“Ah, shut up.”
Rapunzel clutched her hair to her chest and whirled around, staring into the darkness in every direction until she found the source of the familiar voice. Jack knelt several paces away, grimacing as he dug his bare hands into a thorny plant and worked her braid out of its prison.
“Jack!” Rapunzel’s voice was ragged from shouting. “I caught you! I thought I’d fallen too far behind, I thought —”
“You,” Jack said, freeing her braid and throwing it into the dirt, “are the loudest person I’ve ever met.” He gathered up the rest of her hair in an unkempt pile, dragged it over to her, and dumped it at her feet.
Rapunzel looked down at the pile in horror. Her braid, which had always been clean and golden, was as battered and filthy as Jack’s fingernails. But she would have to deal with that later. The only thing that mattered right now was the glass vial that Jack was carrying.
“Give me the cure,” Rapunzel demanded. She seized Jack by the front of his vest so she could search his pockets. Jack grabbed her wrists and fought her.
“Let go!”
“Not — until — you give — me — the cure!”
Jack stepped nimbly back. “I don’t have it anymore, all right? I already gave it to a fairy. He was waiting for me.”
Rapunzel whipped her head around in fear, but she saw nothing but the darkness and the trees. “Where is he?” she asked.
“He flew ahead to give it to his mate.”
“His what?”
“The fairy who’s dying. He went to save her life.”
Rapunzel gasped. The fairies had their cure. “But those fairies want to kill Witch,” she moaned. “They’ll hurt her.”
“Maybe they have their reasons,” said Jack with cool unconcern. “Maybe they’re just defending themselves against her. Ever think of that?”
“Don’t you dare blame Witch,” she shouted. “She did nothing to those fairies!”
“Then why did one of them almost die just from being in your tower?”
“That was the fairy’s own fault! She shouldn’t have pushed her way in!”
Jack shrugged. “Fine,” he said. “Have it your way. Just follow me close, all right? We have to get to the Red Glade, fast. It’s dangerous out here. Especially for me,” he added, and suddenly he looked afraid. “Come on,” he said, and he turned and set off into the darkness.
Rapunzel did not move. “The Red Glade?” she repeated.
Jack glanced back over his shoulder. “It’s where the Red fairies live,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! I’ll never go where the fairies live!”
“Well, that’s where the cure is,” said Jack, smirking. “So if you want to save your witch, I guess you’d better hurry.”
Rapunzel hesitated. To follow a peasant through the woods, away from her tower and into the lands far, far away — it violated everything that Witch had ever taught her. She knew what Witch would tell her to do. But if Witch came now, she would want to protect Rapunzel, and that would mean going back to the tower while Witch traveled alone to the Red Glade to retrieve the cure. And if Witch went to the Red Glade, where her magic didn’t mix with the fairies’, she might be killed.
Rapunzel could not allow it. She would go to the Red Glade herself, for Witch’s sake. She swallowed hard.
“What will I do with my hair?” she said in a small voice.
Jack raised his dark eyebrows at the dirty, tangled heap of braid that sat at Rapunzel’s feet. “Cut it off,” he said. “We’ll move faster without it, and I can’t afford to lose time. I’ve wasted enough already.” He strode back to her, pulled a rather large knife from a short sheath at his belt, and grabbed her braid at shoulder length.
Rapunzel shoved Jack so hard that he landed on his backside in the dirt, his knife still clenched in his fist.
“What’s wrong with you?” he yelled.
“Cut it off?” she said. “What do you mean, what’s wrong with me, you lying, thieving, hair-cutting —”
“Peasant?” Jack hefted a good portion of Rapunzel’s braid into his arms before she could stop him. “What’re you dragging, fifty pounds of hair?” He dropped it with a thud. “It’s useless. Get rid of it.” He raised his knife.
Rapunzel kicked out as hard as she could and caught Jack in the front of his trousers with the sole of her slipper — just barely, but it seemed to be enough. He stumbled back with a howl, and his knife flew off into the trees. “If I see that knife anywhere near my hair again,” Rapunzel began, “I’ll —”
“That was my dagger!” Jack hobbled into the trees. “I don’t have another one!”
“Well, I don’t have another braid.” Rapunzel swept her braid back over her shoulder. “So stop trying to chop it off.”
Jack made no reply. He emerged from the trees, teeth clenched. “Great,” he said. “It’s lost, and I don’t have time to go digging it out, so you better hope we don’t run across bandits. Or a Stalker.”
“What’s a Stalker?” Rapunzel asked.
“Tell you what,” said Jack. “If we come across one, I’ll feed you to it.”
Rapunzel looked into the dense and towering woods, which were forbidding enough in the darkness, even without bandits. But at least they were empty of sizable creatures — or seemed to be.
“We’ll have to carry your stupid braid.” He sighed heavily. “Give me half,” he said. “You’ll take forever if you try to haul it yourself. And hurry up.”
Rapunzel wound her braid around Jack’s shoulders. She crisscrossed it over his back, sashed it around his front, and twined it around his waist like hairy, golden armor. Jack’s head stuck out of the hive of hair, looking red and angry.
“I said half,” he barked.
Rapunzel made a few big loops around herself with the remainder of her braid. Looking furious, Jack set off at a waddling run. Rapunzel skipped to keep up with him, but her skip turned to a hobble when her skin began to burn again where the rope had torn into it.
And then it occurred to her.
“You remember the day that I forgot,” she said, coming to a halt and forcing Jack to stop with her. “Don’t you? You remember coming to my tower, and a prince cutting my hair, and the fairy being sick and everything?”
From within the hair hive, Jack sliced a contemptuous look at her. “Maybe,” he said.
“Tell me the story!” Rapunzel said eagerly. It had bothered her beyond belief not to remember Jack’s first visit. The opportunity to have the blanks filled in was too tempting to resist, even if it meant listening to a liar who worked for the fairies.
“You want to know what happened?” Jack asked. “The truth?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
“Then come see for yourself,” said Jack, veering left off the path and plunging into a dark, dense thicket. He pulled Rapunzel with him, and she hunched her shoulders as the trees closed in around her.
“Where are we going?” she whimpered. “I don’t want to go this way.”
“Neither did he,” said Jack, and he came to a halt. “Look.”
Rapunzel stopped beside him. She looked. And then she screamed so loudly that birds flew from the trees.
The man before them was made of stone.
RAPUNZEL stumbled back from the horrible statue. “He’s real,” she said. She wasn’t sure how she could tell, but there was no doubt in her mind.
“Yeah, he’s real. He’s Prince Dash of the Blue Kingdom.”
He looked exactly — but exactly — like the princes in her storybooks.
“Prince who?” she whispered.
“Prince Dash,” said Jack, and he shook his head. “You must be the only girl in Tyme who doesn’t know who he is.”
“Does he know we’re here?” Rapunzel asked. “Can he see us?”
“I don’t know. He could be dead.”
She hugged herself. “You mean he’s killed?”
“If he’s not, he probably want
s to be.”
Rapunzel’s heart fluttered. She had never seen anyone dead before, and Prince Dash of the Blue Kingdom was so lifelike that he might have moved at any moment. Though his eyes were made of stone, they were full of fear. She swept her gaze over his beautiful mouth, his billowing stone cape, his broad chest, and the veins that stood out in his large, strong hands. One hand was flung up before his face. In its grip, something golden glinted. Something not stone.
Her hair.
Rapunzel recognized it at once, and a shiver of shock ran through her. Her very own hair, shining in the stone grasp of a strange prince.
So he really had cut it, then. Jack had told the truth.
“That’s mine,” she said, and her breath came fast. “He took it.”
She stepped up to the stone prince and yanked on her hair, but it was caught fast. When she tried to get a better grip on it, her fingertips brushed the prince’s stone ones, and she recoiled.
“He’s warm,” she said.
A gust of hot wind blew through the thicket and made the branches rattle. Dried leaves rained down on the prince, scraping his stone limbs and his wide-open eyes.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Jack, “before the same thing happens to me.”
“Why would the fairies hurt you?” asked Rapunzel, dragging her eyes away from the statue to look at Jack. “Aren’t you their emissary?”
Jack looked silently at her. Then he pushed his way back toward the path, bringing Rapunzel behind him through the dense thicket.
“Ow,” she said. “Wait! Can’t you hold the branches so they don’t — ow!”
She ducked and turned to avoid being smacked in the face. When they were walking once more along the narrow dirt path through the woods, Jack spoke. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?”
He struggled to loosen a thick coil of braid that had wound itself about his neck. “The fairies didn’t hurt that prince. The witch did.”
“Liar,” said Rapunzel. “Witch would never do anything like that.”
Jack let out a long, irritated breath. “Look,” he said, “I guess I can see how this might be hard for you to believe, but that witch is —”
“Stop calling her that witch. She’s Witch,” said Rapunzel. “Now, tell me the story of the other afternoon, with the prince and my hair and the dying fairy. And tell it fast, because as soon as I get the cure back, I’m going to call for Witch and go home.”
She waited for him to speak, but he was silent. “Well?” she prompted, but Jack only waddled along faster. He dragged her with him, over rocks and gritty dirt, through plants that scratched her ankles and across a little stream that soaked her slippers and made them squish with each step she took.
“Wait!” she snapped, tripping over a root. “Tell me the story!”
“You won’t believe me.”
“Selfish peasant!”
“Spoiled brat.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you,” said Jack. “ ‘Tell the story, tell the story!’ ” he screeched. “My eight-year-old sister is more mature than you are.”
“Mature?” said Rapunzel. “Sister?”
Jack blew out another breath. “Skies,” he muttered. “Fine. Here’s your stupid story about the other day, all right? I was trying to find the Red fairies, but instead I found your tower. I thought it might be magical —”
“It is.”
Jack gave her a look. “Are you going to say something every five seconds?”
Rapunzel pressed her mouth shut.
“I stayed back in the trees,” said Jack. “I could see a man standing on the ground by the tower. I didn’t know it was Prince Dash, I just saw him holding on to your hair.”
“I would never let my braid down for a prince!”
“It wasn’t in a braid,” said Jack. “It was all spread out and hanging over the railing and stuff.”
This made sense, and Rapunzel nodded. “Witch washed it that morning and hung it out to dry before she left,” she said. “I remember that.”
“Congratulations. So while I was standing there watching, Prince Dash cut a piece of your hair off.”
“Evil!”
“It’s just hair,” said Jack, “and you have plenty to spare. But you screamed like he’d cut off your arm, and you started pulling all the hair up onto your balcony really fast. The prince ran for it, right past me, into the woods. When he saw me, he shouted, ‘Run, there’s a witch!’ — and believe me, I ran. But I didn’t get far before Rune flew in front of my face and told me to stop.”
“Rune?”
“The fairy who needed my help. Stop interrupting!” said Jack. “So, while the prince was cutting your hair, Rune’s mate was climbing up it.”
“A fairy was climbing my hair?”
“Yeah. She couldn’t fly into your tower, because the magic in there was too thick and she couldn’t use her wings. But she wanted to talk to you.”
“She was climbing up to kill Witch!” said Rapunzel. “When did you get there?”
“Right after that,” said Jack. “Rune was panicked. You pulled up your hair while his mate was still climbing, and she didn’t come back or give him any sign. He was afraid she would die, so he asked me to rescue her.” He lifted his chin. “He said the magic in the tower wouldn’t hurt me the way it would hurt him.”
Rapunzel picked her way over a fallen log, listening hard. It was just as Witch had told her. “Fairy and witch magic don’t mix,” she ventured.
“Right,” said Jack. “Rune said that the witch who protects you is more powerful than any witch in Tyme, and if I wasn’t quick enough, she’d kill me. But he also said that if I rescued his mate, he’d owe me a very great favor. So I couldn’t say no.” He slowed, his expression tense. “I need their help.”
Rapunzel prodded him onward in the tale. “So you climbed up to my tower?”
“Yeah.” Jack glanced at her. “Rune’s mate was lying on your dressing table, in the middle of a bunch of rose petals, and you were trying to talk to her.”
“What did she say?”
“She couldn’t talk back. She was really sick. She reached up a hand when she saw me, and then she went unconscious.”
“So Rune’s mate is the powerful fairy,” Rapunzel said, “and she’s the one who needs the cure.”
Jack frowned at her. “What do you mean, ‘the powerful fairy’?”
“Witch told me that one of the fairies has powerful magic.”
“Just one?” he said, and he laughed. “There are probably a thousand Red fairies.”
The number unsettled Rapunzel. It was larger than she could imagine. She had pictured maybe twenty or thirty fairies at most, which already seemed like an awful lot of creatures all at once. Witch had said they were useless, but that did not put her at ease.
“So then what happened?” she prompted. “The fairy went unconscious, and …?”
“You gave me your pink handkerchief to wrap her up in so I could carry her away. And then,” said Jack, with feeling, “you rang your stupid bell, even though I begged you not to. I told you the witch would kill me — I said, ‘Please just let me go’ — but you said no, which meant I had to run. That witch came after me pretty fast after she visited you. She would’ve caught me, but Rune was waiting for me. He led me into a fairywood, and the witch couldn’t follow.”
“A fairywood?”
“That’s how fairies travel. They go into one group of trees, and they come out in another. They can get all the way across Tyme within a day. Wouldn’t that be great?”
Rapunzel didn’t really hear him. Jack’s story had given her a great deal to think about. She trudged forward, wishing again that she could call for Witch. But she couldn’t bear to subject Witch to danger just because she herself had been stupid.
“Will we be there soon? To the fairies? How much longer?”
“I don’t know,” said Jack. “Rune told me to walk northwest away fro
m the tower and he would come for me as fast as he could. Can’t you walk any faster?”
Rapunzel could not. Her shoulder already ached from carrying loops of her braid, which she had to shift to the other arm. The night was intensely hot, which she was unused to; the air in the tower was never thick and wet like this. The ground was as horrible as she had expected.
It was also much bigger than she had imagined. Without a ceiling or walls, space continued forever. It was forty paces across her tower and one hundred twenty-five and a half paces around it, but she lost track of her steps in the woods before she even started counting. Her eyes went everywhere as she walked, her gaze drawn helplessly to the tops of the towering trees.
A rustling in the bushes to the left of the path made both Rapunzel and Jack freeze.
“Quiet,” Jack whispered, holding up a hand. “Don’t move.”
Rapunzel looked to her left. A pair of wide, luminous eyes stared back at her from the darkness. She screamed in terror, the luminous eyes widened, and a toast-colored beast leapt out of the thicket and dashed across the path in front of them, followed closely by a smaller beast of the same color. Both disappeared into the woods.
“Ground monsters!” said Rapunzel. “Vicious, gluttonous beasts! Will they eat us?”
“They’re deer,” Jack said.
Only after he had defended the harmlessness of deer to Rapunzel’s satisfaction did they march onward. Finally they reached another clearing ringed by more woods. Rapunzel dropped down to sit on a log.
“What are you doing?” Jack demanded.
She ignored him and looked at the sky, where the moon shone above the pointed peaks of the trees. It was the same size down here as it was in her tower, and she was grateful for something familiar. A sudden wind blew across her face, and she was grateful for that too. It was nice to sit still and let the wind cool her sweating brow and lift the damp hair from her temples.
The wind smelled different here. Not like her tower breezes. It was bigger. Sharper. She took a deep breath of it and decided that, of all the ground things so far, it was the least offensive. Rapunzel lifted her braid from her neck and bent her head to let the wind touch her hot skin.
Grounded: The Adventures of Rapunzel Page 4
