Chapter Twenty-Three Rapunzel
Twenty-Three
Rapunzel
“LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!”
Rapunzel can’t hold back a flinch as Enver’s voice chases her and Eugene down a corridor, audible even over a crash that rocks the audience hall.
It’s not the fear, though all of this is nerve-wracking.
It’s how long it took to see what was right in front of her face.
It’s how maybe, on some level, she did see it—she just wanted it to be different this time.
It’s what Eugene puts into words as they careen into a garden:
“He sounds like Gothel,” he says, disturbed.
Rapunzel spins until she finds the sails of the palace sunmill over the rooftops, and heads for the archway in the right direction. “I guess I thought she was, well, unique. But the way he talks to Verette—it’s almost the same, isn’t it? It’s just a pattern any awful person can use.”
They emerge into the courtyard of the dormant sunmill as confused birdsong breaks overhead. For a moment, Rapunzel’s just as confused. It should be late, well past sundown, yet a pearly glow is turning the palace grounds nearly as bright as day.
“Where is that light coming from?” Eugene searches for the source while fishing in a pocket for his lockpicks.
“Not sure,” Rapunzel starts as they reach the sunmill’s doors.
She gives them a futile rattle; sure enough, they’re locked.
Eugene kneels by the keyhole and gets to work.
Pascal buzzes a warning in her ear. She looks back and finds cracks darting over the stones of the courtyard, racing toward them.
Silvery light jams through the fractures, the roots tickling at the edge of her awareness. “Enver’s found us, hurry!”
Eugene twitches the picks, his words strained through gritted teeth. “He’s gotta be following the apple. If we see a way to destroy it—” He breaks off as the lock clicks. Something in the catch of his voice tells her that’s not the only reason he paused, though.
Roots explode from the ground, thrashing toward them, only to jerk to a halt as a more prismatic light flares over the silver. “It’s Verette,” Rapunzel realizes aloud. “She’s fighting—”
Before she can finish, another tangle of roots erupts near them, heading for a ladder on the side of the sunmill.
The coils snarl around it and, with a horrible squeal, rip it to pieces, flinging them into the air as shrieking gulls wheel away.
Rapunzel stares, bewildered. Why would Enver go for a ladder—
Eugene yanks Rapunzel through the doors and slams them shut, turning the lock. Then, through the dim, he points to the apple. “If it gets bad, you could try eating this. I’d do it myself, but…the starlight doesn’t know me the way it knows you.”
Rapunzel stares at what’s left of the apple glowing in her hand. The slice for Cressien didn’t take much, but Enver’s own savage bites claimed nearly half, his teeth marks dug even into the seedy core.
It’s the kind of power people would lie for, kidnap children for, kill innocents for. The kind of power that others will do anything to use.
“If it gets bad,” she evades, and turns to look for the machinery.
Surprisingly, it’s not as dark as she expected, but for disconcerting reasons: More cracks have spiderwebbed the empty basin of the Great Starlight Fountain, and silvery light juts up from below and illuminates the interior almost enough to see by.
The marble statue’s eyes fall on her with an air of judgment.
“We’re right over the spring,” Eugene notes, frowning as a fragment of the basin rattles and falls out of sight. Another spear of silvery light breaks through the void. “Why isn’t he using the roots there to stop us?”
Rapunzel waves a hand in a broad circle and heads for the jumble of gears and shafts at the far end of the sunmill’s ground level.
“Everything he’s doing is destabilizing the ground under the palace, especially here.
I bet the roots are the only thing holding up the fountain basin right now.
The starcloud tree might survive the fountain caving in.
It won’t survive the sunmill also coming down. ”
Eugene shudders. “There goes my plan to camp out here. How do we get this thing moving again?”
“When a sunmill isn’t operating, the main shaft is raised so it doesn’t turn the water screw by accident.
” Rapunzel reaches the machinery and starts hunting around, holding up the apple to see better by its muted glow.
“There should be something like a crank or a lever to lower it around here somewhere.”
“I thought you said you did the reading!”
“I went on a tour!” Rapunzel retorts, a bit sheepish.
“It’s close enough!” She spots a rusty crank wheel the size of a tabletop, pockets the apple, and gives one of two handles a push.
A wretched groan ricochets off the sunmill’s walls, which brighten a little more.
A faint, rocky thud tells Rapunzel more of the fountain basin has fallen into the spring.
Dust billows down from the support beams overhead, catching even more of the starlight, but the shaft has barely moved.
When she drags on it again, it lets out a disgruntled creak and refuses to budge.
Eugene grabs the other handle. “Think this was meant for two. Clockwise?”
“Clockwise,” she guesses with a veneer of confidence. “On three—one, two, three—” The wheel grinds into reluctant motion, then picks up speed as a massive iron rod begins to descend. “Steady, it’ll throw off the gears if it falls too hard—”
There’s a bone-shaking judder—from the doors behind them.
Enver won’t disturb the roots holding up the spring, but those aren’t the only ones he can use.
Eugene just lets out a grunt of aggravation as he wrenches the crank wheel. “This—guy. Can’t he—give it—a rest?”
The main shaft finally drops into place in another great spurred wheel. “There! Now we just have to get…” Rapunzel stops.
“What is it?” Eugene steps back and wipes his brow.
“We have to get up to the brake wheel,” she says slowly. “It’s behind where all the sails connect at the top of the sunmill. But…Enver tore down the ladder outside.” She looks at the walls and finds only barren stone. “I don’t think there’s one in here.”
Another splintering bang shakes the doors.
Rapunzel takes a deep breath, then reaches for the apple. Eugene catches her hand.
“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” he says softly. “I—I can try to climb up, or something.”
The walls grow brighter as another slab of the fountain basin falls away. Eugene’s throat moves as he swallows. Rapunzel doesn’t have to say it; they can both see there’s no time.
“I just—” she whispers, “I’m just scared it might—change me.
Make me more like Enver. I don’t want to be used again, but I still really, really want to be useful.
My hair had this incredible power, but the only good thing it ever really did was save you.
And I don’t know if I could have cut it off myself. ”
Eugene doesn’t answer right away. Then he folds his hands around hers. “This is about…the gallows, isn’t it?”
The next crash frays with breaking boards, even if the doors still stand.
Rapunzel’s throat burns as she nods. “I love my parents, but what they almost did to you was wrong. And the same power they have, Enver has, and look what it did to him. How can I be sure I’ll be different?”
“You make sure there are always people who can tell you no,” Eugene says bluntly.
“If people say there’s a better way, you hear them out.
Your hair didn’t make you a better or worse person, just different.
” He lifts their twined fingers and, even sticky with apple juice and smudged with rust, presses a kiss to her knuckles.
“Sunshine, I loved you before the whole princess thing. I loved you with your hair, and even more without it. And whoever you’ll be in a minute from now, a week, a decade… I know I’ll love her most of all.”
For a moment, the world falls away, and it’s just her and him, and the way he can always make her feel like she’s stepping into the sun. Rapunzel’s whisper is ragged. “You’re always going to be my dream, Eugene.”
The ground trembles, the hinges of the sunmill doors screaming as the wood starts to give way.
She frees a hand, pulls the apple out of her pocket, and bites down.
It tastes like—an ordinary apple.
Then it tastes like frost on a December morning.
Then it tastes like the honey candy Gothel brought her when she was seven, and then the mint plant she grew on the windowsill, and then the salt air of the sea at midnight.
Starlight runs down her throat, kindling every bone.
She can feel the roots writhing at the door like hundreds of fingers.
She can feel the utter exhaustion of the starcloud tree below, forced to grow roots far deeper than it was ever meant to, to bear fruit long after it wanted only to return to the earth.
She can sense Enver and Verette’s struggle in the audience hall, like an arm wrestling match with a thousand arms.
This far away, and with Enver this distracted, it only takes a push to drive him from the doors.
She opens her eyes and discovers that the roots have frozen in place over the wooden wreckage. A soft, buttery glow washes over them—not the daylit blaze of the sun, but the golden glimmer of the morning star.
“Huh,” says Rapunzel.
She can sense the starlight in the apple’s remains, concentrated into dangerous potency. It feels…malleable, the way the sunlight used to, when she pushed it out and into a wound.
She cups the apple in her hands. Then she takes a breath and imagines drawing out the starlight, letting it drain into her bones.
In moments, she’s left with a plain, mostly eaten apple, its skin dull, its flesh starting to brown.
“Enver won’t be finishing that,” she says with grim satisfaction. “Come on.”