a moment. Immediately, he reacted.
“Does that bother you?”
I wasn’t used to someone paying close attention to me. “No,” I said, lying. “But she did not curse him. She wanted to save him, and then change him back.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “She is a powerful witch, Rapunzel. She was powerful back then. I can only imagine what she’s capable of now.”
“I owe her my life,” I said. “I used to miss her so much, when I first came to the palace.”
“I’m sure she’ll stay well away.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she was banished. She cannot return.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Mathena was banished from the palace.”
“But . . . no one has ever told me that.”
“No one dares tell you, I expect. You are the queen. She raised you. I thought you knew this.”
“But Josef . . . he invited her to come live in the palace when we were married.”
He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Rapunzel,” he said. “They would have killed her, had she come.”
I shifted, moving my hands over his chest, twisting to push my back against him. He wrapped himself around me, like a lettuce leaf. One hand on my breast, another on my belly.
“She left the kingdom to take care of me,” I said, my voice small. “To save me.”
He was quiet. “Is that what she told you?”
The trees swayed back and forth, the night wild and open. Above us, I saw a million stars through the branches that laced the sky, like pieces of thread.
I did not answer him. I reached out my hand, traced the ground, the leaves, acorns, pinecones, needles, bits of bark.
His hand moved down, pressed between my legs. I opened them, let his hand move inside me.
My hair glittered in the moonlight, and a swath of starlight spread across the black earth. In the distance, wolves howled, and my heart with them.
17
It was a gorgeous spring day when I asked the mirror the question I’d been asking it for years. I wasn’t even paying attention, I was so anxious to get to the mews, to Gilles. I’d thought that it would be difficult to return to the castle, after what had happened, but instead I felt more powerful, more free. Habit, more than anything, was what drove me.
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who is the fairest of them all?”
“She is.”
I stopped and wondered if I was hearing things. I peered inside. The mirror like water, like something I could slip into.
“Who is the fairest of them all?” I repeated.
I waited, and for a moment there was nothing, no response. And then two words rumbled out of the mirror, moved into me like arrows.
“Snow White.”
“What?”
“You may be the fairest in this room, but Snow White is a thousand times more fair.”
I stared at my face in the glass. Didn’t I look the same as I always did? My hair golden, the color of wheat and sun and daffodils, my eyes bright blue, like sapphires. I was a bit older, yes, I was over thirty now, but I had been careful. My figure was long and slender, my waist nipped in, my breasts high.
I pressed my face against the glass.
Her face loomed up at me like a reflection in water.
She was so young, lush. Like a piece of fruit hanging from a tree, so full it was about to burst.
I slammed my fist against the glass, waiting to hear the cracking, but nothing happened.
I ran from my room, from my chambers, to find her.
“Where is the princess?” I asked a young maid scurrying past. “Tell me!”
“She is bathing, I believe.”
I ran to her chambers, pushed open the doors.
“It is the queen, mademoiselle,” I could hear one of her ladies saying, rushing before me.
She stood naked in the bath, her ladies positioned around her.
“Your Highness,” she said.
I took her in, the length of her body. She was shorter than I, and more rounded. Her breasts were full, her nipples a perfect pink. Her hips flared out from her waist, her sex a patch of dark. Her skin luminous, as white as milk. Those violet eyes, lined by thick lashes. Her black hair tumbled down to her shoulders, wet and curling.
When had she become a woman? She was only fifteen, wasn’t she?
“What’s wrong?” she asked. Her voice was cold, hard.
I stood there. Foolish, a witch queen, speechless in front of a bathing child.
But what could I say?
Two of her ladies stood on either side of her, their hands filled with wet cloths. Behind her, another was waiting to plait her hair, the way she always wore it now, braids lining her face.
I turned and left. I started running, desperate to escape, to get as far from her as I could, far away from all of this.
