The Fairest of Them All (5 page)

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.

J
osef’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 pure for
the man that you will marry.”

“No,” I said. “I want this child!”

For the first time in weeks, something like joy entered me, and it started to sink into me, the miracle happening just below my skin. There was a
child
inside of me. Already I loved it. I knew it was a boy. I could see his gold hair, his bright eyes.

I looked up at her and laughed, and it was a laugh that came from pure happiness.
The way I sometimes felt watching the flowers and plants come back to life every spring, when it had seemed impossible only days before, when the world was covered in snow and ice and frost. The natural world was full of miracles. This body of mine was a miracle.

She watched me, worried, as I leapt up from my seat and spun around, right there in the little room, in front of the fire, with our
sewing strewn around us and batches of dried sage hanging from every window and doorway.

“A child, Mathena!” I said.

I imagined myself happy, glowing, my son against my breast, swathed in my hair. It was the warmest image I could conjure, perhaps because my own mother was lost to me. This would be a child born of love. It did not matter that his father was, that very day, wedding another. I
would love our child enough for both of us.

I danced over to Mathena, grabbed her hand, and pulled her to her feet. Brune and Loup just watched suspiciously, most likely wondering if I’d gone mad. “Be happy for me!” I said. “Think how beautiful a child it will be. How much life he’ll bring to this house.”

Perhaps it was in my mind or perhaps the child reached to
me, in that moment, unfurling
his fist like a flower, uncoiling himself, pressing himself into my heart and making me whole again.

“Please,” I said, gripping her hands in mine, “help me bring this child into the world. Help me be a good mother to him, as you have been to me.” I looked into her dark eyes, inhaled the comforting scent of spices and bark that clung to her all the time.

She did not answer me, not then, but when
she took me into her arms and passed her hand over my face, stroking my cheek, I thought it was her way of saying yes. That she loved me and would love my child, no matter what.

And for the first time in weeks, I felt entirely at peace.

I
t changed everything, knowing that I would be a mother. My whole life seemed to shift into focus. Even when reports came of the extravagant
royal wedding, how beautiful the bride was, how happy the couple seemed, I thought only of my child. My body suddenly was an alien, wonderful thing, and now that the garden was ready for winter, I spent hours up in my tower alone, my hair strewn around me, watching my shape in the mirror, looking for every little change. I rubbed oil on my belly to help prepare it for what was coming. I asked
Mathena to teach me every spell she could, to make my child strong, handsome, a warrior. A king.

I asked her, too, about what life had been like, for her, at court, now that I was carrying the child of a prince.

“What did you do there?” I asked one evening, as we drank tea together next to the fire. “What is it like to live in a great palace?”

“I spent much time with the queen,” she said. The
flames threw shadows across her face. Outside, the air was crisp and clear, the world bracing itself for the first snow.

“You mean . . . his mother?” I was surprised she had not mentioned such a thing before.

“Yes,” she said. “Queen Anne.”

“I didn’t know you were so important!”

She laughed at my enthusiasm. “I gave her advice. Spells. Like what we do now for the women who come see us, I did
that for her then. She was a great believer in the stars. I expect she still is.”

“You read the stars for her?”

Our work suddenly had a glamour to it that hadn’t been there before. I imagined myself, sitting beside the queen—I pictured a stunning woman draped in jewels—reading her cards, her stars, her tea leaves.

“She wouldn’t do anything without checking the sky. People used to be like that
then.”

“At court? I thought magic wasn’t allowed there. That’s why we can’t call ourselves witches.”

She looked at me sharply. “Don’t ever use that word, Rapunzel. Not even here. Do you understand? People can be hanged for that now.”

I sat back, reprimanded, but her words were hard to understand when such terrors seemed so far away. I set my tea down on the floor.

“Things were different then,”
she said, leaning back on the couch. “It wasn’t a bad thing to be known as . . . an
enchantress
.” She smiled at the word. “People believed in magic. They still do, obviously, but things changed in the palace before I left. A new
priest came. The king reformed, and it became a crime to talk openly about such things.”

I nodded, but I was already far away, imagining Mathena and the queen sitting
side by side, the queen’s jewel-covered hand upturned on a table between them.

I wanted a life like that. I wanted to have more in my life than this cottage in the forest.

“Here,” Mathena said, setting down her tea and grabbing my wrist, “let’s go outside.” She dropped the branch she’d been holding. In front of us, the fire leapt up as if to grab it.

We walked outside, the sky black and clear
above us, scattered with thousands of stars. The garden squatted down next to us. Above us, the tower seemed to stretch indefinitely.

She sat, cross-legged, on the grass, gathering her long skirt into her lap. I sat next to her, despite the cold. Breathing in, I smelled smoke and rotting leaves.

“I spent a lot of time at court just staring at the sky,” she said.

I stared up with her, wondering
at the mysteries embedded with it. Already I could make out the characters in the great stories she’d told me. Pegasus. Orion, Artemis’s lover, with his bright sword. Scorpio, who killed him, stretching his tail across the sky.

“Can you see anything about my son?” I asked.

She hesitated. “I think he will be born in Cancer,” she said. “Do you see it up there, the crab?”

I followed her finger
to the faint spots in the northern sky, the line of stars splitting into thin claws. “Yes! Hercules kicked the crab into the sky, right, after Hera sent it to him? While he was battling the Hydra?”

She smiled. “You remember. It’s been years since I told you those stories.”

“I remember all of them,” I said.

“He will be strong and gifted,” she said. “Like his mother.”

We lay back, side by side,
watching the stories in the sky. I imagined my own body being placed in the heavens, outlined by diamonds.

I felt a rumbling through the earth before I heard it. I sat up, instinctively placing my palms over my belly. It sounded as if a whole army were heading toward us, with hundreds of horses storming over the ground, their massive hooves shod with iron.

Mathena sat up and put her hand on
my shoulder, keeping me seated. “It’s all right,” she said. “Stay where you are.”

The hooves got louder. Leaves shook on the trees around us, rattling together, and then I saw several figures—five, I counted—men with sacks raised up in their arms, knives and crossbows strapped to their sides, approaching through the woods. In the dark, their bodies were hulking shadows and it was impossible to
tell where man and horse divided, so that it seemed as if great mythic beasts were bearing down on us.

Bandits.

My heart hammered in my chest. They came right toward us. I ignored Mathena and scraped at the ground, trying to move out of their way, but I felt as if my own feet were covered in iron. The sound deafened me, the earth shook beneath me. All the while, Mathena sat calmly watching.