Rapunzel had wrapped her hair around the tower's secret for a hundred years before she learned what it was. Now the people who broke things to get what they wanted were digging at her walls. If they reached the sealed thing first, they would find the object that named her binder. She could not let that happen. She meant to learn who chained her here, and free herself. That answer sat beneath her own floor, and strangers wanted it. She stood at the balcony rail and looked down. Her tower rose above a crystal cavern, and the crystals below glowed blue through the arch. Hunters ringed the base. They swung picks at the stone. Collectors watched from the tree line, patient, waiting for the wall to break. A pick struck near the crystal arch. A crack ran up the stone. Rapunzel felt it in her scalp, because her hair lived inside that wall. The pain told her they were close to the burial ground her roots had grown through. Too close to the thing sealed below. She would not dig them out one by one. She would swallow the ground itself. Rapunzel gripped the rail and pushed her hair down through the tower. It poured out of every crack in living ropes. It found the soil, the old bones, the crystal seams. She fed her magic into it and grew. The earth heaved. Thorned vines burst up around the tower base. They wrapped the picks, the ropes, the men. A wall of briar climbed higher than the arch. The hunters shouted and cut, but the vines grew back faster than steel could sever them. In minutes a thicket sealed the whole base of the tower. No pick could reach the wall now. The collectors did not run. One of them raised a horn and blew three long notes into the trees. Rapunzel heard the call carry over the forest and knew it was a signal, not a retreat. Something answered from the far dark. Brush snapped. A shape pushed through the briar as if it were grass. It was a boar built of red brick and tangled thorn, taller than a horse, its tusks scraping the vines aside. Her wall meant nothing to it. It walked to the cracked stone and set its shoulder against the base of the tower. The wall groaned. A brick tusk gouged the crack wider. Blue crystal light spilled out through the gap. Below that light lay the sealed thing and the evidence inside it. Rapunzel pulled her hair back into her hands. The briar had stopped the men, but not this. Her wall was already broken. Whoever built that beast had sent it straight to the one place she was trying to hide. She stared down at the boar working her wall apart. She had bought herself no time at all. She had only learned that someone out there wanted her binder's name as badly as she did.

The brick boar ground its shoulder against the tower. Rapunzel's vines wrapped its legs and tore like wet paper. She grew fresh thorns, thick as her wrist, and drove them into the beast's flank. They snapped against the brick. Her magic bit into wood and stone and living flesh. It could not bite into this. She stood at the balcony and watched her wall come apart, and she understood she needed help she did not have. She knew one person who unmade things. A witch had rebuilt a candy house beyond the ravine, closer now than the old stories placed her. Rumor said her stove had swallowed a boy's breadcrumb trail whole and left no ash. Rapunzel did not trust her. But the boar had already cracked the crystal arch, and blue light spilled toward the sealed thing below. She sent her hair racing through the soil, west, fast as roots could run. Her hair found the sweet-walled hut and knocked at its door with a knot of vine. The door opened. Cordelia stood there in her star-marked robes, staff in hand, its crystal glowing green. She looked at the writhing vine on her step without surprise. "You're the tower," Cordelia said. "The hair that grows through graves." "A thing of brick is breaking my wall," Rapunzel spoke through the vine's shaped mouth. "Steel won't cut it. My thorns won't cut it. Your fire unmade a boy's trail to nothing. Unmake this." Cordelia stepped onto the path her vines had laid. "Payment first." "Later. It's at my arch now." Cordelia studied her a moment. "Then take me there. Roots are faster than my feet." Rapunzel wove a seat of braided hair and swept the witch across the forest floor. They reached the tower as the boar drove a tusk into the widened crack. Cordelia planted her staff and raised the crystal. Green light poured out. It touched the boar's hindquarters, and the brick did not burn. It came apart. Mortar turned to dust. Bricks fell as loose clay. The beast squealed and swung its head, and Cordelia walked the light up its spine until the whole boar collapsed into a heap of rubble and dead thorn. Rapunzel pulled her vines back and sealed the crack with fresh stone-hard root. The tower held. For the first time in weeks, nothing dug at her base. Cordelia leaned on her staff and looked at the rubble. "Someone built that on purpose. Aimed it at you." She wiped clay from her sleeve. "You owe me now. I'll name the price when I've decided it." Then she looked at the arch, at the blue light and the sealed thing beneath. Her eyes stayed there too long. Rapunzel saw the witch had learned exactly where her secret lay. She had saved her tower. She had also shown one more powerful stranger the spot she most wanted hidden.

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.