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was well on my way to deciding it might be preferable to feel nothing.
"That's the real reason you took me in and raised me. You need me to
free your daughter. You don't love me at all."
"That's not true," Melisande said at once. "I took you in and raised you
for the same reason I have always said: Because I loved you from the
moment I first saw you, Rapunzel. But I will admit that there is more.
When I gazed into your mothers heart and found no room for you
within it, I heard a sound, like the opening of a door. It seemed to me
that her inability to look with the eyes of love could not be
coincidence. At long last, perhaps I was being offered the chance to
redeem the daughter I had lost.
"But only if I could take you in and love you truly, if I could teach you
all the things my heart had learned in the days since Rue had been
taken and locked away. And so I did what the woman who gave birth
to you could not. I looked with the eyes of love, claimed you, and
raised you as my own."
"And never mentioned your daughter once," I added, finishing the list.
"Until tonight, when I'm supposed to meet her tomorrow. Is this my
final test? What happens if we can't stand the sight of one another?"
I don't know," Melisande said, her own voice ris-ing for the very first
time. "I can't see the future. That is not my gift. I don't know what is
to come. I've done what I thought was right, what I thought I must.
That's all I caii tell you."
"What about what I want to do?" I asked. "Suppose all I want to do is
turn around and go back home? Does what I want even matter? Do I
have a choice?"
"Of course you have a choice," Mr. Jones said, his first words for what
seemed like a very long time. "The sorceress has said what she has
done, but she cannot say what you will do. That, only you can decide."
"Thank you," I said. "I'm glad to see somebody's on my side."
Mr. Jones knocked his pipe out on a stone with-out looking up. "It is
not a matter of taking sides. It is what it has always been: a matter of
the heart. You may think you are listening, but you're hearing only
what you want to hear, Rapunzel. What is in the heart cannot be
forced. This, the sorceress has already acknowledged. If the heart
bends, it must be of its own free will, or not at all.
"Personally, I think she's right. Your heart is stronger than you know.
But you may never learn how strong unless you put it to the test."
"I'm tired of being tested," I replied.
"Now that," the tinker said briskly, as he got to his feet, "is a feeling I
understand very well. I'm sorry to tell you that it may not make much
difference in the long run, though." He came over and kissed me on
the cheek, an action he had never performed before. "I suggest we all
go to sleep. I don't know about any-one else, but I am tired. I'd put an
extra blanket on if I were you, Rapunzel. Even summer nights on the
plain are cold."
With that, he moved to the wagon, pulled his own bedroll from it, and
went to bed down close to the horse. I went to lie in my usual position,
wrapping myself in an extra blanket as the tinker had suggested, my
arms around my knees as if to make myself as small as possible. For
the first and only time that I could remember, Melisande and I did not
say good night.
All through that night, the sorceress stayed beside the fire. What her
thoughts were, as the fire died down to nothing more than cold gray
ash, I cannot say. To the best of my knowledge, she never told
another living soul.
Chapter 10
I did not go back home in the end, of course.
You've heard the saying, better the devil you know than the one you
do not? What a load of poppycock. In fact, if I had to make a guess, it
would be that whoever came up with that particular phrase was never
called upon to face any sort of devil in his or her life.
What did I have to go back for, after all? I'd only be going right back
into danger, the very same danger I'd just gone to such great lengths
to avoid. It was hardly as if there would be anyone at the end of the
road, or even anywhere along it, waiting to welcome me with open
arms.
It wasn't all that likely there would be open arms if I went forward,
either, but at least I would be going into the unknown. And here is a
fact of life that those who are quick to speak of devils never mention:
As long as a thing is unknown, it belongs to us in a way that well-
known things do not. For we have the opportunity to fill the empty,
unknown spaces for ourselves, and in them there is room for
imagination and for hope.
If I went forward, I might imagine that I could somehow pass this
impossible test. Maybe my heart was stronger than I knew, and all
would yet be well. So, on the morning of the fifth day, going forward
was precisely what I did. On the morning of the sixth day, I saw Rue's
tower for the very first time.
I might have guessed there was some magic at work in its
construction, even if I had not been told this ahead of time. Surely any
sort of structure should have been visible for miles away in that flat
land. Instead, you could see the tower clearly only when you had
actually arrived. It rose up out of the ground like a great tree trunk of
hard, gray stone, its roots indistinguishable from the very bones of the
earth itself.
The tower the wizard had created to house the innocent victim of his
curse was perfectly cylindrical, perfectly smooth. I could neither see
nor feel one seam or chink to show that the stone had ever been cut.
At what I thought of as the tower's back, though this was merely my
own fancy as a circle has no such thing, was the river. A dense forest
held it in a great, green embrace on its other three sides. All around,
just as wide as two carts abreast, ran a close-cropped greensward.
If I leaned back and shaded my eyes, I could see a wrought-iron
railing, intricately carved, running around the towers very top. Just
behind it, a circle of windows caught the light. But no matter how
many times I walked around it, three to be precise, I could find no sign
of any door. At the end of my third cir-cuit I stopped beside the
sorceress and said, "How do we get up? I assume that's what you
have in mind."
Conversation between us was still stilted, at best. Among all of us, if it
came to that. Even Mr. Jones had kept silent during the last day of our
journey, as ifwrapped in his own thoughts.Not that there was much
use in talking. It would be deeds, not words, thatwould end the story
and decide its outcome.
While I walked around the tower and Melisande stood perfectly still,
Mr. Jones unhitched the horse and let her wade into the river, which
here was broad and shallow. As if he had no other care in the world,
the tinker washed clothes at the river's edge, then spread them out to
dry. I knew what he was doing, of course. He was letting the sorceress
and me sort things out on our own. Mr. Jones was hidden now by the
bulk of the tower, for Melisande and I stood with our backs to the
forest, and the river was on the other side, out of sight.
"More wizardry," Melisande replied now. "There's a password of sorts.
Rapunzel, I "
I really wish you wouldn't," I interrupted swiftly, suddenly afraid that
I might cry. I was trying to do what Melisande herself had done what
I thought was right, what I thought I must. But I was still hurt and
uncertain, and more than a little afraid. If we stood around talking
about it for very much longer, chances were good I'd lose my nerve
entirely.
"By my own free will, I shall go up," I said. "But I cannot promise I'll
be willing to stay, not from down here, anyhow. Your daughter and I
must decide that together, I think."
"Fair enough," said Melisande.
I pulled in what felt too much like my last breath of free air. "Okay," I
said. "I'm ready whenever you are."
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