Becoming Rapunzel

The First Farewell

Twirling a loose strand of hair around my finger, I bit my lip. The information laying before me fascinated me. I lay on the floor, hunched over a book in the library. Gothel would come back today, probably, but I thought it was worth the risk of her catching me to finish this section on astronomy.

It was amazing to think about the heavens and all the stars in them. It seemed like many natural philosophers disagreed on the makeup of the heavens, such as what circled around what and how many stars existed and how big it was, but it didn’t matter to me. It was just incredible that the tiny points of light studding the velvety sky were that far away and bigger than anything I had seen before. The stars were best seen usually during the moon cycle of my birthday. That had just passed. In the back of the book was a list of dates and mathematics that showed when shooting stars would come. It was still cold out, but I found an old trap door on my bedchamber ceiling and pried it open. It led to the roof—I just had to position my chest of drawers under the hole to climb up onto the roof.

Wrapping myself in a blanket, I had burrowed in a corner of the roof. It was flat, and four adult arm lengths wide and long. There was even a low wall around the edge, making it like a terrace. I had learned that word last sennight and enjoyed calling my private place a terrace. When I saw the shooting stars, far past my bedtime, I had gasped in delight. Gothel was away again, spending her night elsewhere. I was sorry I couldn’t share this wonder with her. I wanted to tell her about it the next morning, in hopes she would watch the starshow again with me, but knew I shouldn’t. I was too worried that she would tell me my terrace was too dangerous for a little girl. It was my one place of freedom, outside and away from the tower, and I valued it far too much to risk losing it.

Gothel still let me outside, into the garden, to help her pick fresh herbs and weed the area. I wasn’t allowed to explore the woods. But she did it less than a few years ago. I came up with the bright idea today to begin transferring dirt from the garden—and a few plant sprouts—up to my terrace. I had found a couple of old leaky buckets Gothel no longer used in the kitchen—I thought it was perfect to create a garden of my own.

I closed the astronomy book, marking my page before I put it back on the shelf. I looked at the spines of the books around the room. Some were old and frayed, others were new and looked like they had been sewn with metallic threading. Most of the books were on magic—spells, fortune readings, manipulations of events, and the like. I wasn’t interested in those. It seemed like only special people could do magic, and most of them could only practice in certain areas. Gothel loved magic—it was obvious. She loved brewing things and taking spices, animals, and all sorts of strange things into her locked workroom. I didn’t think I was grown-up enough for magic. When I was little, I thought I was so smart to know how to read and write and recognize herbs. Now that I looked at all the magic, and how important it must be, I realized how ignorant and dumb I was.

Still, I wanted to learn. Even if I wasn’t smart enough to learn magic—I had magic in my body, Gothel said, so I couldn’t learn magic with my mind—I could learn how the moon changed its phases. Or why the body fell ill and how the herbs helped. Well, not a lot of people knew the answers to that. But I had learned a lot from the books. I learned about blood flowing inside the body, about how bees help flowers to bloom, about fractions, and a strange number called zero. I learned that sometimes there were such big bodies of water you couldn’t see the other side, and they were so deep you could drown in them. Or get eaten by fish with teeth, if Gothel was to be believed. I learned that there was an outside world. I learned that not everyone lived in towers. I learned that music could be written down, on parchment, instead of just heard by one’s ears. Somehow squiggles and circles on four lines, with a mark at the beginning, showed how to pluck the strings of a lute.