Gothel and the Maiden Prince (A Villain's Ever After) Read online

  This day was looking up.

  The tower sulked in the shadow of the woods. When Gothel tried to get in, it refused to let her in; nor would it stop sending out spurts of dark, sticky magic that clung to her skirts and tangled in her feet.

  Gothel made the attempt a good few times before she lost her temper and kicked the bulging stones at the foot of the tower. A moment after she did so, she heard, “Gothel? Is that you?”

  It was the tiniest whisper of sound, anxious and brittle, and it caused the small coal of rage that always stayed somewhere in Gothel’s chest to flicker and flame up again.

  “Of course!” she said, kicking the tower again for good measure. “The tower is making trouble again, that’s all. You know how it gets after someone comes and tries to force their way in.”

  “All right,” said the voice, this time more cheerfully. “I’ll let down my hair, then, shall I?”

  Gothel sighed. Ascending the tower from the outside was tiring and undignified, but there wasn’t really any other way when the tower wouldn’t behave. “I suppose so,” she said.

  There was a moment of pause before the voice said, “I made you biscuits.”

  “Don’t try to bribe me with baked goods,” Gothel snapped. “A rabid little child threw stones at me today and made me rescue its dog. I am in a very bad mood.”

  A delighted chuckle curled down the vines, stifling the flame of anger. Gothel hadn’t wanted to leave the tower earlier with her charge in the state she had been due to the previous prince, but it sounded as though she was doing better now.

  She caught the thin coil of hair rope that dropped nearly on her head, then took a moment to rearrange the skirts of her dress into a more decent order. There was no one to see, of course, thought Gothel, looking around quickly by force of habit despite that knowledge, but she disliked looking foolish whether or not anyone was there to see it. After the mess she had made in the village, it would be a good few months at least before anyone dared to sell information to passing princes with more hair than sense. When they left, that disparity had usually been remedied—hence the rope—but they were nevertheless troublesome.

  Technically speaking, it was Gothel’s fault that there was no other way of ascending the tower if it wouldn’t let her in: she had specifically spelled it against entrance of every other kind—chain, ladder, flight, rope made of fibres from plant to animal gut—and they had discovered by accident one dreadful day that the only thing she hadn’t spelled it against was entrance via human hair, or rope made from the same.

  These days, there was a thin, spelled, carefully braided rope of hair to climb in case of emergencies or sudden sulks from the tower. In the beginning, it had been her charge’s hair, but Gothel didn’t believe in letting anything go to waste, and she had been depriving each prince and knight of his hair after she defeated them for quite some time now. Consequently, the rope was now of a decently useful length.

  If Gothel had been less tired, she might have done a more thorough check of her surroundings before she began to ascend the tower. But she was tired, and it simply didn’t occur to her that someone could be so foolish as to have found her at the tower after the mess she had made of the village square. She put one hand in front of the other, cross and tired from a combination of the magic she had done and the weight of the pack across her shoulders, and climbed.

  Thus it was that Gothel didn’t see the slender young man who watched her ascend the tower on her rope of hair, his eyes bright with fascination and his lips curled in a delighted smile. If she had known he was there, there would have been a great deal more activity in the forest that afternoon than there had been that morning.

  And if she had known he caught a glimpse of the young, golden-haired girl who helped her in through the window of the tower, the Maiden Prince would certainly not again have left the forest.

  Gothel had reached a kind of equilibrium by the time she woke the next day. This was partially because, upon waking, there was the distinct scent of fresh bread in the air, warm and inviting, the sharp tang of raspberry jam cutting through it.

  She opened her eyes and saw sunshine in the form of her young charge, and immediately closed them again. “I’m old and I want to sleep.”

  Pleadingly, a musical voice drew out her name. “Gothel. You can’t sleep right now.”

  “I can, and I am.”

  “You’re not, you’re talking to me.”

  “Zelle.”

  “Gothel.”

  “I am trying to sleep.”

  “Don’t moan at me,” said Zelle, her tone unexpectedly severe. “You took the long way home and came in late yesterday with a headache from overstimulation—”

  “It wasn’t overstimulation, it was from dealing with stupidity.”

  “—and magic use, and you know you won’t feel better until you get up and eat. I don’t know why you always have to flop around and groan when you might be up in five seconds and feeling better as soon as you eat.”

  “I’ve nurtured a brat,” Gothel said, sitting up. Her head felt heavy and dense, and the tower moved around her as she put her feet over the edge of her bed. “A brat ten years younger than me who likes to think she’s my mother.”

  “You shouldn’t have kidnapped me if you didn’t think you could put up with living with me.”

  Gothel bit back the teasing retort that she hadn’t expected to be living with Rapunzel quite this long because as much as it would have been a playful remark, she didn’t think the golden-haired girl in front of her would take it that way. Neither of them had expected Rapunzel to still be clinging to her imprisonment of perceived safety when she could have walked freely in the forest, far from the prying eyes of villagers and travellers alike.

  Gothel had imagined that once Rapunzel was away from her room and the castle—from her family and the country—that she would naturally start opening up more and needing the security of stone walls less. Both of them had expected that Rapunzel would grow better swiftly when removed from everything that had caused her to hide herself away.

  It hadn’t been the case: in fact, if Gothel was any judge, Rapunzel had grown more reclusive than less. That could have been attributed to the erratic but constant stream of princes and knights who had shown up over the years, attempting to free her from Gothel. Rapunzel had certainly spent an anxious, tearful week in the aftermath of that first prince, and every sign of forward motion that had been apparent until then vanished entirely.

  Instead of the cheerful raillery, therefore, Gothel only said severely, “That had better be raspberry jam I smell, if I’m going to be forced out of my bed before I wish to be up and about.”

  It wasn’t until she was leaning contentedly on her elbow to slouch into her second cup of pre-breakfast tea, that Zelle said, “Don’t be angry, but there’s another one outside.”

  Gothel sat up straight at once, her gaze anxiously on Zelle. “What?”

  To her surprise, the furthest extent of her young companion’s distress was a small frown between the golden eyebrows. She wasn’t shaking, and she hadn’t wrapped herself in her hair as she was unthinkingly wont to do. Her arms were folded around herself, but they weren’t tight, and her shoulders weren’t hunched.

  “He hasn’t—he hasn’t been shouting,” said Zelle. “And he didn’t try to throw something at the tower, either. He’s got a lot of magic, but he hasn’t been trying to use it.”

  “What has he been doing, then?” Gothel asked, climbing back up the stairs to get to the window.

  Zelle sounded thoughtful. “Sleeping, mostly—I think he’s been out there all night. He ate some pastries a little while ago, though.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me? I would have taken care of it.”

  “You said I have to start trying to get used to m—people again. I’ve been watching him sleep and eat.”

  “What on earth is that noise?” demanded Gothel, but by then she was already by the window, and she could see what the noise was. Be
low, at the base of the tower with his head resting on a mossy, cast-off flagstone, was a supine boy with dark hair and half-shut eyes, singing lullabies over his cocked knee and into the forest beyond the tower.

  “He’s been singing a lot of the time, too,” said Zelle. “Do you think he can have come here by mistake?”

  Gothel said grimly, “I very much doubt it,” and came away from the window. She threw her everyday frock over her head and rather viciously tightened the laces. “I’ll go down and see what he wants. If they’ve sent another one after me so soon after the last…!”

  “That’s why I made bread,” Zelle said, smiling at her anxiously. “I thought you might like to finish breakfast first.”

  Gothel took a moment to calm herself down: Zelle was already incredibly tightly strung in general, and she reacted to anger even if it wasn’t directed at her. She could also tell when someone was hiding anger, so the calming down had to occur sincerely.

  “Thank you,” she said, smiling at the girl. “You know I’m not angry at you, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Not everything is directed at me,” said Zelle obediently, but her eyes didn’t lose the last flicker of anxiety until Gothel sat down on the window-sill and turned her attention back on the boy below.

  “I’ll go down and talk to him soon,” she said. “Then you can go for your walk without worrying.”

  It wasn’t as though Zelle would be walking out in the forest, of course: the closest thing to out of doors that she had been able to prompt the girl to assent to was the covered walkway with its cut arches that left the world perilously free to come in. Fortunately for Zelle, that walkway began in the heights of the tower, and the only way the world could really impinge on her from there was in the form of a bird or two. She had had to walk with the girl the first few weeks despite that: Zelle was still terrified of open spaces—and, more importantly, outside spaces—and had had to be coaxed to take her exercise every day for those few weeks.

  It wasn’t even a fixed walk: it turned in and around on itself, repeating the same ten or twenty metres over and over again in different shapes in a nebulous space that was part of the tower and not part of it at the same time. Perhaps that was why Zelle felt safer there than she did outdoors. She could always count on the red flagstone being where it was: count it as she went past it. It was a comforting, always-present metric by which she could tell she was still inside, still safe, still secluded.

  And if Rapunzel was up in that safe, secluded walk, Gothel would be free to deal with the nuisance that was waiting below.

  Gothel went back to her breakfast and spent a quiet half-hour making plans for battle while Rapunzel climbed the tower for her walk, then descended into the rather wobbly and not quite set interior of the tower to the exit.

  She didn’t purposely set out to startle the boy, but she wasn’t sorry when her egress from the tower, in a snap of strong, tar-black magic, made him start up defensively from his languid position and almost over-balance into the moss.

  It was hard to tell exactly how old he was, but he was certainly old enough to flush rather deeply when startled out of his composure by a woman, especially since he had to scramble himself together to get up. He did so, and bowed, but his cheeks were still rather pink when he straightened from the bow.

  “What are you doing here?” Gothel asked him crisply, without giving him a chance to recover.

  “That was very sudden!” he said. “Did you know I was here?”

  “Of course I knew you were here: you’ve been singing while I was trying to eat breakfast. What are you doing here?”

  “I saw you in the village yesterday, so I asked around and came to find you here,” he said, smiling at her as if that made perfect sense. “My name is Lucien.”

  “I don’t care what your name is,” Gothel told him. That made his smile falter a little, but she refused to let herself feel bad about it. “If you saw me in the village yesterday, there’s even less of a reason for you to have sought me out.”

  Unexpectedly, his eyes sparkled. “Because you knocked that building down?”

  “Amongst other reasons,” said Gothel. “You’re boring me. Go away.”

  “Yes, but I can’t go away,” he said apologetically. “I was told that you’re holding a princess prisoner here, and I’m rather opposed to people being able to keep prisoners, actually.”

  “It’s none of your business,” said Gothel. “Actually. And I’m opposed to people bothering me at my home.”

  “That’s what they tried to warn me about in the village,” said the boy, and his eyes were certainly dancing. “But there’s the matter of you keeping a prisoner here, so…”

  Gothel frowned a little. She wasn’t entirely sure that this boy believed she was doing any such thing: he was certainly by far too casual about the entire business. She far preferred the princes who came sailing through the forest on the unassailable sense of their own importance or power, ripe and overblown with the self-righteous indignation that seemed to always come with setting themselves in opposition to an evil woman.

  He added, “When I heard the rumour that you’d kidnapped a princess, I thought I’d better come out here and see about it. Things get blown out of proportion, and I like to find out first if they’re true, you see.”

  Gothel studied him in perplexment. “I see. I’m still not sure why it’s your business, apart from being morally opposed to it, so—”

  “Oh, that’s easy!” he said. “I’m a prince of Lombargy. It’s rather my job to see about rumours of kidnapped princesses in Lombargy.”

  Gothel tried very hard not to sigh in exasperation. It was another prince. He had a decent amount of magic to him, too, so he would be an annoying one—and he was a prince of the land to boot. Still, there were rules to dealing with contenders as well as the tower, and things always went badly if one didn’t at least pretend to be going by the rules.

  “I will give you exactly fifteen minutes,” she said. “And if you don’t become less boring or less inconvenient to me, I’ll remove you from the forest by your hair. Use your time wisely.”

  Now we’ve begun to get somewhere! thought Lucien exultantly. He said, “How do you think you’d remove me from the forest by my hair? I’m not a brawler by any means, and I’m quite certain you could put up a decent fight against someone my size, but I do have rather a lot of magic.”

  Gothel’s head tilted just slightly, enchanting and amusing Lucien in equal measure. She seemed remarkably impervious, and it was delightful to get such a big reaction out of her.

  “Is that really the question you want to ask?” she asked. “I don’t mean to complain, but most of the princes do like to get down to the business of trying to rescue the princess they’ve been told about.”

  “I’m not here to rescue anyone,” said Lucien. Not when he wasn’t convinced that such a prisoner actually existed. He had certainly seen a girl in the tower far above, but she hadn’t looked like a prisoner of any kind; if anything, she had looked ridiculously content until she caught sight of him. “I just want to know what’s going on. It’s my father and my brother who are the heroic ones; I just ask the questions.”

  “Very well: I would do so by using the rather a lot of magic that I also happen to possess,” said Gothel. There was a very slight edge of mockery to her voice as she repeated back his words.

  “Yes, I saw that,” he said. He had seen it yesterday, and up close it was truly terrifying; a shifting, barely-restrained brawl of power that seemed as though it could kill you by its mere presence. “Where did it all come from? It’s…rather impressive.”

  “I stole it from all the princes I killed,” Gothel said.

  “Not very many princes have that amount of power,” said Lucien. He didn’t want to call her a liar, but he was quite certain she wasn’t telling the truth.

  “Not singly, no,” said Gothel. “But there were rather a lot of princes over the years, and they each had quite enough to add to the stock I alre
ady had. There were also a few mages.”

  She was telling the truth, but only pieces of it, thought Lucien. He hoped the thought was correct; he had no other reason to think so than that he had seen her yesterday. He didn’t think that the sort of person who could knock down an entire inn to save a child’s dog could deliberately set out to kill anyone. Nor did he think she could then talk about the act of killing so easily.

  “Yes, I heard that you’ve been trying to persuade the villagers to stop sending princes in search of you for some time now.”

  “If you knew that, you would have been well advised not to come yourself,” she said shortly. “You now have ten minutes.”

  Lucien had to resist the impulse to cover his hair protectively. “I told you,” he said. “I’m the youngest prince of Lombargy. I have to look into these things, even if they don’t seem to be more than silly rumours.”

  “Do you indeed.”

  “Yes, but the rumours are so big!” he persisted. “They range from you kidnapping the princess of a neighbouring country to the charge that you’ve been doing away with princes one by one. Why did they even start?”

  “I suppose because I kidnapped a princess,” said Gothel, matter-of-factly. “It might have taken them a little while to find out I’d done it, but they certainly would have known it was me. That’s why I travelled so far away: why else would I leave my country?”

  Lucien felt the world swing beneath him. He said faintly, “I beg your pardon?”

  “You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I’m innocent of the crimes I’m accused of,” said Gothel. “I’m not. Go away now. I don’t have time to deal with you.”

  “You can’t—you can’t kidnap princesses,” said Lucien, still trying to catch his breath.

  “Of course you can!” Gothel said scornfully. “It’s not easy, naturally, but it’s very possible. I suppose the princes of Lombargy have had a few of their own kidnapping attempts.”

  “Well, yes,” Lucien said, calling to mind a few memorable occasions. “But that wasn’t really the point I was trying to make. Exactly which princess did you kidnap?”