Into the Wild(59)

Was he disappointed? She felt her heart plummet. “I’m sorry.”

“It is all right,” he said. She shook with relief. “But . . .” he said, and then hesitated. She lived and died a dozen deaths in that pause. “But it has been years?”

“Five hundred years,” Julie said.

His face paled and then flushed—thorn scars starkly visible on his cheeks. He hadn’t known, she realized. Oh, no. She should have thought to cushion the blow. “I’m sorry!” She was making mistakes right and left. She was ruining this!

He took a deep, raking breath, and his face settled back into its calm, soft look. He took her hand. “Be easy,” he said. “It is all right.” And suddenly, it was all right. Julie stared at his hand—at her father’s hand. His hand swallowed hers completely. His palm felt dry, like warm wood.

He said lightly, “You do not look like a five-hundred-year-old.”

“I’m twelve,” Julie said. “Grandma worked a spell so I wouldn’t be born until Mom felt safe.”

“‘Grandma.’ Do you mean Rapunzel’s witch?”

“She’s not a witch anymore,” Julie said. “She’s nice. Or at least she was.”

“Ahh . . .” He had a faraway look on his face.

What was he thinking? she wondered. She hadn’t expected she would feel this . . . this uncertain. She had imagined she would fling herself into his arms. She’d thought she would feel an instant bond. Instead, she couldn’t read him.

His eyes swept across the throne room with its ivory buntings, marble walls, and golden statues. “It is different,” he said. “Always before, after we reached the end, I woke riding through the woods; you were not here, and I could not remember.”

“What do you remember now?” she asked. Maybe if he would tell her, maybe if she could understand what happened, maybe then, the years wouldn’t matter.

He closed his eyes. “I remember despair.”

“Despair?” she asked, startled.

“We failed,” he said softly. “So many times, we failed. After the battle . . . even Rapunzel despaired.”

This wasn’t what she expected to hear. What about Rapunzel, the valiant rebel? What about Rapunzel, unafraid, like a general? “What else do you remember?”

“Hope.” He opened his eyes. “It was the dwarves who gave us hope after all was lost. It would have been over if not for them.”

Snow’s seven? Snow’s seven were useful? She felt guilty as soon as she had the thought—they had tried to keep the prince from kissing her in the glass coffin.

“The dwarves told us of the wishing well,” he said. “They risked much to learn its location and to send us word. Risked much and lost much—there were, at the start, thirteen dwarves.”

Thirteen? Did he mean . . . ? Were they . . . ? Six dead? Julie swallowed hard. Was that why Mom felt she owed them? “So you made a wish?” Was that how Mom and her friends had escaped? It made sense: a wish to make the Wild strong, a wish to make it weak. But if that was true, why hadn’t Dad escaped?

“Not I,” he said. “It had to be the right wish. Rapunzel in the tower, who could want freedom more than she? Of all of us, she was the one who remembered first, the one who fought the hardest, the one who led the way. She did not know, not for certain, that anything existed beyond the Wild. None of us did. But she never wavered. She believed so strongly in her dream of freedom that she inspired us all.” His eyes shone with the memory. “Do you know of her deeds?”

“Bits and pieces,” Julie said. “Not the whole story.”

“She was our light,” he said. “Our beacon in the tower. She was amazing. Cycle after cycle, she would reawaken us and stoke the fires of rebellion. Our rebellions were small at first, but then she conceived the idea of the Great Battle. And she began to prepare us. Painstakingly slowly, so the Wild would not suspect, she laid traps: a woodcutter’s ax next to a future beanstalk garden, extra ice to make all the bears’ porridge too cold, signposts to replace the bread crumbs so that Hansel and Gretel could find their way home. She drilled us all in our tasks: we were at the same moment to stop every story from continuing. Break glass slippers, protect the Beast’s rose, dull the spindles on the spinning wheels, steal all the apples. The Wild rose up against us—every character that Rapunzel could not convert, the Wild used against us, until every ally we had won either perished or fell prey to stories and became our enemy.”