But it was the young woman standing beside the loom who drew and held my eyes.
She was about my age, just as Melisande had said she would be, though that was the wizardry at work, of course. Slim and straight and taller than I was, with skin so fair I could see the blue veins running underneath, see the throb of the pulse at her temple and throat. Without thinking, I counted the beats and so discovered that they precisely matched my own. Her eyes were a color I had seen only in the garden. Dark, like the faces of pansies.
Beautiful, I thought once more.
But frozen, like a plant that had bloomed too soon and been caught by a sudden frost. The sorceress’s daughter still possessed her outward form. But inside, it seemed to me that everything was brittle, holding its breath, as if waiting to discover if the next thing to come along would be the frost that would kill it, or the thaw that would bring it back to life.
I will be that force of nature, I thought. By my actions, I would determine both Rue’s future and my own.
She moved, then, almost as if she’d heard me, as if I had spoken my troublesome thought aloud. No more than a tilt of her head, a shift of her shoulders, but it was enough. Enough to show me that my eyes had deceived me in one thing: It wasn’t the stone giving off the golden light. It wasn’t the stone at all.
Flowing over the young woman’s shoulders, running the length of her body to curve in great shining coils at her feet, was the braid that Melisande and I had used to scale the tower. It was this that caused the room to glow as if alive, burning with its own inner fire. I had a feeling it would shine, just like this, even in the dead of night.
Hair, I thought.
Hair such as I had imagined only in my dreams. Hair as bright and shining as the sun. As golden as the petals of the flowers I had been forced to leave behind in our back garden.
If I could have wept then, I would have done it. But beneath Rue’s violet gaze, my eyes were as dry as the stone walls that suddenly seemed to close in all around. No wonder her mother heard the sound of a door opening, I thought. At that moment, I could almost hear it myself. I could see the way that Rue and I might fit together. Two halves of the same circle. The lock and the key.
Then her gaze shifted, and Rue looked at Melisande. As their eyes met, a strange ripple of movement seemed to pass through them both, and I saw the sorceress press a hand to her heart. But whether it was because she felt a sudden stab of pain or joy, I could not tell.
Rue’s lips parted, and she drew in a breath. “Mama,” she said, her voice sounding musical and rusty all at once. Like a fine instrument that has gone unused for many years but has not yet forgotten how to sound a tone.
“Mama?” she said once more, a question this time, her voice stronger and more urgent.
“Rue. My child,” said Melisande.
I did weep then, as I watched the sorceress and her daughter slowly move together until each had stepped into the other’s outstretched arms.
Eleven
It was the cat who decided things, in the end. A turn of events I don’t think any of us, not even Melisande, could have foretold. Not that I made the final decision to stay and help lightly. It was merely that Mr. Jones enabled me to catch a glimpse of something I might not have been able to see on my own. And this turned out to be what tipped the scales and changed the balance, weighing it down on Rue’s side.
Prior to that particular moment, however, in spite of all my noble intentions, it was pretty touch and go. It’s one thing to think you understand what the right thing to do is. Actually doing it isn’t always as straightforward, or as noble, as it sounds.
“Rapunzel, this is my daughter, Rue,” Melisande said, once we had all shed tears for our own reasons and things had settled down. “Rue, this is Rapunzel, who is our hope.”
She looked at me then with those violet eyes. In them I could read absolutely nothing at all. When Rue looked at her mother, her eyes seemed vivid and alive. But when she looked at me, they were flat and dull. I recognized the look; it seemed I was not the only one who was afraid and unwilling to show it.
“Why?” she asked simply.
Well that’s getting right to the point, I thought.
“Because I love her as I have loved no one else but you,” Melisande answered, as honestly as always. “I hope this love may help her break the curse that binds you.”
“She’s supposed to find the way to free me?” Rue asked, and all of us could hear the disbelief in her voice. “But why can’t you do it? I thought it would be you. You were the one who—”
I pulled in an audible breath and Rue broke off.
“I thought so too, for a time,” Melisande answered after a moment. “But when I saw Rapunzel, I began to see another way, and so I made room for her inside my heart, took her in, and raised her as my own.”
Rue’s eyes flickered to me, and then away. They definitely held emotion now.
“All this time,” she said. “She’s been with you the whole time we’ve been kept apart?”
“Not all of it,” Melisande answered, and I thought I could hear the effort she was making to keep her voice steady and calm. This meeting was hard on all of us. “Just the last sixteen years or so.”
“I’ve been trapped in this tower, waiting,” Rue continued, as if her mother hadn’t spoken. “And you’ve been trying to replace me. You’ve been loving someone else.”
“That’s not altogether true,” I said quietly. “Your mother loves me and I love her. That much is true enough. But she’s never tried to replace you. She’s never even let me call her mother. I think her heart is big enough to hold the both of us.”
“What do you know about it?” Rue flashed out. “I never asked for your opinion, in case you didn’t notice.”
“Well, if I didn’t,” I came right back, “it’s probably because I was distracted by the sight of you feeling sorry for yourself.”
“I have a right to be unhappy,” Rue began.
“Of course you do,” I said. “But so do I. A week ago I had my very own bed, and apple trees to climb. My life wasn’t perfect, but at least I had the illusion that it was mine. As of today, I’ve been dragged halfway across the country only to be informed that the reason your mother raised me in the first place was to help break the curse that keeps you in this tower.
“I learned about you yesterday, I’m meeting you for the first time today, and I have yet to decide whether or not I like you. What makes you think I’m any happier about all this than you are?”
“Well, don’t expect me to ask you to stay,” Rue said. “As far as I’m concerned, you can go whenever you want.”
“Fine,” I said. “Nice meeting you.” I turned to her mother. “I’d like to go back down now.”
“Rapunzel,” said Melisande.
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry, but no. ‘Of my own free will,’ you said. But she has to ask, some part of her has to want me to stay, or there’s no point in this at all. I’m right and you know it.”
“But I don’t want you,” Rue said. “I want—”
“I know, I know,” I said. “You want a knight in shining armor.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Rue demanded.
“Not a thing,” I responded. “But I’m not making any promises.”
“You’ll never get anything accomplished with an attitude like that.”
“No, we’ll never get anything accomplished unless you ask me to stay in the first place,” I all but shouted.
We eyed each other for a moment, both of us breathing just a little too hard.
That was the moment the cat intervened. Bounding up the spiral staircase to pounce upon the ribbon at the end of Rue’s hair. I hadn’t thought about Mr. Jones since our arrival. But now here he was, a great fat copper penny wrestling with all that gold.
“Oh,” Rue breathed. “A cat. Whose cat is it? Is it yours?”
At the tone of her daughter’s voice, Melisande went very still. Together, we watched as Rue kne
lt and ran her fingers over Mr. Jones’s fur. A moment later, his rich purr filled the room.
“Does it have a name?”
“Of course it has a name,” I said. “It is a he and his name is Mr. Jones.”
Rue was sitting on the floor now, sitting on her own hair, though I don’t think she noticed. If you can let people climb up your hair, sitting on it yourself probably counts as nothing.
“That’s a silly name for a cat,” she said, at which he crawled up into her lap as if he’d known her all his life, turned around three times, then curled up with his tail tucked beneath him, just the way he always did in my lap.
I felt a pang in my heart. So that’s the way things are going to be, I thought.
“He’s named for the person who gave him to me,” I explained. “A tinker, called Mr. Jones. He has ginger whiskers. It was meant to be a compliment to all concerned, and it seemed a good idea at the time.”
“Can we keep him?” Rue suddenly inquired. She looked up. Not at her mother, but straight at me, and now I could see the way those violet eyes could shine. Almost as brightly and beautifully as all that golden hair. “If you were to stay, could he stay too?”
“I hope so,” I said simply. “For I love him.”
Her expression changed then, and Melisande became even more still than before, so still she could have been one of the stones of the tower.
“Would you, could I—”
Rue exhaled a frustrated breath and began again, though I noticed she no longer met my eyes, but kept hers fixed on Mr. Jones.
“If you stayed, would you be willing to share him with me? Could I learn to love him as well?”
I took one very deep breath of my own, held it for a count of six, then let it out.
“I would be willing to share him,” I said. “But whether or not you can learn to love him, only your heart can decide.”
At this, Rue looked back up, her eyes wide. “You love him, but you would be willing to share,” she said, as if she didn’t quite trust that she’d heard me right the first time. “You wouldn’t try to keep him all to yourself”
“Yes, I would share,” I said. “Or at least I would try. That’s the best thing to do with love, so I’ve always been told. If you can make room in your heart for the cat, I can make room in mine for the fact that you love him.”
Her face changed then, her features slowly transforming themselves into an expression that I recognized: hope. Unexpected hope, at that, which is often the strongest kind.
“How would it work?” she asked, turning to her mother. “If I ask her to stay. How long?”
“Her name is Rapunzel,” Melisande said. “You’ll probably want to learn to say it. Together, the two of you must find the way to free you in the time it took to imprison you in the first place: two nights, the day that falls between, and the blink of an eye.”
“Oh, for crying out loud!” I exclaimed. “Make it challenging, why don’t you?”
“It isn’t me ..., ” Melisande began.
“It’s the wizard,” I interrupted, “I know. You don’t have to tell me. I’m beginning to think this world would have been a much better place if he’d simply learned to keep his mouth shut.”
At this, Rue turned her head to look at me and did the very last thing I expected: She smiled. Before I quite knew what I was doing, I smiled back. Mr. Jones opened his mouth and gave a great, teeth-gnashing yawn. Rue’s smile got a little bigger, and I felt my own hope suddenly kindle.
We can do this, I thought.
“Go ahead,” I said. “It’s not so difficult, once you put your mind to it. Just ask.”
Rue gave a sigh, almost as if she’d hoped the fact that she already loved my cat meant I was going to let her off the hook.
“Will you stay with me, Rapunzel? Even though the outcome is uncertain?”
“Though the outcome is uncertain, I will stay with you, Rue,” I said. “I will do my best to free us both.”
And so the promise was made, and a bargain struck.
Twelve
I cannot tell you what was said at the second parting between the sorceress and her daughter. It hardly seemed right for me to overhear it, so I went back out of that great golden room the same way I’d come, then walked around the tower’s top until I could see the river and Mr. Jones, both far below me. I stood for a moment with my hands on the railing, as he looked up, and I looked down.
“You are going to stay, then,” he said, his voice reaching me easily.
“I am,” I said. “Though not for long, assuming all goes well. I’m to free the sorceress’s daughter in the same time it took to make her a prisoner: two nights, the day that falls between, and the blink of an eye. How did you know? That I would stay, I mean.”
“I didn’t,” the tinker answered. “I only thought you might.”
“It’s that heart thing again, isn’t it?” I said, and, to my relief, we both smiled.
“Something like that,” the tinker agreed. “Have you thought about what you’ll tell Harry? He’s going to want some sort of explanation, you know.”
I felt the tower sway beneath my feet then, though my head knew it hadn’t moved at all. Harry. I’d forgotten all about Harry. Again.
“No, I can see that you haven’t,” said Mr. Jones.
“I didn’t mean ... I never thought...,” I said.
“Take a deep breath,” Mr. Jones said. “Stay calm. I’m sure you’ll think of something when the time comes. You seem to have done all right so far.”
“Where will you go? What will you do?” I asked. For, now that my brain was thinking beyond the tower, it seemed to me unlikely that the tinker and the sorceress would simply sit at its base and gaze upward for seventy-two hours, no matter how much Melisande might want to.
“I have traveled in this land a little,” Mr. Jones said. “There is a town about a day’s journey through the forest, the seat of the king who rules these parts. That’s as good a place to go as any.”
“What of Melisande?”
“You’d better ask her that yourself,” the tinker said. At this, I turned to discover the sorceress standing by my side.
“Ask me what?” said Melisande.
“I was wondering whether or not you’d go with him,” I said. “He’s going to the closest town. I think I’d feel better knowing the two of you were together.”
“Are you asking me to do this?” Melisande said, and I thought I could see the barest hint of a twinkle at the back of her eyes.
One good question deserves another, I thought.
“Yes, I am asking you to do this,” I said. “For my sake, will you please stay with Mr. Jones?”
“Gladly,” Melisande replied. “For your sake, as well as my own.”
With that, before I quite realized what she intended, she reached out and enfolded me in her arms. A thousand memories seemed to rush through me, as if summoned of their own accord.
The sorceress and I sitting before the fire on a winter’s night as she patiently taught my fumbling fingers to knit. Standing in the kitchen on a hot summer’s day, laughing as we realized that every single one of our mutual twenty fingers was stained the exact same color from picking blueberries the whole morning long. I remembered lying in my bed at night when I was supposed to be asleep, gazing instead at where Melisande sat brushing out her hair. Wondering if I would ever have hair of my own, knowing she would love me just the same even if I never did.
She loves me, I thought. Against all odds, and in the face of her own pain, she had made room for me inside her heart. Now the time had come for me to return the favor for her daughter, if I could.
“Thank you,” she whispered, and she stepped back and let me go.
“Don’t thank me yet,” I answered. “I haven’t done very much.”
She raised her eyebrows at this. “You think not?”
“I’ll do what I can,” I said.
“That’s all that can be asked of anyone,” she replied.
> With that, almost as if she was moving quickly before either of us could change our minds, the sorceress spoke the password once more.
“One so fair, let down your hair. Let me go from here to there.”
No sooner had she spoken than the pane of glass behind us flew open and Rue’s great golden braid came flying out. Once, twice it wrapped itself around the railing, just as it had before, them plum-meted down to land beside the tinker with a plunk. Melisande gave me a final kiss, then, without another word, climbed down. As soon as her feet touched the greensward, the braid ascended, whooshing out of sight, and the pane of glass closed silently behind it.
“We’ll see you in a couple of days,” Mr. Jones called up. “When Harry finally gets here, tell him we’ve gone on to the town. He can follow if he wants to. He can’t get lost. All he has to do is keep to the main road.”
“I’ll do that,” I said. “Assuming he speaks to me at all.”
“Oh, he’ll speak to you,” the tinker answered. “I have a feeling you can count on that.”
Then he helped Melisande into the wagon and clucked once to the horse. I stood at the railing, waving until they were out of sight and then some. Finally I turned around. The great bank of windows at the tower’s top showed me nothing but my own reflection, with the sky at my back.
Was Rue on the other side of the closest one? I wondered. Had she watched me say farewell to her mother?
Stop it, Rapunzel, I chastised myself. If you start off thinking of this as a competition, the whole exercise will be nothing but a waste of time.
Time, the one thing I could not afford to waste. Holding that fact firmly in my mind, I crossed the stone balcony, whose width was fifteen paces but felt like a hundred, and went back inside.
Rue had remained sitting right where I’d left her, at the top of the steps with Mr. Jones in her lap. She was teasing the cat with the end of that long, long braid.
“Does it hurt?” I asked suddenly. “When people go up and down?”
“No,” she answered, with a quick shake of her head. “I don’t feel it at all. I don’t think I feel much of anything, to tell you the truth.”
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