“Well, won’t I?” said Rapunzel. “I want to go to the Violet Peaks with you too. I want to meet Tess.”
Jack smiled a little. “Thanks,” he said. “But I don’t know.”
Rapunzel’s heart sank. “You don’t want to travel together?” she asked. “Why? Because of my hair?”
“No! No.” Jack took a deep breath. “You think you’ll be allowed to come and go from that tower whenever you want,” he said. “But I don’t think Envearia will let you. In fact, I’m sure she won’t.”
“You’re wrong,” said Rapunzel. “And even if you were right, it wouldn’t matter. When I want to leave, I’ll just climb down again.”
“How? With what?”
Rapunzel shrugged. “I’d find a way.”
Jack tilted his head and considered her for a long moment. “Rapunzel, what would you do if you knew Envearia was using you? Would you still go back?”
“Using me for what?”
He dug into his knapsack. “Nexus Keene gave me this last night, after you walked away,” he said, and he tossed a small, dark book onto the blanket in front of her. On its front, in tarnished golden lettering, it said Witches: A Master Slayer’s Comprehensive Guide to Identifying, Understanding, and Exterminating the Abominations of the White ~ by Exalted Nebenson, Witch Slayer and Beloved of the Black.
Rapunzel’s heartbeat quickened. She picked up the book, opened it to the table of contents, and ran her finger quickly over the topics. The Origin of Witches … White-Hatching … Consuming Innocence … Bargaining Power …
She felt sick to her stomach. She didn’t want to know.
“I read the part about innocence before I went to sleep last night,” said Jack. “Start with that. It’ll explain some things.”
He prepared dinner for them, but Rapunzel’s appetite had crashed like it was Ubiquitous. She wrapped a blanket around herself and moved closer to the fire, where she could see better. She opened the book and began to read.
PART III:
CONSUMING INNOCENCE
How Witches Gain Power and Live to Unnatural Old Age
Once the White-hatching bargain is complete, a new-made witch leaves Geguul and is returned to Tyme on the great unfurled leaf of some abhorrent plant belonging to the White. The witch appears no different, and may even seem frightened and pitiful, but on no account show the creature mercy; on the contrary, take your opportunity to kill it while it is weak. Know this: that witches are unmortal beings, lost forever to the Black, corrupted at their very cores by the White’s demented magic. Being less than human, they are capable of the most savage and execrable crimes. It is the duty of the Exalted Council to exterminate them wherever they are found.
Fortunately, a witch has no special immunity. It can be killed like any creature. Burning, drowning, stoning, throat-slitting, shooting with arrows, pushing from heights, suffocating, hanging, bludgeoning, disemboweling, and beheading are only a few of the viable methods of execution, and I can attest personally to all of their efficacy, having used every one of these techniques. But be warned: An experienced witch can protect itself against any of these mortal means, so long as it has magic. Therefore, the first rational step in slaying a witch — particularly one who is older and more cunning — is to deprive the witch of its wellspring of power so that it cannot defend itself.
Innocence is this wellspring. It is the purity of innocence that fuels a witch’s magic, and the most pristine source of this purity lies in little children. Witches therefore gain power through that foulest of methods: child-eating. When constantly nourished by the flesh and blood of the innocent, the power of a witch is limitless. The Witch of the Woods, who died by fire in 1056, is said to have eaten nearly five hundred children during her seventy-five-year reign of terror.
It is important to recognize that the older a child is, the less innocence remains for a witch to consume. The more inexperienced the child, the more power the witch achieves. Infants, therefore, are the most vulnerable targets, and the children of Tyme will only be safe once every White-hatched monstrosity is slain and sent back to its foul birthing place in Geguul.
The old stories of witches snatching babies from their beds and boiling them for supper, however, are exaggerated. Witches, like anyone else, may kidnap babies from their beds, but they gain next to nothing by doing so. Taking a child by force grants the witch only a brief, weak ability. To gain deep and lasting power, the source of a witch’s power must be obtained through a fair bargain — a disturbing echo of the bargain every witch strikes with the White Fairy upon being White-hatched. If the child is still a baby, incapable of reason, then a bargain must be struck with the child’s parents.
Rapunzel stopped reading. Her throat was dry and her fingers ached from clutching the book so tightly.
Innocence was fuel for magic. And Witch had always told her that she was the most innocent girl who ever lived. She had said it made her perfect.
Did that make her Witch’s fuel?
Yes.
“But she didn’t eat me,” said Rapunzel, although she couldn’t believe she was thinking such a thing. “Witch didn’t eat me — it doesn’t make sense. She can’t be feeding off my innocence if she didn’t eat me. This book says so.”
“Well, whatever she does,” said Jack, “she’s using you. She bargained with your parents, didn’t she? She didn’t have to take you by force, right?”
Rapunzel slammed the book shut and threw it onto the blankets.
“Aren’t you going to read the rest?” Jack demanded.
She covered her face with her hands.
“You have to!” he yelled. “You’re throwing yourself in prison if you go back to that tower. Why won’t you listen to me?”
“I’m listening! But this book only says what witches do. It can’t tell me why.”
“Why what? Why Envearia kept you in a tower and lied to you? Why she wiped your memory? Why she used you?”
“Yes!”
“So you admit that she messed with your mind?”
“Yes — yes, I admit it!”
Rapunzel’s breath came hard and fast. She felt lighter and heavier all at once. She uncovered her face, threw her shoulders back, and looked Jack straight in the eyes.
“I admit it,” she repeated. “Witch took my memories. She lied to me and kept secrets from me. And if that book is true, then she tricked my father into giving me up so that she could … use me,” she said. “To make her magic stronger. But I still miss her. I’m worried about her. I love her. And there is nothing you can say, and no book you can show me, that will make me stop believing she loves me too.”
Jack said nothing for a long time. The fire danced and crackled before them, filling the long silence. When he spoke, his voice was hard.
“Then my answer is no.”
Rapunzel looked at him in confusion. “No what?”
He met her eyes. “No, I don’t want to travel together,” he said. “When we’re finished with the First Wood, we’re finished.”
Rapunzel drew back, struck. “You mean … we’re not friends?” she managed. “You don’t like me anymore?”
“I won’t watch you hurt yourself.”
“But —”
“No. You already forgot me once,” he said. “And maybe I didn’t care then, but I’d care now, all right? I don’t want to visit that tower again and find out that you don’t remember me.”
A fierce wind blew across their camp. The fire sputtered and went out, plunging them into darkness. The wind died down again as quickly as it had risen, leaving the night abruptly and uncomfortably still. There were no stars in the sky overhead, and Rapunzel could not see Jack’s face, though he was only a few feet away.
There was a scrape of flint on tinder, followed by a spark of light. The fire caught quickly and flickered back to life as Jack tended it.
A great shadow fell over him.
Rapunzel followed the shadow with her eyes. Strange, oily movements undulated in the darkne
ss just beyond the firelight, almost as though the darkness itself was moving. She squinted, trying to see what was there. Whatever it was, it was big. Far bigger than they were. Rapunzel put her hand on her dagger.
Jack saw her do it, followed her gaze, and was on his feet in a flash. He drew his sword. “Who is it?” His voice was rough. “Show yourself.”
Their campfire roared as if in reply and blazed higher and brighter than any fire Rapunzel had ever seen. She and Jack leapt back. Its glow widened, casting a broad light across the snow and into the sky.
Illuminated before them was a tree.
A monstrous tree.
A black and twisting, terrible tree.
Its roots sprawled across the ground and stretched far out into the darkness. Its trunk was wider and higher than Rapunzel’s tower, and a head of enormous, tangled branches filled the sky. Against the darkness and the stars, the black branches appeared to be moving. Slithering.
“Crop rot,” Jack whispered.
“That tree wasn’t there before,” Rapunzel said weakly. “Was it?”
Jack shook his head, staring up. The hand that gripped his sword had fallen to his side, and the tip of the blade dragged in the snow.
The tree did not come closer, but its branches moved continuously. It loomed there, dark and terrifying, as the silence thickened around them. Rapunzel could hear only her own breath. She felt a strange pressure, first inside her head and then inside her body, as though the tree was waiting for her to do something. To say something.
“Are … are you the Woodmother?” she managed.
The tree did not reply.
“Or … or the First Tree? Or the Splinterwood?”
The tree was silent, but the slithering of its branches quickened.
Rapunzel felt the pressure growing inside her arms and legs, and she knew that guessing the name of the tree was not what it wanted from her. It wanted … it wanted …
“Rapunzel, don’t!”
But Rapunzel walked up to the tree and extended her hand. She had to touch its trunk — she had to. That was what it wanted. That was why she had come. To reach the First Wood. To find the Woodmother. For Witch.
She stretched her fingers toward the black bark.
“NO!”
Jack tried to pull her back, but he was a moment too late. Rapunzel’s fingertips brushed the rough bark. It crumbled like ash, and her fingers sank into the tree up to her knuckles. She tried to pull them out.
They would not come.
Rapunzel pulled again, but as she tried to twist her fingers free, they sank in deeper, until her hand disappeared up to the wrist. She tugged, struggling at the same time against the strange, heavy haze in her mind. She was stuck in the tree. Stuck in the tree …
Stuck in the tree.
Rapunzel came to her senses with a jerk and tried to extricate her hand, but it was stuck fast, lost inside the tree’s black trunk. She could not see it. To her horror, she could not feel it either. She could not wiggle her fingers, could not stretch them. It was as though her hand was simply gone. Absorbed.
“Jack!” she screamed, yanking at the stump of her wrist and screaming again when this motion only served to bury her arm up to the elbow in the tree. Jack grabbed her around the waist and pulled, but the added force did nothing. Rapunzel pressed her other hand flat against the trunk in an effort to shove herself backward. That hand disappeared into the strange, ashen bark along with the first.
“Let go!” screamed Rapunzel, flailing. “Let go!” She tried to kick the tree and only succeeded in lodging the toe of one boot inside it.
She lost her footing, stumbled forward, and plunged in all the way to one shoulder. She screamed as her face nearly brushed the black bark.
Jack grabbed her by her hair and restrained her.
“It’s eating me!” she wept, terrified beyond reason. “Jack, it’s eating me, it’s killing me —”
“Stop touching it!” he cried. “Rapunzel, don’t move! I’ll get help — I’ll go back to the Orange camp —”
“Let her go.”
The voice that spoke did not belong to Rapunzel or Jack, and Rapunzel knew it instantly. She would never forget it. It was the first voice that had ever been cruel to her.
“Rune,” she gasped.
He fluttered into view before her eyes, white wings shimmering.
“Surrender,” he said quietly. “Let the Woodmother take you.”
“This is what you sent her to do?” Jack shouted. “Get eaten? I never agreed to help with this. Get her out of there!”
“Glyph did not send her here to die,” said Rune. “The Woodmother will not kill her.”
Rapunzel strained her muscles and craned her neck, but her whole weight leaned toward the tree, making it impossible to resist sinking in. Her boot tip was gone; the tree had her entire foot and part of her knee and thigh, and the bark was climbing her limbs now, actively seeking her, drawing her inexorably in.
“Please, Rune!” Rapunzel wriggled her trapped shoulder, trying to keep it free, but it only sank in farther, past her armpit. Her neck was next. “Help me.”
“I cannot,” said Rune.
Hot tears spilled from Rapunzel’s eyes and down her cheeks. She wanted to sob — to scream — but if she moved, she would be lost.
“I did what you asked of me,” she whispered.
“Let the Woodmother take you, prisoner child,” Rune said again. “I will travel back quickly through the fairywoods to tell Glyph that you have done as you promised. As for you, Beanstalker, come back to the Red Glade and claim your reward. We stand ready to help you.”
“I’ll chop this thing open,” said Jack. “I’ll get you out, I swear —”
“No, Beanstalker. She must do what she has come to do, and you must keep your appointment with Geguul.”
Rune’s voice was very close to her ear. Rapunzel could hear his wings buzzing, but she could not turn to look at him. Her face was a finger’s width from the deeply scored bark that covered the great tree’s trunk.
“You traveled farther than I thought you could.” Rune’s voice was quiet. “Now you will go where few have ever gone. May the Woodmother open your eyes.”
“Will I ever get out?” Rapunzel gasped. “Please say I’ll get out.”
“Farewell, prisoner child.”
Rapunzel’s nose brushed the blackness, and then her lips, and then she could ask no more questions. She closed her eyes and went limp.
The Woodmother swallowed her.
RAPUNZEL blinked, but couldn’t see her own eyelids as they closed and opened. She tried to speak, but no noise issued from her mouth. Within the Woodmother, the darkness muffled sound as well as sight.
But she could wiggle her fingers.
Rapunzel sagged in relief. She could wiggle her fingers — her body wasn’t gone. She tapped her toes, shook her legs, shrugged her shoulders — yes. She could even touch her face. She was all in one piece; nothing had been eaten by the tree.
Or everything had.
Rapunzel reached out into the darkness, expecting to feel the inside of the walls of the tree, but there was nothing to feel. No rough bark, no crumbling ash. She took a few slow and careful steps in a random direction, then reached out again. Nothing.
Rapunzel crouched to touch the ground. At least she had to be standing on something. But there was nothing solid underfoot.
“Let me out!” she cried silently. “I’m afraid!”
The blackness around her stirred in a slow circle, and she felt herself revolving with it.
“Stop!” she tried to shout. “Please stop!”
The stirring stopped. Rapunzel gasped. The revolving darkness had turned her toward her braid. She could see it, and only it, glowing gold in the blackness, as though it were lit from within. It looked as though it had been severed about ten feet from her head.
Rapunzel choked. She seized her hair with both hands. As she pulled her hair close to her face to inspect it, the braid g
rew longer, as though she were pulling it out of the darkness.
It hadn’t been cut off, she realized. Most of it just hadn’t fallen into the tree with her. The rest of her braid was still somewhere outside the Woodmother, lying on the snow. She began to pull on it, hand over hand, and sure enough, it piled up in front of her. When she got nearly to the end, the braid went taut with resistance. She wondered if it was snagged on something out there.
She had no sooner thought this than the darkness around her drained away like ink. She stood beneath the stars again, on the dark and snowy plain, as though the Woodmother had never come. Jack stood five paces from her, his heels digging into the snow, his hands gripping the end of her braid. The fairy wheel lay abandoned beside him. Beside that, half-buried in the snow, was the iron chain that Purl had given her. It was tangled up in a wet little heap, as though the Woodmother had spat it out.
“Jack!” Rapunzel shouted, but her voice still made no sound.
Jack did not reply. He twisted her braid around his hand and leaned back, his arms shuddering, his feet making trenches in the snow where he was trying to find purchase.
“Come on,” he muttered. “Come on.”
“Jack, I’m here! I’m right here!” she cried voicelessly.
He only clenched his jaw and pulled harder. His hair was damp with effort. Sweat trickled from his temples. Rapunzel jerked her braid toward her, trying to get it away from him.
“Jack, look, don’t you see? It’s all right!”
Jack would not budge. “Let her go!” he yelled.
Rapunzel dropped her braid and ran toward him. With no more resistance to pull against, Jack flailed and fell backward. Rapunzel fell to her knees in the snow beside him and grabbed his shoulders.
Her hands went right through him.
She looked at her hands in shock. They seemed substantial enough. She tried once more to touch Jack, and this time she was less surprised when her hands passed through him. He could not see, hear, or feel her. Slowly, Rapunzel realized that she couldn’t feel the cold of the snow through the knees of her trousers. She couldn’t sense the night wind. She couldn’t smell smoke from the fire.
She wasn’t here with Jack at all. She was still inside the tree.
Grounded: The Adventures of Rapunzel Page 24