“NOW!” cried Jack, and they shoved the wall of crates at Greve. The boxes tumbled off the wagon, and Rapunzel heard Greve shout with pain as he was pinned beneath them.
“Let’s go!” said Jack, jumping out of the wagon. Rapunzel stepped down with less ease, now that she had the burden of her hair again. Once outside, she saw that Greve had brought them right up to a small house built of shining white stones. It stood alone at the top of the hill. Beneath its peaked roof was a large triangle of delicately carved stone, wrought like lace around a circular window. Rapunzel stared at it.
“Come on!” said Jack. “What are you doing?”
The door of the white house flew open. At the top of the front steps stood a tawny woman in a long apron, wearing her brown hair in a net.
Her eyes fell on Greve. “White skies,” she cried, and ran down the steps. “What have you done to him?” She fell to her knees and pulled the crates away from Greve’s head and chest. Blood gushed from his lip, and he groaned but did not stir.
“Same thing we’ll do to you if you get in our way,” Jack said to the woman. “Let’s go, Rapunzel.”
“Rapunzel.” The woman looked up from the crates.
Rapunzel felt a stab of fear. The woman knew her. Greve had brought them here on purpose.
“Having trouble, Skye?”
The voice was deep and unfamiliar, and it came from right behind Rapunzel. She and Jack both whirled. They looked in dismay at a man as large as Greve but younger, with no beard and no limp. He was carrying an ax, and its blade glinted in the sunlight. He glanced past them at Greve. “Did they attack him?” he asked, his voice dropping lower. “Is he —”
“He’ll be fine — Edam, that’s Natty’s girl, look. Look at her hair.”
The man nearly fumbled his ax. He stared at Rapunzel. “No,” he said.
“Yes …” The low growl came from Greve, who winced as he moved. “Didn’t tell them where I was taking them,” he said, struggling to sit up. “Not their fault. Had to make sure she’d come.”
“Make sure why?” Jack asked, taking a step back from Edam and his ax and throwing out his arm in front of Rapunzel. “Who are you people? What do you want with her?”
Skye put her arm around Greve. She helped him to his feet and handed him his stick.
“What’s your name, boy?” said Edam, flipping the handle of his ax in his palm as he looked at Jack. “What’s your business with this girl?”
Jack flushed. “I have no business with her,” he said, taking another step back and bringing Rapunzel with him. “I’m just … with her.”
“Are you now? Since when?”
“We don’t owe you explanations,” Jack said harshly. “And we’ve had about enough of being locked up. So if that’s your plan —”
“No one’s going to lock her up here,” interrupted Edam.
“Where is here?” asked Rapunzel.
None of them made any move toward her or Jack. They didn’t seem interested in killing them or selling them into slavery. They were only watching her with great curiosity and something like … Rapunzel couldn’t quite name it. But she was sure that they had no desire to hurt her.
“Natty’s girl,” said Edam, shaking his head a little. “Out of the blue.”
“Who is Natty?” asked Rapunzel. “Does Witch have another name?”
Skye inhaled sharply, and her wide brown eyes brimmed with tears. She put her hands over her face and began to cry in earnest.
Greve put a bruised hand on Skye’s shoulder and fixed his dark eyes on Rapunzel.
“Natty was your mother,” he said.
Before Rapunzel had gotten over the shock, Greve leaned on his stick and limped more slowly than usual toward the door.
“This was her home,” he said as he went. “Now come on inside. Your grandmother’s been waiting a long time to meet you.”
GRANDMOTHER.
“Your mother’s mother,” Jack told her, watching her with black eyes almost as curious as everyone else’s. He no longer seemed worried that Greve would cheat them. On the contrary, he hung behind Rapunzel and apologized to Edam and Skye for what they had done with the crates.
“Apologize to the old man, if you want,” said Edam. “But it sounds to me like he left you no choice. Only a fool or a coward would let a man lock him up without a fight.”
Jack seemed to feel better at this.
If Greve heard the exchange, he didn’t acknowledge it. He limped up the steps and onto the white porch. He pushed the door open and looked over his shoulder at Rapunzel.
“After you,” he growled.
Rapunzel walked in.
The room was larger than it looked from outside, and warm and well lit. Windows stretched nearly from floor to ceiling on either side of her, framing the bright trees outside and allowing sunlight to pour in. The furniture was simple and sturdy, nothing like the elegance Rapunzel had grown used to in her tower, but there was something inviting in the curve of the rocking chair’s wide arms and in the worn, quilted cushions of the sofa. Glass lamps stood on corner tables with graceful legs. Samples of intricate lacework in small, polished frames looked down from the wall above the great fireplace, within which flames crackled, baking the room. Even the books looked cozy and comfortable; they filled the shelves in the walls, and the lettering on their thick, weathered bindings glinted in the firelight. A slim, dark book drew Rapunzel’s eye, and she stepped closer to read the tarnished golden title on its spine: Fairies, Willcrafters, and Witches: A Mortal’s Guide to Magic.
Rapunzel removed the book from the shelf at once and flipped through it for mention of her own name. To her surprise, the book wasn’t about her at all. A few chapters of it were about witches. Not her own Witch either, but witches in general. Rapunzel was derailed momentarily by the idea of more than one Witch. She had never imagined there were others. But since more than one mother existed, she supposed that it made sense that there was more than one Witch, and she wondered if there were other Rapunzels, in other towers.
Rapunzel shelved the book and looked across the room. To the right of the fireplace, the space opened into a clean, spacious kitchen full of gleaming copper pots and a big-bellied oven. To the left of the fireplace, she saw a narrow, lamplit hallway with three wooden doors. At the end of the hallway were stairs. Perhaps they went up to the room with the peaked roof, where the stone looked like lace around the window.
“It’s nice,” said Jack, beside her. “Really nice,” he added a bit wistfully. “Tess would like it.”
“I like it too,” Rapunzel said. The whole house seemed to want her to belong to it. She would have liked to curl up on the quilted cushions and read a book in front of the fire, as though she were at home. She felt at home. But that was wrong — her tower was home. She thought of Witch, and her stomach twisted.
Rapunzel heard the door of the house close and looked around to see that everyone had followed her inside. Edam glanced at her but tended to Skye, who was still weeping.
“I’m sorry,” Skye said, looking up at Rapunzel. “But you could be Natty back from the dead. What will Purl do when she sees you? How will she stand it?”
“I’ll get her.” Greve limped past Rapunzel, down the hallway, and knocked on the first door. There was the sound of a sharp rap in reply, and Greve let himself in. Rapunzel tried to see into the room, but caught only the flicker of lamplight, more lace, and more books before Greve closed the door behind him.
“How long have you been out of that tower?” asked Edam.
“Twelve days,” said Rapunzel.
“You must be tired. Hungry. What can I get for you?”
Rapunzel’s eyes drifted to the room into which Greve had disappeared, and she wondered if her grandmother was in it.
“I want to meet my grandmother,” she said.
“My dad’s waking her now.”
“Is she asleep?” Rapunzel was surprised. “It’s the middle of the day.”
“She …” Skye
sniffled and lowered her voice. “She’s fragile these days. She’s gotten old so fast these last few years. We’re not sure how much longer she’ll last.”
“Last?” asked Rapunzel, frowning as she remembered what Jack had told her about people growing old and wearing out. “Is she dying?”
“Hard to say,” said Edam. “She’s been ill, off and on. Stays in bed most of the time. It took her years to give up on you, but that’s what she’s done.”
“Give up on me?”
“On ever getting you home,” said Skye. “Fighting for you kept her strong. She read every book, talked to everyone she thought could help her, supported every movement to impose more laws and controls on magical folks. And then she stopped trying.”
Jack was listening to Skye with interest. “Are you Rapunzel’s aunt?” he asked.
Skye shook her head. “I’m just a neighbor — but Natty was like my sister,” she said. “Best friends since we were barely toddling. I never wanted her to move down to Yellow with Rem. The only good that came out of the whole mess was that I met Edam — he lived next door to them. He’s the one who drove Natty back home after the Bargaining. After Rem …” She looked at Rapunzel. “After he passed,” she said.
“Passed what?” asked Rapunzel.
“Died,” said Jack, his attention still on Skye. “So her father died first. His name was Rem, you said? Rem what? What’s Rapunzel’s last name?”
“LeRoux.”
The room stilled. A new voice had spoken — a quiet, wavering voice, but one full of command nonetheless. Rapunzel’s eyes darted to the lamplit corridor.
A woman in a long white nightdress stood in the doorway, supported by Greve’s strong arm. She looked as though she had once been tall, but she stooped now, and she leaned her shaking hand on a straight white cane with a silver tip. Her skin was as wrinkled as a piece of crumpled parchment that had been smoothed out. Only her eyes, piercing blue, had anything of strength still in them. But it wasn’t her eyes that caught Rapunzel’s attention.
It was her hair.
Her grandmother’s hair was as silver as a polished coin. It was bound at the nape of her neck and cascaded from its binding in a long, soft tail, like a stream of water in moonlight. The tapering curl at its end brushed the wooden floorboards with a shushing sound. Rapunzel had seen enough in her travels to know that hair was different from person to person. But she had never found anyone’s hair, other than her own, to be worth staring at.
“Lottie,” whispered Rapunzel’s grandmother, her voice shaking. “Is it you?”
Rapunzel had no idea what she meant.
“Is your braid a hundred feet long?”
Rapunzel nodded. As she became used to her grandmother’s wrinkles, she found she could see past them, and the features they had clouded came into clearer focus. Her grandmother’s eyes were like mirrors of Rapunzel’s. Her nose was the same. The lift at the corners of her mouth was the same.
“May I see it?”
Rapunzel barely knew what she was talking about. It was Jack who slipped behind her and helped her to pull her arms out of the wheel straps. He held the wheel and asked it to spin, and Rapunzel’s braid came loose. The coils made a golden hill on the floor.
Skye and Edam stood together by the fire, hands clasped. Greve neither moved nor spoke.
Rapunzel and her grandmother looked at each other across the room, each gazing at the other, each studying the other’s hair, clothing, and face. Rapunzel’s throat was dry; she wanted to speak, to ask questions, but her grandmother’s blue eyes burned with an emotion so fierce and raw that Rapunzel could not find her voice.
“Lottie,” her grandmother finally whispered, and she swayed where she stood. “My granddaughter. My Charlotte.” She drew a sharp, trembling breath, and the sound that came from her frightened Rapunzel. Her grandmother’s eyes watered and spilled over; tears ran down her cheeks in strange patterns, following the map of wrinkles that covered her face. She moved toward Rapunzel, who tried to step back, but there was nowhere to go. Her grandmother threw thin arms around her and clutched Rapunzel to herself with another low, passionate sob. She held and rocked her, repeating “Charlotte, Charlotte …”
Rapunzel was terrified. She wanted to feel something kinder — she could see how much her arrival meant to her grandmother, and she suspected that it ought to mean just as much to her, but it didn’t. She tried to pull away, but found that there was more strength in the old woman than there appeared to be. She looked toward Jack, who watched them with sadness in his face.
“I don’t understand!” said Rapunzel. “Who is Charlotte?”
“You are,” he said.
Rapunzel’s grandmother pulled back and seized Rapunzel’s hands. Her grip was tight and uncomfortable.
“Your mother would have named you Charlotte,” she said, through the tears that continued to stream down her face. “Lottie, if you were a girl, she said. If you were a boy, she would have named you after Rem. My poor daughter. She never had a chance to call you anything.”
“If you wanted to meet me so much, then why are you so unhappy?” said Rapunzel, trying to pull her hands out of her grandmother’s papery grip.
“I have never felt such happiness. Oh, my own Charlotte —”
“Stop calling me that!” She jerked her hands free. “My name is Rapunzel.”
Her grandmother’s tears slowed. She stared at Rapunzel with her powerfully blue eyes, and there was a new expression in them now, one Rapunzel was not sure she liked any better than the crying. There was pity in her gaze. Pity — and fury.
“I believe I need to sit down,” she said. “Greve?”
Greve helped Rapunzel’s grandmother into the rocking chair. She dried her eyes with a handkerchief, and Greve draped her long, silver tail of hair over the arm of the chair. It pooled on the floor.
Now that her grandmother’s expression was composed, Rapunzel was struck again by how much the woman’s features reminded her of her own. It was so strange.
“Will you sit? Near me?” her grandmother asked.
Edam brought a chair from the kitchen. As Rapunzel sat beside her grandmother, she caught sight of Jack behind the sofa, where he put down the hair wheel and retreated toward the wall. She wished he would come nearer.
“Can’t Jack sit with me?” she asked.
Her grandmother’s eyes shifted to him, and Jack straightened up.
“Jack Byre of the Violet Peaks,” he said, bowing slightly. “I’m her friend.”
Rapunzel looked gratefully at him. She had only ever had Witch for a friend before. It was a comfort to have Jack too, and to have him here with her.
“Very well,” said her grandmother, her frail fingers trembling as they tapped the top of her white cane. She kept her eyes on Jack as he came around the sofa. Edam brought another chair from the kitchen, and then he pulled the sofa closer, and the rest of them settled on it as Jack took his seat. The room was quiet except for the crackling of the fire. With all eyes upon her, Rapunzel’s grandmother drew a shaking breath and began to speak.
“My name is Purl Tattersby,” she said, her gaze level with Rapunzel’s. “And I have rehearsed many speeches in hopes of this moment, but I never imagined just how much you would look like my daughter. I am sorry if I frightened you. But you are all that I have left of Natalie, and I have hoped for so long….”
Purl’s voice trailed away, but her eyes stayed fixed on Rapunzel’s face as she lifted the silver tip of her white cane and pointed it at Edam.
“My book,” she said.
Edam was up at once, running his fingers along the spines of the books that filled the shelves to the left of the fireplace. When he came to a fairly unimpressive, slim, green-spined book, he pushed it with his fingertips.
There was a soft click. A small door, made to look like several tall book spines, swung open, and Edam reached into the hidden cabinet he had revealed. When he withdrew his hand, he held what looked like a large diary of ro
ugh paper, its pages full to bursting. Scrolls, old papers, and other small objects stuck out from in between the pages. With great care, Edam placed the book in Purl Tattersby’s waiting hands.
She opened it. Rapunzel sat on the edge of her chair, unable to look away from the well-worn cover and stuffed pages. It was a book about her, she knew — one that she had never read — and she barely managed to stop herself from reaching out and snatching it. It took all her patience to wait as her grandmother unfolded the delicate spectacles that hung from the long chain about her neck and balanced the thin frames on the bridge of her nose.
“I always thought,” Purl said, “that it would be a waste of copper to commission a portrait of Natty. She was a pretty girl, but I didn’t want her vain as a peacock, and in any case, I saw her every day. What would I need a great oil portrait for? Ah, hindsight.” She opened the book in her lap and turned the first page.
“This is the only likeness I can give you,” she said, offering it to Rapunzel. “Done just before they left.”
Rapunzel took the book at once, and her heart slowed down to a strange, slurring rhythm as she looked at a small watercolor painting of her mother.
It had to be her mother. The golden hair, the laughing mouth, the sharp blue eyes. Freckles dusted her nose and cheeks, and her stomach protruded roundly underneath a loose white gown. She held her massive belly in her arms, leaning against the man who stood behind her in the painting. He was handsome, broad-shouldered and striking, and taller than Rapunzel’s mother. His hair and eyes were dark, his smile white. Under the painting were words in careful script: Natalie and Remoulade LeRoux, Summer 1072.
“LeRoux,” said Rapunzel, testing the name in her mouth as she brushed a fingertip over the man’s small, painted face. “This is my father?”
“Aye,” said Purl. “Handsome boy. With a way of pleasing and a head for business — and wasn’t Natty gone on him? He was older and had his pick of sweethearts. I never thought he’d give a second look to Natty, lovesick puppy that she was. Still, from the time she was old enough to go down for Market Day, she pined after him, and when she came into her own beauty, at about your age” — Purl paused, tilted her head, and nodded at Rapunzel — “Rem noticed her too. I never thought she ought to marry him, though I understood. He was the finest young man in Maple Valley and had great plans to make his fortune in Yellow. He was famous in these parts for making sauces that could melt a man’s stomach, just the way his smile could melt a woman’s heart.”
Grounded: The Adventures of Rapunzel Page 18