The Fairest of Them All

sorrow streamed up to me but it didn’t matter, there was nothing at all I could do to change what had happened, what I’d given him.

He was gone.

2

When Mathena returned that day, just as the sun was dropping in the sky and melting over the mountains, she could sense immediately that something had happened. Brune got to me first, landing on my shoulder and nuzzling me with her beak. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor in a pool of hair and my own tears, sobbing with grief. Moments later, I heard the great door creaking open, and Mathena’s footsteps as she raced up the stairs to me. What she’d tried to protect me from had happened despite her efforts, and now her sole concern was to see that I was all right.

I was not.

“My child,” she said simply, over and over, stroking my hair back from my face. “Shhhh.”

Even in my sorry state, I noticed that her touch had no effect on me, and that I could not feel anything of her in it the way I had with the prince. It only made me feel more bereft. She seemed so distant after the kind of closeness I’d felt with him. Only his touch, it seemed, could awaken all the magic within me.

She led me out of the tower and to our little house, where she sat me in front of the fire and served me tea and stew. She heated water on the fire and washed me, rinsed the tears and dirt out of my hair, the imprint of his lips, and slipped a clean dress over my head. She wrapped up my hair and covered it with cloth. I sat, silent. Neither of us spoke about what had happened. Her magic sometimes was a convenient thing; she already knew.

In the following days, we found out all the details from the women who visited us: that Josef was marrying a princess from the East to strengthen a still-shaky alliance his father had made the year before, and that his bride was a pale, dark-haired beauty with eyes like the sea. She was named Teresa, after the saint. She would not only ensure peace between our kingdom and the East, but bring us all closer to God. This was what we heard, over and over: that the new queen would bring happiness, peace, and God’s favor to the kingdom, which had been ravaged by failing crops, illness, hunger, the threat of war.

I listened bitterly. All those spells I had watched Mathena cast for women over the years, she cast for me then, because I had forgotten them. All those teas and baths and potions, she made for me. “Bite down on this,” she said, handing me a stick of wood she’d boiled with hemlock root. “Close your eyes,” she said, handing me a steaming bowl, “imagine him, and drink this all at once, to flush him from your body.” She put elderberry bark around my neck, so that it hung next to my heart. She rummaged through my room and when she found the sachet I’d made, she burned it, then swept every bit of earth and herb from my hearth, down the stairs, and onto the forest floor. But I was committed to my suffering and nothing worked to rid me of it. It was the first rule of witchery, at least the kind she practiced on me then. One had to be open to it. Changing hearts was something else altogether.

Still, I could not wallow for long, even as the prince’s wedding approached. The days grew shorter, leaves began to cover the ground, and we had much work to do to prepare for the long winter, which would not wait for any human grief. We had a root cellar to fill with vegetables and meats, a garden to harvest and cover before the snow came, firewood and wild herbs to gather, birds and animals to hunt and butcher. It seemed fitting, the earth dying, the plants going to seed, all the leaves gathering on the ground and rotting there. I liked stalking through the dead forest with my bow and arrow, searching for prey. In a perverse way, I delighted in it. If my heart was going to be broken, the earth might as well be, too, and there we were, scavenging from it before it retreated under ice and snow.

So, slowly, we filled the root cellar with beets and carrots and turnips and onions and garlic, and prepared the soil to turn back into itself.

At the same time, I began to eat. More than I ever had. I craved meat and attacked the store of it in the root cellar, to the point that Mathena began to worry about having enough food for the winter, despite the abundance of our garden and the heaping bags we carried down each day. I promised her I would continue to hunt, that I did not care about the cold or the snow. We would be fine. At the very least, we would survive. In the meantime, I took hunks of venison and pheasant to the tower, gnawed them down to bone.

And then the swelling came, and the sickness in the mornings, and the strange shiftings in mood that left me in fits of giggles one hour, and wailing the next, as we worked. Through all of it she watched me, and brewed me special teas that, considering what happened, I’m not sure were for my benefit. But that is something I do not like to think about.

Josef’s wedding day came on one of those last days of autumn, after the leaves had all fallen and our garden had been harvested and covered for winter. For us, it was a regular day, or so we pretended, and we did not speak of the royal marriage. We sat by the fire, repairing some clothes. It was good for me, watching clothes mend under my hands, seeing how broken things can be fixed, that with each pull of thread the world kept moving, healing itself, becoming something new.

Brune walked back and forth across the mantel while Loup slept in Mathena’s lap. Outside, the wind rattled through the trees, carrying the faint scent of rot.

“Rapunzel,” Mathena said.

I looked up.

“I know you’ve been feeling strange lately, have you not?”

I shrugged. “It’s the season,” I said.

“No.” She shook her head. Her face was pained, which was unusual for her. “It’s because you are with child.”

“What?” I dropped the shift in my hands. I looked down at my belly, under the thick wool shift I was wearing. The slight swelling there I had attributed to my recent appetite, which I was sure derived from grief. “How do you know?”

“I’ve been watching you,” she said. “You have all the signs of it, and your cycle has not come, has it?”

“No,” I admitted. I had not given much mind to that, either. I did not expect my body to function the same way it had before, after all that had happened.

“Have you lain with anyone besides the prince?”

“Of course not!” I said. My face reddened with embarrassment. We had never spoken about my lying with Josef in the tower, and how foolish I’d felt afterward.

“I just wanted to make sure,” she said. “There are some ardent poets around these parts at times.”

“Mathena!” I said, blushing. “Don’t be horrible.” I felt my belly again, the swelling that seemed to have doubled in the last few minutes, and looked up at her. “Do you really think I’m pregnant?”

“Yes,” she said. “Can you not feel it yourself?”

Even as she answered, this new knowledge was moving through me, taking up residency in my blood and bones. The idea that a child could be growing inside me . . . in the midst of all that sadness and loss, autumn and death. It was unthinkable. A miracle.

A gift.

“So we will have to do something, then,” she said, matter-of-fact, as if we were talking about a bad harvest.

I narrowed my eyes. “Do something, how?”

“What we have done countless times, Rapunzel, for the women who come to us,” she said. “Do you want to have the child of a man who belongs to another?”

The fire sputtered and crackled. Outside, the wind swept about the house, bending the trees.

“No,” I said. “I want this baby.” And the moment I said it, I knew it to be true. I wanted this child, born of him and me.

“There are ways to remedy this. It will be as if it never happened at all, you know that, and then you can be