Mother Gothel’s voice scythes through the open palace window once more:“Rapunzel! Let down your hair!”
A sleek gold shroud falls around Rapunzel and slithers out the window, unbidden. There’s another neck-straining yank, and another, as Gothel’s weight drags her out of bed—Gothelis climbing into her bedroom, even though this is all wrong, this is the palace, she left the tower behind—
“Look what I made, pet,” Gothel croons, fingers tangling in the ends of Rapunzel’s hair. Suddenly a golden noose swings from her fingers. “Now where’s the man who took you away?”
Dread and anger surge in Rapunzel’s chest. She whips the noose out of Gothel’s grasp. “I tookmyselfaway.”
“Now, now, don’t make me the villain here.” Gothel seizes her by the shoulders and gives her a hard, strangely slow shake. “Stop fighting me, Rapunzel. That criminal is to be hanged. Stop trying to run—”
“NO!”
Rapunzel sits up with a gasp. Her head thunks against the low wooden ceiling.
Her neck is cold.
Her neck is cold, and it was just a dream.
Pascal lets out a sleepy chirp on her pillow, but only curls into a tighter ball.
For a moment, she just sits there, heart racing, trying to catch her breath. This isn’t the palace; it’s a royal galleon. She’s in the middle of the ocean, and tomorrow they’ll reach Astera.
Gothel isn’t here. The rocking came from the waves. Gothel is gone.
Eugene was fine.Isfine. He didn’t hang; Gothel’s knife couldn’t even finish him off. Sometimes she sees him showing off his stomach’s scar to the guards and boasting he still has eight lives left.
They just don’t talk about the gallows.
The moon slides over the water’s surface beyond her cabin’s porthole. Rapunzel’s pulse isn’t settling anytime soon. She makes an executive decision, throws on a dressing gown over her pajamas, grabs her sketchbook and pastels, and leaves the cabin. Even though the ship’s creaking timbers cover her, she treads lightly as she passes Minister Cressien’s door, then Eugene’s. The sailors on night watch only bow their heads briefly when she climbs above deck and takes a post near the bow, bracing her sketchbook against the railing.
Councilor Teophine’s ship leads them by a few hundred yards, its pearly sails almost glowing under the moonlight. It’s a curious little craft—the captain said it was called a caravel—with gleaming jet-black sides and brass trim. Councilor Teophine insisted on serving as their vanguard lest the Asteran navy automatically bar passage into the archipelago. Now the ship is almost as good as a second moon bobbing over the waves ahead, bearing northwest.
It’s exactly the sort of thing that she can draw to calm down—the moonlight’s sufficient for blocking out shapes, even if she can’t do detail work until the morning. Rapunzel flips to a new page in her sketchbook, wedges the pastel case into a niche in the railing, and smudges a swath of cobalt over the page. Between the rolling waves and the change from paint to soft pastel, it takes her a few minutes to feel really at home again—but then the world simplifies to salt air, moonlight, and the possibility waiting in the paper.
She never thought she’d see the open ocean, only read aboutit. It scares her in a way nothing else outside her tower has; the whole world was bigger, fiercer, closer, but the ocean in particular makes her feel like a grain of sand on a beach. It’s an enthralling, gleeful sort of terror.
And it’s strange, having a home she’s free to leave. It wasn’t until after the highest tower of the royal palace vanished behind the horizon that Rapunzel felt it: the wild, awful joy of knowing—she could go.
When Eugene joins her at the bow, she’s outlined the caravel and is searching for the proper slate gray for the base layer of the hull. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” she says as he leans against the railing next to her.
“Funny thing is, I’d probably sleep right through it if you were stomping,” he admits, rubbing his face. “Sneaking by might as well be an alarm bell. Everything okay?”
“I had a bad dream.” She finds her gray, but can’t make herself set it to paper just yet. “Can…can I ask you something?”
“Fire away.”
“Does it bother you that…” She swallows. “That if you hadn’t been rescued in time…that you almost…”
His hand brushes his throat, and she knows he understands.
“Yes,” Eugene allows. A layer of veneer strips off; Rapunzel enjoys his attempts at charm and bravado, but this is the Eugene she likes best. “But also—no. You don’t do things like rob the royal palace without knowing the risks. There’s no rush without them. And a month ago, my life was the only thing I really had to gamble.” His voice catches. “So now the gallows just remind me how much more I have to lose.”
Rapunzel stows her pastel stick as the ship crests a strong wave. Finding the words feels harder than picking the right blue. “It doesn’t feel right,” she says slowly. “You didn’t even get a trial. You were almost killed just for stealing a—an expensive hat that belonged to the wrong family. I know everyone loves my parents. It just scares me that I’m going to have that kind of power to hurt people. That I might make a mistake. Especially since I can’t…fix it anymore.”
Eugene’s hand catches hers, and she realizes she was picking at the ends of her hair again.
“I would like to remind you we’re on a ship to fix something right now,” he says, droll. “And the king and queen aren’t liked because they’re perfect. They’re liked because they try to take care of their people, not just rule over them. They’ve opened and funded schools, libraries, clinics…even my orphanage would have shut down without the royal grants. You’ve only known you’re a princess for a month. Maybe now is when you figure out what kind of princess you want to be.”
Rapunzel moves his hand to her cheek. “Is this still your dream, Eugene?”
