She tweaks the lantern shutters to let only the thinnest hint of light out, then heads after the newcomer. The path doesn’t branch out again, but there’s no telling how close they are to catching up. Neither she nor Eugene makes a sound—until Rapunzel stops in her tracks, and Eugene bumps into her with a quietoof. It’s her turn to hold a finger up.
For a long breath, she’s half convinced she imagined it. Then she hears it again: a rumble of voices.
“I’m starting to get the feeling they did not in fact seal off every entrance,” Eugene says under his breath. “Want to go back?”
Rapunzel grips the lantern tighter. “No. We’ll just be careful.”
They keep moving, taking extra care to hold the light low and avoid stepping on any noisy loose gravel. The voices continue to echo back to them, indistinct but growing louder. Finally they turn a corner and find firelight spilling out from an entrance cut into the passage wall—firelight and the dull roar of faraway water.
Rapunzel sets the lantern down a few paces back, closeenough to light the last few feet, far enough that it won’t draw notice. Then she and Eugene creep closer.
When she carefully peers around the timber bracing the entrance, she finds it’s the top of a ramp leading down into the biggest cave she’s ever seen—almost an underground harbor. At least a dozen ships are bobbing at a long torchlit dock below while crews move crates and barrels into cargo holds. A stocky man is pacing over the planks, shouting orders—the man they followed here.
She recognizes him now from when they arrived and she was introduced to the king’s council. “That’s the Master of Seas, Councilor of the West, Erwan Persevault.”
Eugene’s breath hitches audibly. “I heard Solena say something about her brother’s fleet.” He squints. “She used ‘Vald’ for her last name back home—maybe that was short for Persevault. But why on earth are they hiding ships down here?”
Rapunzel scours the dock but doesn’t see anything obvious. She waits until they’ve retreated to the lantern to answer, still keeping her voice hushed. “Maybe it’s just so people underestimate the size of their navy?”
“Therehasto be an easier way to do that.” Eugene looks past the entryway in the wall; the corridor carries on into the dark. “Onward, or back to the fork…wait. If what we’re looking for is growing from the spring, could you follow the roots?”
The lantern light catches ridges in the stone wall, and Rapunzel frowns, running her fingertips along a streak worming through the basalt. It’s not limestone, not any kind of rockshe recognizes—and she memorized her geology book’s table of rock varieties when she was eight, so she knows her schist.
She draws a breath, then, as quiet as she can, hums the opening stanza of the lullaby.
Light sparks beneath her hand, shimmering along the streak. It spreads up, branches through the walls, and slows to a pulsing halt no more than a few paces away. After a moment, it fades.
But not before she sees the fraying pattern of roots in the glow. And they look like their source is back the way they came.
“Come on,” she whispers.
Once they return to the fork in the path, she hums the lullaby again and doesn’t stop this time. She doesn’t even have to touch the walls for the roots to ignite, glimmering with a silvery iridescence that reminds her of the white shells, and shining brightest around her. Even the moss clustered on the unused path pulses with a faint green-gold glow.
For a moment, she feels almost upsettingly…at home.
Not the way her parents’ palace feels like home, but the bitter way cold flagstones under her soles sometimes remind her of the tower’s tiles in winter—how she’d huddle by the fireplace until the floor’s chill didn’t bite. Or how petrichor reminds her of watering the window planters in summer, and that she’s not sure how to ask her parents if she can go get them, if the petunias are even still alive.
That’s the problem with truly seeing where you grew up from the outside. You have to figure out how to explain that when something feels like home, that’s not always a good thing.
“How are you doing this?” Eugene sounds almost awed. Hedah-dah-daahs a few notes under his breath, with no reaction from the roots. “It’s not just the song—it’s responding toyou.”
Rapunzel pushes the treacherous nostalgia away and starts methodically picking her way around the clumps of moss. “I think it, er, translates? From the sundrop flower? It doesn’t feel the same, just…familiar.”
She hums another line to light the way and can almost picture her hair, not these roots, lining the walls. It’s a faint echo of when the magic used tosingthrough her, nowhere near enough to heal people the way she once could. But…
King Enver said a power like the sundrop would forever change her. Maybe he was right.
It’s an idea that feels like home. And not in the good way.
Rapunzel decides she needs to think about something else. “So where did you sneak off to while we were at the hospital?”
“Well, I learned something new today, and that is that Hughes definitely can’t be trusted.” Eugene fills her in on the rest of his and Cressien’s escapade as he follows her up the path and concludes with “So I don’t think we can trust Enver, either.” For some reason, her heart twists. Eugene doesn’t miss it. “What’s the matter?”
Rapunzel’s been walking her fingers over the walls, observing how light ripples from them whenever she touches a root. The farther they’ve gone, the thicker they’ve gotten, until there’s less exposed stone than root. She swallows. It’s not the easiest thing to explain, even to Eugene; she’s not quite sureshe understands it herself. “I want to—to fix this,” she stumbles. “I miss being able to fix things. And when Enver told us about the spring this morning, he sounded so…hurt.”
Eugene catches her shoulder. When she looks back, he cups her cheek in a hand. “Even if you still had your hair, you know this wouldn’t be easy to fix. And it wouldn’t be your job, either.”
He has a point, and she wishes he didn’t. “I just don’t know what to do.”
