Page 22

CHAPTER 22

P ollox and I could barely look at each other the following morning as I bade him farewell and began the trek away from the forest where we’d met. Each step felt like I was pulling half of my heart away from the other, but I continued on, pack slung over my shoulder. Why did it feel so final? Pollox said he would be coming for me soon, and he’d never given me reason to think he would lie to me.

I reached the outskirts of the village closest to the castle just before midday and stopped in a grove of trees, glad for Pollox’s suggestion of having the table prepare travel foods so I didn’t have to stop and talk to anyone. I didn’t want to answer any questions about my supposed captivity, and I feared what would be done to me if the citizens had killed my father. Would they do the same when they discovered who I was? If Pollox and I had discovered the connection between our ancestors and lifted the curse earlier, could it have saved my father’s life? I never had a chance to reconnect with the father I’d known and loved.

I kept to the shadows, hoping to be almost as discreet when sneaking back to the castle as I had been when I’d left. But as I drew closer, a blast of trumpets let me know I’d been spotted.

“It’s Princess Rapunzel! She’s back! Open the gate!”

The drawbridge lowered and the portcullis raised. I lifted my chin and crossed, prepared to give a speech to the servants and soldiers to explain my sudden arrival.

“Rapunzel! Thank goodness you’re home!”

All of my rehearsed formal, somber words vanished as I saw Father, alive and well, running toward me with his arms outstretched. My bag dropped to the ground as he flung his arms around me, nearly knocking me over from the force of it.

“What?” Shock, even greater than when I’d seen Pollox transform for the first time, nearly made me black out. “You…you’re alive!”

“And so are you, thank the stars. I’ve been worried sick!”

“But…” Pollox may as well have been sitting on my brain. “But…”

“I told you she would come.” Griffin followed close behind Father and smiled at me. I looked wildly between the two. “Good afternoon, Princess.”

“Ah yes, Griffin!” Father flung his arm around the squire and jiggled his shoulder. “If it weren’t for him, who knows how long you’d still be trapped. Ingenious, how he planned for a decoy to ride with him into town so the dragon wouldn’t know that you were following after. And here you are, safe!” He released Griffin and hugged me again. “Now we can plan your official wedding.”

This time, I did stagger backward. Griffin leapt to my side to stop me from falling. His hand closed around my wrist, and I felt colder than I ever had before in my life. “Wha—what did you say? My what ?”

“Wedding,” Father answered patiently, tugging at my elbow to coax me into the castle’s interior. “I did offer your hand in marriage to whomever rescued you. Besides, I hear he’s quite the chess champion. You have lots in common with him, and I saw the letter you sent, agreeing. Don’t worry; his station won’t be a problem.”

Ice flooded through my veins. They expected me to marry Griffin? The letter I’d signed before I realized Pollox could shift…

“No, I can’t.” I looked at Griffin. “I’m sorry if I misled you, but you said…”

“We made promises, Rapunzel,” Father said, his brow furrowing in confusion. “It’s fortunate that Griffin here comes from a long line of dragon hunters. He knew things about dragons even our scholars didn’t.”

“This isn’t your future,” I shot back in clipped tones. “You have no right to tell me who I can and can’t marry.”

“Do you mind giving us a few minutes alone?” Griffin asked Father. “I’d love to discuss this privately with my wife.”

“I’m not your wife!”

Father and the guards retreated, and Griffin began to lead me to an empty chamber, but I whipped my arm out of his grasp, refusing to touch him. “I know this must be a shock to you,” he began in a placating tone.

“You lied to me!”

“As you did to me. So we’re even.”

“I never told you that your father was dead! Why would you do that?”

A cold expression hardened Griffin’s otherwise handsome face. “I promised your father I would get you back here, and I succeeded. I knew you’d come back with the right incentive.”

“What are you talking about? I escaped on my own.”

The look in Griffin’s eye was much too shrewd. “You really want to stick to that story that you were a poor, mistreated prisoner? Or would you like to tell the truth for once?”

“How dare you? You’ve seen where the dragon kept me. You know what I’ve been through.”

Griffin never broke eye contact. “I told you my father died years ago, and that was true. Want to know how he died?”

I backed away. “No.”

His smile broadened as he advanced. “He was a dragon hunter, but his mission went rather wrong. I’ve hated dragons ever since. I knew I would need to find a way to gain more power and have access to more resources if I wanted to eradicate dragons. Now, do you remember the first chess match we played?”

“Yes,” I answered warily.

“That game was a gambit.”

“Neither of us used a gambit. I remember.”

“I’m not talking about a chess opening. You already know that a gambit is a risky move made to gain an advantage, by sacrificing something small early on in order to achieve something grander in the end. I sacrificed one chess match in order to win your interest, and by doing so, you lowered your guard. You began making mistakes, many of them.”

My eyes widened and my stomach soured. What was he talking about? Ought I call for a guard?

Griffin sniggered softly. “You think you’re so clever. You are so ready to mock everyone you meet for being easy to manipulate and you think that you can make any man fall for you, and yet you fell into the same exact trap. You’re used to strong, brash men, and I knew something different would catch your eye. What do you think? Did my shyness and humility draw your attention?”

Just as he had done in that tiny carrier pigeon room, he placed his hand around the back of my neck, his thumb pressing against the vein throbbing on the side of my throat. I slapped his hand away.

“Glare all you want,” he chuckled. “That day when I took you up to send the pigeon, if you truly had been locked up with prison rations, you never would have rejected the food I offered. Starving people aren’t picky. And another thing—women are so quick to believe that any man who touches them is merely after physical affection. But did you know that this is the perfect position for checking someone’s pulse?”

I froze, processing what he was saying as he went on, “You were too calm when you and I talked back then. If your life had truly been in danger and you were genuinely escaping from a dragon, your heart would have been pounding much harder and faster.”

His words fell like physical blows to my gut. That time… It hadn’t been romantic at all. He was testing me, and I had failed. I cursed my own naivety. He had played me like a fiddle. All these years, I considered myself a master at manipulating everyone’s emotions, but no, I had been the gullible fool this time. My feelings were painted clear as day on my face.

Griffin smirked. “Remember: three steps ahead. You and the dragon were quite the con artists, but I’m a dragon hunter, and my father left me quite a bit of equipment I intend to use against your co-conspiring dragon.”

“Guards!” I shouted, backing away from Griffin. “Guards!” Within seconds, the guards and Father came running. “Arrest him,” I said, pointing a shaking finger at Griffin.

Father patted my hand. “Now, now, darling, you mustn’t fuss. Let’s get you up to the infirmary.”

“I’m not ill! He’s…he’s…” What was I supposed to accuse him of? That he’d discovered my plot? Was he going to tell?

“It’s just as I suspected,” Griffin said sadly, shaking his head. “She has dragon fever. I’ve seen it before. She will be out of her mind until she recovers.”

“I’m not sick!” I insisted, looking wildly around at the guards. “It’s him! He…he’s threatening me.”

“You were right,” Father said, nodding solemnly at Griffin. “Moments of lucidity interspersed with delusion, particularly when it relates to the dragon or her memories from her captivity.”

Everyone had adopted the same sympathetic expression that was on Father’s and Griffin’s faces, looking at me like I was some child with a dreadful illness but was too fragile to handle the severity of my supposed condition.

“Your delusions will fade over time,” Griffin told me with that same maddeningly concerned facial expression.

“You’re the delusional one!”

“If you say so,” Griffin answered, calm as ever.

“My daughter needs time to rest and recover with her new husband,” Father informed the guards. “Help escort her to her rooms.”

“We’re not married !” I shouted. “What are you talking about?” I hadn’t lost my mind; everyone else had.

Father was already preparing to leave, but a glimmer of the same paternal warmth I’d once known shone again in his eyes. “Rapunzel, I have a meeting with Lord Morvain, but I’ll come see you in a few hours, as soon as I can.”

“No!” I screamed, dragging my feet as I was forcefully escorted back to my chambers. My ineptitude at self-defense had never been more glaringly obvious, but what was I to do against nearly a dozen men? What did it matter if Pollox had lifted my father’s greed if he believed me to be insane? Kindly locking me in my room until I recovered from a fake illness would still result in me being shut away from everyone, unable to contact Pollox.

The guards deposited me into my room, and Griffin entered, locking the door behind him. I immediately snatched up an empty vase and hurled it at him.

He smirked as it shattered on the wall beside him. “You missed.”

I threw another, which he dodged. “You know, you’re only solidifying to everyone that you’ve gone insane. Thanks for the additional evidence.”

Angry as I was, I slowly set down the porcelain wash bowl I’d been preparing to throw next. “Congratulations, then,” I spat. “You’ve successfully convinced everyone that I’m crazy, but I’m never marrying you.”

“You already have. The ceremony is only a formality. Legally, you are my wife now.”

“I am not.”

“Yes, you are. The letter you signed was already given over and agreed with your father that upon your safe return, we would be legally married. The documents were signed and sealed two days ago. Naturally we can’t have someone who has temporarily lost her mind to dragon fever make her own choices, and your father understands that the kingdom needs a sane person in line to inherit the throne.”

“I’ll run away.” All I needed was for Pollox to come. I had been wrong to want to come back. Pollox and I had done so much more for the people in my kingdom than Father ever had.

He shrugged. “Go ahead and run. So long as I’m next in line, it doesn’t matter to me what you do.”

I crossed my arms, seething.

“It was a clever idea to team up with a dragon, I’ll give you that,” Griffin told me. “A very lucrative venture, and I haven’t told anyone else what you did. You ought to thank me.”

If only I could shoot fire from my eyes the way Pollox could from his mouth. “How long did you know?”

“I suspected from the beginning,” he told me. “You did a good job with staging your own kidnapping, but there were signs that it was fake.”

“Like what?” I snarled.

He began ticking on his fingers. “If a dragon had smashed his tail against your balcony door, more than one window pane would have shattered, and the glass would have gone into your room, not back toward the attacking dragon. That was the only night the entire night staff fell asleep, and they all exhibited symptoms identical to when you drugged men with wyrmsleep. You really need to vary your drug of choice. No dragon could sneak into a castle and drug the water supply, but you could do it from the inside. And finally, dragons only shed scales once every five years, and as they are more vulnerable during that time, they rarely go out, and if they do, they would have shed many more than the four scales we found.”

My mouth hung so low it felt like it should have been dragging on the floor. I couldn’t think of any response.

“And then ,” Griffin continued, “you must have used the old escape tunnel, because although you did a good job of covering your tracks when you first entered the tunnel, you let in fresh dust and rocks when you exited.”

“How did you know about the tunnel?”

He smirked wickedly. “My ancestors dug it. My father often showed me the trapdoor in the ruins. But besides all that, your dress changed too often for your dragon not to be lavishing you with gifts, you didn’t have sores on your wrists even though the other knights claimed you had been in manacles, and I knew you had a well-rounded diet. Your nails would have turned flaky and brittle with the burned-bread diet that the other knights claimed was your only food, yet when I pointed out how strong they were, you still didn’t realize I’d found you out. You aren’t unintelligent,” Griffin went on, with the air of bestowing the greatest compliment gifted to mankind. “I knew from the beginning that if you had wanted to escape, you could have.”

“Why didn’t you tell everyone, then?” I asked.

“And give up my advantage? I told you: one must always be three steps ahead. If anyone wants to kill a dragon, they must first determine its weakness.”

“He doesn’t have one.”

Griffin gave me a withering stare. “Oh, really? I predict that right now, your precious dragon is planning to come here and help you mourn the loss of your so recently departed father, not expecting us to be ready. I have enough dragonsbane to kill an army of dragons. You are his greatest weakness.”

Oh scales. This was a grand trap, and I was the bait.

“No!” I screamed. “You can’t!” I threw myself at Griffin, prepared to claw, kick, bite, anything to stop him from harming Pollox.

He laughed as he restrained me, finally succeeding in locking my arms around me then whispered into my ear from behind, “I had hoped that sowing the seed of doubt about the dragon’s intentions would’ve had you confiding in me earlier, but when that didn’t work, all I had to do was convince you that people were plotting your demise, and you signed your future right over. Now, your kingdom will belong to me.”

I headbutted him with the back of my skull and felt a satisfying crack as his nose broke.

“Guards!” This time, Griffin called for them, and they came and wrestled me back.

“No! Let me go!”

“Be gentle. She isn’t thinking right,” he crooned, hand up to his bloody nose. “The beast has addled her brains, but we’ll be ready for it when it comes.”

Tears of anger gushed out as I pulled against the guards, desperate to fly at Griffin, to punish him for what he had done.

“It’s like I told you all before,” Griffin said, the kind, patient tone back to his voice. “My wife needs time to recover from such a traumatic event. She isn’t to be blamed for her actions…the dragon is, and we will make him pay. Make sure the door is locked until she improves so she doesn’t hurt herself or anyone else.”

This match was no longer being played out on a chess board. I was the future queen, and I was trapped.