Chapter 15 The Tower of Iron and Cotton #2
“But why?” he snapped. “I decided not to kill you!”
She jabbed the dagger at him. Grumbling, he turned back to the hair and gingerly grabbed it, giving it a stout tug to ensure it held fast. It was cordlike and thick, with reddish tints. “This is so weird,” he murmured before hoisting himself up.
Forty feet was a lot of hair to climb, and by the time he had surfaced through the window, he was panting too hard to notice much of anything except that he was in a brightly lit room, and that the air smelled like…boeuf bourguignon escargot?
When he finally stopped wheezing, stooped down with his hands on his knees, he looked up.
He was in a single room that was quite cozy, with lots of warm candlelight and a boisterous fireplace and rich furniture.
There was also weight-lifting equipment in the corner, a child’s bed littered with numerous plush animals, paintings of fanged, horned women on the walls, and a library’s worth of books with titles ranging from Men’s Muscle Magazine: Bodybuilding Techniques for the Ultra-Devoted to Beef Cuisine Recipes for the Ultra-Devoted to Master’s PhD in the Operation of Lighthouses.
Also in the corner was a small oven, which Morfran guessed was where the salty smell floated from.
And then, as he stopped scanning the room, he spotted him: the most absurdly muscular man Morfran had ever seen.
The fact that he wasn’t wearing anything except a skimpy loincloth only seemed to exacerbate the intensity of his hulking body.
His hair was a shining gold, more gold than Gueldefore’s, but it wasn’t the hair on his head that Morfran had used to climb up the tower.
It was the seventy-foot beard attached to the man’s face.
Alarm bells rang through Morfran’s ears, indicating danger, and yet the man was still staring intensely at him, the muscles above his eyebrows square and thick and manly.
Then, without warning, the man’s massive arms went around Morfran and lifted him off the ground.
Morfran flailed, expecting to be crushed like a cream puff.
“Are you real?” The man’s voice vibrated clear to Morfran’s feet, his arms tightening around Morfran’s rib cage, and Morfran was denied any possible way of responding that wasn’t a squeak of expired air.
The man sniffed aggressively. “You smell like sushi and warm tidings,” he whispered.
“You must be real. Welcome to my abode, brother!”
Morfran tried to slam his head against the man’s pecs, tried to squirm out like an unruly child, tried giving the man the dead fish response. None of it worked.
It was only when Bronwen finally climbed through the window, huffing and sweaty, that the man’s grip loosened at once.
“Aaaaahh!” The specimen of muscle abandoned Morfran and executed a beautiful swan dive as he launched behind the child’s bed, the commotion of which shook the entire floor like an earthquake.
Morfran collapsed to the floor, choking on his breath. Bronwen, who’d been witness to Morfran being bear-hugged by a half-naked chunk of pure muscle with a seventy-foot beard one second and then watching said chunk of muscle torpedo behind a bed at the sight of her, looked terribly confused.
“I…uh,” she stuttered. “Are you…Rapunzo?”
In response the man let out another terrified scream, and followed it by chucking a stuffed bear at her.
Being a child’s toy made of cotton, it normally wouldn’t have hurt her, but this stuffed bear had been chucked at a velocity of seventy miles per hour, and if the man’s aim had been any better, it would have quite possibly done some serious harm to her.
As it were, it missed her by five inches and slammed into the tower wall in an explosion of white stuffing.
“Wait, wait, wait!” Bronwen held up her hands to show she was unarmed. The man responded by snatching up another plushie—this one a gentle pink lamb—and cranking his arm back to launch it.
Morfran stepped in front of her before he could be witness to death by stuffed critter. “Hold on a second there, Rapunzo. You just welcomed me to your abode. Why not her?”
There was live fear in Rapunzo’s gaze as he gawk-glared at Bronwen. In her assassin’s gear, Morfran could see how she appeared to be a threat. Was that why he was afraid? Perhaps he’d had encounters with assassins before?
Bronwen herself looked terrified as well. Despite Morfran holding a knife to her throat twenty minutes ago, she was now hiding behind him for safety.
Rapunzo cleared his throat. “She’s a woman.”
Morfran paused. “Yes. Indeed. She is a woman. I’ve noticed that, too. Now, we came here in complete peace. Might we sit down, like normal people do, and speak to each other without stuffed animals being involved?” He paused, then added, “Or hugging?”
Rapunzo was still cowering behind the child’s bed. “I don’t trust women. They are lying and manipulative and dangerous.” He hesitated, and added as an afterthought, “And mean.”
Bronwen shot him an offended look at that last descriptor. Morfran just raised his eyebrows, opening his mouth, trying to think of a reply. Finally, he just went with: “Did someone…a woman, perhaps, I don’t know…hurt you when you were a child?”
Rapunzo gingerly stepped over the child’s bed and sat down.
The mattress sank against his muscular glutes.
“Everyone who has ever hurt me has been a woman,” he explained.
“My own mother, who locked me in this tower for a time-out and forgot about me. That powerful sorceress who placed a prophecy on me and gave me magical jewelry I didn’t even want.
The mail lady, who forgets this tower has no doors.
How can I get my mail when it’s four floors below me?
Huh? Answer me that, foul courier woman! ”
He exhaled like a bull, wringing his hands on his thick thighs.
“And then came the day when my true love scaled the tower. She was prophesied to rescue me from this place. Instead, she stole my magical rings, said my beef Wellington recipe sucked, and kicked me in the head.” He shut his eyes in distress, as if he were reliving the moment.
When he opened them, he glowered at Bronwen.
“What have you come to do? Spit in my boeuf bourguignon escargot and chop off my head and steal Randy?”
Neither of them had any clue who Randy was. But Bronwen still had her hands raised and said in a quiet, gentle voice, “I promise I haven’t come to do any of those things. In fact, I came because I thought you might be able to help me—”
He released a menacing exhale. Bronwen quickly continued on.
“—because I, too, have been wronged. And by a woman! I couldn’t even harm you if I wanted. I’m cursed to fail at anything I try to do.”
A suspicious glower sank over Rapunzo’s features. “What woman did this to you?”
There was loathing in Bronwen’s voice as she said, “Queen Ravana.”
Rapunzo leapt to his feet at that, pointing at her, furious. “She’s the one who stole my magic rings!”
Bronwen looked at Morfran in surprise. “That’s where Morfran and Ravana got their powers? This man’s jewelry?”
Morfran shrugged self-deprecatingly. It was indeed.
In fact, they’d used his rings as wedding bands shortly after they married.
Back then, nothing said romance more than stolen magical goods and a story of Ravana smashing the dreams of a hopeful suitor.
Of course, Morfran had since destroyed his ring and abandoned this man’s true love, who he’d stolen from him, but no way was he going to admit it now.
Rapunzo had moved from his seat, giving Bronwen a wide, distrusting berth, and whispered to Morfran, “Are you sure she’s telling the truth?”
“I’ve seen her trip over air enough times to know she is,” Morfran whispered back. “Queen Ravana is indeed the mastermind behind both of your miseries.” As well as mine.
Rapunzo scoffed, then lumbered towards the oven, next to which sat a dining table set with two placemats.
“Were you expecting company?” Morfran inquired.
“No. The other one is for Randy. He’s sitting right there.” He gestured towards the dining table.
Morfran and Bronwen leaned over to see who this Randy fellow was, and were greeted by the sight of a lone mallard duck sitting astutely on a chair.
Bronwen took one look at its brown and blue feathers and whispered despondently, “Randy’s a female.”
Morfran whispered back, “Don’t tell him that if you want Randy to live.”
It was nice to meet someone else who also had a habit of accidentally naming female barnyard animals traditionally masculine names, however, and they did have business with Rapunzo, so Morfran gently asked the man if they could join him for dinner, despite the fact that it was at least three in the morning and Morfran wanted nothing more than to dive out the window.
Rapunzo hurriedly said, “Of course you have to stay! Sit, sit!” He ushered Morfran into a chair, set down a placemat for him, set a napkin onto his lap, and then brought out a dish that was indeed boeuf bourguignon escargot, the little snails curled up like tiny red commas on his plate.
Bronwen he made sit clear at the opposite end of the table, and he gave her only a wilted parsnip by tossing it in her general direction.
Morfran politely tonged apart a snail and put it into his mouth. For being cooked by a madman locked in a tower, it was a mean dish. Still didn’t mean he wanted to be here. “So,” Morfran said, “I assume you don’t often get visitors?”
Rapunzo was in the seat next to him, except it was pulled right up alongside Morfran and the man was sitting sideways in it, so his thick knees were resting against Morfran’s leg and his face was less than a handbreadth away. He also wasn’t blinking.
“You’re my first visitors in eight years,” he breathed.
Morfran scooted his chair away. “I can see that.” Bronwen shot him an urging look. He sighed and gestured to her. “Look, my friend here—”
Rapunzo squinted his eyes. “You dare call her a friend?”