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the kingdom was shaking. the wind was rising. her mother was hissing threats and exhortations beside the thornbushes--
when rapunzel and her prince ran, they vanished.
they sold his fine horse on the far side of the wood. her tears had healed his sight, but not enough, so he talked her through checking the coins for forgeries. the merchant told his wife about them, later, the blind warrior and the little maiden with her sharp eyes and clever fingers.
they sold her wedding ring on the slopes of the biggest mountain she had ever seen. they sold his before that mountain had faded from the horizon. they kept tarnished coins hidden here and there on their persons. her hair grew out, unnaturally fast, some last gift of her mother's, and she chopped it off and sold the long golden plaits at the towns they passed. she liked it best to curl around her ears, fluffy and light as corn silk. she was tired of that weight hanging from her.
wishes are children. so was she.
rapunzel would flinch at crowds for the rest of her life. it took them years to find a place that was theirs, with doors that locked and walls that blocked out the noise of the world. she found that when things got too loud the closest thing to safe strong walls was to curl up in her prince's lap, her forehead pressed against his collarbone, his arms warm and close around her. she counted his heartbeat and tapped her fingers out against the rise and fall of his chest.
she ran away once, left her prince sleeping in a hollow with a note tucked into his loose fist. it terrified her, the idea that she was building her world and safety into the flesh and bone of this man, the way her mother had tried to build things in her. so she took half their coins and ran. rapunzel walked through cold copses of trees and over dry creek beds, asking herself questions like she was stuck, tar on the soles of her slippers.
somewhere a baker and a princess were telling children that no one was alone. red slept by the coals of the hearth fire, so when she shook herself awake she would see the red-lit beams of the bakery and not the inside of a beast. in jack's worst nights the thuds of his heart were the footfalls of a giant that was coming to get him. in his dreams, he always survived. in the worst ones, no one else did.
rapunzel was cold and hungry. she would never live within sturdy stone walls again, just wood and straw and mud. she didn't know what she wished for, but she did know what she wanted. maybe that was alright. maybe she would make it alright.
when she came back to the hollow where she'd left him, her prince was still there, snoring, and she laughed aloud until he stirred and blinked up at her. he never could get up before noon without her help.
she reached down and pulled him to his feet with muscles that were learning that the world was so much bigger than pacing the round stone floor of her tower room and hauling witches up by her braid. she didn't stop laughing. when he kissed her, in that cold copse, she was carrying no weight but her own choices.
child, your hair is not a ladder. it never should have been.
your voice belongs to a girl and not a songbird. your home does not live in your mother's ribcage no matter what she says. you are home-- your feet on the ground, your hair like a bird's nest. you can pick it up and take it with you when you go.
they lived on others' kindnesses and their own luck; on his strength and her sight. an old woman at the edge of a marsh let them stay for a month, in exchange for chores and heavy lifting. she taught them how to butcher chickens and manage a garden, to scrub floors and pots, mend shingles, to haul water from the well.
his brother was taught to be charming, not sincere, but rapunzel's prince was the younger son and had more room for error. when the old woman thanked them for the help, he took her hand (he had traded his old silk for rough cotton her husband left behind; his hair had grown rough, shabby; his boots were the best thing on him, except for the way he met her eyes and meant it), and he said, "no, thank you."
they finally settled down in a little town, by a lake cradled in grassy hills, because rapunzel was tired of forests. they rented a little room together over a carpenter's shop, because for all that some days rapunzel had to shut all the doors and windows and hide under her blankets with wax in her ears, there were so many days when she did not have to. she was tired of being a step away from the world.
her prince's eyes were too weak to read, so she read to him, bedtime stories and agricultural manuals. they learned all the tax laws of the new kingdom, and the town marched them out whenever the tax collectors came to call. he wore his old boots and his new, patched clothes, hands rough from helping with the harvest. he had a voice like a lord's and she had every relevant tax code marked up and memorized under her fingers. the collectors didn't know what hit them.
her prince taught the commoners to read. he played stick-sword-fighting with the town children and lost as loudly and dramatically as he could. he told them about great love, great battles, and running away. he was braver than his brother would ever be. she told him so.
they did not have children, twins or daughters or otherwise. but they settled down there, along that lake shore, and when she sang the children came to listen. there was a little girl who tagged along at her heels, asking for mathematics lessons. she wanted to grow up and slay the tax monsters too. the children followed her, when rapunzel hiked up into the orchards to remind herself she could leave, she could go, whenever she wanted, so she told them her story. she told them they were allowed to run.
she was careful with the things she said, because they would listen, because she had listened--rapunzel had seen all the ways her mother was rotten. her mother called it love, and maybe it was, but what had that to do with anything at all?
she listened to the children, when they told her the worlds they wanted to see, when they tried to grab up the snippets of gold she cut off whenever her hair dropped below her ears. she taught the little ones tax law when they asked (few asked). she told them that home was not a place, a tower, or palace; it wasn't mothers either, no matter how hard they crooned to you it was true.
you're right here, she told a little tousle-haired boy. this is you. this is me. no one can take that away, but they might try.
you do not have to be good. you do not have to be kind. you do not have to come back. you just have to be.
there are wolves out there, she said, and princes and humans too; there are women with eight children who will spare you a crust and the warm dredges of their stewpot; there are barkeeps who will undercharge you for a hot drink on a cold night, and townsmen who will underpay you for the gilt and pomp you slowly strip from your prince's royal attire. and there is you.
they heard news of scandals of inheritance, back in a kingdom weeks and weeks travel hence: a single remaining son, and all of his bastard children leaping out of the woodwork in the dozens, as brave as their mothers and as sly as their father. the king went looking for his second son, who he had forgotten to look for when that son was wandering, blinded, lost.
when messengers finally made it out to a little town on the edge of a lake, with its orchards climbing up over the hills, with its content little fishing fleet of two boats--they asked for news of a prince and the town laughed at them in the streets.
there were no princes here, only a man with softening posture and rough hands, only a woman with hair like dandelion fluff who could calculate a household's taxes to the last penny. he was her safe walls and she was his sharp eyes, and here at the quiet end of the world that was enough.
rapunzel had spent her whole life shouting out to the world. she was all the stories of maidens trapped in towers, but she was also the stories of trees that sing, the shades of lost lovers trapped in woodbark, ghosts in the thorn bushes.
they would tell ghost stories about that bodiless soaring voice until the day all the trees of the wood withered away. but even in the city that rose up afterward, in concrete and asphalt and brick, she was not forgotten. (she is not remembered either). (she was not a fairy tale ending, not a ghost, not good). (she was a child and she is gone).
her mother had called her good, but rapunzel had disobeyed all her life. trapped, she had thrown her voice out as far as it would go. however beautiful the witch had thought rapunzel's song, it was still the first thing to escape her.
when the prince had come to her window, she had let him in. when her mother had wept, begged, snarled, rapunzel had turned around and left. she had looked back, but never with guilt.
she was not kind, obedient, or good. she had been a child with no options.
she sang out her window, now, while she did the mending or the latest taxes. she went with them to sell fish at the market a whole three days west. there were more people in the market than she had ever seen, even at her few days at the palace, and they were brighter, louder, waving carrots and slapping shoulders and hailing old friends.
her friends understood when she needed to take a long solitary walk at midday, but when she came back she perched on a stool and hollered, sang, shouted out at passerby about their fine fine trout, fresh caught, the best you'd ever see.
she missed her old soft sheets. some mornings she missed the way light had slid through her high window at dawn, but sometimes she was busy shoving at her sleeping prince until he rolled onto his side and stopped snoring. some nights she couldn't sleep, waiting to hear her mother's call through the window. (she tangled her fingers in hair too short to climb.)
some mornings, cold mornings, some afternoons, hot and heavy afternoons helping with the orchard harvest while her back ached and children shrieked and raced between the trees, she wondered how her mother was. she decided she didn't care.
there is a woman, growing old and content in a little town by a lake. her hair is no longer as yellow as corn and her hands are not soft and never idle.
she is not good, she is not nice, she's just free.