Chapter Five Rapunzel #2
“Do you usually just go around barefoot?” Verette asks. Rapunzel can’t tell if it’s with surprise or derision; she’s barely spoken the entire tour.
“Oh! Would that be more comfortable for you?” Enver doesn’t sound bothered, despite Cressien’s obvious and increasing mortification. At her sheepish nod, he laughs again. “Well, no need to”—he elbows Verette—“stand on ceremony, eh?”
“If you’re sure,” Rapunzel says, already peeling her slippers off. Cressien’s face says this is going into the next report, but she can’t bring herself to care. “Now, about the spring systems…”
The chief engineer’s face lights up, but Princess Verette clears her throat. “The Councilor of the North will answer your questions at this afternoon’s social. I’m afraid we must be on our way if we’re to return in time.”
“That’s my Verette, keeping us on schedule,” Enver says with a chuckle.
“Understood, Your Highness. Right this way.” The chief engineer leads them down the catwalk, footsteps clanging on the hammered iron.
Rapunzel falls in step with Verette, trying not to favor her blistered heel too obviously. The crown princess has mostly let Councilor Teophine and King Enver take the lead on the tour today, and for someone who’s about to have her eighteenth birthday, she doesn’t seem terribly excited.
Then again, Rapunzel is still working on estimating peoples’ ages.
For most of her life, she had her own mirror to judge from, and Gothel’s fluctuating youth, and that was it.
So her best guess is that Verette is about eighteen, like Rapunzel, but…
she’s not entirely confident. There’s something younger in the softness of her face, something older in the pinch of her narrow lips, and something steely in her bearing that promises prying will be a waste of time.
But if there’s anything Rapunzel can do, it’s get people to open up. “So,” she says merrily, “your birthday’s next week! Do you know what presents you’re getting, or is it a surprise?”
Verette tilts her head, twin loops of pale braids swaying at the sides of her face. “Presents?”
“For your birthday?” Rapunzel rubs the back of her neck. “You know, like…well, I wanted paint this year, but I got wine. And a carriage.”
“Ah,” says Verette, tipping from confusion into reluctant obligation.
It’s an emotion nonetheless, so Rapunzel counts that as progress.
“We don’t do that here. There’s a benediction ceremony, where your family and friends say their hopes for your next year, and the pledging of deeds during the banquet, and finally invitations. ”
“Invitations to the birthday party?” Now it’s Rapunzel’s turn to be confused. Cressien coughs pointedly behind her.
“No,” Verette says in the sort of tone you use with a small child, “invitations to gatherings, future festivities, and so on. Like what my father sent to you.”
Rapunzel is trying, very hard, not to see Gothel in Verette, too, even if that answer did feel a little condescending.
As they leave the Northeast Secondary Sunmill, she says, “You know, that actually sounds better than presents. I don’t even know what I’m going to do with all the wine I got.
So we should probably invite you to our kingdom for your birthday, too, right? ”
“We,” Cressien interjects swiftly over Rapunzel’s shoulder, “can wait for the proper time and place for such an invitation. Your Highness.”
Of course. Just because Rapunzel’s trying to keep an open mind doesn’t mean they know what she’d be inviting into their home. Not yet.
“Right, sorry,” Rapunzel says in a rush.
“Her Highness has a generous spirit.” Councilor Teophine smooths it over as they descend the steps. The sun-drenched stone feels pleasantly warm under Rapunzel’s soles.
The crowd waiting just beyond the wall of their guard escort might be the largest yet. In every gathering, the faces greeting them have been full of excitement and something eerily like…hope. And just like the previous crowds, these people are making themselves heard.
“Blessings on the princess!”
“An auspicious year to you, Princess Verette!”
“Hail the queen to come!”
Rapunzel sneaks a glance at Verette and Enver. Verette’s mask is as opaque as ever, but—
When she looks at Enver’s expression, all she can think of is the moment Mother—Gothel—told her, Don’t ever ask to leave this tower again.
A sudden shout of alarm rings out. A small figure ducks under a guard’s arm, running for Verette—
And it’s as if the princess tosses her mask aside.
Verette throws a hand up to the guards as a little girl comes to a wheezing stop before her, something clenched in her cupped fists.
Verette kneels, her face breaking into a warm smile, her voice too low to catch beneath the crowd’s murmurs.
The little girl nods. Her hands open to reveal a curious little charm: a pale, crude seashell butterfly threaded on a loop of blue ribbon, the ribbon ends weighted with misty sea-glass beads and dangling like twin tails.
“I’m so sorry, Your Highness,” a man calls from behind the line of guards, wrought with worry and chagrin. “She just slipped away from me—she was working on it all last week—”
Verette stands, palming the charm as she takes the little girl’s hand in her own, then walks her over. “No, don’t apologize, this is lovely. Only a week? That’s incredible. I worked a whole month on my first one.”
“And the moth still came out lopsided,” King Enver calls after her. He makes a face at Teophine. “So much for staying on schedule, hm? Might as well get in the carriages so we can move along when she’s done.”
That feeling is back again, not so much a hair in her lashes now. No, this is like every time she’s looked at a sketch, and even though she couldn’t see where just yet, she knew somehow it was—unbalanced.
Something’s not quite right with this picture.
Rapunzel would be lying if she said she didn’t actually appreciate that, for a moment, she gets the carriage to herself.
Councilor Teophine, Minister Cressien, and King Enver are all in the first coach, and without Verette in hers, Rapunzel can take the chance to just breathe and stop worrying about the eggshells she’s walking on.
(Or the shoes she was walking in.) As she looks out the window, her eyes are drawn up to the palace high on the hill, where hopefully Eugene is having a much easier time.
Especially since she’s going to bore him senseless chattering about the sunmills later.
There’s even one in the palace that she can…
Rapunzel’s train of thought snags. The palace sunmill’s sails are perfectly still.
If that’s how the palace gets its water, shouldn’t they be moving?
The door rattles and opens to admit Verette. A ghost of a smile still clings to her lips, and the charm still swings in her grasp. With a jolt, Rapunzel realizes the butterfly—no, moth—has a familiar iridescent shimmer to its surface, just like—
“What are those shells?” flies out of her mouth before she can give it the layer of polish it needs.
Caution darts through Verette’s expression, though Rapunzel wouldn’t have caught it if she hadn’t spotted it in Eugene the past month when he thinks she’s not looking.
The princess holds up the trinket as the carriage jolts into motion.
“It’s a charm called a verette. According to an old legend, the moon is really a faraway cocoon woven by moths each month, and when they hatch, they carry blessings down to the earth, and their bodies are left behind as seashells.
You make verettes for others so the blessings find them, and since it’s my namesake, people like to give them to me around my birthday. ”
“That’s really sweet,” Rapunzel says with a touch of envy. Of course she’s grateful for the extravagant gifts everyone gave her at the ball, but everyone likes wine, jewelry, expensive things. There’s something irreplaceable in a token that’s made just for you.
There’s also a critical part of her question that’s gone unanswered.
“So,” she tries again, “do those white shells have a name too?”
Verette tilts into mild bewilderment again, bordering on suspicion. “Verai, in Old Asteran. Moth-shells. Why?”
“I’d love to find some before I go. They make this fantastic paint that’s really hard to find. Nothing else catches the light the same way.” Rapunzel sees Verette frowning at the seashell moth and realizes she skipped a step. “They’re ground into powder and mixed with a binding medium—”
“You crush them up?” Verette asks, voice verging on strangled.
“Is that wrong?” Rapunzel wrings her skirt in her hands.
For a brief moment, the only sound is the staccato of hoofbeats and the creak of the carriage. Then Verette’s expression closes off again. “No. It’s fine.”
It is excruciatingly not fine.
Rapunzel wishes Eugene were here. He does a sort of social alchemy, transmuting awkwardness and blunders into laughter and newly minted inside jokes, and Rapunzel’s still trying to pick apart the formulas behind that.
But he’s not here, and silence makes an unwieldy third passenger in the carriage for the rest of the ride, the charm still clenched tight in Verette’s hand.