“Let’s get all the use we can out of this sled,” said Jack. “We’ll just sleep a few hours, all right? Then we’ll keep going, and whenever the sled crashes, we’ll take another break.”
Rapunzel agreed. She made a fire near the sled and delighted in the way the firelight danced across the whiteness of the snow all around them. Jack got dinner out of the wagon, and for the first time Rapunzel noticed that their current stash of food did not come from acorns. He passed her a bright pink apple, a chunk of soft bread all laced with herbs and oil, and a little brick of cheese.
“Where did you get these things, anyway?” she asked.
“Purl must have packed them in the wagon while we were having breakfast the other day,” Jack replied. “She really loaded us up.”
Rapunzel folded the bread around the cheese and said a silent thank-you to Purl before tucking in.
“You believed her, didn’t you?” said Jack through a mouthful of cheese. “About your mother and everything?”
Rapunzel’s bread suddenly felt too thick in her mouth. She swallowed, with effort, and looked down at her apple.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
“Come on,” said Jack. “You’ve barely said two words about everything that happened at your grandmother’s house, and her story goes along exactly with what Governor Calabaza said, and with what Serge told you —”
“I know.”
“And that woman in the picture looked an awful lot like you —”
“I know.”
“Then you won’t really go back to Envearia, will you?” said Jack. “I mean, you can’t, can you? Knowing what you know?”
“I don’t know what I know.” Rapunzel twirled the apple in her hands, watching firelight bounce from its taut pink skin. “Except I know — I know — that Witch loves me.”
“Rapunzel, you can’t seriously believe —”
“You asked what I think, so listen.”
Jack closed his mouth.
“I didn’t know Natty LeRoux,” said Rapunzel. “Witch is my only mother. She’s taken care of me my entire life. That’s love, isn’t it? Even if she didn’t tell the truth about everything —”
“So you admit —” Jack began, but at the look Rapunzel gave him, he fell silent again. He hunched forward and frowned at the fire, his hair falling into his eyes. “Do you know where witches go when they die?” he asked eventually.
Rapunzel was surprised. “I thought you said they didn’t die.”
“Not like humans, they don’t,” Jack said. “Remember how I told you what happens when we die?”
“Our bodies get buried, but the part of us that isn’t physical goes into the Beyond?”
“Yes.” He spoke slowly. “But witches don’t get to go to the Beyond.”
“Where do they go?” said Rapunzel, leaning toward him.
“They go to Geguul,” said Jack. “The White Fairy takes them.”
A cold wind blew across the dark and snowy plain. Rapunzel put her apple aside and drew her blanket close around her.
“Tell me about Geguul,” she said. “What was it like?”
Jack looked pained.
“Please — at Purl’s house you said we were friends, didn’t you?”
“We are,” said Jack. “But I did something bad, Rapunzel. Really bad.”
“Worse than tricking me out of my tower?”
“So much worse,” said Jack, and he hugged himself. He looked afraid.
Rapunzel moved to sit beside him and gave him half of her blanket. He huddled under it with her.
“I told you how, before I started traveling, I lived with my mother in Dearth.” His voice was strange. Unreadable. “My mother and Tess.”
He stared at the fire before continuing.
“Fifty-eight days ago,” he said, “I was sitting outside our house. It’s not much of a house — it’s not like your grandmother’s place. I was milking the cow when these things that looked like shiny white beans dropped from the sky and into the milk pail. I fished them out, and they sparkled like diamonds or something. But while I held them, they changed. They turned brown. They looked kind of like seeds.”
Rapunzel understood seeds. Witch used them to start her roses. “Did you plant them?” she asked.
“I threw them in the dirt, and I guess they planted themselves. That night, while I was asleep, a beanstalk grew in our yard.”
“Beanstalker!” Rapunzel burst out.
“Right. See, beans usually grow on vines about this tall,” said Jack, showing her with his hand. “But the beanstalk in our yard went all the way to the sky and pierced the clouds. It had leaves almost as big as me. I tried climbing on them, and they held me up, no problem, just like steps. So I climbed higher, and for a couple hours I was just picking beans and throwing them down. They were huge, and I figured we could eat them. I didn’t realize I’d gotten to the top of the beanstalk until I saw whiteness everywhere, and mist. The ground looked like clouds.”
“Really?” Rapunzel was fascinated. “You walked on top of the clouds?”
“No, I stayed on the beanstalk. I wasn’t sure what to do, or whether it was smart to do anything — I guess I realized that I might have found Geguul, but it didn’t seem possible. I thought maybe I’d found some other magic place, somewhere nobody had ever discovered, and if I explored it, I might find something good.”
“Something like what?”
“Something I could trade for money. My father had been dead for a year, and the farm was in bad shape. Like I told you, we were starving. Tess usually got something to eat, but my mother and I had to take turns skipping our meals to make that happen.”
Rapunzel stared at him. “Your father died?” she said. “You never told me.”
Jack shrugged. “He went exploring,” he said. “He found a map that he thought would lead him to treasure deep in the caves of the Violet Peaks. So he pulled together some people and supplies from around Dearth, and he led an expedition to find the treasure.”
“And what did he find?”
“Nothing.” Jack’s voice was flat. “There was a cave-in — some rocks inside the mountain fell. He was crushed, and his party came back without him.”
Rapunzel did not know what to say to this.
Jack pressed on. “The point is,” he said, “I climbed the beanstalk. It was pretty empty up there in the clouds, but there was this big white cave nearby, all surrounded by white mist. And when I say big cave, I mean huge. Huge,” he repeated, throwing out his arms to show her. “You could fit ten houses in it. That’s when I knew it had to be Geguul. Only a giant could live in a cave like that.”
“And a giant … is a very big beast?”
“Giants are shaped like humans,” said Jack, “except they’re ten times taller, and they’re all white. Dead white.”
“Like snow?”
“Like snow,” Jack agreed. “Their skin, their nails, their tongues — white as snow. And they have no hair. They look like they’re made of lumps of white clay. Except their eyes.” He gave a faint shudder. “Their eyes have color. Their eyes look human.”
“Did you meet one? Is that how you know?”
“Yes,” said Jack, and then he stopped talking again for a minute and looked as though he was trying to piece the next parts of his story together.
“In the mist,” he said, “right next to the top of the beanstalk, someone had left three treasures. One was a silver harp a lot like the one in your tower. One was a golden goose — really golden, but alive, and it laid an egg made of solid gold right there in front of me. The third was a bag of coins. And I should have thought a lot harder about what I was doing, but I didn’t. I was stupid. I picked up the goose to look at it. The second I did, a giantess came out of the cave nearby and told me not to move. I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
“Not even of the Stalker?”
Jack laughed humorlessly. “Giants make Stalkers look like kittens,” he said. “I thou
ght the giantess would kill me. But she … she was …” He paused. “She had kind eyes,” he said. “She didn’t want to hurt me. She said that since I had taken something precious from her, I would have to do as she asked, or she would take what was most precious from me. I told her I didn’t steal anything, but she said, ‘You are standing on a thing of the ground while holding a thing of the sky that you were not invited to hold.’ I tried putting the goose down, but it was too late. She said I had to take it with me, that it was mine now, so I owed her a treasure in exchange. She’d tricked me. She put those treasures there hoping someone would pick one up.”
The story was too fantastic to be real, but Rapunzel knew, from the way Jack spoke, that every word was truth. “What did she want?” asked Rapunzel. “Something the Red fairies have to give you?”
Jack nodded. “The giantess wants to die,” he said. “She said it’s agony, living in Geguul. She said she wishes she’d never been White-hatched, that it wasn’t worth it — that she just wants to die like a regular human and go to the Beyond.”
“White … hatched?”
“It’s what happens when someone goes up to the White Fairy and gets magic power from her. ‘White-hatching’ — I guess it got shortened to ‘witch.’ Anyway, part of the deal when people White-hatch is that they go to Geguul when they die. When that happens, the White Fairy turns them into giants and just sort of … keeps them.”
“Will the White Fairy turn Witch into a giant?” asked Rapunzel in a small voice. “How long will she keep her?”
“Forever.”
“And the giants are unhappy in Geguul?”
“The one I met was.”
“So unhappy that she wants to die?”
“Yeah. She said that the Red fairies were the only ones who might know how to help her. So she sent me to find them, and she gave me seven fortnights to come back. Ninety-eight days.” His voice was quiet. “She’ll lower the beanstalk at the end of each fortnight, and if I’m not back to climb it and give her what she wants by the seventh time, then the beanstalk will wither and I’ll lose my chance. I’ll owe her whatever is most precious to me.”
“That means …” Rapunzel calculated. “You’ve got forty-one days left.”
Jack nodded.
“And you have to go south again to the Red fairies and then go all the way north to the Violet Peaks in just forty-one days?” She finally understood why Jack needed the fairies to help him. They could give him what he needed for the giantess, and then they could take him home through fairywoods to get him there fast. “What’s the giantess going to take if you don’t make it back in time?”
Jack spoke, but his voice was so faint that Rapunzel didn’t hear him. He cleared his throat and spoke again.
“Tess,” he said.
A chill that had nothing to do with the snow passed through Rapunzel. Distressed, she tried to touch Jack’s arm, but he pulled away. She withdrew her hand, and her fingers fluttered to her heart instead.
There, beneath her fingertips, she felt a strange, frozen lump.
Rapunzel looked down. In the vest pocket over her heart, there was a familiar bulge. But the bulge was motionless.
“Prince Frog,” she gasped.
Her fingers fumbled uselessly as she worked to unbutton her pocket. The fear that gripped her made her clumsy and stupid. She couldn’t believe it. She had forgotten all about Prince Frog. Her mind had been so full that she hadn’t checked on him since Maple Valley, and he had not moved, or croaked, or bounced, or done anything at all since they had left Purl’s. How could she not have noticed? The weather had grown ever colder, and now they were surrounded by snow, and she had done nothing to keep him warm.
“Help me,” she yelped, and Jack grabbed the front of her vest and threaded the button through its hole. Rapunzel dug into the open pocket and let out a cry when her fingers closed around Prince Frog’s frozen form. She withdrew his squat little body from her vest and felt for the beating of his belly or the trembling of his gut chin.
His eyes were shut. He was cold and still.
“Oh, my frog,” she whimpered, and she stumbled from the sled to kneel beside the fire, where she could see him better. She laid him on her knee and rubbed his icy flesh until it was somewhat clammy again. When he did not stir, she laid her cheek against his back. “Jack, what do I do?” she pleaded when Prince Frog did not respond.
Jack knelt beside her, his face grim. “I don’t think we can do anything.”
“Of course we can!” Rapunzel cupped his little body in her hands and held him out to Jack. “We have to!”
Jack felt Prince Frog with his hand for a moment, then shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be sorry — do something!”
“I can’t. When something dies, it’s just dead.”
“No!” shouted Rapunzel. “You take that back!”
Jack only looked at her, and it was much worse than if he had argued. Rapunzel’s pulse thudded with such force that she felt like she was rattling.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said again. “I really am.”
“You shut up!” she spat. “He isn’t dead, you’re wrong!”
“If he isn’t breathing,” Jack said, “then he’s dead.”
“BREATHING!” Rapunzel leapt to her feet and clutched Prince Frog’s inert body to her heart. “Oh, Jack! Yes! It’s a perfect idea — hurry, hurry, get it out!”
“Get what out?”
“The lifebreath that Rune gave us! We’ll break it near Prince Frog’s mouth, and it will save him! Hurry, before it’s too late!”
“It might already be too late,” said Jack. “Rune said it could bring someone back from the brink of death, right? Not from death itself.”
“It will work, I know it will, please, Jack, hurry —”
Jack hesitated. He took a deep breath. “Rapunzel … look. I hate to say this … but we might need the lifebreath for ourselves before this is all over. We can’t just spend it on a frog.”
“Can’t just spend it on a frog?” Rapunzel shrieked, the pitch of her voice rising with every word. “You give me that lifebreath and you give it to me now!”
“You’ll regret it later if I do,” said Jack.
“You’ll regret it now if you don’t!” Rapunzel held Prince Frog to her chest, which rose and fell rapidly. “I will never forgive you, and I won’t go another step on this journey, and I don’t care what Rune does about it, do you hear me, I don’t care!”
When she said this, she thought she saw a trail of red sparks out of the corner of her eye, and she knew that Rune was watching. But at this moment, she felt she would face anything at all, if only she could wake Prince Frog.
Jack narrowed his eyes, but he got to his feet and pulled the lifebreath out of his vest. The wisp of whiteness still whirled inside the little glass bubble.
“You’re going to wish we hadn’t done this,” he said. “I’m telling you.”
“Break the glass!” Rapunzel commanded, thrusting Prince Frog toward Jack. “Do it now!”
Jack held the fragile bubble near Prince Frog’s mouth and crushed it in his fingers. It crumbled into glittering red dust, releasing the wisp. It twisted and turned, then fled into one of Prince Frog’s nostrils.
Rapunzel held her breath and watched Prince Frog’s body for signs of life. She waited for his belly to move, or for his eyes to open, or for his gut chin to wobble.
Nothing happened.
“It’s too late,” said Jack. “We shouldn’t have used it —”
“SHHH!”
Apart from that sound, Rapunzel did not stir. She knelt there in the snow, hearing her own heartbeat in her ears, holding Prince Frog and wishing with all her might for him to open his eyes and look at her. The fire crackled cheerfully, and the sound was terrible and out of place. Jack did not venture another word.
Rapunzel’s shins were half-frozen in the snow. She would have to get up soon. She couldn’t pretend any
longer. Wanting him back would not make Prince Frog spring to life. He was gone. He was there, right there in her hands — but he was gone.
So this was death. And she had caused it.
Guilt and grief struck her together, and she knew what they were, but that did not make them easier to endure. “Sweet frog,” she managed. “Forgive me.” She laid her face against his cold little back and began to cry. But the tears gave Rapunzel no relief; they seemed to pour from the empty place in her heart that Prince Frog had occupied. They came and came, and she huddled beside the fire, still cupping Prince Frog in her hands, unwilling to let him go. Her sobs filled the dark night around them, and she thought her heart would break apart inside her.
“Is everything all right?” asked a voice that did not belong to Rapunzel or Jack. “What’s the matter here?”
Jack sprang to his feet. He whirled around, brandishing his sword, and nearly stabbed the man who had come up behind them.
The man was tall and broad, older than Jack by a handful of years. He wore a dark orange cape that fell to the snow and was embroidered with intricate designs in copper thread and fastened with an ornate copper hook. In this hook was set a large orange jewel that glimmered in the light of the fire. The man’s hair too was flaming orange, and his face was plastered all over with freckles.
“I’m looking for my dog,” said the man. “Have you seen him? Big, red, likes to lick people. I thought I heard his bark coming from this direction, but now I see your Ubiquitous dogs —”
“Who are you?” Jack demanded, keeping his sword out.
“He’s a p-prince,” Rapunzel managed through her tears. Other than the freckles, the man fit the images in her storybooks perfectly, from his cape to his heavy, buckled boots. She wiped her eyes with one hand and kept the other curled around Prince Frog’s body.
“Prince Mick the Magnificent of Orange,” said the prince. He bowed sideways to avoid the point of Jack’s sword. Jack quickly sheathed it.
“Forgive me, your highness,” he said, bowing low.
“It’s dark,” said Prince Mick. “You’re right to be careful.” He straightened as several men and women came up behind him, also dressed in capes and heavy boots, with swords at their belts.
Grounded: The Adventures of Rapunzel Page 21