The Fairest of Them All

by Carolyn Turgeon

  It was overwhelming, feeling that I knew every part of him, feeling I was seeing all the secret parts of his heart that should have remained hidden.

  Finally, he grabbed on to the stone windowsill. His face was right next to mine and he pulled himself into the room. He moved gracefully, like an acrobat.

  And then he was standing before me, several inches taller than me, still clutching my hair in his hands. I looked up at him. His face was sweet and glowing. I had to look away, embarrassed to see him as nakedly as I did.

  “I could live in this hair,” he said, pressing his face into it. I felt his breath, his lips, through the strands.

  “Give that back to me,” I said, grateful for his silliness. I pulled it from him and yanked more of it in from the window until it reached the floor, then reined in the next batch.

  He turned to help me, gathering my hair into the tower, letting it brush against his face as he did. A thousand more images sparked in front of me: painted letters on a page, banquet tables covered with gold plates and sparkling glasses, childhood afternoons on horseback chasing falcons, stretched-out canvases and the feel of a brush dipped in paint, artists and dancers and musicians . . . Infusing all of it, a deep love for art and beauty, a desire to fill the world with wonderful things. I could feel my own heart expanding as I took him inside me, and everything became possible for me, the way it was for him. More than anything else, there was joy. I had never felt the kind of joy that he did. Even at his most hurt, his most lonely, he contained this wonder inside him, a passion for the world and all its beauty. People loved him for that, I realized.

  I could love him for that.

  “This must be what heaven is like,” he said, interrupting the flow of emotions.

  “Pulling my hair in through a window?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I was giddy with happiness. “You don’t seem very much like a prince,” I said.

  “And what is a prince supposed to be like?”

  “I thought princes were dignified.”

  “You don’t find me dignified?” He made a face at me, twisting his features into a ridiculous expression.

  “Well, you are the most dignified prince I’ve ever seen, though it’s true I’ve only seen one.”

  “You might have better luck if you didn’t get yourself locked inside of towers.”

  I laughed, as he reached out and ran his palm along my cheek. I leaned into it. And then we fell silent, just watching each other.

  “You’re here,” I said, finally. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Did you not call me to you?”

  I was so moved, I found it difficult to speak. I had called to him, and he had felt it.

  “Yes,” I said softly.

  “I waited for you at the ball,” he said, his voice curling into my ear, vibrating along every strand of my hair. “I was afraid that bandits had attacked you, that you weren’t safe; I know the dangers of the forest and the dark forces at work here. I came as soon as I could. When you called to me . . . it was as if you were inside me. I hadn’t slept that night and at first thought I was imagining things. But your voice was so clear.”

  He stepped closer to me, and took me into his arms. As he held me, I could feel myself transforming, as if under a spell. My body changed into liquid, into points of light. His body became an anchor as I felt myself melting, disappearing into him. I couldn’t get close enough to him.

  I knew it was too fast. I knew it was foolish, and wrong, but I’d brought him to me, the flow of feeling was overwhelming, and he was—I knew it, with absolute certainty—my fate.

  The sun spilled into the room. His hands were on my waist, my neck, pulling off my dress. I let him press against every bit of my body, ensuring that I was still there, that I hadn’t dissolved into light, too. I pulled off his shirt, slid my palms down his chest onto his smooth belly. And then we were on the bed and I looked up, saw my own face in the mirror—was it only mine? I was sure I saw a rippling, another face appear beside it—for one moment before he pulled me down beneath him. And then it was only his thoughts, the press of his skin under my hands, the feel of him entering my body.

  After, we lay tangled together on the bed, as the sun dropped in the sky. My hair cocooned us, humming with a contentment that moved from him to me, and back again. And then I felt, underneath it, something else. As he pulled himself up, a panic swept over me. I knew he was going to leave, that something was wrong. Why hadn’t I sensed it before?

  “I must return to the palace,” he said, as I sat up next to him. “Though I’d like to stay here with you. Can you let your hair down for me again? I’ll send soldiers back here to release you. I’ll have her punished for what she’s done.”

  The room came into relief. My body was a solid mass. “No, don’t send anyone,” I said.

  “But she has done wrong to you,” he said.

  “No! Please, don’t punish her. She just wanted to protect me. That’s all.”

  “From what?”

  “From you.”

  He stared at me.

  “She didn’t want me to go to the ball,” I continued. “She said . . . that you wouldn’t love me. That you were promised to someone else.”

  He did not answer. He didn’t need to.

  “It’s not my decision, Rapunzel,” he said, finally.

  I pushed him away, forced him to look at me directly. “Who are you promised to?”

  “I’m to marry the princess from the East.”

  “When?”

  “In two months.”

  The room had gone cold. His heart had shifted, clouded over with guilt and pain and regret. I could feel every bit of that shift, pulsing up from him to me through my wretched hair.

  Tears pricked at my eyes. He was still bewitched, I could see the glaze in his eyes, feel the strength of his desire. But it didn’t matter now. He was marrying someone else.

  He buried his face in my neck, ran his hands up and down my spine.

  “I’ll try to return to you,” he said.

  “Marry me,” I said. “Marry me instead.”

  “I do not have that freedom.”

  He kissed me again, shoved his hands and arms into my hair, which made me feel his grief more intensely. He didn’t want to leave me, but would anyway. I had misunderstood the way things worked, overestimated my power. He pulled my body into his, and I kissed him back even though tears streamed down my face. And then within what seemed like seconds I once again lowered my hair out of the window, and he climbed down. His own sorrow streamed up to me but it didn’t matter, there was nothing at all I could do to change what had happened, what I’d given him.

  He was gone.

  When Mathena returned that day, just as the sun was dropping in the sky and melting over the mountains, she could sense immediately that something had happened. Brune got to me first, landing on my shoulder and nuzzling me with her beak. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor in a pool of hair and my own tears, sobbing with grief. Moments later, I heard the great door creaking open, and Mathena’s footsteps as she raced up the stairs to me. What she’d tried to protect me from had happened despite her efforts, and now her sole concern was to see that I was all right.

  I was not.

  “My child,” she said simply, over and over, stroking my hair back from my face. “Shhhh.”

  Even in my sorry state, I noticed that her touch had no effect on me, and that I could not feel anything of her in it the way I had with the prince. It only made me feel more bereft. She seemed so distant after the kind of closeness I’d felt with him. Only his touch, it seemed, could awaken all the magic within me.

  She led me out of the tower and to our little house, where she sat me in front of the fire and served me tea and stew. She heated water on the fire and washed me, rinsed the tears and dirt out of my hair, the imprint of his lips, and slipped a clean dress over my head. She wrapped up my hair and covered it with cloth. I sat, silent. Neither of us spoke about
what had happened. Her magic sometimes was a convenient thing; she already knew.

  In the following days, we found out all the details from the women who visited us: that Josef was marrying a princess from the East to strengthen a still-shaky alliance his father had made the year before, and that his bride was a pale, dark-haired beauty with eyes like the sea. She was named Teresa, after the saint. She would not only ensure peace between our kingdom and the East, but bring us all closer to God. This was what we heard, over and over: that the new queen would bring happiness, peace, and God’s favor to the kingdom, which had been ravaged by failing crops, illness, hunger, the threat of war.

  I listened bitterly. All those spells I had watched Mathena cast for women over the years, she cast for me then, because I had forgotten them. All those teas and baths and potions, she made for me. “Bite down on this,” she said, handing me a stick of wood she’d boiled with hemlock root. “Close your eyes,” she said, handing me a steaming bowl, “imagine him, and drink this all at once, to flush him from your body.” She put elderberry bark around my neck, so that it hung next to my heart. She rummaged through my room and when she found the sachet I’d made, she burned it, then swept every bit of earth and herb from my hearth, down the stairs, and onto the forest floor. But I was committed to my suffering and nothing worked to rid me of it. It was the first rule of witchery, at least the kind she practiced on me then. One had to be open to it. Changing hearts was something else altogether.

  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.

  Josef’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 ey
es, 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.

  It 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.”