Rapunzel squeezes his shoulder as he passes. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” she tells him.
Eugene briefly folds his fingers over hers. Then a shadow slips through his face, and he lets go. “It’s not worth worrying over.”
It’s the same tone from the ball a week ago, when he saidMe? They’re never going to like me.
Rapunzel is starting to see the outline of an entirely different quandary. But before she can pull on that dangling thread, he’s already left with Hughes.
“I WANNA HEAR ABOUT FLYNNIGAN RIDER!”howls the girl with the sea turtle.
“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” babbles the nurse. “I didn’t know, he just said it was a book from when he was a boy.”
“I’ve never even heard of it,” Verette says…a little too smoothly for Rapunzel to believe. She claps her hands and projects her voice over the clamor. “Do you want to hear a special song?”
It works. The older children feign disinterest, flopping back onto pillows, but the littler ones bounce with excitement. Gwenna leans in closer to Rapunzel, voice low. “These ones are either patients’ children, or healthy enough to play under observation. Sometimes, they get a little…wound up.”
“The princess has a knack with them,” Rapunzel notes.
Gwenna nods. “We’ll be very lucky to have her as queen.”
That itch returns to Rapunzel’s thoughts, just like with the tour yesterday. Something in this room isn’t quite sitting right.
Verette crouches as the last of the children settles. “I learned this lullaby from my mother, Queen Gaelle, and she learned it from her mother, and from her mother’s mother, all the way back to when the stardrop fell to Astera.”
“That’sold,” murmurs a child from under a stack of pillows.
That’s when Rapunzel sees it. Every child’s hair has a delicate gradient; the ends, the oldest part of the hair, are the closest to the locks she assumes they were born with, from black to blond and every shade in between. But their roots are paler, less vibrant, starting to fade to white. If Eugenehad grown up in Astera, she’d guess his hair would be a dusty taupe now.
Gwenna said the starlight used to turn their hair white by eighteen. That it takes nearly twice as long now.
Why does something about that feelwrong?
The answer’s almost in reach, Rapunzel can feel it—
The first notes of Verette’s lullaby float through the room.
And to Rapunzel’s shock—she knows them.
“Starlight, gleam and glow,”Verette sings. Goose bumps sweep over Rapunzel’s arms.“Moon, lend us your eyes.”
The words are different, but the melody—identical. Frightening, even, to hear someone else singing it for the first time in years. Once Gothel decided Rapunzel was old enough to do it herself, she never sang a note.
Whenever Rapunzel called on the power of the sundrop flower, she could swear she felt sunlight itself welling up in each vein and spilling down her hair. She hasn’t felt it in over a month, except in her dreams.
But now—it’s not the same, not blazing sun but a flicker of dawn—and yet the song calls to her. Her blood remembers. Her bones remember.
The room goes still, like they’re all frozen in glass, until the last notes fade. Every child is asleep. Even the adults look calmer, steadier.
In the quiet and the clarity, Rapunzel’s thoughts compose themselves into one corner of the picture:
Somehow, starlighthasto still be in the water supply. Thechildren’s hair wouldn’t be turning white without it, even if it’s taking longer, like Gwenna said.
But the only source is the poisoned spring. And no one here is sick from poison.
Andthatmeans Rapunzel has a theory to chase.
She casually sidles to the nearby window, hoping to spot Eugene. This calls for skills outside of her wheelhouse, but firmly in his.
The garden outside is sadly devoid of Eugene. Still, a faint glint draws Rapunzel’s eye to the windowsill.
