were seven in all. One was as short as a child, another tall and thin like stretched candy. Their voices were low and I could barely hear them above the sound of my own heart, but it was clear they had some kind of plan for the night. All those years I’d lived in the forest, and only now did I realize how powerful Mathena’s protections had to have been to keep us safe.
They headed around the corner of the house and I could hear the sounds of horses, the clomping of hooves, and then they appeared again, all of them racing forward, on horseback, into the woods.
I sat still, silent, and caught my breath.
There was no sign of her.
I stood, wiping grass and debris from my clothing, and walked as quietly as I could to the house, looking over my shoulders to make sure no one was watching me. Fear made me lose my senses, become afraid of ghosts and other imaginary creatures.
When I reached a front window, I crept up and peeked inside. All I could make out were chairs and a long table, the gaping cavern of a huge hearth.
I went to the front door and put my ear against it, but I could hear only the forest and my own breath. What if she wasn’t here? The thought seized me with a sudden awfulness: What if they’d killed her already? I cursed myself for not bringing the mirror to help me see.
I turned the knob, and the door was locked. I concentrated. Focusing my thoughts, I said a quick spell and tried again. To my relief, the door swung open and I was inside, inhaling the smell of the still-smoking hearth, a fire smoldering down.
I looked around. I’d never been in such a small, masculine space. There were coins and papers and items of clothing scattered about, along with dishes and mugs that held remnants of that night’s drink. A staircase led to another floor. I ascended to another large room that contained a number of beds. Seven, lined up against a wall.
She was not there.
“Snow White,” I whispered. “Please.”
I ran through the house, looking for any sign of her at all.
“Snow White,” I said more loudly. “Are you here? Snow White!”
I ran out of the house and back to the stable, to the well, and to the back of the house, where I saw a door on the ground, an entrance to what seemed to be a cellar. Crouching down, I opened the door and yelled into the dark space: “Snow White!”
And just as I was about to cry out in frustration, I heard a faint sound, a voice, in the dark.
I froze, and listened. I heard it again then, more clearly. My name. “Rapunzel?”
“Where are you?” I cried, as relief flooded through me.
“Down here.”
My eyes adjusted to the dark and I began to make out shapes in the cellar. I could not make out stairs. It was a hollowed-out room under the main house, filled with bulging sacks and buckets.
“I’ve come to take you back to the palace,” I said.
There was no response.
“Snow White?”
I looked around frantically for some way to get down to her. Surely they used a ladder, but there wasn’t anything in sight. I ran back to the front door and into the house, looking for something I could use.
Nothing.
But I had my hair.
Back at the cellar opening, I lay on my belly and stuck my head inside, trying to find her. “Where are you?” I said. “Are you all right?”
A moment later her answer came. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so.” Something was wrong with her. Her voice was flat, strange.
“Can you stand up?” I said. “Are you hurt?”
“I don’t know.”
“I need to get you home, Snow White. Before those men come back.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to leave.”
“What?”
“Go home, Rapunzel. Please.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t tell anyone you found me.”
And then I heard a faint shuffling, and she appeared under me, her pale skin glowing in the dark, illuminated by the small bit of moonlight coming down. She was even deeper underground than I’d thought.
“Snow White,” I whispered. I was shocked at her appearance even from so far above her, a flatness I’d never seen before in her, the wide, empty eyes.
And then she was me, locked in the tower, and I was Mathena. But I realized that she could not leave the tower she was in.
“Please, leave me here to die,” she said. “I can’t go home again. Not now.”
Her despair hung in the air between us, in the damp darkness.
“You must come,” I said, my voice rising in desperation. “They will keep hurting you if you stay.”
I could see circles under her eyes, bruises on her skin. What had they done to her? I thought of that sad little girl I’d first met, walking next to me in the garden with her back straight, her dress swishing around her. How happy I’d been to make her smile and laugh.
When she didn’t respond, I continued, “The king is devastated, he can’t sleep, he thinks of you every moment. Even now he is planning to go to war with your mother’s family.”
“They cannot know me, the way I am now!” she said.
“You will heal,” I said. “Be happy again. Let me take you home.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I’m ruined.”
“People do not get ruined!” I said, though even as I said it I did not believe it.
She laughed a dull, hollow sound.
“Let me get you out of there and I will prove it to you.”
“No!”
“I can give you something so that you will forget all of this.”
For a moment she was silent. She was crying now, her tears like diamonds on her cheeks.
“Forget?” she repeated, her voice cracking.
“Yes. You’ll be brand-new.”
To my relief, she nodded. I knew we had only minutes.
I leaned down into the cellar entrance, and quickly, surely, I started pulling my hair, hand over hand, great chunks of it at a time, piling it in circles until I reached the end. Softer than fur, stronger than an iron chain.
“I need you to climb,” I said.
The expression on her face almost made me laugh, despite everything. Here I was a queen and she a princess, and yet the world was as absurd as it’d been that long-ago day when the prince came to the tower to find me.
“It is strong enough,” I said. “Believe me.”
She just stared up at me as I took the edge of my hair and dropped it through the entrance. The rest of my hair unfurled after it.
She cried out as my hair fell down around her like a blanket. I felt her hands wrapping around it. I braced myself for the rush of feeling moving from her to me.
“Climb!” I said.
I held tight to the doorway as I felt her weight, as she started placing one hand over another.
I felt it then: her pain and anguish, the way they’d taken her body, the horrors they’d enacted on it. I could see their sweating, clenched faces. Their massive hands. I could feel the wound in her body.
In the distance, I could hear the beat of horses’ hooves on the forest floor.
“Climb!” I said again.
Older wounds streamed into me; I could feel her shock when Gilles took her to the forest, telling her that
