The Fairest of Them All (24 page)

A
fter that, I started visiting the mews regularly. Often I went alone in the mornings, when
Snow White was busy with her studies. I came to love the birds, all their majesty and power. I became a falconer, the way I’d been in the forest. I hadn’t realized how much I missed it: the freedom I’d felt racing over dirt and leaves and pine needles, Brune in the air above me, all manner of creatures crouching in the trees. I loved the feel of a bird on my wrist again, the moment when it first came
back to me, after I’d released it. The way the falcon and falconer became one, my heart in the air soaring above me. It distracted me, too, from life in the palace.

Though spring had come and the earth burst open all around us, my womb remained barren. Each night I could feel the king’s frustration, which he tried to hide from me. I could always feel it—when he lay next to me, when he stroked
my hair—those cracks in his heart. Clareta’s hands betrayed even more: that my ladies had begun whispering among themselves, wondering why I could not carry the kingdom’s heir. As Clareta strung pearls through my hair and sculpted it into ships and castles, I could feel her own doubt, the way her mind stretched back to that wintry day when she’d come to the forest, leaving the next morning with a
package in her grip.

By the time summer came again, and the wheat fields turned the countryside golden, healthy grain sparking up like fire, I started to feel like there was only one thing for me to do. If my own spells did not work, maybe Mathena’s would.

Plus, I missed her. I missed the forest and the life I’d had before, and I knew she would never visit me in the palace.

I told the king
that I wanted to visit Mathena, and he agreed to let me go if I brought Gilles along, as well as a retinue of guards. When he wanted me to go in the carriage, I insisted that I’d be more comfortable riding my own horse, dressed in the simple clothes I’d worn before coming to the palace. No one needed to know that I was queen.

He agreed, of course, for my safety.

“My lady of the forest,” he said.
“Don’t stay away too long. I’m instructing my guards to keep close watch on Mathena, so that she doesn’t lock you away from me again.”

“I promise I’ll return, my king.” I smiled and curtsied to him.

It was my first ride back into the forest after over a year of being away. My ladies packed a few satchels for me and helped make preparations. As the stablemen led out the horses, Gilles seemed
uncharacteristically excited, greeting me with a warm smile.

“I haven’t seen Mathena since I was a boy,” he said.

“I wonder if you’ll find her changed.”

“Perhaps I’ll find that I myself have changed and don’t see her as I did then.”

“I wonder that, too. About myself.”

“I imagine your life there was quite different from the one you have now.”

I smiled. “A bit.”

We mounted our horses and
set off slowly away from the castle, through the gates and into the kingdom at large, and then we began to fly. My hair streamed out behind me. The guards rode in front and behind, while Gilles stayed by my side. Occasionally,
I looked over to him and caught his eye, and we both laughed, and I could see that he loved, as much as I did, being wild, out in the open air. That he understood.

We rode
hard, back through my past, through the kingdom. We stopped the first night in the inn at the edge of the forest, to rest, and the next day we entered the woods. I breathed in deeply, the scent of forest and life and rot. I remembered the girl I’d been, a bow strapped to her arm, and felt more alive than I had in months.

Once we entered the woods, one of the guards let me use his bow and I hunted
alongside the men for fresh venison, though we had plenty of dried meat packed in our bags. I enjoyed the hunt so much that day turned to evening and we set up camp a second night, sleeping on the earth, more peacefully than I could remember ever having slept in the castle, with all its ghosts and secrets. Finally, on the third day, I saw the tower in the distance, and knew I’d come home.

She
was in the garden, bent over the earth. As we approached, she looked up at us, her eyes like copper in the sunlight. She looked years younger than she was.

“You’ve come to visit,” she said, as if she’d been expecting me.

Above us, the tower loomed. The trees crisscrossed each other, cutting the light into sections.

I slipped off my horse. Suddenly I was years younger.

She stood and made her
way over to me, stretching out her arms. I let her hold me, and took in her scent of earth and herbs, the faint smell of smoke. As usual, I could not feel anything of her, though she touched my hair.

“And who are you?” she asked, pulling away from me and gesturing to Gilles. “You look familiar.”

He bowed, and I saw him through her eyes: this imposing man, roughly handsome, his eyes black and
burning. He looked like he belonged in the forest, like he was already half wild.

“I’m the king’s falconer, my lady,” he said. “I believe I knew you when I was a boy, when you were a great friend to my father.”

She smiled with recognition and disbelief. “Yes!” To my surprise, she rushed over and threw her arms around him, genuinely moved.

He folded her into his arms more gently than I would
have expected, given his gruffness.

“It’s an honor to see you again,” he said, as they broke apart. “My father spoke so highly of you. I remember you clearly.”

“Your father was very loyal to me. He was the only one who was loyal to me, at the end.”

“You didn’t deserve the treatment you were given.”

I looked back and forth at the two of them, speechless.

“Let’s go inside and get something
to eat,” she said, “and then you can tell me why you’ve come.” She looked over to the three guards, who were caring for the horses discreetly. “Would you like to join us?”

They seemed taken aback by her offer, and bowed awkwardly. “We are fine here, my lady,” one of them said.

I knew they were thinking of bandits; they’d been keeping watch vigilantly ever since we entered the woods, not knowing
that we were already protected.

“Very well.”

We stepped into the cottage and there was Loup, rubbing against my ankles, meowing up at me. I bent down and picked her up, carried her with me to the couch. Brune stood on the mantel, and looked away from me haughtily.

“Brune!” Gilles said, striding over to the bird. “What a grand lady you’ve become. You have aged better than any of us, haven’t
you?”

Brune hopped on Gilles’ wrist, letting out a squawk of recognition.

It was disorienting, seeing Gilles standing by the fire in this little house, as Mathena busied herself preparing tea and heating two bowls of stew for us. She served them to us with thick slices of brown bread. Brune stayed on Gilles’ shoulder, and occasionally he passed chunks of meat up to her. As I ate, I could feel
my strength coming back to me. My heart starting to mend.

She had always been a powerful witch.

“This is where you grew up,” he said, shaking his head, sitting across from me now with his bowl in his lap. “And now you’re queen. Did you ever think such a thing would happen, when you were a girl?”

“Oh, no,” I said, shaking my head. “But she did. She knew.”

I gestured to Mathena, smiling, but
she pretended not to have heard. Gilles watched her as she stood to refill our mugs.

“Well, it is wonderful, anyway,” he said, turning back to me, “the way fate can twist and surprise you.”

It was comforting, being with the two of them, and with Brune above us, and Loup, old and nearly blind now, curled next to Mathena on the couch. I had the sudden, fleeting thought that I could stay like that
and never return to the palace at all.

When night fell, I led Gilles and the guards to the tower, where they would sleep. It was strange, having men inside the house and tower, the only real sign that things had changed dramatically since the last time I’d been there.

“I hope you’ll be comfortable here,” I said, turning to him. The guards were already laying out blankets on the stone floor.

“I will,” he said. “I love this place you come from.”

“You do?” I asked, breathing in.

“Yes.”

“You know, you can see the palace from up here. I used to stare at it, when I was a girl, imagining what it would be like to go there one day.”

I pointed to the window. A faint twinkle was visible, spires lit by the moon.

But he did not take his dark eyes off of me.

“Well, good night, then,” I said.

“Good night,” he said.

I was careful, as I turned to go, to keep my hair from touching him. It would be too dangerous to look into his heart right then. Too dangerous to look into my own.

O
nce I returned, Mathena sat me down on the couch, took my hands into her own.

“What is it that troubles you?” she asked. “Is your life at the palace what you hoped it would be?”

I
took a deep breath. “I cannot conceive,” I said. “And the king is not pleased with me.”

She nodded.

“I need you to help me,” I said. “Give me something so I can have a child.”

“What can I give you that you haven’t already tried yourself?”

“You know so much more than I do, Mathena.”

I thought of her with Clareta and all those women who came to see us, the way she’d take their hands in her
own and cast spells to heal their gardens, their children, their hearts. Surely she could do the same for me now.

A sadness crept into her face as she watched me. “Rapunzel,” she said, shaking her head. “You cannot have a child.”

“What do you mean?”

“You cannot have a child. I am sorry.”

“But . . . I had his child. I had a child.”

She shook her head. “It has never been possible, for you.”

I closed my eyes, remembering the teas and my ancient suspicions. “Did you . . . Was it the teas you gave me?”

She sighed. “No. I told you. When you killed the stag, something changed. Your fate changed. I tried to protect you when you were with child, because I knew . . . it was not right.”

“What do you mean? Was it . . . the flower we ate? Isn’t there something you can do to fix it? I must
give him a child, Mathena.”

She did not answer my question. Instead she said, “He has a child already. The princess Snow White.”

“Yes,” I said, shocked at how casually she said it.

“How is she?”

“She’s a good girl. I didn’t expect to love her the way I do. But I do.”

“Ahh.” She tilted her head, watching me as if she knew something I didn’t.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m surprised that
you love the child. When her mother took him away from you.”

“That was not her fault,” I said. And then I looked at her directly, trying to read her. “Mathena, did you do something to me, to make me barren?”

“No,” she said, and I was sure, in that moment, that she was lying. She smiled softly, and yet her eyes were hard as diamonds. “But it is true that you will never conceive.”

I let the information
sink into me, and with it, a whole new sense of the world and what was possible, a new grief that bit into my heart.

“What about Gilles?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” I asked, blinking up at her.

“He’s an extremely handsome man, don’t you think? You do realize he’s in love with you.”

“Mathena!” I said incredulously, as if I had not had the same thought myself. “I’m married. I love Josef.”

“Josef is a king. You can never be fully married to a man who has everything in the world.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” I said.

I turned away from her, not wanting to hear anything more.

T
hat night, as Mathena slept, I padded out into the moonlight to visit my son’s grave. Red, heart-shaped petals scattered the ground all around it. I focused, tried to send all
my feeling down into him as if the ground were my hair in all its magic, as if my own heart—with all its love and grief, as fresh as if it’d just happened—could stream down to him, comfort him in the cold ground.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “that I could not give you life.”