Never in my whole life have I wished for the power to take back my words, even as anger rips through me.
“Do you? Do you really? You don’t want me to suffer from guilt for living, but when my lips touched hers, I hated myself.” I doubt she understands what her stubbornness is doing to me. How her insistence on remaining Sybil’s captive is killing me. “I keep coming here, in the cold, and the rain, and the snow. To visit you. Because I… Because we’re friends. And now you tell me I need to go to court? To go off and live a life I don’t want? What happens when a pretty girl asks for more than a kiss? What then, Rapunzel?”
If I climbed the tower and slapped her across the face, I don’t think it would hurt her more than my rant.
“You need to go, Wren.”
“Come away with me, Rapunzel,” I rush out—and once the plea leaves my mouth, it’s as if a burden lifts from me.
Rapunzel steps back from the window. “I can’t.”
Those two words fall on me like arrows. One slams into my heart. The other pierces my soul.
“You mean you won’t.” I storm over to where I left my belongings and snatch up my jerkin, longbow, quiver and arrows. “Youshould have been my first kiss, but you’re too damn scared to leave this tower.”
When I turn to walk away, she calls my name. I stop dead and spin to face her. She looks so fragile and lonely, framed in the window.
“Say it,” she demands, her voice shaking.
Oh, God, she’s crying.
I made my Rapunzel cry.
“The rhyme,” she shouts. “Say it!”
Right at this moment, I’d carve out my heart and hand it to her if it would dry her tears.
“You see me. I see you. Your turn to tell me true.”
Rapunzel reaches for something near her feet. That familiar scraping, the one I heard a hundred times over the years, finally—finally—has a source. Draped in her tiny hands is a length of thick chain. She sets her bare foot on the ledge, revealing a metal cuff clamped around her left ankle.
Sybil, that monster, tethered Rapunzel to the tower.
She drops the chain, and it makes a terrible rattle and thud when the links crash against stone. “You have no idea how dangerous I am.”
“You’re right, Rapunzel, I don’t!” I roar. “I don’t, because for six fucking years, I’ve shared all of myself with you. During that time, I’ve learned nothing about you other than your favorite color, food, and other frivolous bullshit. I know nothing of substance about you. You talk of us being friends. I’ve done the work for both of us.”
Again, I turn to leave, and this time when I walk away, I don’t stop.
No matter how desperate her screams are for me to come back.
The trek to Leeds has never been so arduous and lonely.
6
WREN
Twenty Years Old
“This must be a proud day for you, Percy.” King John winks at my father while he tugs on the neck of my new, crisp brown jerkin. The soft leather slides through his calloused hands. The ruby adorning his finger—as large as a baby’s fist—gleams under the glow of the candlelight. “And for you, Wren.”
“Yes, your majesty. Of course.” My reply is by rote, my mind elsewhere.
I’d rather be freezing my balls off in a cursed forest while gazing at an enchanting blonde. Instead, my worst nightmare has come to pass. The day has arrived when John is bestowing upon me an ‘honor’ I neither want nor intend to keep.
“Bah.” Rygard’s gregarious king dismisses my proper etiquette with a wide grin. “None of that formality between us. Percy and I are old friends.” He steps back and examines me, his keen blue eyes missing nothing. They’re a sharp contrast to his black hair and sun-tanned skin. An active king who spends as much time ruling from his throne as he does on the back of his horse. “That makes us friends as well.” He may be tall, but he lacks my stature. His lips thin to a somber line, and his expression speaks of a story I can’t decipher. “This kingdom has its secrets, Wren. Secrets some men might be desperate enough to kill to protect.”
An odd remark.
