Grounded: The Adventures of Rapunzel

by Megan Morrison

  “Good memory,” said Jack, and Rapunzel grew warm with pleasure.

  “Do you live in a tower?” she asked.

  Jack chuckled. “Are you serious?” he said, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “No. People live in houses and stuff on the ground — like those farmhouses we passed. My family lives in a … cottage.”

  “Cottage?”

  Jack shrugged. “If you want to call it that.” He toyed with one ragged corner of the map. “Didn’t you get lonely in that tower?” he asked. “Or scared?”

  “Why would I?”

  “I don’t know. Was the witch always there?”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t have sisters or brothers or anything. Or even a pet.”

  Rapunzel shrugged. “No, I guess not.” In fact, a pet would be very nice to have. She would take Prince Frog with her when she went home. She was sure Witch wouldn’t mind.

  “I’d go crazy all by myself in one room,” said Jack. “What did you do up there all day?”

  “I ran on the balcony, and I read books. I played dress-up and puzzles and things.”

  “By yourself?”

  Rapunzel nodded. “Don’t you ever play by yourself?”

  Jack rolled the corner of the map between his fingertips. “I mostly play with Tess,” he said. “I watch her all the time, so I taught her to read and play jacks and stuff.”

  “You play jacks?” she said, somewhat startled. “So do I!”

  Jack smiled. “Tess and I have this map game,” he said. “You close your eyes and point somewhere on the map, and that’s the place you’ll live when you’re grown up.”

  “Really? Is it?”

  “Well, no … it’s pretend. You know. For kids. My sister likes it.”

  “Can we play?” she asked.

  “Sure. Close your eyes. No peeking,” he added after a moment.

  “I wasn’t!” Rapunzel stopped trying to see and squeezed her eyes shut.

  “Now move your finger in a circle.”

  She made a wide circle in the air with her index finger, and felt Jack’s hand on hers, guiding it downward. “Has to be over the map,” he said. “Now, put your finger down!”

  Rapunzel planted her fingertip on the map, and she opened her eyes.

  She had landed on Maple Valley. It was a place in Commonwealth Green, not far from the capital, and Rapunzel lifted her fingertip, not sure what to think. The game was pretend, she knew, yet it felt suddenly real and serious. She had never imagined where she would live when she was all grown up. She had never imagined living anywhere but the tower.

  There were so many places on the map.

  “My turn,” Jack said, and he closed his eyes and made circles with his finger until his fingertip landed on Quintessential. He looked pleased when he saw it. He told Rapunzel it was the capital of the Blue Kingdom — a huge, important city with a massive palace. “I’m going to travel there one day,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to see it.”

  Prince Frog leapt right onto the map and landed on a place marked Olive Isles. These looked like several tiny countries all sitting in the middle of blue space. “Islands,” Jack explained. “They’re part of Tyme, but the whole country is surrounded by the Tranquil Sea.”

  “What is the Tranquil Sea?”

  “Salt water,” said Jack. “As far as your eyes can see. Water that stretches forever. It’s supposed to be beautiful.”

  Prince Frog croaked and looked down at the painted sea beneath his gelatinous toes.

  “Prince Frog wishes it were real water,” said Rapunzel, giggling as she moved him off the map and into her pocket, where he could stay damp. She had continued to wet her pocket for him at every opportunity. “Or you can keep playing in the rain,” she told him, patting him again through her pocket.

  “When we get to Commonwealth Green,” said Jack, “you’ll have visited three countries, out of thirteen.”

  “Three whole countries before I go home.” Rapunzel was amazed by the prospect.

  Jack lifted his eyebrows. “Before you go home?” he asked. “You’d go back and live in a tower after seeing all of this?”

  “Of course,” said Rapunzel. Her eyes trailed over the rest of the map, and she absorbed all she could. Orange. Crimson Realm. Republic of Brown.

  “How could you stand it, now that you’ve been out?” Jack demanded. “How could you stay locked up?”

  “I wasn’t locked up,” she said. “Witch lets me do whatever I want. I just didn’t want to leave.”

  “But there are so many places to go,” said Jack. “The Lilac Lakes, and the jewel mines of Crimson, and the beaches in Orange, where the Bardwyrms write poems in the air — don’t you want to see all that?”

  Rapunzel could not conceive of the things he was describing. “What’s out here?” she asked, drawing a circle in the air around the outside of the map. “Past the Violet Peaks and the Tranquil Sea?”

  “The Beyond.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Everybody guesses, but no one knows,” said Jack. “That’s what my father said.”

  Rapunzel found it a strange answer, but was forced to accept it. When she asked Jack for more information, he had none to give.

  “Why are there only twelve countries on the map?” she asked. “You said thirteen, didn’t you?”

  “The thirteenth country is Geguul.”

  Rapunzel turned to him. “You told me to go there! What is it?”

  “It’s the country in the sky, where the White Fairy lives.”

  “In the sky!” she repeated. “Is it beautiful?”

  “No,” said Jack.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  Prince Frog wriggled out of Rapunzel’s pocket, leapt onto Jack’s knee, and sat staring up at him with eyes like saucers.

  “Tell me the story!” Rapunzel cried, delighted. It sounded exactly like the sort of thing that Witch would put into a book for her. “How did you get to the sky? Were there beasts there? Ogres, maybe?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Please? You have to!”

  Jack didn’t answer directly. “Up until forty-seven days ago,” he said, “I lived here.” He unrolled the map again and touched a tiny cursive word written among the eastern ridges of the Violet Peaks: Dearth. “I helped my mother work our farm — just a few cows and goats.”

  “Like the ones we saw on the farms we passed?”

  “Yeah, but not as healthy as the ones you see around here,” said Jack. “Where I’m from, it’s pretty rough. After our animals got sick about a year ago, it got worse. No one would buy what was left, and we couldn’t even trade them. People knew they were diseased.” Jack pushed his hand through his hair. “We’ve always been poor,” he said. “I’m used to being poor. But until my father left, we’d never been starving.”

  “Buy?” said Rapunzel, not sure she understood. “Trade?”

  Jack shook his head a little. “You’re lucky,” he said, petting Prince Frog once with his thumb. “You’ve had magic giving you whatever you want. Everyone else needs money. See, you give people money, and they give you what you need. To get money, either you can sell something — which means someone else takes that thing in exchange for money — or you can get paid to do things.”

  “That sounds simple.”

  Jack laughed, but did not sound happy. “You’ll see when we get to Cornucopia.”

  “Why? Will we have to trade and buy things there?”

  “If we want to eat, yeah.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Rapunzel, alarmed. She pushed herself back up onto her elbows. “Of course we want to eat.”

  “Well, food costs money.”

  “Do you have money?”

  “No. I had a golden egg, but I traded it to get supplies for my trip to the Red Glade. Since I’ve had to travel with you, we’ve eaten everything twice as fast — and I wasn’t planning to go to the First Wood. I thou
ght I’d be going straight home after seeing the fairies. After we eat breakfast tomorrow, we’ll be out of bread.”

  Rapunzel lay back down, thinking hard. It had been bad enough eating just bread and water for the last four days. Their lack of food scared her.

  “We’ll just have to find some money,” she said. “I’ll get some. I’ll do something.”

  Jack looked up at the canopy of hair that protected them. “We could get a lot of money for your hair, I bet,” he mused.

  Rapunzel crossed her arms behind her head. “Never,” she said, and yawned.

  “So what’s your big plan?”

  She didn’t have an answer. “You never told me how you got to the sky,” she said instead. “Finish your story.”

  “Later,” said Jack.

  Rapunzel decided not to press him, and he said nothing more. When she fell asleep, Jack was still sitting up with Prince Frog beside him, staring out into the darkness and the rain.

  RAPUNZEL awoke to the sound of birds chirping and the smell of damp leaves. She glanced over at Jack, who was fast asleep on his back, his mouth open, his chest rising and falling.

  “Wake up,” she said. “Help me get my hair down.”

  “Ngh,” he said, and curled up in protest.

  Rapunzel stood. Her body was stiff, and her bones felt like they were creaking. Worse yet, her stomach felt tight and empty.

  It was a nasty job unwinding her wet hair from the branches, and a worse one plaiting it up again. When Jack woke, he wasn’t much help. Sighing, he held her hair off the ground as she twisted it into a misshapen braid. It took so long that her fingers grew sore, but she finished and slid her shoulder straps on. When her hair rolled onto the wheel, Rapunzel’s back began to ache at once. They had not walked long before she was forced to slow down. “How much farther to Cornucopia?” she asked, stopping beside a tree to lift her right foot, trying to give it a rest.

  “About a league,” said Jack. He cupped his hand above his eyes and squinted up into the sun. “We’ll get there in time to eat lunch — if you can get us some money, that is.” He smirked.

  Rapunzel twisted her left ankle in circles and gritted her teeth. “My feet,” she said.

  “You need boots,” said Jack. “You could use some clothes too. You can’t go wandering around in your nightgown forever.”

  “How do I get clothes?”

  Jack pushed back his hair. “Money,” he said.

  Rapunzel was beginning to think that money was stupid. “Does anything not take money?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Water’s free,” he said. “We can forage for berries and roots.”

  “Roots?”

  “Can’t be too picky.” He scratched his head. “We can fish, but it’ll work better if I can buy real hooks and line. We could use your hair for line, I guess. It’s not quite strong enough, but I could wind a few pieces together. And I can always catch a rabbit or something. It’s just that all that stuff takes time,” he finished, sounding anxious. “I don’t have time.”

  Rapunzel didn’t know what half the things were that he had just mentioned, but she wasn’t in the mood for explanations. She put her left foot down and winced when it throbbed, but started walking again with determination. They were close to Cornucopia, and somehow, in town, she would find a way to get enough money for lunch and boots.

  They had not even walked another hour before she had to stop again.

  “I have to rest,” she said, and slid to the ground. She rolled onto her side and cried a little when the weight of her hair slumped onto the grass and off her.

  Jack stood over her, looking uncomfortable. “I guess I could carry it,” he said.

  When she stood up again a few minutes later, Rapunzel gladly passed the wheel off to him. Without its weight on her back, she felt so much lighter that she would have skipped for joy if her feet hadn’t been so blistered. They didn’t speak again until the woods thinned and they reached a long, grassy slope, which spilled down into clusters of tidy little thatch-roofed buildings. Warm, fragrant, delicious scents wafted across the fields and up the slope. Moved by hunger, Rapunzel hurried toward the buildings, dragging Jack and the hair-wheel along with her.

  “Wait,” he yelped, and though Rapunzel did not want to, Jack dug in his heels and brought her to a halt. “We have to hide your hair before we get into town — and your nightgown, for that matter. You look like a lunatic.” He shrugged off the wheel of hair and helped Rapunzel into it. “Put this on,” he said, pulling a thin cloak out of his knapsack. He flung the cloak over the wheel of hair, and Rapunzel tied it closed in front. “You look like you have a hunchback,” he said, sounding more than a little amused. “But believe me, that’s better.”

  They ran down the rest of the slope, toward the wonderful smells. Soon they were wandering among long lanes of short, boxlike houses all pressed together, with people milling in and out of their windowed doors.

  “Look at all the people!” Rapunzel whispered, nudging Jack. “What are they doing?”

  “Those are shops,” said Jack. “People buy things in them.”

  “Can we get food in them?”

  “If you have money.”

  Rapunzel bounced on her sore toes. “It smells so good,” she said.

  Prince Frog wriggled out of Rapunzel’s pocket and stared around with his wide golden eyes. Rapunzel put him on her shoulder.

  “How do I get money?” she asked.

  “See that fountain?” said Jack, pointing down a long road toward a great expanse of green. Just before it there stood a round, stone-walled pool of water, very like Rapunzel’s marble bathtub at home. Water spilled from a high-up stone dish, down into another, bigger dish, and then into another, even bigger one, which sat in the middle of the water.

  “Is it for taking baths in?” asked Rapunzel. Almost a week of walking had left her uncomfortably grimy.

  “No,” said Jack as they approached it. “It’s a public fountain. Just stay here so I can find you again, all right? I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll go faster on my own.”

  “Should I try to get money?”

  But Jack had already disappeared into the crowd.

  Rapunzel stood for a minute at the edge of the square, watching all the people. There were short people and tall people and people in between. There were people with black hair and white hair and brown hair; people with toasty-brown skin and peachy-pale skin, wrinkly skin and spotty skin. There were skinny people and fat people, old people and young people, people in feathered hats, people in aprons, and people carrying big wicker baskets full of fruits and vegetables. There were so many kinds of people that Rapunzel couldn’t count them all.

  What they had in common, she realized, was that they all wanted to look at her. Everyone who passed gave her a long, incredulous stare. Men and women alike swept their eyes over Rapunzel’s dirty slippers and the hump on her back, wearing looks of disdain, disgust, and pity. Children huddled to whisper, point, and laugh.

  They had something else in common, Rapunzel noticed. Nearly everyone who passed her was either carrying food or eating it. All of them must have had money.

  Almost salivating at the smells that mingled around her in the air, Rapunzel approached a woman who was sitting on a bench, licking a large spoonful of custard.

  “Do you have any money?” she asked. “I’m hungry.”

  The woman drew back. She looked at Rapunzel’s cloaked hump and ruined slippers. She looked at Prince Frog on her shoulder. And then she gathered up her skirts and her custard and hurried away.

  A fat woman in an apron leaned out of the custard shop. “Get on with you now,” she said to Rapunzel. “Stop scaring away business! Shoo! Shoo!” When Rapunzel didn’t move, the woman swatted at her with a large wooden spoon. “Filthy beggar!” she cried. “We work for our livings here.”

  Rapunzel moved away from the shop, undaunted, and wandered down the road, reading the signs. The Cursed-Tongue Bait Shop didn’t sound lik
e it had much promise, and neither did Tully’s Tack and Saddle. Between these shops stood a waist-high pillar of dark stone topped with a cheerful yellow box that repeatedly emitted the words “Hear ye! Hear ye!” Through a small glass door in the box, Rapunzel saw a stack of paper. She wished it were a stack of food. At the end of the road was a place called Shepard’s Alehouse that looked more interesting — a lot of people sat inside on stools, drinking from big metal mugs and laughing at the tops of their lungs. Across from the alehouse was a very pretty corner shop, neat and tidy, marked with a copper sign shaped like an oven that read Copper Door Confectionery. This shop overflowed with visitors; the candy inside it must have been delicious.

  “Hello, freckly!” A man stood beside the confectionery, in front of a little red door with a painted window that read The Muffin Man. He grinned at Rapunzel when she caught his eyes. “Free samples!” he called, beckoning to her with pudgy fingers. His cheeks were round and red. He held a platter laden with bite-size muffins.

  Rapunzel hurried toward him and took one. She shoved it into her mouth and closed her eyes to relish the taste. It was airy, sweet, and wonderful.

  “Feckly?” she managed through her mouthful.

  The man tapped a fingertip to the end of Rapunzel’s nose. “Freckles!” he cried. “They’re cheerful! They make you look hungry!”

  “I am hungry,” said Rapunzel, taking another sample and popping it into her mouth. “I’ve been journeying for four days with nothing but bread to eat.”

  “Tut tut,” said the man, “not a good idea. You need fuel for a journey like that.” He pointed to a menu that stood by the door. “Try our sausage and eggs for three thorns!”

  “Thorns?”

  “That’s what it costs, freckly.” The man’s eyes twinkled for a moment, but when Rapunzel ate a third tiny muffin, the twinkling faded. “If you’re a beggar, you can just move along,” he said. “I thought you looked ratty — you and your frog.”

  Prince Frog croaked reproachfully. The man put down his tray and picked up a broom. Before he could swat at her, Rapunzel hurried away among the shops. It was misery to see food everywhere and know that she was not allowed to touch it.