Rapunzel and the Dark Prince Page 9

He laughed, a low rumble in my ear. “You certainly will keep me from descending into brooding, won’t you.” Then he put his mouth to mine, kissing me deeply while he penetrated me just as deeply. He pulled back, almost withdrawing from me, and then thrust again, and again. His tail didn’t move as much; but it was slowly stretching me, slowly forcing its way deeper. With every thrust, his cock raked against a sensitive spot inside me.

  He was kissing me, but I couldn’t kiss back, I could only cry out into his mouth with every thrust as my body was rocked into the quilts. I felt so fully claimed by him, and the feeling was like an anchor. The thought of facing the court and those dinners day after day still made me want to hide under the bed, but I belonged here and I wanted to be here. It wasn’t like the tower where I had no choice.

  Well, maybe I don’t really have a choice, I thought, considering the bond spell. But I thought the bond spell did know that we had been born for each other, all along.

  He brought me to the edge and then he slowed his rhythm. I stood on the precipice of explosive pleasure. My passage was tortured with sensation, winding tighter and tighter.

  “Scream for me, my sweet. I like to hear it.”

  I wanted to protest that someone might hear, but his directive unleashed something in me. I cried out, I screamed his name. I begged him. “Please, Dorin…ohh please!”

  “Please what?”

  “Make me come—please—”

  His cock drove into me and his tail pushed deeper and my pleasure mounted into an unbearable climax, my inner walls throbbing against him. “Dorin! Ohh—Dorin!” For a moment I felt as if I left the rest of my body behind, I was nothing but a core of pulsing pleasure. He slid his hand along my throat like he had gone deaf and not blind, and wanted to feel my cries vibrate under his fingers. I understood that he needed this, that I was a vessel for all the things he would never say, all the emotions he would never voice. He drove them into me and I let them go.

  “Rapunzel,” he panted, and then his hot seed started flooding me inside. I writhed beneath him as he was still fucking me hard and the peak started to die. In another moment, it was over and he collapsed on top of me, just barely keeping his weight from crushing my ribs.

  Now I ran my fingers through his hair lazily.

  He slowly withdrew himself from me, and went to the bathing room. He felt out the door frame and then I heard him washing up. I was too spent to move an inch.

  Then he settled back in beside me, pulling my body against him, affectionate now. He caressed my hair and skin with a touch that was exquisitely tender.

  “I have to do something about my hair,” I said, although I was thoroughly exhausted. It was all over the bed and trailing across the floor. It was still astonishingly clean; the palace must be swept and scrubbed every day.

  “No,” he said. “You have ladies to do that for you now. It’s time you started focusing on other things. Just lay here with me and sleep.” He gently gathered up my hair, twisting it into a loose coil, and let it drop over the side of the bed. Then he returned to me and pulled the quilts over us both.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Rapunzel

  The court let us sleep late into the morning, but eventually they started knocking on the door, and indeed the rigamarole began again. The ladies dressed me in a “day” gown. I didn’t know there were different dresses for day and night. It was not much better than the evening gown, but it was made of a softer fabric instead of something thick and fancy and had long sleeves so I wasn’t cold. They combed out my hair and decided to fix it in two braids for the day. They discussed all this amongst themselves without consulting me once.

  Dorin and I had an informal breakfast in his sitting room of pancakes dusted with sugar, which were so delicious I stuffed myself again. Then I went to see Magdalena. Servants were happy to point me to her workroom, which was down on the lower floor of the castle. It was a little scary down there. The walls were bare stone, with walkways lit by torches.

  “Oh good! You came.” She held open the door of her workroom. Today, she had a pink apron over her black dress, and pink ribbons around her horns. I think Magdalena was a little bit vain; she laced her corset tight and her dark curls were clean and shiny compared to a lot of the court ladies, who just wore their hair in oiled and scented crowns of braids. You didn’t have to wash it as much that way.

  I walked inside and then pulled my braids in after me.

  “You must have a very strong head,” Magdalena said. “All that weight.”

  “I guess I do! Oh—this room smells like my home.”

  In particular, it smelled like the workroom in the tower where the Witch kept her spells and herbs. The same sorts of bottles lined the wooden shelves. Against the wall by the single window was an examination table.

  “Are you homesick?” Magdalena said. “I heard you lived in a lonely tower.”

  “I did. But I am a little homesick. It was so familiar to me.” I burped and clutched my stomach. “I—I ate too many pancakes.”

  Magdalena smiled, but she got right down to business. “I know Jarvin told Prince Dorin that there was no cure for his blindness. And I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up to the contrary. I just wanted to ask you for any details you might have about the spell.”

  I told her exactly what the Witch told me about how to cast the spell, and how I had thrown the dust at her and said the words and she had bounced the spell off of a mirror.

  “So, you cast the spell, in fact?” Magdalena perked up.

  “Yes, not that I know anything about it…”

  “Hmm. I’m surprised he didn’t ask you.”

  “Well, he spoke to Dorin, not me, but I’m sure he just assumed the Witch cast the spell directly. Does that mean there’s a chance?”

  “I would think such a curse could be broken by true love…”

  “I do love Dorin,” I said.

  “You have a bond spell,” she said. “Maybe you just need time to fall in love with him more deeply…”

  “How long will that take? He’s miserable over it.”

  “I don’t know…and I wouldn’t tell him. I could be entirely wrong.”

  I was frustrated. “How come no one knows? Shouldn’t palace mages be able to say for sure if a spell is curable or not?”

  “Magic doesn’t always work like that.” She put her hands on her hips. “It does have rules, laws of fairness that it follows, but sometimes we can’t see them until after the fact. It isn’t a chemical formula where you put in X and Y and get Z. Good and evil, love and hate, strength of will…these things matter. That’s why I think this may be a true love curse. When you love Dorin with all your heart, maybe you can cure him. Maybe.”

  “Ahh,” I said, a little uncertainly. “That’s annoying. I don’t know how to fall in love with him any more than I already do.”

  “Give it time!”

  “Isn’t there anything I can do for him in the meantime? Do you have a spell to make him…I don’t know, have keener senses? Or great strength?” My eyes roamed the shelves, looking for familiar labels. I picked up a bottle that said “Strengthwort”. “Like this one?” I asked. “Does it make strength spells?”

  She took the bottle from me with a little shake of her head. “Be careful touching things without asking in a mage’s workroom! No, it’s not that simple. This is just one ingredient.”

  “Would you teach me to make spells?”

  Magdalena chewed her lip a moment. “Royalty and mages aren’t supposed to mix…”

  “Why not?”

  “Because royalty already has a lot of power. In order to keep them from getting too powerful, some kingdoms have a law that the royal family will not study magic.”

  “Awww. But I don’t feel like I have any power at all.”

  “Well…there is one exception. You can study healing spells. And only healing spells. I could lose my practice if I taught you anything else.”

  I clapped my hands, excited. “I’d study
healing! I don’t care what kind of magic, I just want to learn something. I was always so desperately curious to know what the Witch was doing.”

  “Okay. Well, let me think. Before you touch a single thing, you should start by reading this—and this.” She took two big fat books off of a shelf. One was a guide to herbs and ingredients. The other was called “Healing Magic for Novices”. She dumped them into my arms; they were even heavier than they looked.

  “Read both of those,” she said. “Cover to cover. And when you’re done, I’ll give you a test.”

  I resettled the books in my arms. “Do you just want to get rid of me?”

  “No.” She shook a finger at me. “Do you think it’s easy, learning magic?”

  “I guess I hoped it was easy.”

  “Well, it’s not. But I’m not trying to get rid of you. Actually…I mean, I do work alone here for hours and hours. The queen is focused on the commercial aspects of the kingdom. It would be nice to get a little attention down here for once…” She grinned. “So how has it been, your first day here?”

  I blushed. “Well, I’m not used to crowds…”

  “But you’re happy with your prince, aren’t you? All the girls in Yirvagna hoped it would be them.”

  “Oh dear. I guess they must hate me now?”

  “Maybe.” She looked impish. “But there’s no arguing with a bond spell. So we’ll all have to get over it!”

  “I guess I’d better go study before the queen finds other things for me to do,” I said.

  Magdalena opened the door for me. I glanced down the hall, trying to remember how to get back to my rooms.

  “Has anyone given you a tour of the palace?” Magdalena asked.

  “Not really. The queen showed me some of the main rooms.”

  “Would you like one? Maybe you won’t get lost if you get your bearings.”

  “Yes. Thank you! I’m so turned around.”

  “I’ll just have someone send the books to your room.”

  I have a feeling the queen would never have given me as thorough a tour as Magdalena did. She showed me everything from the enormous pantry, filled with crates of imported lemons and huge jars containing six different kinds of flour and other wonders, to the guard posts in the west tower. We popped into Jarvin’s room, which made me sorry I couldn’t study other kinds of magic; he had all sorts of interesting objects like bones and glittering gems and colored powders, but I don’t think he appreciated the intrusion. He was glaring at us and gathering up papers.

  I was particularly delighted by the farm behind the gardens, where cows, goats and sheep provided fresh milk, butter and the materials for cheese, and chickens roamed freely. There was a dog there, too, who herded the animals. I had never seen so many animals at once and Magdalena said I could even touch them. “But try not to look so delighted,” she said. “Most people get that out of their system at a younger age.”

  “I know every bit of the palace by now,” Magdalena said, as we strolled the grounds. “When you’re a healer, you get around. I’m asked to come to people’s place of work all the time to look at this or that. One thing you’ll realize quickly enough is that Yirvagnans never like to admit they’re sick. So if something is wrong, they don’t dare come down to me and risk everyone seeing them. They tell me to slip in to their office or their quarters after hours and look at that little rash that they’re sure is nothing. Then I get there and find they’re breaking out into the rosy fever or something like that.”

  “I think I’ve seen that already,” I said. “Dorin’s been trying his best to act like absolutely nothing happened.”

  “It’s kind of adorable,” Magdalena said. “Watching these big strong warrior men trying their damnedest not to cry when they get badly wounded. I always say, ‘Go ahead, I won’t tell’ and they’re like, ‘No! Never!’ And then I turn my back and catch them with a trembling lip. Ah—look, isn’t that a fine example of Yirvagnan stoicism right there?”

  We walked through a stand of trees, and Dorin was in the clearing ahead with his bow, firing at a target. And—well—missing it. An older man was sitting in a chair not too far away, smoking a pipe, and a few servants wearing jackets with braiding hovered off to the side.

  “Dorin!” I called.

  He turned with a scowl, which he quickly forced into a faint smile. “Rapunzel? I didn’t expect you to be wandering around.”

  “Magdalena has been giving me a tour.”

  “Is your hair full of leaves?”

  I grinned. “No, I’ve draped it over my arm. It is getting heavy, though.”

  “I’m glad you’re making friends,” he said.

  “Friends? Am I? I don’t know!” I tried not to get too excited, but I hadn’t realized that Magdalena might be my friend.

  “Sure we’re making friends,” she said, sounding amused in much the same way Dorin did at times.

  I guess, if you want to amuse everyone, spend your life in a tower.

  “What are you doing?” I asked Dorin, although I was wary of asking. A servant was collecting arrows that he had shot all over the lawn. I had a bad feeling that what he was doing wasn’t going that well.

  “I don’t want to give it up,” he said. “I’ve always been able to hit my targets. Maybe if I keep practicing…” He trailed off and made a face like he’d realized this sounded, if not insane, at least very stubborn. “Viktor says that with time, my hearing will improve—or, at least, I’ll become more sensitive to its signals, and I’ll be able to hear my surroundings better. If I keep at it, why shouldn’t I be able to hear a target?”

  Magdalena scratched her cheek with a finger, squinting. “Sounds hard.”

  It certainly did, but I didn’t want to say anything discouraging. Better to let him figure it out on his own. I gave her a look, and said, “Well, you look very handsome.”

  He sighed, and a servant approached with a tray. “Sir, I have a towel and a flagon of water for you.”

  Dorin held out his hand. “Towel first.” He wiped the sweat off his face and neck, and then drank the water. “That’s it for archery today, I suppose, but I refuse to give up,” he said.

  The older man rose from his chair. He had wrinkled, leathern skin, but seemed quite fit. He bowed to me. “Princess Rapunzel. I’m so glad to meet you.”

  “This is Viktor, my old hand-to-hand combat teacher,” Dorin said. “A fever damaged his eyes a long time ago, so I’ve dragged him out of his recent retirement to advise.”

  Viktor nodded. His eyes pointed at me, so maybe he could see a little, but they didn’t focus. “If I were you, my prince, I would train mostly in close combat. Use your keen ears, your sense of touch, and your tail to good advantage and you will be as strong as anyone in a wrestling match.”

  “Yes, yes. From graceful archer to barroom brawler,” Dorin said grumpily.

  “I say, nothing stirs the blood like a good match between fists,” Viktor snapped back. “Archers are the sneaks of the fighting classes. Erm, pardon me, your majesty.”

  “Pardoned. But only because I can’t spare sending you to the dungeon.” Dorin offered me a hand. “Shall I join you ladies on your tour?”

  “Of course!” I said. “That is, if Magdalena doesn’t mind.”

  “Oh, no. You’re the princess,” Magdalena said.

  “I hope that isn’t the reason you don’t mind.”

  “It’s quite all right.”

  “Every girl loves to be the single friend walking along with a newly married couple,” Dorin said, slipping a hand around my waist.

  “Don’t forget your stick,” Viktor said, handing Dorin a walking stick with a silver handle.

  Dorin snatched it from the old man. “Now I really feel like a beggar.”

  Magdalena snorted. “You look much too grand. I think your injury will only add to your mystique, although a scar wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “Not too much mystique, I hope! Magdalena’s been telling me how every girl in Yirva
gna will be jealous of me.”

  “Well, of course. I am the prince,” Dorin said, with a laugh I was happy to hear. “But I might not be the only one. I’ve been getting a lot of compliments on my golden-haired beauty today.”

  I flushed. “Oh dear.”

  We strolled the training grounds for the palace guards. Dorin said he would take me on the horse trails next time. As we were heading back, Dorin’s mother came walking down the path. I was starting to tense up every time I saw her. I knew she was only trying to make sure I was a princess suitable for the court, but it was hard not to feel small the moment her eyes locked onto me.

  “Dorin. Rapunzel,” she said cordially. “Cordial” is a hard tone to read. It’s not quite nice but it’s definitely not mean either. “And Magdalena.”

  Magdalena curtseyed. “Your majesty.”

  “I have just heard that two books on healing magic were sent to your suite,” the queen said to me.

  “My sweet?”

  “Your rooms,” Dorin said.

  “Ohh.” Why were there so many different names for the same thing? My books and conversation with the Witch had left a lot out.

  “Members of royalty are not supposed to study magic.”

  I felt sick. I didn’t want to get Magdalena in trouble, but I didn’t want to get in trouble either. “I understand that I can’t become a witch,” I said. “But I thought I could become a healer.”

  “It’s my fault,” Magdalena said. “That was my understanding.”

  “Magic is a familiar discipline to Rapunzel,” Dorin said. “It wouldn’t be so bad to have a healer queen someday.”

  “Jarvin advises against it,” the queen said. “He said it could set a dangerous precedent for Rapunzel to start dabbling in other spells.”

  “Well, a lot of good Jarvin is these days,” Dorin said. “He was no help to me.”

  “Rapunzel has so much else to learn,” the queen said. “I really think we should leave magic to the mages, and focus on etiquette and policy, I’m sorry to say.”

  “You don’t sound very sorry,” Dorin said.

  “Because—” She sighed. “You know it’s true.”