Chapter 12
Rapunzel
Something in me breaks like ice cracking underfoot.
My scream tears my throat raw. The tower answers, low and long, like the bottom of the world groaning awake.
Hair thrashes. Books leap. The stove throws sparks.
Magic detonates under my skin like white-hot lightning through my veins, and my body remembers.
The pendant around my neck ignites. Burning. Scalding my sternum as heat burrows inward like hot wire. I gasp and claw at it, skin sizzling, and rip the chain free. The amethyst thrums in my palm like a second, ugly heart.
“What is this?” My voice is a rasp I don’t recognize.
Gothel stills. She tips her head and smiles. “I told you never to take it off, didn’t I? That it would protect you? Foolish child. It was never for your protection. It was for mine. It’s the siphon.”
The world narrows to the pulsing thing in my hand. Up close, the stone isn’t smooth. It’s threaded with hair-thin roots, tiny veins of dark that squirm when I look at them. It pulses again, hungry and smug.
“This is how you’ve been feeding on me,” I say, quiet and flat.
Gothel lifts one shoulder. “Not all of you. Just… enough.” Her eyes cut to the roots embedded in the floor.
“A tether to keep you weak. To keep the magic flowing. The tower, the roots, the loneliness—all of it channeled so sweetly. You gave and gave. And I took. Why do you think you were never able to be rid of it? You cannot destroy it. The siphon spell is unbreakable, shackling you to this place. To me. And now that your precious beast is dead”—her smile is triumphant—“your loneliness and despair will power me for an eternity.”
I look at the man—my orc—lying lifeless on the floor, and something pure and clean moves through me.
The hollowness of grief is there, sharp and jagged, but shining through it is the happiness I’ve tasted, the hope I refused to stop feeding.
And most of all, love. All gifts my outlaw orc carried in with him when the forest—my forest—delivered him to my window.
The same forest that purred when I sang and bloomed when we made love.
Sing, he said.
Because it makes me happy. Like Brannock made me happy.
I kneel in the wreckage, the pendant hot and hateful in my palm, and I close my eyes.
I picture Brannock’s laugh rumbling against my throat.
His hands gripping my hips. The way pulled me close in sleep.
The flowers bursting from the cracks like applause.
I gather all of it—joy, love, the ridiculous, stubborn hope that kept me alive when I was alone—and I pour it into my voice.
I sing. True and from the heart.
The forest hears me first. New green vines hush and lie along the shattered floorboards. The darkest, vein-shot roots hesitate.
Gothel stumbles, eyes widening. “What are you—”
The pendant pulses, greedy little leech, and I realize how it’s always worked—how she’s always worked. Pain in, power out. Loneliness in, obedience out. Gothel didn’t just bind me; she twisted my magic to feed her hunger.
It wants to instigate fear and sadness. I give it joy instead—too bright, too wild, too mine for the siphon to hold. Heat surges up my arm and away as the current reverses. The amethyst shrieks, cracking from the inside as I feed it everything it cannot use.
“No,” Gothel snarls, flinging witchfire at me.
My hair slams down between us, and the spell skitters and dies.
The pendant fractures. The hair-thin roots inside writhe and wither. I project one last blast of love, hope, and the fierce joy of choosing myself, and the siphon... shatters.
I stop singing. The tower inhales. Power floods back through the severed loop and settles over me like a river flowing over familiar terrain.
The black-veined roots recoil as if scalded, and new vines surge as magic hums in my palms. It pours through me, wild and alive.
It coils through my veins, lighting up every strand of my hair.
The dark roots shrink from me now because they know I’m no longer their prisoner.
I am their mother.
Their queen.
“NO!” Gothel’s scream is raw and furious as she draws on her magic.
It doesn’t answer.
I do.
“My loneliness won’t feed you anymore,” I tell her, rising.
My hair lifts, the ends glowing green-gold like new leaves as the heartbeat of the forest pours through me. The tower trembles—not from Gothel’s power. From mine.
The floor opens beneath her feet. Vines coil around Gothel’s ankles. She claws for purchase on the stones. The darkest roots—her roots—reel away, hissing. The green vines climb, sure and slow, up her calves, waist, wrists, and around her neck.
She spits my name like a curse as the forest drags her down into the hungry spell she wove.
It accepts her like a debt collected, like a feast delayed.
Her hands claw the air, and her eyes reflect a hundred versions of my face, all caged.
Her skin cracks and her bones twist as the magic she stole turns on her.
I don’t look away as the roots finish their work.
Silence falls.
The blossoms tremble and settle. My hair drops around my shoulders, shorter now, the ends lit like fireflies. The window unseals with a soft sigh. The room smells like rain after a drought.
I turn to Brannock. He’s so still.
“No,” I whisper, crawling to him. “No, no, no—”
He’s cold. His chest doesn’t rise.
“Don’t you dare,” I sob. “You don’t get to leave me. Not now. Not after I finally found you.”
My short hair lifts, swaying around us like a curtain. The strands glow with firelight and forest magic, pulsing not with pain but with hope. With love. With me.
“I’m not done,” I whisper. “You said you love me, so come back and see what your love made me.”
I place my hands over his chest and pour it all into him—my magic, my will, my heart.
“Breathe,” I command.
Nothing.
I press closer, bow my head, and let the song in my chest spill out. It isn’t a melody I’ve learned. It’s the song I hum when I shell peas and stare at the tree line. The one I dreamed before I knew what dreams were.
My magic responds. The moss thickens beneath his shoulders, cupping him. Tender vines slip from the cracked floorboards and coil around my wrists, steadying my hands.
“Breathe,” I tell him again, feeding the command with everything I am.
The vines at my wrists thin into luminous filaments that slip into the gash without pain. Beneath my fingers, the ragged edges of his wounds reach for each other, knitting together. They weave over and under until they cinch tight.
“Come back,” I whisper, palms moving in small circles over his heart, coaxing. “Come back to me, Brannock.”
A faint thrum. Then a stutter. One beat, then two. The green filaments dissolve into him like dew. The seam of the wound glows once, softly, and the skin finishes knitting—first muscle, then fascia, then a thin, pearly line of scar that looks like frost kissed jade.
His chest hitches. A shallow breath scrapes in. I lean closer, tears slipping off my chin and dotting his sternum like glassy beads.
“That’s it,” I breathe. “Follow my voice.”
He coughs harshly and turns his head with a groan. Color seeps back into his lips. The cords in his throat loosen. Another breath, deeper. Then another. His lashes flutter. His beautiful green eyes open and find me, dazed and fierce all at once.
“Hey,” I choke out, laughing and crying. “Took your time.”
His mouth crooks. “Bossy,” he whispers, his voice raw.
He lifts his hand and clumsily brushes a lock of my hair away from my face. “It’s shorter,” he murmurs, his voice full of wonder and relief.
I laugh, half a sob. “You don’t like it?”
“I love it,” he says, and the way he says love makes my bones melt.
I press my forehead to his. “We’re free, Brannock. I can feel it. It’s over.”
He brushes his fingers down my cheek. “No, princess. It’s just beginning.”