Chapter Eleven Rapunzel #2
They continue through the rest of the second floor, pausing to let Verette and the councilor check in with patients and staff.
Rapunzel can’t help overhearing more questions about the coming of age ceremony, if the throne will pass to Verette, what the first thing she’ll do as queen is.
She deflects them all with refrains of “We’ll see” and “I trust my father” and “If he thinks it’s time. ”
Rapunzel also can’t help noticing more verette charms on the nurses and doctors, pinned to collars or swinging from belts.
Unlike the variety of the patients’ verettes, though, all of theirs seem to be crafted with the same midnight-blue cord and golden beads.
Like they carry more meaning than a blessing.
They’ve just reached the top of another ramp leading back downstairs when a kerfuffle erupts below. Voices rise, Eugene’s among them.
Rapunzel hurries down the ramp and finds him attempting to keep The Tales of Flynnigan Rider out of the grasp of a flailing elderly nurse.
“You asked me to read a nap-time story to them,” he grunts, trying to back up while avoiding the dozen or so children strewn about the room on heaps of pillows, cushions, and blankets.
“Not from that book!” The nurse makes another swipe for it. “The king banned it twenty years ago! We could get shut down just for having it on the premises, you foolish—”
“It’s fine,” Verette interrupts from behind Rapunzel. “It’s all right—”
“I wanna hear about Flynnigan Rider!” shouts a girl of about seven, clutching a stuffed toy sea turtle to her chest.
“Yeah! Let him read!” another boy yells. Three children, all in the vague stage Rapunzel thinks is between ages three and five, take the opportunity to start wailing at the top of their lungs, setting off a chain reaction of hysterics through the children’s ward.
The nurse also looks ready to cry as she scowls at Eugene. There’s real trepidation in her eyes, like he’s brought a wolf into the nursery. “Now look what you’ve done!”
“I didn’t—it’s just a book!” Eugene protests.
Hughes clears his throat from the doorway, steadfastly ignoring the toddler hammering his shins with a toy horse that, for reasons beyond Rapunzel, squeaks with each blow. “Minister Cressien stepped outside for some fresh air. Perhaps the young gentleman and I might join him.”
The toddler loses interest in Hughes and shifts targets to Eugene, who neatly sidesteps him with a bewildered shrug. “Fine! Fine. I’m going.”
Rapunzel squeezes his shoulder as he passes. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” she tells him.
Eugene briefly folds his fingers over hers. Then a shadow slips through his face, and he lets go. “It’s not worth worrying over.”
It’s the same tone from the ball a week ago, when he said Me? They’re never going to like me.
Rapunzel is starting to see the outline of an entirely different quandary. But before she can pull on that dangling thread, he’s already left with Hughes.
“I WANNA HEAR ABOUT FLYNNIGAN RIDER!” howls the girl with the sea turtle.
“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” babbles the nurse. “I didn’t know, he just said it was a book from when he was a boy.”
“I’ve never even heard of it,” Verette says…a little too smoothly for Rapunzel to believe. She claps her hands and projects her voice over the clamor. “Do you want to hear a special song?”
It works. The older children feign disinterest, flopping back onto pillows, but the littler ones bounce with excitement. Gwenna leans in closer to Rapunzel, voice low. “These ones are either patients’ children, or healthy enough to play under observation. Sometimes, they get a little…wound up.”
“The princess has a knack with them,” Rapunzel notes.
Gwenna nods. “We’ll be very lucky to have her as queen.”
That itch returns to Rapunzel’s thoughts, just like with the tour yesterday. Something in this room isn’t quite sitting right.
Verette crouches as the last of the children settles. “I learned this lullaby from my mother, Queen Gaelle, and she learned it from her mother, and from her mother’s mother, all the way back to when the stardrop fell to Astera.”
“That’s old,” murmurs a child from under a stack of pillows.
That’s when Rapunzel sees it. Every child’s hair has a delicate gradient; the ends, the oldest part of the hair, are the closest to the locks she assumes they were born with, from black to blond and every shade in between.
But their roots are paler, less vibrant, starting to fade to white.
If Eugene had grown up in Astera, she’d guess his hair would be a dusty taupe now.
Gwenna said the starlight used to turn their hair white by eighteen. That it takes nearly twice as long now.
Why does something about that feel wrong?
The answer’s almost in reach, Rapunzel can feel it—
The first notes of Verette’s lullaby float through the room.
And to Rapunzel’s shock—she knows them.
“Starlight, gleam and glow,” Verette sings. Goose bumps sweep over Rapunzel’s arms. “Moon, lend us your eyes.”
The words are different, but the melody—identical. Frightening, even, to hear someone else singing it for the first time in years. Once Gothel decided Rapunzel was old enough to do it herself, she never sang a note.
Whenever Rapunzel called on the power of the sundrop flower, she could swear she felt sunlight itself welling up in each vein and spilling down her hair. She hasn’t felt it in over a month, except in her dreams.
But now—it’s not the same, not blazing sun but a flicker of dawn—and yet the song calls to her. Her blood remembers. Her bones remember.
The room goes still, like they’re all frozen in glass, until the last notes fade. Every child is asleep. Even the adults look calmer, steadier.
In the quiet and the clarity, Rapunzel’s thoughts compose themselves into one corner of the picture:
Somehow, starlight has to still be in the water supply. The children’s hair wouldn’t be turning white without it, even if it’s taking longer, like Gwenna said.
But the only source is the poisoned spring. And no one here is sick from poison.
And that means Rapunzel has a theory to chase.
She casually sidles to the nearby window, hoping to spot Eugene. This calls for skills outside of her wheelhouse, but firmly in his.
The garden outside is sadly devoid of Eugene. Still, a faint glint draws Rapunzel’s eye to the windowsill.
Strange silver threads are climbing the glass outside, pressed to the panes.
Fascinating.
She leans closer. They look almost like the worms she saw yesterday—
Not worms, Rapunzel realizes. They stretch all the way down to the flower bed below the window and taper at the closest ends to a hair-fine point.
They’re roots. Silver roots.
Rapunzel jerks back with a gasp, drawing Verette’s notice. She turns to Rapunzel, and Rapunzel silently points to the windowsill.
Verette’s eyes widen. She tiptoes around the sleeping children to stand by Rapunzel, and whispers, “Is that what—”
The roots shiver and whip back, shrinking into the soil until no trace of them remains.
“…you saw,” Verette finishes, blinking.
“In the royal gardens,” Rapunzel confirms with barely muffled intrigue. Her botany book described plants that trap insects, and plants that roll up their leaves at a single touch, but those are simple, functional reactions. This seems different. Not a reaction, but an answer.
Either the same plant species grows both on the palace grounds and somewhere near the hospital, or…
Something has roots that run from the palace all the way here.
And the last time she saw them…they were stretching away from that iron door in the gardens.
That settles it.
It doesn’t matter if she has to find a new path into the Starlight Spring, or break into the king’s way with Eugene’s help. Rapunzel is going to see the spring for herself.
Tonight.