a book or maybe two or three

[powershines]

Mother is out getting Rapunzel more paper and ink, among other errands. Rapunzel is taking advantage of the privacy to do some indexing. Notebooks per se are usually hard to come by, so Rapunzel drills little holes in stacks of loose leaf, ties them together with twine, and rearranges pages as it suits her to do so every now and again. She has already done the day's chores and has dinner slow-roasting in the oven; she'll make the sauce when Mother's back with the herbs she wants for it.

She finishes rearranging last summer's leaves of paper by topic, ties them up, stacks them in her closet for reference, goes to lean on the windowsill, and contemplates what to do with the remaining hours before Mother returns.

The options - while the oven is spoken for, anyway - are mostly crafts (assorted) and music (her own voice, her guitar, her piccolo, and her xylophone). She has a lot of crafts, really. Mother understands that while Rapunzel doesn't mind being left alone she does mind being left with nothing to do. At this point Rapunzel is reasonably accomplished, at least according to her own aesthetics since she has no peers to compare against, at: rug-hooking and painting and interestingly layered-and-carved candles and embroidery and pottery and beading and knitting and sewing and other things she's come up with to do with the same materials. Half her books are patterns and recipes and sheet music. Most of the tower is space for her to work on projects, except for Mother's rooms and the family room and the kitchen on the bottom and Rapunzel's bedroom at the very top. She sits in a sling of her hair, hooks it at the ceiling over the empty center of the spiral staircase, and lowers herself down. She nearly enters the studio; contemplates the tub of clay and stops; reaches for her guitar where it's propped on the stairs within reach and stops. She does pick up a stray xylophone mallet and toss it towards the corresponding instrument, where it plunks out a middle C before clattering to the floor.

Maybe it's time to pick up another hobby. Mosaics? There's a collection of glazed, broken shards from past pottery projects and dishes that have fallen, maybe enough that she could chip them into smaller pieces and make something of them. She has plaster left. Or at least start an elaborate mixed-media - something.

That doesn't sound interesting either.

She winds up on the bottom floor in the family room where the stairs end. She sighs and picks up one of the ubiquitous combs and starts draping her hair over the furniture so she can get at it all. This is always something to do. It doesn't get remotely as tangled as it would if it weren't magic - it doesn't really tangle at all - but it still looks and behaves best when maintained, and there's a lot of it.

When she has brushed it all out, and gone back through her studios (via the stairs, since she pulled her hair down after her and can't climb it back up) to note what she's low on and should add to Mother's shopping list, and practiced the tricky part of that one sonatina on her piccolo until she manages it correctly all the way through one time, Mother comes home.

Rapunzel goes to the window, hooks her hair around the relevant protrusion, and heaves the rest of it over the edge. Mother hangs on, Rapunzel hauls her up. Regular hair would suffer some damage in the process - Rapunzel has looked at what Mother leaves on her own hairbrush, how easily it'll snap, how often it's split - but Rapunzel's is fine. Mother steps lightly into the room, Rapunzel gathers her hair in again. They hug. Mother sets down the day's shopping.

"I'll go make the sauce for the beef," says Rapunzel, when she identifies which bag has the herbs, and she slides to the ground floor on her hair again to get started.

And she serves dinner, and Mother tells her about her day, and wants to see what Rapunzel has been working on, and likes the piccolo piece but is less impressed by the morning's half-a-sampler. Mother sits down with some tea. Rapunzel hairs her way back upstairs to write, and is called down fifteen minutes later because Mother is feeling "run down".

Rapunzel gets her a comb and sits at her feet and sings. The whole tower brightens. Mother looks much better.

Rapunzel hugs her again, remembers to offer her the shopping list - she's low on white paint, which is a long trip to fetch, but she goes through a lot of it - and she goes upstairs again.

The next day Mother makes sure there's enough food in the house for Rapunzel for the next three days because she's going to get the paint. Rapunzel hugs her again, while they're on the by the window. "I love you very much, dear," Mother says.

"I love you more," recites Rapunzel, smiling a little.

"I love you most."

And off she goes, down to the lawn, letting go of Rapunzel's hair, saddling up the burro, riding into the forest that surrounds the tower.

Rapunzel hauls her hair back up and goes downstairs to make a batch of muffins or something and design a new pair of slippers for Mother, which she'll piece together later. Mother works very hard to keep her supplied and safe in their tower and Rapunzel appreciates it.

There's always something to do.

Comments

[hisowninvention]

"Well, when you do, we can sit under a tree and eat leftover muffins."

[powershines]

"Yep. I should have packed more water than I did, though, I think."

[hisowninvention]

"We can probably find some."

[powershines]

"How do you do that?"

[hisowninvention]

"There's plenty of little streams in this forest, and they're safe to drink from. We've already passed one or two - you can hear them when you get close enough."

[powershines]

"Okay, good."

[hisowninvention]

[powershines]

Walk walk walk.

"I'm going to need to sit down the next time we find a reasonable spot to do that."

[hisowninvention]

"Sure," he says agreeably. Walk walk. "That tree looks cozy."

[powershines]

Rapunzel peers at the tree, trying to determine how it might qualify as cozy.

[hisowninvention]

It has many soft sittable places underneath it, because of moss and things!

[powershines]

All right then. She sits. And winds her hair into a loop so there isn't a seventy-foot trail of it through the forest while they're still. She pulls out the paper-wrapped muffins.

[hisowninvention]

Rolan sits next to her, within muffin-passing distance but not much closer than that.

[powershines]

She passes him one.

"What were you going to do if the tower had been empty?"

[hisowninvention]

"Stay a night in it, eat some terrible travel rations. I have terrible travel rations if you want to try them, but they're pretty terrible. Your muffins are much tastier." Nom. "And then I was going to leave in the morning, maybe aim to be out of the kingdom by tomorrow night, maybe not. I prefer improvising to making detailed plans. I can do detailed plans, mind you, but improvising is more fun and responds better to unexpected setbacks."

[powershines]

"The crown would be easier to sell out of the country?" she guesses.

[hisowninvention]

"And I would be harder to catch."

[powershines]

"And now your plan is that I will be welcomed home as the princess and amnesty you for stealing what according to you is in fact my crown."

[hisowninvention]

"Pretty much. If you don't amnesty me I can, of course, run away. And if they don't welcome you home as the princess - which I'm pretty damn sure they will, but if - we can both run away."

[powershines]

"I have no strong opinions about the crown yet, so I imagine I'll pardon you for taking it to begin with if I can, although I would be kind of annoyed with you if you made off with it a second time if it is mine after all."

[hisowninvention]

"I've done all the crown-stealing I feel like doing."

[powershines]

"How exactly did an opportunity to steal it present itself so irresistibly?"

[hisowninvention]

"This might take some explaining," he starts. "But I guess we have time. So to start with, I was staying at an inn and my room happened to have a window that was right across from the second-floor window of the famous jeweler's next door, and I happened to be sitting in my room looking out at the extremely limited view when the jeweler got the crown in for a polishing, and I happened to see him leave it right where I could see it while he went into the inn to have a drink or something. There were royal guards outside the door of the jeweler's place, but they couldn't see the window I was looking that, so I guess they didn't know it was open. And it was just such a perfect moment - if I moved right then, I could steal a royal crown. So I did. Out my window, in the jeweler's, grab the crown, climb back across - that was one of the tricky parts, I just barely made it. Nobody knew a thing. But then I didn't know if the jeweler had come back from the inn while I was taking the crown, so it wasn't safe to stay where I was because my room would be the obvious first place to look, and it wasn't safe to leave through the downstairs because if he was still there he might spot the crown in my bag - I've moved stuff around in there since then so it's less obvious, but at the time it was pretty blatantly poking those three points at the top into the side of the bag and I didn't have time to fuss with it and make it stop. This is where the Mud Brothers come in - they have names, I just can't remember them - I'd seen them before a few times that day, they were staying down the hall, and they looked shady enough that they might take a deal like 'I'll give you ten suns if you help me climb out your window onto the roof of the next building over'. Well, they took the ten suns, but they wanted to know what I was carrying, and they suggested I hide out in their room until the search moved on and then leave with them later, and I think I told you the rest."

[powershines]

"And the chance to steal a royal crown was very exciting, I take it."

[hisowninvention]

"Yeah. I don't think I would've gone for it if I'd had more time - I would've remembered why they were going to put up such a fuss if it was stolen. But, well, it happened the way it happened."