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Jacob thanked the sisters and promised to care for his queen. “Call on us if you need anything at all, Jacob,” Lucinda said as they reached the thicket. He promised he would but didn’t intend to keep his promise. “We’ve left a raven, Jacob. Please send it if Gothel needs anything.”
Jacob nodded as he watched the sisters pass through the thicket like wraiths. The sight sent a chill through him he hadn’t known was possible. He was relieved to see the sister witches go. But he quickly turned his mind to his little sleeping witch.
He had never in all his years been without a queen in the dead wood. His little witch hadn’t taken the blood, and even if she had, she couldn’t rule while she slept. He had no choice but to act as regent.
He arranged majestic crypts for Hazel and Primrose, with stunningly beautiful weeping angels in the image of Gothel, just to the left of the courtyard. Their crypts and weeping angels flanked the tree-lined path that led to the city of the dead, right on the border of where their legions of minions slumbered….He had almost entombed them in their own corner of the city, but he knew the soil there was still steeped in Manea’s magic. He had vivid waking nightmares of Hazel and Primrose rising from the dead to do his bidding. The thought terrified him. He was seized with worry that Gothel would try to resurrect her sisters in that fashion in a fit of grief when she woke. So he instructed his minions to place the crypts carefully on the border and to remove from Gothel’s library all of Manea’s books that pertained to necromancy, for fear she would foolishly try something out of desperation.
He would tell Gothel the books had been destroyed. He would lie. It wouldn’t be the first time. Gothel hadn’t read the entry about him in her mother’s book closely enough. She had misunderstood the meaning. Yes, he was bound to her, but not in the way she supposed. His duty was indeed to protect her. So he would hide the books. He would keep her from making foolish choices. He would protect her. He would lie.
Jacob wondered if Gothel would ever wake. As the years passed, he contemplated writing the triplets. So many years passed, more than he could count, and Gothel just slept with Jacob at her bedside under the glass dome of the morning room so the potted rapunzel flower on her bedside table would receive enough light. He often said the words written by Manea that Gothel had recited in the greenhouse so the flower would keep Gothel young. Thus, time did not diminish Gothel’s young face or raven hair as she slept, even though the landscape around her changed by the year. She remained forever timeless with the help of the flower and perhaps with the triplets’ enchantment as well. Jacob didn’t know.
Finally, he decided to write the sisters. Their raven had been waiting and watching in one of the largest trees in the dead woods. It had made a home for itself, the only living creature in the woods aside from Gothel. It sometimes circled around the woods, screeching, but it always returned to its tree. Jacob made sure his minions left food for the raven every day, in a wooden bucket at the base of the tree. And he sometimes saw the raven drinking from or bathing in the Gorgon fountain. He didn’t question how the raven lived so long. Jacob had served many witches over the years and had seen stranger things. His experience told him that if the raven was still alive, the triplets were likely alive as well. So he sent a simple letter with the raven, asking the triplets for help. Asking them to wake his grieving little witch. The dead woods had gone without a queen for far too long. The world around it was changing, and he was starting to become fearful for his little witch’s well-being.
But the witches never came; instead they sent Jacob the incantation to wake Gothel himself. They lamented their inability to come themselves. They sent their many apologies—written in three different hands—all of them sincere, and all of them full of worry about Gothel. They promised they would come when they could, but they weren’t sure when. Their own little sister, Circe, was in peril, and they were doing everything they could to save her. They promised if they hadn’t been terribly occupied with their own ordeal, they would have come to see Gothel through her grief themselves.
They would come when they could. If they could.
In their place, they sent their cat, Pflanze. She was a beautiful feline with tortoiseshell markings, black, orange, and white. Her eyes were large and bewitching, and she seemed always to be taking one’s measure. Her paws were white, like fluffy marshmallows, and she was often adjusting them, shifting her weight from one to the other, almost like a little dance, all the while looking straight into Jacob’s eyes, as if daring him to ask her what she was thinking. When she arrived in the dead woods shortly after the raven came back, Jacob knew she was no ordinary cat. Magical creatures always knew each other on sight, or perhaps it was smell. Jacob wasn’t sure which. He was sure, however, that the cat was there to help. And he knew from the start that he liked her, though he could tell she didn’t think much of him.
Jacob put off performing the incantation the odd sisters had sent. He dreaded Gothel’s grief. He feared what she might do. He didn’t want to break her heart all over again. He didn’t want to see the realization that she had lost her sisters wash over her again. But the dead woods needed its queen. And perhaps in her grief Gothel could be a proper queen of the dead, having experienced the greatest loss one could imagine.
The loss of sisterhood.
Pflanze hopped onto Gothel’s bed and snuggled beside her as she slept, as if comforting her before she woke. It’s time, Sir Jacob. It’s time to wake your queen.
Jacob heard the cat’s voice in his head the way he used to hear Manea’s when she didn’t use her actual voice—clearly, as if she were speaking aloud. He didn’t question the cat’s ability to communicate that way. The cat had been sent by three powerful witches—witches so powerful even Manea feared them. Jacob had never shared Gothel’s notion that she was one of the witches from her mother’s vision. He knew it was Lucinda, Ruby, and Martha. But he did start to doubt Manea’s interpretation of the vision. He wondered if Manea hadn’t brought all of this about herself. Never mind, he told himself. Never mind.
Pflanze’s voice filled his head. There is a reason many of our ancient stories involve self-fulfilling prophecies, bringing doom to the visionary.
Jacob didn’t respond. He knew the cat was right. He took the letter the triplets had written out of his jacket pocket and read the incantation to his sleeping queen.
Wake the grieving sister
Bring her to the light
Send all thoughts of grief away
And chase away the night
Gothel’s eyes opened slowly, adjusting to the light coming in from the domed ceiling. She looked around the room as if searching for something—or someone. She sat up and started to cry silently.
“They’re dead, aren’t they? It wasn’t a dream?” she said, tears running down her face.
“No, my little witch, it wasn’t a dream. I’m so sorry,” said Jacob as Gothel fell back to the bed with tears still in her eyes.
“Then Mother was right. I guess I am destined to be alone after all.”
Gothel woke up in the carriage house. She didn’t know how she had gotten there. The last thing she remembered was being dragged out of Hazel’s crypt, but the memory was hazy in her mind. She did remember seeing the words written on her sisters’ crypts as she was being pulled away.
Sisters. Together. Forever.
Jacob had had the words carved into the stone. He had done it out of respect. He hadn’t known it would rip at Gothel’s heart to see it there, a reminder that she had failed her sisters. She wanted to be with them, even now. But then Jacob would just drag her out again, wouldn’t he? She didn’t even remember going to see her sisters’ resting place. She remembered waking up in the morning room, and then waking up here in the carriage house. She didn’t even know how long she had slept, how long her sisters had been in their graves.
And Jacob couldn’t tell her. “Time means nothing in the dead woods,” he had said when she asked him earlier.
It could have been days or it could have been hundreds of years. Gothel didn’t know. She could see through the carriage house window that there were spires beyond the thicket, a castle. No longer was she surrounded by small villages filled with simpletons. There seemed to be a number of more sophisticated hamlets on the edge of a bustling city, and in the distance a flourishing kingdom. All right outside her thicket. How many years did it take to build a kingdom? Surely Jacob saw this happening around him while I slept, she thought. Maybe the odd sisters knew how long she had slept. I should ask them, she thought. Did the sister witches track the time where they lived? She would have to ask them if they ever made their way to her again.
In the meantime she had their cat—a cat who just stared at her, watching her every move.
