by Anita Valle
My chest tightens. “But….”
“So, congratulate yourself, Rapunzel.” Snowy looks at me and her eyes are black as a starless night. “You’ll see your coffin before your sixteenth birthday. I hope you’re very proud.”
Tears flood into my eyes. “Fine! I hope the Beast eats your first!” I yank up my braid and leave, sobbing by the time I’m midway down the stairs. I hate Snowy! I hate her so much!
I try to find my room again but in my anger, I’m not paying much attention. The palace just seems to go on and on, another turn, another wing, another tower. I don’t know why it has to be so big. I think I found my floor - at least, the paintings look familiar. I pass a room with an open door and hear someone humming inside. It sounds like Beauty, slightly off-key. But when I peek in, I don’t see her.
I rub my eyes with my sleeve and walk in. She has a sunny room of yellow and white, with shiny furniture like mine. But unlike mine, there’s a set of glass doors that go outside. When I look out, I gasp and step back. Beauty is sitting in a kind of outdoor room with a low fence around it. Strange enough but that’s not what made me gasp. She’s perched on a low stool and working at a device. A wooden device with a wheel that spins.
I push open the glass door. “What’s that?”
Beauty doesn’t act surprised to see me at all. “It’s a spinning wheel. Never saw one?”
“Beauty! What about the curse?”
“The curse is on my birthday,” she says. “I can spin all I want until then. I need to make a dress.”
“A dress?”
“For my coronation.” Beauty smiles and it’s way too smug. “Now watch this. Are you watching?”
I fold my arms. “Yes.”
Beauty pumps a wide pedal with her foot and sets the wheel spinning. She’s got a bundle of straw in her lap and feeds it onto a thread that runs through a small hole in the device and gets wrapped around a spool. The spool stands on a slender spike that points upward. That must be it: the spindle.
“Look closely,” Beauty says. She adds another bit of straw to the thread and pinches it between her fingers. Her fingers slide back, twisting the straw around the thread. I wash her pinch and slide, pinch and slide, adding more straw as she goes. As it passes between her fingers, I’m surprised by a flash of brilliance.
“Is that…?” I look at the spool, filling with new string. It doesn’t look like straw anymore. It’s smooth and shining and almost looks like-
“Gold?” I say.
Beauty grins. “I can spin straw into gold. Real gold! I always could, it’s my little magic trick. How about you, got any magic tricks?”
“My tears can heal the sick,” I say.
Beauty snorts. “That’s not much, the fairies do things like that. But I’m the only one who can make gold from plain straw. I discovered it when I was little.”
“Me too,” I say.
“I need a new dress. The most magnificent one I’ve ever had. Godnutter can make the dress for me but I have to provide the gold. I’ll need about twelve large spools, I think. That’s why I have to get started.”
“You had on a gold dress at the party,” I say. “Why can’t you use that?”
“That’s my second gold dress,” Beauty says. “I won’t destroy it to make this one, they’re part of my collection. I’ll be the golden queen.”
I roll my eyes. The spinning wheel whirs as she continues to pump the pedal. Beyond the stone fence, night is descending and the land is darkening to cool patches of blue.
“What are we standing on?” I ask.
Beauty laughs. “It’s a balcony! Goodness, Zelly, you don’t know anything!”
I flinch. “Don’t call me that.”
“Why not? Kay does.”
“It’s just for him.”
“Aw, that’s sweet.” Beauty grins at me. “You really like him, don’t you, Zelly?”
I clench my fists. “Why don’t you like him? You’re really hurting him with this. He just wants you to give him a chance.” I’m not really arguing for Kay. I just want to know why.
“He’s too nice.” Beauty grabs more straw from a bundle by her feet and lays it across her lap. “Nice is boring. I don’t want to be just a pretty girl with a nice husband. It’s too ordinary.”
“Kay’s not ordinary.”
“I don’t need him! I can be queen by myself,” Beauty says. “I don’t want him to be the king, that’s giving him exactly what he wants.”
“He wants it?”
Beauty smirks. “He wasn’t too happy when little Jack was born. Tries to hide his disappointment but I can tell. Kay was first in line to be king until then. And now he’s not.” She stands up and leans back to stretch her back. She walks to the front of the balcony and rests her hands on the stone railing. “Besides, Kay is just a boy. I could have any man I wanted.”
I follow her, frowning. “What do you mean, he’s just a boy? What kind of….” I feel myself blushing. “What kind of… man do you like, if you don’t like Kay?”
Beauty’s face changes. Her pristine profile droops a little, her lashes falter. “Leave me alone.”
I have a hunch. Because she looks like Snowy when she’s talking about Hunter. With a smirk, I lean closer. “What’s wrong, Beauty? Is there someone out there who doesn’t like you?”
Beauty turns and smacks my face.
I gasp and step back, covering my stinging cheek. “You hit me!”
Beauty shoves her hands against my chest and I fall backward, my braid just saving my hip from the stone floor. When I try to scramble up, she steps on my braid.
“Forgetting your manners, little girl?” she snarls.
I yank my braid out from under her foot, jump up and run. She chases me as far as the bedroom door but when I’m tearing down the hall, I don’t hear her behind me. She yells something that sounds mean but I can’t make out the words.
I take all the stairs I can find that lead downward. Eventually, I burst out of the castle and into the rose garden. I’m sobbing and there’s no one – not Snowy, not Kay, not anybody – to comfort me. I trudge down the nearest path, crying through clenched teeth, so angry that I grab random roses off the bushes and hurl them at the ground, petals spraying.
Snowy never hit me. Other than her accidental ice blast the other day, she never tried to hurt me. Beauty just smacked my face! I burn all over with the shame of it, cry in angry heaves. My face is who I am. It’s what makes me Rapunzel and not someone else. I feel like all of me was hit, my whole person. My whole me.
I stop walking because my hand hurts. I uncurl my fist and find a bleeding puncture wound on my first finger and some scratches from when I grabbed the roses off the bushes. I forgot about the thorns.
I stare at the wound on my hand and my eyes slide up the palace wall. Beauty’s probably still up there, spinning at her stupid wheel, so confident she’s going to escape the curse. But I know one thing about that curse that she doesn’t. And it’s going to be her downfall.
She’s never going to have Kay. She’s never going to be the queen. And she’s never going to hit me again.
You will prick your friggin’ finger, Beauty. And I will make it happen.
~*~ 33 ~*~
I find a bench made of curling iron and sit down. I pull the sleeve of my dress over the wound until the bleeding stops. Gradually, my sniffling subsides.
I hear a door slam, a voice shouting. And I groan. Lunilla is coming.
“I want them dead, I want them all dead! Right now! All of them!” She comes into view and marches up a path with Cooper behind her. “There has to be a way!”
“I’m thinking, I just don’t know,” he says.
“You’re not with me on this!” Lunilla whirls around and points in his face. “You’re soft on the Ice Witch, I can see it!”
“Look, Snowy’s no threat to us,” Cooper says. “We should let her go home, she seems pretty broken anyway. It’s those girls that are the problem.”
At t
his point, they both see me. We’re separated by only a few rows of bushes and I wasn’t trying to hide. I’m disappointed, though - I liked watching them fight.
“Hello,” I say.
“What’re you doing there?” Cooper barks.
“Just sitting. What are you doing?”
“We’re trying to get rid of you!” Lunilla says.
I nod. “I can see that. This is like your worst nightmare, isn’t it?”
“Don’t get cocky,” Lunilla says. “I’m not worried about you. You’re the least important one here.”
I lift my chin. “I’m more important than you think.”
“Ugh, she is SO like her mother! That was Cindy all over again, always had something to prove.”
“I think the other one’s like Cinderella,” Cooper says. “Plain nasty.”
“It’s the fairy we need to worry about,” Lunilla says. “She’s the one tying our hands. If we stop the fairy, we stop them all.”
“I don’t know how,” Cooper says. “She’s got too much magic. She can do whatever she wants.”
“What about the roses?” Lunilla gestures at the shrubs around her. “The blue ones make you forget everything. Maybe we could put it in her tea.”
“She won’t fall for that,” I say. “You’re better off just taking her pipe away.”
Lunilla stares at me. She turns and looks at Cooper with wide eyes.
“I don’t know...” he says.
“But Coop! All of her spells are stored in that pipe. If we could steal it-”
“She’ll still have magic without it. She’s a fairy,” Cooper says.
“But that pipe is her weapon, her magic wand. She wouldn’t want to lose it. It’s something to think about, at least.”
I stand up. I wasn’t really serious but they’re taking it that way. There’s no way anyone could steal that pipe. Except Beauty… maybe. But I doubt Godnutter leaves it lying around.
I walk around a corner of the castle wall with a vague idea of going back inside. I’m still in the garden, which is spacious and sprawling, like everything else at this palace. Once I’m sure Lunilla can’t see me, I stop and pluck a blue rose off one of the bushes, breaking the stem with my thumbnail. I twirl the blossom in my fingers but don’t touch the petals. The blue roses make you forget, she said. There’s something I like about that.
My shoulders tense up. Something is wrong. I spin around, expecting someone behind me but no one is there. I don’t hear Lunilla’s voice anymore – maybe she went inside. I glance at the palace and my eyes travel up the wall to a slender tower far above me. I squint my eyes and step back.
There’s a window near the top of the tower, tall and narrow. A woman stands at the window, looking out – no wait, she’s standing on the window. Right on the sill, her hands gripping the walls, her white dress flapping in the breeze.
It’s Snowy.
What’s she doing? That’s dangerous! Why would she climb out onto the ledge, is she looking for something? I can’t make out her face, but she’s not looking down. She simply stares ahead of her. And then she takes her hands off the sides of the window and covers her face.
And Snowy steps off the sill.
~*~ 34 ~*~
My whole body jerks and I scream like mad. Snowy drops like a stone in front of the palace, twirling end over end, her face hidden beneath her hands. In two seconds, she’s halfway to the ground, in three seconds-
A blast of light shoots at the palace. It seems to dive from the sky and aim at Snowy. The light hits her with an exploding flash of gold and a boom that knocks me to the ground. I roll to my side and stare with huge eyes. The light rises momentarily above the garden and then begins to lower itself. The blinding glow shrinks until, finally, I can see what’s behind it. It’s the fairy, Hunter. With Snowy in his arms.
I hear Snowy’s shriek of disbelief. “HUNTER!”
His face is tense. He floats down the few remaining feet to the ground, his silvery wings fanned out. Though he sets Snowy down carefully, her limbs collapse like a newborn deer and she turns her eyes up to Hunter as if terrified. “HUNTER!”
“Shhh… it’s me, Snowy, it’s me.” He crouches and takes her face in his hands. “It’s all right, don’t be afraid. I couldn’t let you harm yourself, I couldn’t do that.” His eyebrows curl upward, he looks shaken.
“Hunter?” Snowy’s hands shake as she reaches for him. She touches his cheeks with her fingertips, curves her hands over the line of his jaw. For a long moment, they simply gaze at each other, each one holding the other’s face. I can’t even breathe as I watch them.
“I am so sorry, my Snow Queen,” Hunter says in a voice so soft and beautiful, I creep forward on my elbows to hear better. I fell beside a stretch of blue rose bushes and I shuffle closer to them to conceal myself.
“What happened?” Snowy asks. She moves her hands to Hunter’s shoulders but seems afraid to let go of him. “I – I saw you die! I saw it, Hunter, the Mirror killed you. I was right there!”
“I know. It was horrible.” He brushes her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “It was the fairies, Snowy. They saved me. Although my body had been destroyed, my life essence clung to it, just faintly. But it was enough for them. The only way to save me was to make me one of their own.”
Snowy gasps. “I – I’ve heard of that! Cinderella once said-”
Hunter nods. “Yes. It was done for her godmother. Not everyone is given that chance, they have to consider you worth saving. And they struggled with me. I was kept in heavy sleep while they worked their spells on me but I nearly slipped away a few times. My healing took over a year.”
“A year….” Snowy looks at him and her eyes, for a moment, turn reproachful. “But – but afterward. When you woke up….”
Hunter sighs. “I know. I wasn’t sure what to do. I wanted to show you I was alive, but….” He takes her hands and gently squeezes her fingers. “I thought I’d be breaking your heart all over. To come and see you… and then leave you again…. We couldn’t go back to what we were, Snowy, too much had happened. Our paths had turned in different directions. I wanted you to be free, to move on with your life.”
“But I didn’t! I can’t!” Snowy says, her voice rising to a tearful pitch. “I never stopped mourning for you! Every day my heart ached until I felt like it would split open. I can’t forget you, Hunter! You were my first love.”
Hunter gives her his dazzling smiling. “And you were mine. That’s never going to change. But the heart has many chambers, Snowy. There is room for so much love. Keep me in one of your chambers and I’ll always keep you in one of mine. But clear a space for someone else.”
Snowy wipes her eyes and I think she’s going to sob. But when she looks at Hunter, she smiles. “I’m so glad you’re alive. And that you don’t blame me for what happened.”
“Not at all,” he says softly.
“May I hug you?”
“Of course.”
Still on their knees, they clutch each other so tightly, I can’t even see their faces. He got a hand pressed to the back of her head; her arms cross behind him and she clenches his tunic with both fists. It seems a long time before they let go.
Snowy wipes away more tears but when she looks at him, she laughs. “This might sound a little strange but… you look so young!”
Hunter laughs. “Nineteen. That’s it for me.”
“Do I look much different to you?”
He tilts his head and pretends to study her. “A little less girlish. A lot more beautiful.” He smiles. “But… also less joyful, I think.”
Snowy lowers her head and nods. “It’s been hard. I felt very much alone. I lost everyone, even….” She looks up again. “Oh my stars, what about your brothers? Do they know you’re alive?”
“Yes, I made sure of that. When they saw me, they were immensely relieved. It broke the grudge they had against you, they stopped trying to hunt you down. That was important to me, I wanted you safe.”
Snowy looks pouty. “I still think you should’ve told me. I was in my tower all that time….” She gasps and covers her mouth. “Oh! What about Cinderella? You said… I thought… why haven’t you kissed her awake?”
I twitch in my spot beneath the bushes. That’s a good question.
Hunter sighs. “It’s tragic that she’s been asleep for so long. But I can’t break the curse. I’m no longer fully human, I’m part spirit now, like all fairies. But I do feel that someone will come for her. For her sake, I hope so.”
“Ooh! Wait! I have a question!” I scramble up to my feet. Snowy looks shocked to see me but Hunter does not. I think he knew I was there all along.
I hurry up to them. “Snowy, I’m… I’m sorry but I saw you fall. I was right over there.” I point behind me.
Snowy shakes her head. “No, it was my fault. I did an extremely foolish thing. I felt….” She shuts her eyes. “It won’t happen again, I’m sorry.”
I look down, feeling embarrassed. It’s not like her to apologize. “I’d like to ask Hunter something, if that’s all right.”
Snowy nods and steps back. Hunter smiles and his soft brown eyes are so beautiful, it makes me shiver.
“You knew my mother, right?” I say.
“I did.”
I blink fast and feel the beginnings of tears. “Could you tell me something nice about her? No one ever says anything nice about her.”
“Well, how strange, because she had such beautiful qualities. She always spoke to me with respect and her voice was soft and elegant. She had a touching devotion to the memory of her father and told me lovely stories about him. And when her babies were born, she held them and sang to them with so much joy in her face. She loved her children.”
I’m crying. Not openly but my face is all scrunched and the tears pour down. “Thank you,” I say, wiping my cheeks with my sleeves. “That’s – that’s good.”
“I’m sorry you never knew her. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, you should have grown up with your mother and your twin sister.”
