Chapter Twenty-Three Rapunzel #3
“I don’t need it!” he interrupts, drawing himself up as if being taller somehow makes that true.
“You’d know better if you just listened to me!
We can take turns—I’ll kill the tree here once the one’s grown in Kourenne, let the Starlight Spring recover, then cut down the tree in your kingdom and plant one back here! It can be a cycle!”
“Crop rotation is not an excuse for invading another country,” Eugene calls from behind the rubble heap.
“He’s right.” Verette reaches out a hand. “Father, please. You’re going too far—not just with the plan, with this magic. Look at yourself.”
Now, the rough streaks of bark gnarling into his skin are unmistakable…as is the pewter gleam.
“You have to stop,” Verette urges.
Enver stares at her. A bitter resentment builds up behind his eyes, twisting his face with rage.
“I did everything for you,” he hisses. “I am your father. You don’t tell me”—his hands flex, even with leaves budding at the knuckles—“what I can”—silvery starlight burns down every limb, acid bright—“AND CANNOT DO!”
The starlight is slipping from Rapunzel’s control.
Even with her and Verette both fighting, years of sustaining himself on the apples have made the starlight part of him in a way they can’t match, the evidence written in the veins blistering over his skin but not theirs.
Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the more distant roots curling and shriveling as he strips the starlight out of them.
A hand lands on her shoulder.
“This doesn’t look good,” Eugene says in her ear. “And I hate to say it, but Cressien’s not looking good either.”
They’re running out of time.
Rapunzel thinks of the starcloud tree being torn up in the spring. How it lit up brightest of all at a song. How she shoved Enver from the roots before, when—
When his attention was split.
“I have an idea,” she whispers to Eugene, “but we need to break his concentration.”
He looks up at the ceiling, mouth tilting, and says, “Give me twenty seconds.”
“We can find some other way to keep your wound healed,” Verette pleads to her father, hand still outstretched. “It doesn’t have to be like this. But you have to let go. You have to let us both do what we’ve promised.”
Enver meets her gaze for a long, long moment. It’s a chance he didn’t earn, one last try to save him from himself, save them all from him.
“It’s killing you,” Verette breathes. “Please, Papa. Just let go.”
Rapunzel feels the shift—
Of Enver’s drag on the starlight tightening.
“Not yet,” he gasps. Pale blue leaves sprout from his fingertips. “Not ready—not yet—”
He turns to the throne.
Eugene taps Rapunzel’s elbow. “I need a boost to the roof.”
She takes a deep breath and focuses on one more heavyweight root, summoning it up through the floor in a torrent of pale gold. Eugene grabs on to it, an odd lump swinging over his shoulder—a tablecloth gathered into a makeshift bag.
Enver’s voice thunders through the broken hall, brittle but steady, laced with pain and triumph. “This is still my kingdom! I am its master and its ruler!”
When he lifts a foot, roots trail like a beard from his boot sole.
Rapunzel pushes her way through the squirming masses of tendrils on the ground and reaches Verette’s side. The other princess’s face is streaked with tears and grime. She gives Rapunzel a look of pure astonishment when Rapunzel takes her hand.
Rapunzel opens her mouth, thinks of the sun as one more star, and begins to sing the lullaby.
Enver has decades of stolen starlight in his veins. But the song, like their memories of sunshine and lost mothers, lives deep in their bones, where even the roots can’t reach.
Verette’s breaking voice joins in. And this time, the starlight answers to their call, not the king’s.
Enver is fighting still, even harder than the tree fought before, chasing after every scrap of light and magic and digging in.
“You will not take my place,” he grits out, lurching onto the dais.
“It’s mine! The throne is mine! I am still in control!
” Leaves flush and bristle at his cuffs, while pewter bark hardens over his face.
“I will not be moved! If I can’t have it, no one will! ”
He hurls himself into the rootbound chair and grips the armrests hard enough to splinter, glaring balefully as shoots tear through his bloodstained waistcoat and lock him into place.
Rapunzel sees the difference, clearer than ever:
Verette has walked the highest and lowest streets in Astera, sat by sickbeds, sung to children, crawled through sewers, built a coalition to guide their future. And Enver…Rapunzel realizes she only ever saw him leave the palace for a tour.
It’s the difference between someone who wants to lead, and someone who simply wants to rule.
“Actions make a monarch,” Rapunzel tells him as Verette keeps singing, “not a throne. If you haven’t learned that, you’re not ready to be king.”
Enver glowers at her, wordless with outrage, clinging to the starlight and the throne simply so no one else can have them.
And over the song and the rumble of roots and clamor of fighting, she hears something else: a maelstrom descending on beak and wing.
A flapping noise precedes the soft patter of a shower of—bread? Rolls, breadsticks, tiny bits of toast, they all rain on Enver from above.
Of all the possible challengers to the Asteran throne, the last thing anyone probably anticipated was a flock of relentless seagulls.
They swoop down on Enver, who can’t even lift his arms to bat them away.
Verette’s voice falters, but Enver’s grip on the starlight evaporates.
Suddenly it’s all rushing to Rapunzel in a sweeping tide, and all she can do is lead it—not to her bones, not to the spring, but to the man dying in a strange palace in a strange land, here only because someone invited a princess in over her head.
A princess’s powers may still be new to her, but if there’s one thing Rapunzel will always know how to do, it’s heal someone.
Drop by drop, spark by spark, she guides the starlight from weary roots and wilting leaves and splinters of a warping trunk. She sends it into Cressien, closing the wounds in a way Enver never could, until his heart beats steady, his breath comes easy, and the pain is only a memory.
When the starlight has done its work, she turns and finds the roots no longer burning with silver, or opal gleam, or mellow gold. They’re dulling to plain gray stone.
And Enver is fading with them.
Verette stands in front of the throne, tears running down her cheeks. “Papa, we just wanted to help. Why didn’t you let go?”
A distant, defeated smile only barely flexes his lips. He breathes, “Make me proud.”
And then—
The starlight is gone, and only the stone is left.
Verette sways on the spot. Rapunzel steps closer and braces her elbow, trying to think of anything to say that is big enough for something like this.
Footsteps crunch over the broken stone. Hughes comes to Verette’s other side, looking almost as lost as she does. He wraps an arm around her shoulders. Then he gathers himself.
“Your mother is with the stars,” he says raggedly. “And as one of the few who knew her, I swear—Gaelle has always, always been proud.”