The Fairest of Them All (32 page)

I
was her revenge. The one who would avenge her. I had already done
it, hadn’t I? I had managed to marry the king and become his queen. I had tried to kill the kingdom’s sole heir. I had not been able to produce an heir of my own.

She had foreseen all of it, set all of it into motion.

A
t dawn, I rode through the forest, past the ancient trees and the twisted river until I saw the tower stretching through the trees, and soon afterward I
reached the cottage.

The garden was spilling over with rotting vegetables. She
had more bounty than she knew what to do with and could not tend to it all alone.

I pushed open the front door and walked in. My hair seemed to crackle around me as it swept over the dirt floor.

She sat on the couch by the fireplace, a pile of dried sage in front of her. Brune was perched on the mantel, spreading
her wings. Loup lay curled in a ball in front of the fire. Stew heated over the embers, and I recognized the smell of cooking carrots, gravy, herbs, meat—a concoction I’d eaten countless times in my youth.

“Rapunzel,” she said, looking up at me, as if she’d been expecting me.

It was years earlier, suddenly, and nothing else had happened. I might have dreamed everything. She watched me, and I
blinked, looked away. She was still a more powerful witch than I’d ever be.

“Come sit with me,” she said, making her voice warm, inviting.

I walked over to the chair across from her and sat down like any number of heartbroken souls had before. I had grown more powerful over the years. I could feel those souls, the clamor of their pain, their furtiveness as they entered the dark woods to consult
with witches.

“You look wonderful,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said. “You look just the same.” It was true. Her hair was still deep black, and her face was as I remembered. She had always been a stunning woman. “I could have been gone for one minute.”

“Perhaps you were,” she said, smiling.

I had a woozy feeling, wondering if I’d imagined everything. “Stop it.”

She went back to her sage, sorting
it into bundles. “You’ve turned out just as I hoped you would.”

There was a pain in my gut, a sick feeling taking hold. “You did hope things would happen this way, didn’t you?”

“What do you mean, child?”

“You hate the kingdom. You hate everything about it.”

She looked at me, and her eyes were hard in a way I’d never noticed before. Had they always been that way? “I never pretended to feel
otherwise.”

“But you wanted me to be queen. Why?”

“You loved a king.”

“Don’t lie to me,” I said. “You know he wasn’t my true love, that I was just a foolish girl. You did not want me to see him, to go to a ball, to have his child. You only wanted me to be queen.”

“I wanted a good life for you.”

I leaned forward. “You sent me to the palace for revenge, didn’t you?”

She looked at me. Her brown
eyes seared into me. “You are queen,” she said, “and you are with the man you wanted. And you are the most beautiful woman in all the kingdom.”

“Other than her.”

“Who is to say?”

“The mirror you gave me,” I said.

She shook her head. “You cannot blame me for your own thoughts, my child. For the fears that come over you, when you look at yourself in the glass.”

“Where is she, Mathena?”

“Who?”

“Snow White. I know Gilles brought her to you. Why would he do that?”

“He wanted to save her. He is a good man, Rapunzel. A better man than that ridiculous king.”

“You took her to the house of the bandits,” I said. “Why would you do that?”

“Why does it matter? You wanted to eat her heart.”

“But I . . . ”

“Stop it!” she said, sharp and bitter. “Do not be weak. Gilles only brought her here
because of you.”

“Why do you hate the kingdom so much?”

“Because they cast me out,” she spat. “After all I’d done for them.”

She was shaking with anger. From the mantel, Brune let out a long squawk. The whole room turned black with her rage.

“Because the king and queen betrayed you?”

“They all betrayed me. I loved the king and queen, and he forced himself on me, and I was innocent. No one
defended me.”

“King Louis? He forced himself on you?”

She nodded to me as it sank in.

“He raped you,” I said. “That is why you sent her to the bandits. So they would do the same to her.”

“Yes,” she said, through gritted teeth.

“What happened?”

I reached over and took her hand. A lock of my hair was caught on my arm. I felt a spark of energy when I touched her, and then all her agony and
rage moved into me, in a rush of darkness that nearly knocked me unconscious. She had always been hidden to me, before this moment. Now I understood why.

“One night, he sent for me. I thought the queen needed me, I rushed to his room. He had had much to drink. I resisted, but it did not matter. He was accustomed to taking whatever he wanted.” Her speech had all the fever of words long held back
and being released for the first time. “He was a king. He did not care that I loved another, or that I loved his wife the queen. He took me as if I were a common whore.”

“And then?” I asked, choking through the blackness of her heart. I had to twist my hand away, for some relief. She barely seemed to notice.

“Marcus found me that night. I told him what had happened. When he confronted the king,
Louis named him a heretic and sentenced him to death. I told the queen what had happened and begged her to intercede, but she blamed me for all of it.”

I was speechless, watching her.

“No one interceded. None of my friends at court dared to stand up to the king. When they were leading Marcus to the gibbet, to hang him . . . That is when I turned him into a stag. It was the only way to save him.
As they were leading him from his cell to the platform.”

“And then you couldn’t change him back.”

“No. I tried but I never could. I tried for nearly twenty years.”

“Is that when you left the kingdom? After you changed Marcus?”

“They banished me. I had to leave after performing that kind of magic. That’s when I came here, into the forest.”

Something seemed off in what she was saying. “To .
 . . You mean that’s when you came here, to this cottage, this tower?”

She nodded slowly, watching me intently.

“But I thought you went with me,” I said. “You lived next
door to my parents, my mother who longed for the rapunzel in your garden.”

“No,” she said. “I came straight here. To leave the kingdom, and be closer to Marcus. I realized I was pregnant with you shortly after that.”

“But .
 . . ” I stopped. It was too unthinkable to say out loud.

She nodded. “I am your mother, Rapunzel.”

“No. That does not make sense. My mother . . . ” I realized, then, that everything I thought I knew about myself, she had told me. The abusive parents, the rapunzel my father had stolen, the mother wasting away from hunger and need. I looked at her again. “You . . . ?”

“Yes,” she said. Her eyes
grew wet as she watched me. “I thought it was better that you not know.”

“Is . . . Marcus was my father?” I lowered my voice as a realization of horror descended on me. “Am I the daughter of a stag, as the gossips at court say? Is that why you did not want to tell me?”

She shook her head sadly. “My daughter,” she said, reaching out to take my hand in her own. “Marcus is not your father.”

“But
then . . . ” The momentary relief was replaced by something worse. A dawning notion that was more horrible. Unthinkable.

“Not . . . the king?”

Her eyes did not leave my face. Her hand gripped my own. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, she nodded.

A dizzy unreality made me numb. It took many moments for me to really understand what she was saying, and what it meant.

“That would mean . . . ”

I looked
to her, waiting for her to tell me this was all a
mistake, but she just sat watching me with those wet, sad eyes.

“Josef,” I said, finally, verbalizing the terrible thought. “He is my half-brother.”

“Yes.”

“I am married to my brother?”

“Yes. As Hera was to Zeus.”

I snatched my hands out of hers, and put them on my belly. I was sick. The same sick I’d felt realizing that I’d eaten the heart
of an animal. All those years, all that time. Him climbing my hair, coming back for me, making me his wife. My brother. And she had known. My mother.

I shook my head. “Why would you—You wanted me to marry him. You killed Teresa so that I could marry him. How could you do that, when you knew?”

“The prophecy,” she said.

“What?”

“The prophecy. An old prophecy, made centuries ago by a very great
sorceress. She said that the kingdom will end when a brother and sister lie together on the throne. Now, finally, the prophecy is fulfilled. This kingdom will end with you. Even now the armies are gathering outside the castle gates. The Chauvin pendants are falling. The one heir, Snow White, is gone.”

“Is this all . . . because of what they did to you? You would destroy the whole kingdom for
it?”

“I loved my king, I loved my queen, I loved the court, more than anything,” she said, with a fury and grief I’d never heard from her before.

“Is it because of what I did to Marcus?” I asked quietly. “Is that what made you do this?”

She shook her head. “No. It was done before then, Rapunzel.
I hoped you were the child of Marcus and me, that I had something left of him. And then you were
born, and I knew you were the child of the king.”

“How?”

She reached down and picked up a lock of my hair, which had pooled onto the couch before falling to the floor below. I braced myself for the onslaught of feeling, which came forth with such vehemence I nearly lost my breath. “You had this blond hair, his blue eyes, his pale skin. You were the most uncommonly beautiful child, and I knew
it was your royal blood.”

“You must have hated me,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I have always loved you. I do love you. I
gave
you this kingdom. I gave you a spectacular life.”

“I slept with my own brother. My own brother is my husband. It’s an abomination! My child—” I pictured his twisted little body.

“We are daughters of Artemis, I’ve always told you that. Zeus and Hera were brother and sister,
husband and wife, and they ruled over all the other gods. You’re a queen, Rapunzel. The most powerful woman in the kingdom. You were right to ask for the heart of Snow White, to claim what is yours.”

“What about the rapunzel?” I asked. “Is that . . . ”

“The forgetting potion,” she said.

“That’s what the forgetting potion is made of? The one you gave me when I was a child?”

“Yes. I mashed it
up, coated an apple with it, fed it to you. That is all true.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why did you do that? There was never a garden in the kingdom, never a starving mother. What did you need to make me forget?”

She shook her head. “That I was your mother. All the things you knew, through your hair. By the time I realized what your hair could do, what it told you, you already knew all my secrets.
You were only a child, and yet you knew. It took a powerful spell to protect myself from you.”

“And now you have destroyed me, and you’ve destroyed the kingdom. Has it brought you any relief?”

When she did not answer, I stood.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I’m going to the house of bandits, to bring Snow White home.”

“No,” she said. She stood, a fierce energy claiming her. “Leave her be.
Stay with me, daughter. I have waited so long for this. They made me do this!”

She reached out for me then, and I wanted to cry from the pain of it, that she was my mother after all, and that she loved me despite everything else.

My mother. Finally.

I took her in my arms, and I held her. My hair wrapping around us. All of her darkness moved inside of me, roiling like an ocean, and I knew it
would never lessen, that she would always be out here, intent on destruction, that no vengeance could heal her. There was no relief, nothing in the world that could heal the great wound she carried. I knew what I had to do, knew that I could do it.

I thought of all those moments I’d spent with her, growing up. All those days bent over the garden or sitting at her side as we handed out spells
and potions, the way she’d carefully taught me how to work the earth. All those moments. And then, for a flash, I saw far, far into the future, when she was very old and bitter, when the little house was full of candy, when children, lost
in the forest, would enter it and never come out. I might have imagined it, but she seemed grateful to me now as I watched her, as I focused all of that dark
energy, and all of that love, down into a point of light. I took all those memories and fashioned from them a wing, a new life, and turned it from me to her.

I don’t know if she knew what was coming. It seemed, from her face right then, like she might.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

And then, slowly, her body began to shrink. Her nose lengthened and jutted out, ending in a point. Her face narrowed, with
its shocked, hurt expression, which broke my heart even then, and seemed to vanish altogether. Her hair turned bit by bit to feather, her long curls now short and sleek, erupting over her skin, erasing every bit of what she’d been. Her body folded in, over, and dropped to the floor. She looked up at me, her eyes small and wet and glittering, the same soft brown—grateful? I thought I saw it, I
hoped I had given her some relief—and her great wings spread out on either side of her body.