His hearing had sharpened these past few days as if to compensate for his blindness. Now, his ears were tuned to every sound in the nearby brush as he harvested. From the gentle skitterings of rodents across the forest floor to the murmuring of the trees overhead, not a sound escaped him. Above all, he listened for the sound of footsteps and didn’t know whether he wanted them or not.
These woods were full of surprises--some beautiful, like his beloved Rapunzel, and others hideous beyond comprehension.
Not that Dame Gothel had been ugly. Indeed, her fiery red hair and the youthful beauty of her skin could have enchanted any man foolish enough to pay attention to his eyes instead of to his heart screaming at him to run.
Prince Alder filled the makeshift bag that had once been a velvet tunic with the precious food. These berries were a welcome change from the roots and bitter dandelion greens that had been keeping him alive these past weeks. Careful rationing might make them last two days, or perhaps three. He picked until he was sure he had checked beneath every leaf.
Sir Oliver would be looking for him, Alder reminded himself. So would Reed, Sir Landon, and the rest of his friends and every servant his father could muster. These woods were deep and treacherous, but eventually, someone would find him. He had to stay alive until then.
He crept slowly along the forest floor, one hand carrying the bundle of blueberries and the other outstretched. Birds sang out their evening refrains, and the angle of the sun filtering through the trees told him the day was further gone than he would have liked.
Choosing a sleeping place in the woods had been easy, back when he’d had his sight. He’d only had to glance around to locate a hollow between tree roots or a comfortable dip beneath the shielding branches of a bush. Now, it took some time before he found a suitable patch of matted leaves, and even then he was cautious about sitting. The memory of accidentally lying on stinging nettle leaves had stayed with him, the pain a reminder of his weakness against the myriad dangers of the forest.
He untied the pointed stick that had been bound to his leg. He had lost his dagger when the witch had flung him from Rapunzel’s tower. This stick was a weak substitute, but a bad weapon was better than none at all. He tucked his makeshift basket of berries safely against his stomach, where he could guard it from hungry birds and rested his head on his arm. He lay, half-curled, as the evening deepened and chilled.
Every moment of rest was precious; sleep would become difficult by the early morning when the earth had given up the last of its daytime heat.
Alder, a shimmering voice cried out in his dream. Alder. My love. Where are you?
“Alder,” she called again. Her voice was hoarse from shouting, her skin rough from clawing through bramble patches, her soul ragged with loss. Even her hair, which had once shone with the texture of silk, now scratched the back of her neck like straw.
None of it mattered to her, because none of it would matter to Alder.
Not when she found him.
Stolen sword in hand, she strode to the middle of a clearing and turned in a slow circle, eyes sharp to any hint of movement under the trees. Night was falling fast; the dim light of twilight would plunge her into blackness in a few minutes.
She only had a few minutes left to search tonight. She would take those minutes, turn them inside out, and force them to stretch until she had the time she needed to find him.
He’s dead, the witch’s voice hissed in her memory. He fell from the tower. He won’t come back.
It was just another lie from the woman who had claimed to be Rapunzel’s mother. It had to be.
“Alder,” she called again. Her voice tore a hole through the evening quiet of the woods. She waited, breath suspended, for his answering cry.
Still, she was not prepared when it came.
Dame Gothel peered through the lens of the golden telescope that sat at the window of the tower. She had used it to keep an eye on the girl, to watch for signs of weakness and resignation. Surely, she had thought, Rapunzel would not have the fortitude necessary to traverse the wilderness below her tower. The woods were full of horrors, from vicious beasts that could tear a maiden apart to tiny mosquitoes that could drink her blood and set her fair skin to itching. To a girl unaccustomed to anything outside the rounded walls of her home, both dangers would hold terror.
And yet, Rapunzel had not come home. The girl had scarcely flagged in her determination to find the wretched prince who had seduced her with fancies of love and happily ever afters. The prince whose father had banished Gothel decades ago and exiled her from society, from the warmth of human companionship, from the possibility of ever finding love and creating a child of her own.
That her beloved adopted daughter should abandon her now for that man’s son, blinded and disheveled in the wilderness as he was--it was not to be borne.
Gothel fixed the telescope on Rapunzel’s face and sharpened its focus. Her daughter’s hair was a mess, her face streaked with scratches and dirt. And still, the blue eyes that blazed beneath the layers of grime shone with determination. Worst of all, she stood scarcely a few meters from the resting place of that contemptible young prince.
Gothel’s magic was waning and had been for some time. If the foolish lovers found one another now, there was little she could do to stop them.
Still, she wasn’t feared as the Witch of the Woods for nothing.
She softened her gaze, searching for just the right weapon.
There it was, between her daughter and the foolish boy who sought to steal her away. The small thorn bush could not have been placed more perfectly.
The witch stretched out her hands and began to chant.
Alder sat bolt upright. The air had cooled; time had passed since he had first closed his eyes. He reached for his bundle of berries. It was still there, undisturbed.
He strained, listening. The sound came again.
“Alder!”
The voice was not the melodic cry from his dreams, and he loved it all the more for its rough edges. He shot to his feet and raised his hands above his head, waving them wildly, as if anyone could hope to see him in what he was sure must be the darkness of night.
“Rapunzel!” he shouted.
The silence that followed was immediate and total. Even the insects crawling about on the forest floor seemed to still, recognizing the weight of the moment.
Footsteps crashed through the undergrowth toward him, light and reckless, every bit as recognizable as her voice had been.
“Alder!”
Her joyful exclamation turned to a scream that chilled his blood. Between them, the forest filled with the hair-raising sound of branches twisting and snapping. The noises started near his ankles, but in a moment they were at his head, perhaps above.
His hand collided with a thorn. He gasped sharply as the prick drove itself deep into the skin of his palm, and his body recoiled in memory of the day he had been blinded by the witch’s weeds.
“She’s found us,” Rapunzel said.
Her voice was so close he felt as if he could throw a blueberry and trust that she would catch it. Rapunzel loved blueberries. He silently vowed that when they got out of here, the palace gardens would be filled with them.
“Stay where you are,” Rapunzel said. “I’ll come to you. She won’t hurt me.”
Her voice trembled, uncertainty meeting with bravery and neither coming out on top.
Alder growled. “I’d sooner be damned than stand here one more moment.”
He stepped forward, hands outstretched. His skin met with more thorns, these thicker and sharper than the last and seeming to multiply under his touch. A vine wrapped like a python around his ankle and tugged him back. He wrenched his foot away from the vile thing.
“She’ll kill you,” Rapunzel said. “Stay where you are.”
“That witch’s thorns robbed me of my sight,” he said. “They may as well take my life, too, because nothing short of that will keep me from you.”
He tor
e through the brambles. Blood dripped from his hands and arms and thorns slashed at his face. Through the rapidly growing tangle that separated them, Rapunzel crashed toward him, too. Something thwacked against the fat branches; she had brought a blade that could cut through these thick stems.
She was brilliant. If he survived the next few moments, he would spend the rest of his life telling her so.
“Reach out,” she called, and now her mouth sounded close enough to kiss.
He stretched a hand forth. It dripped with blood and throbbed with pain.
Rapunzel grabbed it anyway.
Her hand, small as it was, contained more strength than all these twisting vines. She pulled herself toward him. One great branch hit another beside him with enough force that he flinched, and Rapunzel grunted as she shoved them both away.
Her body pressed up against his. Her hands grasped his shoulders and roamed across his face, his chest, his hands. He grabbed her waist and ran his hands along her back and tried to embrace all of her at once.
“Look up,” she said. “Toward the moonlight.”
He hadn’t realized there was a moon, and couldn’t imagine where it would be in the sky. He obeyed anyway.
She took in a sharp breath.
“Alder, my love,” she said. “What did she do to you?”
The next thing he knew, her words had given way to great, wracking sobs. It was the kind of cry he hadn’t indulged in himself since he was a small boy when he’d fallen from a horse or lost his favorite dog to old age, and his nurse had held him and rocked him and advised him to let it all out. He had forgotten the sound of such grief, but he felt its echo in a prickling behind his own eyes.
He held Rapunzel as his nurse had once held him and murmured reassurances. Still sobbing, she bent his head down toward her and kissed each of his eyelids. Her lips were wet from her crying, and the tears that clung to them washed over his eyes and mingled with his own.
The creaking of the thorns around them stilled.
Alder’s eyes fluttered open.
Rapunzel’s face stared up at him, bathed in cool blue moonlight. Her eyes were puffy from crying. Infected cuts crisscrossed her cheeks, and her magnificent hair had been shorn until it looked like roof thatch that should have been repaired years ago. Filth and dried blood streaked across her face, cut into by the tracks of her tears, and her skin was marred by blotchy patches he suspected had appeared the minute she had started crying.
She was beautiful.
He bent his head to kiss her.
The wedding was as magnificent as the kingdom of Floris had ever seen, but Alder was glad the day of celebrations was over. His bride awaited--his beautiful, brilliant, clever, kind, wonderful bride, who had borne the exhaustion of the day with grace and cheer and who now deserved to be whisked away to their bedchamber, where he would massage her shoulders and un-weave the roses from her hair and cover her with kisses until she fell asleep.
He held out a hand. Rapunzel took it. They offered the last of their smiles to the gathered courtiers and dignitaries, and bowed to the king and queen. They left the great hall to the sound of riotous applause, and Alder stopped her in the palace’s elegant entrance hall for a quick kiss.
Rapunzel stepped onto the first stair of the grand staircase that led up to the royal chambers…
And then there was a knock at the door.
* * *
Find out what happens in King of Devotion
.
5
Rumpelstiltskin
The imp's fingers were gnarled but skillful as he fed straw around the bobbin of the spinning wheel. With each breath he took, his foot applied pressure to the pedal below him, and the wheel obligingly spat out gold on the other end.
The miller's daughter watched him with wide eyes as she wrung her hands with worry, darting glances between him and the door.
"Please," she begged. She clasped her hands together as if in prayer. "Can't you go any faster? The King and my father may be back any minute, and they'll expect..."
"All in due time, dearie," he promised benignly.
He knew what they'd expect.
Straw into gold.
It was such a simple magic. Take one flaxen thing and make it into another. Easy. But it never failed to impress the simpleton humans. The girl in front of him had been all too happy to unclasp the jewelry around her neck in exchange for the transformation when her drunk of a father made a claim she couldn't hope to fulfill. And he'd been all too happy to take it.
And then, when the King thought it a trick (it was) or a chance of luck (the imp's luck, perhaps), he’d demanded a repeat performance. The imp had taken the ring from the girl's finger as well. His cost for another room turned from straw to gold.
They'd had a bargain. An agreed-upon price in exchange for his services. And if he wound up with the better end of the deal for the minimal effort he needed to put forth to keep up his end of it, well… that was the girl’s own fault for failing to haggle.
And now, her King was promising to make her a Queen if she performed the "miracle" of straw spun into gold one last time.
They were greedy little things, humans, and preoccupied with the strangest treasures. Shiny objects like gold and jewels. They had a purpose in his magic, certainly, but they weren't all that difficult to come by. As such, he didn’t prize them overly much.
But blood... royal blood. That held the potential for the imp to work magic he'd only read about. And to possess a nigh-on unlimited supply of it…
Nearly salivating at the thought, he'd had to struggle not to appear as desperate as the girl in front of him when they'd made that agreement. The room was filled with straw for her first-born child--the son or daughter who would be the heir to Vale's throne.
All he had to do was perform this simple magic. One. Last. Time.
Beads of sweat began to dot his forehead.
Because lately... this magic wasn’t as easy as it used to be. Something was wrong with the balance of power in the realm. He'd heard whispers from across the continent. Dark magic such as his was failing. Girls were woken from deathlike sleep and “heroes” pulled from labyrinthian brambles.
He'd had the gall to scoff at the rumors.
He grit his teeth and bore down with force on the wheel's pedal. His power came in fits and starts. He should have had the entire room done at this point if it had flowed from his fingers as seamlessly as it had only weeks before.
Still, he had enough left in him for this. It would all be worth it when he could stockpile bottles and bottles of that glorious scarlet liquid among his potions store.
His tempo increased, and the wheel whirred so fiercely it sounded like a scream.
Pounding footsteps on the stairs made the girl whirl in terror to face the door.
"They're coming!" If a whisper could shout, that was what her voice did now. "Oh please, please, hurry. My father... and the King... you don't know what they'll do to me if I fail."
He didn’t much care what they’d do either, but the fear in her eyes was a real and visceral thing, and its twin echoed in the imp's belly. Not a pang of sympathy, oh no. But the fear that he would fail to fulfill a bargain for the first time.
His agreements had consequences if they weren't completed. And the magic would take its revenge on whosoever failed it.
The last of the straw left his fingers as the key turned in the lock.
The miller's daughter dropped to her knees in a breathless bow as the imp gathered every last bit of power left in him to render himself invisible.
The final strand of gold fell onto the floor.
"Your Majesty!" Kneeling on the floor and staring resolutely down, Renee pulled her braid over her shoulder. Inside, she quaked, feeling nauseous with both relief and dread.
He'd done it. The imp had done it. He'd saved her from another beating from her father--and worse, the King's threatened execution if he found her father had lied about her purported talents.
; But this fate--where she was to marry a King greedy enough to threaten her over an idiotic boast her father had made… what kind of a man would hold someone to such ridiculous claims that weren’t even from her own lips? What kind of King would make the price for her father’s lie her life?
Being a wife to such a man wouldn't be much better than the life she had now.
"Renee?"
That... was not the King's voice.
Her head jerked up, and she stared into the wide, green-gold expanse of eyes that looked back at her from beneath curly russet hair.
Prince Bennett.
Her heart leaped up into her throat. The Prince had been so kind to her whenever they'd met. When he'd noticed how her hands trembled while holding a glass in his father's presence, he'd gently taken the champagne flute from her fingers and placed it on the table. When terror had seized her throat as they dined, he'd whispered joking observations of the other diners until she snorted, trying to rein in her laughter.
"Your... Highness?" It came out as a question.
Bennett looked around the room, shaking his head as he marveled at the glittering mass of gold that surrounded them. "I'd intended to rescue you. To free you before my father came to see if you'd completed the impossible task he’d set before you. But I see that you had no need of my services."
His eyes twinkled, and she stared at him, spellbound. He had come to free her.
And maybe he still could.
"Do you think he'd let me escape?" she whispered. "I don't--I can't marry him. Please, Your Highness."
* * *
His eyebrows reached for his hairline as his eyes widened. "Marry my father? Gods, I should think not. No one else should have to endure the man he is now." He shuddered.
Her brow furrowed in confusion. "But he said he'd make me a queen."
"Someday," the prince clarified. He shuffled his feet, looking suddenly nervous. "No, I believe my father had another match for you in mind..."
Kingdom of Fairytales: After ever after - a Kingdom of Fairytales Prequel Page 3