Rapunzel's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

The witch was gone, and Rapunzel stood alone at the arch. Blue light still leaked from the crack in the stone. Beneath it, six feet of grave-earth and rubble buried the sealed thing. She dug with her hair all night. Roots ripped stone from stone. But the diggers had left the walls loose, and every load she pulled up brought two more sliding down. She could not clear it before the collectors came back. She needed hands that knew how to move earth without burying themselves. A pig came out of the trees at dawn. He wore mud-stained overalls and carried a spade over one shoulder. Rapunzel knew him by reputation. Mason built walls and mills that outlasted the men who ordered them. Something from the woods had been breaking his work at night, and he walked the forest now looking for it. He stopped and studied her ruined base without a word of greeting. "You dug this wrong," he said. "Too steep. It keeps falling in." "I have no time to dig it right," Rapunzel said through a mouth of woven vine. "Men are coming to take what's down there." Mason set his spade in the loose soil. "Then don't dig down. Brace the sides first." He pointed at her hair. "You grow those. Line the walls. I'll cut the steps." She wove her roots into flat boards and pressed them against the pit walls. They held. Mason worked below, carving a stair into the packed earth, throwing spadefuls up and out. The braced walls stopped sliding. For the first time the hole grew deeper instead of wider. By midday they struck an old wooden lid, black with rot. Rapunzel's hair curled back from it on its own. She had wrapped her roots around this box for years without knowing. Mason pried the lid up and stepped away. "Yours," he said. "Not mine." Inside lay a folded cloth and a lock of hair not her own. The hair was silver and very old. A name was stitched into the cloth in thread that still shone. She read it, and her roots went still across the whole clearing. She knew the name. She had heard it in the first hundred years, before she stopped counting. This was the one who bound her to the tower. Hooves sounded on the far path. The collectors were returning, wagons and torches, drawn again to the blue light. Rapunzel snatched the cloth and hair into a knot of vine and drew them up into the tower. She let the pit collapse behind her, filling the shaft with dead earth. "They'll find an empty hole," Mason said. He shouldered his spade. "That buys you nothing. They'll know you have it now." He was right. She had the name at last. But she had also shown every hunter in the forest that the prize was no longer buried. It was inside the tower, with her.