by Anita Valle
Godnutter swings her arm around to point the pipe at Lunilla. She flinches back, turning her shoulder to shield the baby. Beauty leaps out to grab Godnutter’s arm but Cooper swoops in and grabs Beauty. He lifts her off the ground, one arm around her waist, and with his free hand, yanks a dagger from his belt. He pokes the tip of it against her neck. “Get out of here now, witch,” he growls at Godnutter. “Or your daughter won’t live another sixteen seconds, let alone years.”
There’s a murmur of alarm among the people, a flutter of disturbance from the fairies. One of them drifts outward and to my surprise, it’s a man. As in, a male fairy. “Pardon me,” he says. “I have not yet bestowed my gift upon the prince.”
“What’s THAT got to do with anything?” Beauty shrieks, still pinned against Cooper. The fairy man smiles like there’s nothing odd in this. I like his eyes, brown and soft as a deer’s. He looks kind. “My gift for the prince was to be protection from harm. But I think Beauty might benefit more from it.”
“No, she won’t!” Godnutter shouts. “Your magic is too young, Hunter. It won’t work!”
Did she say Hunter? Did she say Hunter? Oh, you have GOT to be kidding me! That’s him? Oh my blood and bones - that’s him. He fits every detail Snowy ever told me about him. The dark hair and eyes, the gentle expression, the lean and muscular body. His clothes are different than she described, he wears a wrap-around tunic, tied with a cord, loose pants, and light sandals. Snowy never said he was a fairy. She said he died!
Hunter (I still don’t believe it) lifts a hand. “You’re quite right. I’m not saying the curse can be lifted. But I think it can be lessened. Instead of dying, Beauty will fall into a deep sleep. It may last a very long time. But she will have the possibility of being awakened.” He looks at the king. “Let her go, Cooper.”
I don’t expect the king to comply but he does. Just nods and puts her down. Hunter makes a soft gesture with his wand and a spray of gold sparkles falls over Beauty. She stands still while they settle. “I don’t feel any different.”
Hunter smiles and I instantly forgive Snowy for all her moping and mooning. He is beautiful. “You’ll be fine, Beauty. Don’t worry.”
“Oh, that’s fine to you?” Godnutter cries. “Everyone in my family under a curse, sentenced to sleep in a box? Oh yes, very fine indeed!” She grabs Beauty’s arm and with the pipe shoots a jet of smoke at the ground. It sprays upward and with a harsh BANG!, the two of them disappear.
~*~ 22 ~*~
The smoke dissolves. A hush follows. Not exactly silence, more like rustles and whimpers. The people look at each other and then at the queen.
She’s still clasping the baby against her. But she lets out a sigh that’s almost a laugh. “There, there, my friends. Let us all catch our breath. The wicked fairy did not succeed, she tried to curse my child and instead she cursed her own. Sometimes the world IS fair.” She grins and a few people chuckle nervously.
“But what about Beauty!” Kay cries. “She doesn’t deserve this! Though the curse was lessened, she’ll still be lost to us!”
“Not our problem,” Lunilla says.
“We have to help her,” Kay says.
Lunilla shrugs and shifts her gaze to me. “Oh! Almost forgot about you in this mess.” She hands the baby over to the king and beckons to me with her finger. “Come with me, Runzel.”
I look at Kay. He shrugs, annoyed, and I suspect his thoughts are far away from me. He’s worried about her. I shake my head and walk away from him.
Lunilla marches ahead of me through the ballroom without turning to see if I follow her. I don’t like her any better from the back, her red squiggles of hair bouncing, her skirt swelling out like a purple hill. She takes me back to where the tables are, through an archway in the wall. We pass through a narrow corridor heavy with the smell of grease and I wonder if the kitchen is nearby.
We turn into another long corridor. Two young girls in aprons scurry out of our way like mice into cracks in the wall. Lunilla stops at a plain wooden door about halfway down.
“Faster this way,” she says. “We’re going to the garden.”
“Oh.”
She opens the door and cool air flows into my face. With it comes a mixture of wonderful smells, almost entirely new to me. I step out onto a tidy dirt path and instead of lifeless snow, there is green all around me. Bushes that grow in leafy walls along the paths which are straight as ribbons and cross at the center of the garden. Plants laid out in beds of perfect circles with low stone walls around them. Pale statues of ladies that rise out of the greenery and wear loose dresses that seem to be falling off of them. But what grips me the most are the clusters of color I see growing on the bushes.
I draw my breath. “Are those the roses?”
“Pretty, aren’t they?” Lunilla nudges up a heavy blossom with her finger. “They’re enchanted. Know what that means?”
“It means they’re magic.” Gently, I reach out and touch the rose nearest to me. It feels soft and loving, like a kiss. The petals swirl around each other and curl out at the edges. It’s even more beautiful than a frozen spider web.
Lunilla strolls down the path, stopping here and there to pluck dead leaves off the bushes. “Each one has a different magical quality,” she says. “The red roses are for beauty. The pink roses make you feel happy when you smell them and they can also be used for love spells. The blue roses are calming, they relieve your anxieties, but if you consume too much, you’ll forget everything you ever knew.”
“Goodness.” I shy away from the nearest bush that holds a bunch of blue roses. They do have a mysterious beauty about them, like each one is holding a secret.
We’re nearing the corning of the garden and fall into the shadow of the castle wall which looms over us on two sides. The bushes here must get very little sunlight and yet….
“Oh my blood and bones,” I say.
Lunilla grins. “These are my favorite. The black roses. Aren’t they gorgeous?”
They’re scary. Black roses, black as dirt, blooming in this dim corner of the garden. Their stems and leaves are a dry sort of gray, like all the color was leached out of them. And yet they don’t appear to be dying.
“What do these do?” I ask.
“Oh, these have a lot of… interesting uses. But you have to be careful. Every part of the plant is dangerous.”
“I’m not surprised.” I turn my head. I can’t look at the black roses anymore. I retreat up the path, back into the sun, and stop beside the pink roses. I feel like crying for no apparent reason.
Lunilla strolls up behind me. “All right, Runzel?”
“I’m tired.” I drop my arms and let my braid slide off to the ground. I can’t carry it anymore, it’s too heavy.
Lunilla folds her arms and stares at it. “Only the daughter of Cinderella would wear a hairpiece that long. She was always desperate for attention too, had a sickening obsession with her looks. Do you know who I am?”
“You’re the queen.”
“Yes, of course, that’s not what I meant. I mean I used to know your mother.”
“Oh! Were you her friend?”
The queen laughs and it sounds like honking. “Not a chance! She was my stepsister. We grew up together in the same house.”
“What’s a stepsister?”
“Oh gracious, I’m not explaining all that. We lived as sisters but we weren’t, that’s all you need to know. We let Cindy live with us when her pa passed away.”
“So – so you knew her when she was a girl?”
“Oh yes.”
“What was she like?”
“Ugly,” Lunilla says. “And snooty too. Always thought herself better than the rest of us. A sneak and a liar and a tramp. That was Cinderella.”
Her words hit me like slaps on blistered skin. I hoped, I really hoped, that Snowy was wrong about my mother. But this person is saying she was bad, too. I feel like curling up and crying. I feel ashamed.
Lunilla enjoys my pain
, I can see it. She tilts her head as she looks at me. “You’re a lot like her. The dark streak is there, you just haven’t unleashed it. Where’s the other one?”
“The other what?” I mumble.
“The other twin. Cinderella had twins, Cooper told me. Where is she?”
“I don’t know. She was stolen by-” I gasp. She was stolen by a wicked fairy. I have known this all my life. And yet, when the wicked fairy was right in front of me, I failed to put it together. Until now.
Beauty!
No way. No way. We look nothing alike! But the story fits, all of it. Her age, her brown hair, her fairy godmother. Beauty, the girl that Kay loves. She is my sister.
“What’s wrong?” Lunilla asks.
I pat my chest. “Sorry, I… I had a pain. Uh, my twin was stolen by a plague. It’s just me now.”
Lunilla smirks. “You’re lying. But I expect that from Cinderella’s daughter. Don’t you trust me?”
“Not at all.” I don’t care if she gets mad. I need to talk to Beauty. I can’t say this is good news – I feel distinctly let down - but a long-time question has been answered. She deserves to know. And the queen does not.
Lunilla sidles over and pats my shoulder. “Come on, Runzel, I won’t hurt you. I just want to know some stuff. No harm in that.”
I twist away from her and meet her eyes. “Fine. I’ll trade you. A question for a question.”
Lunilla narrows her eyes. “Fine. But I go first.”
“It was my idea. How did you get these flowers?”
Lunilla shrugs. “The palace has always had a rose garden. They didn’t used to be magic, though. But when the kingdom froze over, the roses did not. They drew from the magic in the earth to stay alive. Cooper thinks they might’ve been blessed by a fairy long ago. We’re not really sure.”
“The black roses too?”
“It’s my turn to ask,” she says. “Where do you live? Why have I never seen you before?”
“That’s two questions.” I glare at her. “But I guess they both have the same answer. Like you, I’ve been kept inside a tower. For my entire life. That’s why you’ve never seen me.”
Lunilla looks at my braid on the ground and draws a noisy breath. “That’s not a piece, is it? It’s your real hair.” Her eyes bulge. “You’re the girl who lives with the Ice Witch! Aren’t you?”
“It’s my turn to ask!”
“NO!” She grabs my arm with a savage face. “Kay told me about you: a girl with long hair kept in a tower by the Ice Witch. He said he was going to get her out. That’s YOU, isn’t it?”
“Let go of me!” I try to yank myself away but her grip is surprisingly strong. She smiles, baring all of her long teeth. “Well done, Kay! He just delivered BOTH of my enemies bottled up in one scrawny girl.” She jerks my body against hers, facing outward. I try to struggle. Almost too easily, she jerks me along the path, back to where the black rose bushes are. Crouching over me, she forces me down and shoves my face into a fat blossom.
“Smell THAT, Cindy’s daughter,” she growls.
I can’t help it. I’m panting and the odor fills my head. It smells sharp and angry, like skunk. It smells like hate. It smells like fear.
It smells like death.
~*~ 23 ~*~
I wake up. It’s very dark. I blink heavy eyelids, don’t understand and don’t try. I’m so tired. The darkness is comforting.
Smell returns to me first. Cold stones. Damp earth. Dead animal, faintly. Human waste, more strongly. I start to wonder but I’m still so tired.
As wakefulness returns, I take in more. I’m in a small, stone room with a dirt floor. There are no windows, no furniture, and no people. Just a door made of metal bars and beyond that, a dark space.
I stand slowly, walking my hands up the wall. My braid is all over the floor. A reddish light burns outside the metal door, like a torch lit close to my room. I walk to the door. There’s a narrow corridor on my right and left, and straight across from me, another door made of bars. No one is there.
“Snowy?” I call out – and flinch back. My voice sounds enormous. “Snowy? Where am I?”
“She’s not here,” a new voice says. I gasp and jerk my head to the brighter end of the corridor. A woman slides into view and stops in front of me. I don’t know her at all.
“What do you want?” I ask. She frightens me. Her face is pale. Her hair is limp. And her eyes have no light in them. She wears a thin dress of grayish blue with no decorations.
The lady looks at me with no expression. “I just wanted to see if you look like Cinderella.” She has a bored, colorless way of speaking. “You do. You look like her before she made the changes to herself. The old Cinderella.”
“Who are you?”
“Melodie. The queen’s sister. I heard about you from my son.”
“Are you… Kay’s mother?”
Melodie nods. “He seems to like you a lot. He’s a good boy.”
“Where is he?”
“Asleep. We told him the queen sent you home in a private carriage – you were sick. He was very upset and wanted to go after you. But we told him to wait for tomorrow. You’ve been unconscious a long time, it’s nearly midnight.
“What!” I grab the bars of my door. “I have to go home! Snowy doesn’t know where I am!”
“Neither do you, do you?” Melodie says. “You’re in a dungeon below the palace. And you’re staying. You’re the queen’s prisoner now.”
“Why?”
“She wants to use you to flush out the Ice Witch. You’re the bait. She’ll have to come here and do what we say.”
I almost laugh. “You can’t control Snowy! She will freeze you, all of you, the second she gets here. You won’t even touch her!”
Melodie shrugs. “We’ll see.” She bends over and coughs into her sleeve. The cough sounds terrible – harsh and wet.
“What’s wrong?”
Melodie sighs. “I’m sick. The tower we were kept in… it was never warm enough. A sickness got into my chest and it’s never left. Some days I can barely breathe.”
“Didn’t they give you medicine?”
“In prison, no one cares if you die. Except for one guard, for a little while. He took me out for air and let me walk by the sea – our prison was along the coast. I was happy with him. But it didn’t last.”
“Why not?”
Melodie shrugs. “We grew tired of each other. It happens. But he gave me Kay, so it was worth it.”
“Oh,” I say, not really understanding. I don’t think Kay looks much like her. And this woman seems so tired and dull, like she has no happy feelings inside. She reminds me of Snowy.
“Did you know my mother?” I ask.
Melodie nods.
“Could you… tell me something about her? Something good?”
Melodie’s dead expression stays dead. “Hard to say. She killed my mother and threw me and my sister in prison. So, I’m not the best one to ask.”
My heart sinks. “You didn’t like her, either?”
“She did it to herself. She could’ve had friends but she chose to be cruel. If she returned, you’d hate her, too.”
“No, I wouldn’t!” I say. But Melodie is leaving. She takes the torch with her and ignores me when I cry out. I’m left alone in the dark and in the blindness. This is worse than my tower. I cover my mouth and shiver through a few quiet sobs. I hate not seeing. And even though she’s dead and gone, I’m feeling sorry for my mother. I didn’t want it to be true but I guess it is: nobody loved her.
~*~ 24 ~*~
I don’t sleep. I can’t possibly lie down on a floor of bare dirt. I pace across the hours, endless and black, my head squirming with questions. Those hours of total darkness are the worst things I’ve ever experienced. I can’t handle no light, no sight.
My legs ache. I try to crouch against the metal door and lean my head on the bars. I guess I doze off for a while because my eyes jump open when I hear someone screaming. I stand up. Light
is moving up the corridor; I hear footsteps and voices. Someone is screaming and crying at once.
Two men with thick arms and frowning faces come into view. They hold a girl between them, gripping her arms and partly dragging her. The girl is Beauty.
“I’m not! I’m NOT! Please, let me go, the queen is insane! Please, you must listen! It’s not ME!” Her face is soaking in tears.
The two men don’t speak at all. They open the door opposite mine, shove Beauty in, and bang it shut. She’s still pleading and crying. The men leave but – thankfully - drop their torch into a bracket by her cell. At least we can see.
I stand at my door, watching Beauty cry. But an odd thing happens. Once the men are out of sight, she immediately stops. She wipes her cheeks with both hands and flicks away the tears. “Well, that didn’t work.”
“What didn’t?” I ask.
She looks startled and stares across the hall at me. “Who are you?”
“Rapunzel.”
Her fancy eyes slide over me, up and down. I stare at her, too. She’s not wearing the gold dress anymore. This one is more simple, reddish in color, with a belt of dark brown, like her hair. The kind of dress you’d wear every day. Other than her looking my age and my height, I see nothing to mark us as sisters.
She turns her eyes away. “You were at the party last night. I saw your hair.”
“Yes.”
“With Prince Kay, were you not?” she asks.
I nod but I don’t want to talk to her about Kay. “Why are you here?” I ask.
“Ugh!” Beauty shakes her head. “The queen has lost it. She asked to see me this morning and oh – silly me! I thought she would thank me for saving her child. But no, not a word about it! She just asked me a lot of strange questions about my childhood and then out nowhere, she yells, ‘YOU ARE CINDERELLA’S DAUGHTER!’ It’s lunacy!”
