Rapunzel pressed her palms against the stone windowsill and looked down. The drop made her stomach tighten. Her hair hung past the sill, past the tower's gray stones, all the way to the forest floor where it pooled in the dirt like a pale rope. She had tested the knot three times. The chair leg was wedged against the wall beneath the window frame, braced by the loose floorboard she'd finally pried free. It would hold. It had to hold. She looked toward the forest edge where the thatched roof sat among the trees. The hut with its round windows and herb boxes. That was where her captor had gone this morning, carrying a basket and muttering about ingredients. Rapunzel had watched from the window, counting the minutes it took to walk there. Eleven minutes down the winding path. Maybe fifteen to gather what was needed. Eleven back. She had thirty-seven minutes at most. The tower's spiral staircase wound down through the stone below her room, but the door at the bottom stayed locked. She had tried it forty-three times over the years, once for every knot in her hair. The window was the only way. Her hair was the only rope. And directly below, tangled against the tower's base, grew a thick wall of thorns and roses. The thorns would cut. The roses would cushion nothing. But past that barrier lay the forest floor, solid and real. Rapunzel gripped her hair with both hands and swung her legs over the sill. Her feet found the stone wall. Her arms burned as she lowered herself, hand under hand, using her hair like a climber's rope. The thorns rushed up to meet her. She dropped the last few feet and landed hard in the dirt beside the briar wall, her hair coiled around her like a fallen banner. The forest smelled of moss and old leaves. She stood on ground that was not her tower floor. The locked door no longer mattered.