The Fairest of Them All Read Online Free Page A

thing I knew, from all my years of working with Mathena: it was in the focusing, and the wanting, the fashioning one’s desire into a point of light, that the magic took place. I’d called him to me before,hadn’t I? Now, for the first time, I took everything I had learned and felt and I pressed it together inside me, filled it with my own longing and need until I could see it, feel it like a blade, and turned it into that light.
    “Come back,” I whispered, clutching the sachet around my neck.
    She thought she could keep me away from him by locking me in a tower. But I could bring him to me. He wasalready tied to me, through magic, through the earth, and now I would make him return.
    I looked at myself in the mirror the way he would look at me. I could hear his heartbeat, his breath, in and out, and I slippedinto his mind and heart as if my whole body, my very being now, had turned to spirit.
    After that, I waited. I used the water she’d left me sparingly, to keep myself washed for him,and I dressed carefully in front of the mirror, and brushed and brushed my hair, using the bit of potion I had left. To make it strong.
    It would need to be. When he came, it wouldn’t matter that I was locked in a tower.
    I had my hair.

    T he next day, I watched her working in the garden, chopping tree trunks and carrying firewood into the house, heading out into the forestto collect mushrooms and wild raspberries. I watched women come and go, into the house. I watched the candles flare up as evening came, watched the lights flame out when she was going to bed.
    She called up to me a few times, but I did not answer her.
    And then the next day, when she was out hunting with Brune—as I had willed her to be, when the time was right—I heard the horse’s hooves, and Iknew he had returned.
    I went to the window and let down my hair, let it fall from my head and out of the window, where it stretched down and tapped the ground, like a flag waving from the mast of a ship.
    He rode into view just as the sun caught my hair and turned it to fire. He looked up at me, a dazed expression on his face. Never in my life had I felt the kind of power I felt right then. Iwas young and beautiful. I had all the magic of the forest at my fingertips. I was foolish, too; I understand this now, after so manyyears have passed, how I confused infatuation for true love, the power of beauty for real power in the world.
    “You came back,” I said. I whispered the words, and let the wind carry them to him. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
    “You were not at the ball.”
    “She lockedme in this tower, to keep me away.”
    He left his horse, walked toward the tower.
    “You have to climb up here,” I said.
    “What?”
    He looked around, and then headed for the great wooden door. I could hear him struggling, just out of my vision. A moment later, he was standing again under the window.
    “I’m locked in,” I said.
    “I’ll get the key from her.”
    “No. She is not here. Climb.”
    He tiltedhis head, not understanding. “There’s no rope or ladder.”
    “Climb my hair.”
    “How . . . ?”
    “You won’t hurt me,” I said.
    Tentatively, he reached out and touched my hair, grasped it in his fist. I could feel that touch. My hair was as alive as skin, as blood. I reeled back from the force of the feeling that spread through me. I could feel him. I knew him.
    “Climb,” I said again, holding on tothe windowsill and bracing myself for the pain in my scalp. But no pain came. Instead, images flashed through my mind: a bed covered in furs, a heavy manuscript scattered across a desk, bright colors blotted across stone. They were all images from his life, I realized withsurprise, flowing from him to me. I’d never felt anything like it before. Of course, outside the tower Mathena always mademe keep my hair tied back, hidden under cloth. Was this why? Did she know what it could do?
    He hoisted himself up and I could feel his full weight, as I