The Fairest of Them All (9 page)

O
ne morning I woke and found spots of blood on my nightgown and the sheets under me. I dressed and carried the linens to the river, let the blood wash out in the clear water.

Over the course of the morning, I realized
that my baby seemed unusually still. Mathena was off hunting with Brune, and so I sent up a quick prayer to Artemis and kept at my tasks. At midafternoon I was standing over the fire, inhaling the scent of boiling beets and porrettes, when the cramping came, so strongly that the room began to spin around me. I dropped the spoon I was using, which clattered on the hard floor.

Something was horribly
wrong.

I crumpled to the floor, doubling over and holding my belly.

“Mathena!” I cried.

As the cramping began to subside, I reached under my skirts,
to the center of my body. When I pulled my hand away, it was covered in blood.

I forced myself up, and reached for a cloth to wad up and press between my legs.

Another wave of pain moved through me and I bent over again, grasping the back of
the couch. Sweat poured down my face as I slumped back to the floor, twisted to my side, and pressed my face into the cool dirt.

I don’t know how long I stayed there, moaning and crying as the pain assaulted me and retreated, and then came back again.

I could feel him leaving me, this child I loved too much already, and it might as well have been my heart slipping from my chest. My body was
coming apart, my insides wrenching themselves. I was like bread dipped in water, unloosening. It was so real to me that I am sure, even now, that there was a whole child there, screaming and flailing and looking up at me, something deeply wrong with it, it was all wrong, though I know it was my own being screaming like that as the makings of my child fell from me and left me scraped out and bare.

When Mathena found me, the blood and tissue had seeped through my gown, staining it bright red.

I had dreamt him, I knew his face, his bright eyes.

I was on the floor, balled up, my legs knotted together around that ruined dress drenched in blood. Too exhausted to speak.

She lifted me into her arms, carried me outside, into the fresh air, onto the grass.

I was sobbing, talking gibberish, and
Mathena just sang and soothed me and cleaned me the best she could, and finally, when I had exhausted myself, she pulled the dress from my body, and took it away.

“Shhhh,” she said, moving her hand along my forehead, smoothing back my hair.

She washed me gently as if I myself were a child—and I suppose I was—cleaning me and putting me back together, the way she’d always done, as far back as
I could remember.

Later, much later, she would tell me that it was a boy, as I’d known it would be. “It is better that he slipped away,” she would say then, “rather than live the life it would have lived. He was not . . . shaped the way children should be shaped.”

T
he day my son died, Mathena took my soiled dress, along with all that was wrapped inside it, and placed it
on the fire. As it burned, she whispered spells, prayers, and sprinkled the fire with potions and oils. I was not conscious enough to know what was happening, but I could feel it, smell the scent of the burning, the anguish of what was left of my son disappearing from this earth.

She buried his ashes at the edge of the garden.

For several days, I slipped in and out of a dream state, and in my
dreams my son came to life. I could hold him and smell his milky scent, I could walk up the steps of the palace and present the child to the king. And in my dreams, the court recognized him and took him to soft beds, to places where he’d never be cold, where he’d grow strong and ferocious and never die. Imagine! Being able to move through time as if it were water, and change the course of things,
prevent the coming of grief. I dreamed of Josef standing over him, saying, “My son.”

“My son.”

Sometimes I’d dream that I was holding him in my arms,
his soft soft skin folding into mine, the smell of him infusing everything, entering me, my whole body, every cell of it filled with love and relief and a crazy new happiness, and then I would wake up, the whole world going flat when I remembered
he was dead.

And then one by one I’d see the stone walls of our cottage, the fire dying in the hearth, Mathena curled up next to me for warmth, my hair blanketing us both.

I’m surprised it didn’t choke us to death.

When I finally rose from the bed and rejoined the waking world, I begged Mathena to give me that ancient potion that would make me forget: forget my lost child, forget the prince
who was now king, forget his wife the queen and the child who would be born when my own child had died. I longed to go back to the time when all I knew was the woods around us.

“You gave it to me once,” I said. “The forgetting potion. Please do it again. Let me start over the way I did before.”

But she refused. “Better things await you,” she said, as we opened the shutters and stared out at
the melting world. Because finally, too late, the world began to warm. “You need only to be patient.”

I stared at her blankly. The word had no meaning to me when my anguish swallowed me whole, when all I could see was grief unfurling in front of me.

I began to think that if she wouldn’t perform the spell, I could find it and do it myself. I started poring over the book she had given me. It was
slow going. I knew how to read, of course, Mathena had taught me that, but I had not done very much book learning before then. Now I welcomed the relief the words offered me, the opportunity they gave me to disappear, at
least a little, the promise they gave me of forgetting everything altogether.

I came upon spells I had not encountered before in our practice. Spells to change the color of one’s
eyes, to call forth a storm, to enter someone’s dreams, to transform a stone into gold, a leaf into a feather, a rose into a bird. There were endless spells, and the more they meddled with the substance of a thing, or sought to change a human fate or heart, the more difficult they were to decipher. Warnings abounded, scribbled throughout.
Do not cast this spell during the full moon, or while the
crops are being harvested. Do not cast this spell with a black heart
. I came, too, upon new spells for things I had seen plenty of times before: spells to seduce, to call a love to you, to end a pregnancy or help create one.

It was something I saw in one of those spells that first made me suspicious of Mathena, and the teas she had fed me while I was pregnant. When women came to see us desperate
to end their pregnancy, we’d always given them pennyroyal and mugwort, with their distinctive, sharp scents. In the book, I saw herbs like tansy, parsley, cotton root bark, and had a visceral memory, the spice of parsley on my tongue. She would have been very careful, wouldn’t she? Feeding me herbs I did not know, in small amounts. Would she have done that to me? I knew I had had parsley, and
the more I read about tansy and cotton root bark, the more I suspected that these were the herbs I’d been given. I stole into the root cellar and sifted carefully through the baskets of dried herbs we kept there. But I did not find what I was looking for.

When I confronted her, she denied it.

“Why would I want to harm you, Rapunzel?” she asked, looking at me. “When I have given up my whole life
for you?”

I remained silent after that.

A
s spring shifted to summer, our garden became more and more lush, filled with vegetables and fruits so large and bright they were almost obscene. We kept the garden watered and fed and were able to start harvesting, filling baskets with bright vegetables and storing them for colder months.

And every day I visited my baby’s grave.
Soon enough, a twisting, green-leafed plant grew from that spot, with beautiful crimson flowers bursting from it, like hearts. I stroked its leaves and petals, whispered into its roots, watered it with my tears.

I
n the fine weather, women started appearing at the house regularly again. We were constantly working to tend to them as well as the garden, which everyone who
came to us whispered had to be the work of pure magic. No one could imagine vegetables like that growing from the earth on their own.

I threw myself into my work. What else was there for me to do? I knew now the grief of those women, with their unrequited loves, their fatherless children, their falls in fortune, their barren gardens and fields.

It occurred to me one day to take down a lock of
my hair and brush it along the arm of a woman sitting in front of us, her sick child on her lap. I moved my hair from her to her child, and it happened just as it had happened with the prince and the man in the forest: I could feel them. The woman, who until that moment had been like any other woman from one of the kingdom’s villages, now had a life and soul to her as vivid as Mathena’s or my own.
I could see her memories, the years she’d spent caring
for her sick mother, her sick children, her husband who’d gone into the king’s army and never come home. I could feel their hot, wet foreheads under her palms, under
my
palms. I could feel the illness that even now was wending its way through her boy’s body, draining him of the little strength he had left.

Without even thinking I told her
what to do. “Wash him with vinegar and rosewater,” I said, momentarily possessed. “And burn rosemary as an incense around his bed. Also, you must roast eggshells and grind them into a powder. Add the powder and chopped rosehips into a pot of ale, warm the mixture, and let the child drink it.”

“I will get you the rosewater, incense, and flowers,” Mathena said, her face registering her deep shock,
and she quickly left the room.

“Could you get some angelica as well?” I called out after her. I turned back to the woman. “You will weave the leaves into necklaces, for protection. Let everyone in your household wear one.”

She nodded. The boy moaned and shifted in her arms.

“You will be well again,” I said softly, taking her hand, as Mathena had so often taken mine.

When the woman and child
left, I was exhausted. Her sadness had latched onto my own.

Mathena was uncharacteristically quiet as we ate our stew and prepared for bed that night.

“Your hair is a great gift,” she said, finally. “I didn’t realize how great. You can be more powerful than me, or any of my teachers.”

“You believe that?” I asked, taken aback.

“Yes.”

“Did you always know what it could do?”

“I suspected,”
she said. “When you were . . . a child, I saw the way feelings came to you, through your hair. You were so sensitive. I thought it was safer for you to keep it up.”

“Have you hidden yourself from it?” I asked. “I cannot feel anything when you touch me, the way I can with others.”

“Yes,” she said softly.

“I thought Josef was special,” I said. “I thought it was only him I could feel that way.
But I suppose it is most everyone, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry I did not warn you. You might have seen him differently.”

I nodded, and remained quiet.

Over the next day, and all the days to follow, I focused on this gift that I’d been given, and took solace in it. If I couldn’t have Josef or my baby or any other happiness in the world, then through my gift and through my own suffering,
I could help others. If I couldn’t redeem myself by giving my son a beautiful life, loving him more than any child had ever been loved before, I could do this.