“I thought you said you did the reading!”
“I went on a tour!” Rapunzel retorts, a bit sheepish. “It’s close enough!” She spots a rusty crank wheel the size of a tabletop, pockets the apple, and gives one of two handles a push. A wretched groan ricochets off the sunmill’s walls, which brighten a little more. A faint, rocky thud tells Rapunzel more of the fountain basin has fallen into the spring. Dust billows down from the support beams overhead, catching even more of the starlight, but the shaft has barely moved. When she drags on it again, it lets out a disgruntled creak and refuses to budge.
Eugene grabs the other handle. “Think this was meant for two. Clockwise?”
“Clockwise,” she guesses with a veneer of confidence. “Onthree—one, two,three—” The wheel grinds into reluctant motion, then picks up speed as a massive iron rod begins to descend. “Steady, it’ll throw off the gears if it falls too hard—”
There’s a bone-shaking judder—from the doors behind them.
Enver won’t disturb the roots holding up the spring, but those aren’t the only ones he can use.
Eugene just lets out a grunt of aggravation as he wrenches the crank wheel. “This—guy. Can’t he—give it—arest?”
The main shaft finally drops into place in another great spurred wheel. “There! Now we just have to get…” Rapunzel stops.
“What is it?” Eugene steps back and wipes his brow.
“We have to get up to the brake wheel,” she says slowly. “It’s behind where all the sails connect at the top of the sunmill. But…Enver tore down the ladder outside.” She looks at the walls and finds only barren stone. “I don’t think there’s one in here.”
Another splintering bang shakes the doors.
Rapunzel takes a deep breath, then reaches for the apple. Eugene catches her hand.
“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” he says softly. “I—I can try to climb up, or something.”
The walls grow brighter as another slab of the fountain basin falls away. Eugene’s throat moves as he swallows. Rapunzel doesn’t have to say it; they can both see there’s no time.
“I just—” she whispers, “I’m just scared it might—changeme. Make me more like Enver. I don’t want to be used again, but I still really, really want to beuseful. My hair had this incredible power, but the only good thing it ever really did was save you. And I don’t know if I could have cut it off myself.”
Eugene doesn’t answer right away. Then he folds his hands around hers. “This is about…the gallows, isn’t it?”
The next crash frays with breaking boards, even if the doors still stand.
Rapunzel’s throat burns as she nods. “I love my parents, but what they almost did to you was wrong. And the same power they have, Enver has, and look what it did tohim. How can I be sure I’ll be different?”
“You make sure there are always people who can tell you no,” Eugene says bluntly. “If people say there’s a better way, you hear them out. Your hair didn’t make you a better or worse person, just different.” He lifts their twined fingers and, even sticky with apple juice and smudged with rust, presses a kiss to her knuckles. “Sunshine, I loved you before the whole princess thing. I loved you with your hair, and even more without it. And whoever you’ll be in a minute from now, a week, a decade…I know I’ll love her most of all.”
For a moment, the world falls away, and it’s just her and him, and the way he can always make her feel like she’s stepping into the sun. Rapunzel’s whisper is ragged. “You’re always going to be my dream, Eugene.”
The ground trembles, the hinges of the sunmill doors screaming as the wood starts to give way.
She frees a hand, pulls the apple out of her pocket, and bites down.
It tastes like—an ordinary apple.
Then it tastes like frost on a December morning.
Then it tastes like the honey candy Gothel brought her when she was seven, and then the mint plant she grew on the windowsill, and then the salt air of the sea at midnight.
Starlight runs down her throat, kindling every bone.
She can feel the roots writhing at the door like hundreds of fingers. She can feel the utter exhaustion of the starcloud tree below, forced to grow roots far deeper than it was ever meant to, to bear fruit long after it wanted only to return to the earth. She can sense Enver and Verette’s struggle in the audience hall, like an arm wrestling match with a thousand arms.
This far away, and with Enver this distracted, it only takes a push to drive him from the doors.
She opens her eyes and discovers that the roots have frozen in place over the wooden wreckage. A soft, buttery glow washes over them—not the daylit blaze of the sun, but the golden glimmer of the morning star.
“Huh,” says Rapunzel.
