Spoiler
So this is a new edit- I've cut the suitors out and changed the general shape of the entire story, not that you saw much of that anyway. As always, I'm wary of those long boring paragraphs which contain necessary information but I can't see any other way to present it. Dialogue as well, strangely for me, feels like a weakness (only because I generally feel my dialogue is one of my stronger points). Meh. Tell me what you think!
1. The Lady in the Tower
“They say there’s a lady trapped in that tower.”
The voices came with the crunching of leaves and the clinking of armour. I froze, needle halfway through a stitch, and let my eyes snap to the window.
“Oh yeah, and where’d you hear that?” asked another voice.
“From one of the lads in the Princes’ Crew. Supposedly Prince Henry used to visit her. Some weird name…”
“Rapunzel,” piped up a third voice.
My gaze flicked to my companion. Like me, Punzi was frozen, hands twisted up in her embroidery, blue eyes wide. I bit my lip and as quietly as I could, I got to my feet and went to the window, avoiding every floorboard that I knew creaked. The soldiers laughter floated up to me. They were the eighth group who had come past in the past two weeks and we had hidden from every single one. But they were the first ones to stop.
“Maybe Henry and Kelwin are up there with her then,” joked the second voice. I grabbed the curtain, digging my fingernails into the purple velvet. Kelwin…
“Hey! Hey! Lady Rapunzel!” the same voice bellowed. From my niche, I craned my neck just far enough to see him, a huge young man with his hands cupped around his mouth. “Are the Prince and Kelwin up there with you?”
Punzi turned in her chair but I put a finger to my lips. I was too terrified to let them know we were up here. The rough voices and the heavy armour scared me, even though I didn’t know what they would do. There was no way of getting in.
The third soldier was walking around the base of the tower and his voice rippled through each of the four windows in turn. “There’s no door. How’d they get up?”
“Apparently they climbed her hair,” said the first seriously, and the other two burst into fits of laughter.
“Now I know you’re lying,” said the second voice. “Come on, there’s no one up there. Best get moving if we plan on having any chance on finding the prince and getting that reward.”
“Like it’s going to be us. I tell you, it’ll be Myers and the village idiots and Prince Cyprian will probably cover him with gold…”
I could do nothing but stare at Punzi as the soldiers’ voices were muffled by the thick undergrowth of the Deadwoods. She looked close to tears- but then, when didn’t she these days? The soldiers‘ words still resonated in the room and her hands moved to her head in anguish. Because where there had once been yards and yards of hair, thick and strong enough to be rope, there was now only a wild gold halo around her head. My mother had cut the rest off with vicious snaps of a rusty scissors. It was shorter even than mine.
I didn’t know what to say next- whether to grumble about the soldiers, or wonder out loud where my mother was, dare I mention Henry-?
“Lady.” Punzi filled in the silence for me. “Why did they call me lady? I’m as peasant as they come. I’m named after a vegetable for goodness’ sake.” Rapunzel. For the cabbages her mother had stolen from my mother. Stolen and paid far too high a price for. But I always called her Punzi. Punzi and Mirzi. We sounded like a matched pair.
“I suppose Henry‘s being in love with you makes you lady enough.” Damn you, Mirzi Crackledawn, you and your big mouth.
“What do you think she did to him, Mirzi?”
I could only imagine as I sat down, picked my sampler back up. It was a pattern of a knight fighting a dragon, from one of the old tales. Henry had brought it all the way from the capital for me. What had my mother done to that boy with dancing eyes? I had no idea. I was fond of Henry, of course I was, and I hoped that he was alright. But I doubted it. My mother was ferocious in revenge and I couldn’t see him escaping her wrath. If he had, surely he and his faithful manservant Russ Kelwin would have come back for us by now.
“They mentioned Russ,” I pointed out to Punzi, though I wasn’t entirely sure why I did so.
“Yes, which suggests that him and Henry are together. Oh, Mirzi, I do hope so. Whatever’s happened to Henry, it’ll be better if Russ is there too.”
But it also meant that whatever had happened to Henry had also happened to Russ, who had always guarded the tower from the bottom when Henry came on his visits. They could both be dead. It wasn’t as encouraging as Punzi made it sound.
I chewed a nail for a minute then picked up a book to distract myself. Russ had lent it to me, with a letter tucked into the cover. It was one of the many he had taken from the university and palace libraries and the private collections of the princes.
“I’m sure they’re alright,” I said after a few minutes and Punzi murmured meaninglessly in response, lost in her sampler- a pattern of butterflies. I bent my head closer to the close-set letters produced by the Story Monks printing presses.
The book was a heavy history of the Dauston family, our ruling family here in Aldira. It was about to launch into the complicated politics of the Polledan war- which was eventually stopped by Lady Mirzia, the greatest magical hero Aldira, and my namesake.
I always wondered why my mother called me Mirzia. The people of the village of Redbrook always called me it grudgingly, and I started shortening it to Mirzi years ago. Now it was simply another thing I did not know about my mother, like I did not know why she had locked Punzi in a tower, and later me, why she had left us. I didn’t know who my father was or why she had chosen to have a child in the first place. My mother never did anything without purpose and though I had so many questions, one thing was certain: she did not love me.
“We should do an inventory,” Punzi said softly and I realised just how long I had been daydreaming. She finished a section on her sampler and broke the thread. “Just so we know.”
“Yeah.” I shut my eyes, thinking of the near empty store room. Cooking had been my responsibility for the past three years, cleaning, Punzi’s. Every day I went downstairs to find a room that had once housed everything we needed gradually emptying, leaving nothing but dusty, cobwebbed shelves. “We’re going to need to ration it.”
“I’ll do it after supper tonight.” For a girl who had lived in a tower room for eighteen years, Punzi was brilliant with numbers. She glanced up and smiled with only one side of her mouth. “We should at least have one proper meal before we cut down. Who knows when we’ll get to have another?”
I set the book down the pile of others we had left. “I always thought Henry’s family would be more interesting,” I said, yawning and stretching.
“I’m sure they were, when they were alive and not just names on a page,” Punzi said. She wasn’t very interested in the books. She had leafed through one or two of them, even read a few of the novels, but she had no thirst for knowledge like I did.
Most of all, I wanted to know what had happened to the boys. My mother had arrived to discover Henry halfway up Punzi’s hair- in the one place where neither Russ nor we could hide him. She had screeched and screamed and forced him to drop to the ground. She chased him and Russ into the trees, their horses fleeing the other direction, back towards Redbrook village. And that was the last we saw of them.
“Wish we had more books. That weren‘t so dull,” I said to Punzi.
“Wish we had more white cotton,” she said, finishing another thread. “I shouldn’t have used it all on that dress.”
“Don’t be silly, it’s a lovely dress, and it will come in useful when-” When what? When we escaped? And just how were we going to do that? “It’s a lovely dress,” I said again and abruptly stood up. “I’ll see what’s for dinner.”
I went down the spiral staircase opposite the fireplace into the storeroom. Below it, there was abyss until you reached the bottom of the tower, which was really raised about six feet off the ground outside. The door- when there was a door- had had a set of narrow steps leading to it, clinging to the stone side of the tower. Down there was our latrine and the well. Then there was only the roof, where Punzi and I would lie on summer days like today if there weren’t soldiers outside and drink in the sky, and on clear nights would wrap up in blankets and draw constellations.
I found some questionable looking salted pork, hard cheese, a lonely looking tomato and some eggs and brought them back upstairs.
“This is going to be an interesting one,” I told Punzi. “I’m thinking omelette- Punzi?”
She was not in her seat by the fire, her sampler of butterflies now laying looking sorry for itself just as mine did. Punzi was leant against the frame of the east-facing window, the one Henry and my mother had always entered through.
“That’s an effective way of hiding from soldiers,” I said.
“I had thought… that maybe it wasn’t your mother. Maybe Henry was gone for a different reason- because of the temple rampage or something. Maybe something had gone wrong and he just couldn’t visit. But now…” She wrapped her arms around her middle like she had always done when she was upset. “Where is he, Mirzi?”
I laid the eggs down on the table and went over to her. I had been telling myself for the past month that I should feign cheerfulness for Punzi’s sake. But that was a lie. Because Punzi wasn’t stupid. She knew no life outside of this tower but she had never been stupid. She knew exactly what might have happened to Henry. Truthfully, my attempts at acting happy were to keep myself from going mad.
“I don’t know,” I said, wrapping my arms around her as she did the same. Punzi and Mirzi. Best friends, surrogate sisters, the stolen farm girl and the witch’s daughter. “I wish I knew, but I don’t.”
We stood there for a long time, Punzi crying her tiny sobs, delicate like everything else about her. I bit back tears. My first night in the tower, the night my mother bricked me in, left me here, I had wept for hours and hours. After that night, I left all the crying to Punzi. I was always the comforter, the one who reassured her, who took Punzi up onto the roof where the two of us would watch the stars and forget whatever troubles we had. There was no use both of us succumbing to tears, no matter how bad things were.
This was the worst it had ever been. But the principle still stood. Punzi was upset, and I couldn’t be. No matter how much I felt like crying, no matter how many hours I spent awake while she slipped into a tear-induced slumber. I took a deep breath, pulled away from Punzi.
“I need to start the dinner,” I said and left her standing by the window.
--
Thanks for reading!
