We spent the day in various amusements that she devised, and afterwards lay idly together by the window. Sometimes we lay in silence, surrounded in the song of the awakening woods, and sometimes she would tell me tales embellished with airy visions that sprang to life to illustrate her words. As she spoke, her blue-black eyes fixed upon me and watched me with dreamy langour. Slowly I drifted asleep with her winged pictures blurring in to my dreams. I always watched her as long as I could before slumber claimed me.

Her face as I saw it from beneath my half-lidded eyes slowly, imperceptibly blurred as my mind wandered; her skin seemed to become looser, more transparent, mottled like thin parchment. Her long, agile fingers as they lay across her lap gnarled like warping wood, the veins emerging in tortured rivers from beneath her skin.

Fascinated, I watched with sleepy intensity – but if I blinked, or betrayed any movement that I was awake, she would smile faintly and the moth-winged shadows would pass from her face, and her skin would again be as smooth as new cream. Search as I would then, I could find no trace of the fascinating shadows and lines that had riddled it.

As the night drew depper and the creatures of the forest awoke, we rose and stood at the window together, her light arm around me, my head beneath her chin. She called to the bats in a high rasp I could not imitate, and they would flutter and veer near us for a moment.

She interpreted for me the voices of the woods-creatures. From the tower I could see the forest spread below me like a tapestry. I watched deer and foxes come to the stream to drink, and the song of the insects in the thorn bushes caressed me as I slept.

By the time I was thirteen, my hair was as long and heavy as hers – mine like the light of morning, hers the weight of darkness, shot with a smoky sheen. Loose, my hair fell about me like a mantle, spilled in golden waves upon the floor. Before I slept, Gothel would bind it in a crown of tiny braids atop my head. When she came in the evening to the foot of the tower, I would loose the sapphire pin that held it, and it would spill with its own weight to the ground to greet her. I would knot it to the ballustrade, and it would lie slack against me, tethering me to the window as I watched my love ascend by it. She would loose me, wrap my braids again about my head and kiss me – smile secretly and stroke my face – did you miss me, my child?

Then her arms were around me for an instant, and she was gone in a black cloud over the balcony, without waiting for me to lower my hair. A storm of weeping overtook me. I was lost; my boundaries and my knowledge overstepped.

She didn’t come the next night, or many nights after, but that day the prince did. I felt wounded and raw. I craved comfort from in my tiny world; the prince’s presence was salve for the deep biting emptiness of Gothel’s absence. For the first time, I threw him my hair and watched him climb, and saw his square golden hands where hers had so often been.

I watched him climb, his body suspended by his arms, hips swinging rhythmically as he ascended. The end of my braid twitched among the thorns like an uneasy cat’s tail.

He crouched beside me as I untied my braids from the grate – his breathing presence beside me distracted my attention; too close, too strange, but fascinating. His scent was a sweet, earthy sweat-smell, salty, and delicious. I inhaled, drawing it into my lungs as I watched him. His eyes are the color of mine, his skin pale golden. His ears are furred with a fine down and his chin glittered as if with crumbs of glass. He reached out and held my braid, letting the plaited curves slide through his fingers. He had sparse golden hairs on the backs of his hands, like a dwarf in pictures. His eyes never left mine, and he drew his hands closer to his body; entrnced, curious, obedient to the familiar tug on my hair. I moved towards him. He closed his eyes and his lips met my forehead. I turned my face back into the kiss. His lips were softer than they looked, and the shorn hairs about them rasped my face. Gothel kisses as if she’d eat me in the small sharp bites; his kisses touched me differently, and I savored the strangeness and the revenge. Perhaps Gothel knew what I was doing and perhaps she’d come to stop me.

He kissed the palms of my hands, called me beloved, his prisoned bird and other names that made me laugh to hear them. With trembling hands he fumbled at the lacing of my dress, an unflattering bright red now for several days in a row. At my touch, the laces fell apart, and I stepped out of it. It clung to my legs as it fell. Quickly, he stripped off his own clothes and I was taken aback – his chest was hard and flat, with tiny wasted nipples. His body’s shape struck my eyes incongrously – it had not seemed so strange in clothes.

A creature rode his stomach – a creature rampant, not seeming a part of him at all. It was a congested purple, springing from a nest of hair darker than golden. I leaned forward to see – its skin was transparent and glistening, quite smooth for delicious dark veins woven about it like vines on a tower. Among those smaller blue veins like those in an insect’s wings, I touched my lips to it and he shuddered but stood – its silken texture was much more pronounced beneath my tongue. His head fell back. He gasped and touched my head lightly, his hands cautious and pleading.

“I love you, Rapunzel!” he said to me, and I lifted my head and kissed him.

“Witch!” he breathed as our mouths parted, “Beautiful succubus, you can’t tell me that I am the first man you’ve known.” His question was so odd that I didn’t answer, only laughed, and bent my head to him again.

When Gothel came at last, many weeks later, she was sunk in silence. She clung to me and abused me in a manner that she never had before. My lips were bloody from her kisses, my body marked and bruised with her cuffs. I wept; there was no question of telling her of my strange daylight life. The fire in her eyes was tender and angry by turns, and I was afraid; afraid of what I had done in anger and could not repair.

And there was something else – a vague stirring, a glowing fullness in my belly that I sensed even before my gowns began to grow tight. My body turned against me in punishment, to reflect my despair and my chaos of uncertainty. Had Gothel cursed me? I knew not what to think.

One night, at my wits end with misery and fear, I took her hand and pressed it to my belly. I had to know, at last, if this was her doing. A light leapt into her eyes and hardened there. Slowly, she withdrew her hand, and lace it with the other, pulling her long fingers through each other as if to erase some stain. Her hands were trembling. After a stretched few seconds she screamed a curse so vile that it burnt my ears to hear it, and lunged at me like a rabid cat. Her face was livid – a terrifying purple mask, veins throbbing like snakes bursting their skins.

I backed away, my imploring voice murmuring nonsense – but my legs gave way beneath me and she snatched at me as I fell. Half lying, my head yanked towards her burning face, I stared at her in terror. My braids were wrapped around her hands. My own hands were held out to her in feeble supplication. I saw the flash of a blade coming to end my life, and I wasn’t sorry. I closed my eyes, dropped my hands and tipped back my head for the blow.

I heard a soft tearing sound, and then I reeled backwards. My head felt light, delerious and aching. The room swam about me as I fell, but my throat was whole.

I opened my eyes and carefully pulled myself up. My head was light and dizzy, bobbing forward on my neck. My neck and shoulders felt naked and the air on them was intrusive and cold. My severed braids hung from Gothel’s pale clenched left hand. She stared at them as I moved towards her, tears spilling down my face. Then her knife hand pointed at me with an oath, and I was borne away on a cloud of blackness.

I awoke, scorched and blistered. My lips were split with heat. My skin was like scalded leather. I threw myself to the ground and sobbed; dry grit scraped in my swollen mouth. My tears vanished into the dry earth as I wept, and finally I ceased to weep.

I slept in a cave. My gravid belly demanded that I live, but my mind left my animal’s body and lived again the days that I’d spent with Gothel, savouring each beauty, each nuance. In my sleep I saw her, trailing her hands through the glowing web of my candlelit hair, with snow in her mouth to cool my burning throat.

I dreamed that I woke to a white dress, felt her cool hands lace around my narrow waist and heap strings of moonstones in my hair.

I dreamed, curled inside my own womb, of my life to come. I brooded silent and alone in a garret, a grey old woman with my beloved’s hands.

I wandered blankly across the forest earth, my eyes bloody voids – crawled over the ruins of a blasted tower and screamed my own name again and again.

Again I heard the nightingale in the thorn hedge – in my dreams Gothel’s cool mouth kissed mine, and I heard the lonely crying of her harp.