"I'm really sorry! Are you okay?"

"Who are you what are you doing here how did you find me how did you get up here?"

"My name's Rolan, I'm running away from some people I may have slightly annoyed earlier, I found you completely by accident and I am very surprised about it, and I am a really good climber," he says.

"Well - you can't be here - so - climb back down and find somewhere else to run away to."

"I'm not that good a climber," says Rolan. "I need like - half an hour and maybe a snack, if I'm going to do that without falling and breaking my neck. Are you saying there's not a secret door? I remain confused about how you get out of here. Or do you farm mushrooms in the basement or something? This is a fascinating look into the lives of flying forest hermits."

"Flying f- I don't leave. You are going to leave. Here." She approaches just near enough to thrust her muffin in his direction. "Snack. And half an hour. And then you have to go, you cannot be here."

"Sure. Okay," he says, gingerly accepting the muffin. "Thank you. What do you mean, you don't leave? I was joking about the mushroom farm. Mostly joking. Do you have a mushroom farm?"

She jerks back like she thinks he's going to burn her when he's got the muffin. "I mean I don't leave. I - I don't think I had better tell you much of anything."

"Ooookay. Sure. Do you want me to tell you things? I talk when I'm nervous, you might have noticed, so it's pretty unavoidable if you're going to stick around while I have my snack and my rest - can I sit in one of your chairs please?" He nibbles on the muffin.

"The flying forest hermit thing," he adds, "in case you're confused, is because when I climbed in here and saw how lived-in it looked, after the ordeal I went through getting up the side of the tower, I wondered who could possibly live here and thought that it might be flying forest hermits. And now I just really like the phrase. Flying forest hermits, kind of catchy, isn't it?" Nom nom muffin.

"People can't fly," sighs Rapunzel.

"Well, there goes that explanation. It's probably possible, though. Lots of things are possible. I could fly down from a height like this, if I had a big enough kite and a clear landing space. I did that once. Wouldn't want to try it in this forest, though, that's a good way to get stuck in a tree and laughed at by squirrels."

"Haven't you ever seen a squirrel? I guess if you never leave the tower you might not have. They have very fluffy tails. I bet they'd be nice to pet if you found a friendly one, but I've never found a squirrel that friendly so I can't know for sure. I did pet a mouse once. Some kid had a pet mouse and they were sitting in the town square together, it was the most adorable thing. The mouse's name was Bubbles. I forgot to ask why. Can't even remember what town it was. Might have been near the capital, but I wouldn't swear to that in a court of law."

"Sometimes squirrels climb the ivy. You're very talkative."

"Yes I am!" he agrees. "I'm not like this all the time, it's kind of a nerves thing. Still adjusting to the fact that the abandoned tower is inhabited by a non-flying forest hermit." Muffin muffin.

"I think I'm more surprised than you are."

"That very well might be true," he says. "And I've been surprised a fair amount in my life, I might be more used to it than you are. Probably you don't get very many surprises sitting in your abandoned tower all day. Probably it's just the occasional squirrel dropping in to say hi and ask if you've got any spare chestnuts. That's a joke, squirrels don't talk. That I know of. I guess they could be doing it where nobody else can hear and we just wouldn't know about it."

"I don't think squirrels talk."

"Well, sure, neither do I. But it's hard to be sure. I didn't think people lived in abandoned-looking towers with no doors, and look how wrong I was."

"I'm getting the sense that you wouldn't like it if I did, and I don't really have a good reason to. If you want to keep being a very solitary non-flying forest hermit, that's no business of mine. I imagine it gets lonely, but maybe you don't care about that as much as I would. Or maybe you secretly talk to squirrels. Do you secretly talk to squirrels? You don't have to tell me, I bet the squirrels made you swear a solemn vow of silence. On a chestnut."

"I don't talk to squirrels."

"Okay." He finishes the muffin. "That was a really good muffin, miss non-flying forest hermit who doesn't talk to squirrels. I have no idea where you get muffin ingredients, but you do amazing things with them. Maybe it's owls. Do you have an owl friend who steals small bags of flour from nearby towns and picks cranberries for you by the light of the moon, carrying them here one at a time in his beak? That would be very impractical. Maybe he has a little cranberry bag that he can carry in his claws. Talons? I think it's talons when it's a bird."

"I don't think I had better tell you."

"Tell me what? Your solution to the problem of how owls can efficiently transport picked berries? Good call, I bet your owl friend would be jealous of the competition if word got out. He would no longer be champion of the owl berry-carrying contests."

Rolan grins at her.

She gets control of herself presently and goes back to watching him warily, like she expects him to spring at her if she leaves her guard down.

"You're a very nervous non-flying forest hermit. Is it me? People usually don't find me that scary. I'm not cut out for intimidation. I prefer running away. I find it solves almost all of my problems." He sets his satchel on his lap and sighs. "The rest I mostly deal with by making new friends, but all the running away kind of interferes with forming lasting relationships. Maybe I should get a pet mouse."

"Yes I am," he says. "I'm just waiting until I'm steady enough to trust myself getting down that wall again, because my minimum standard for any running-away plan is that it has to be less likely to kill me than the alternative. Except under very special circumstances. Are you the kind of very special circumstances I should be risking my life for?"

"Good. Thank you."

"You're welcome."

He smiles.

Rapunzel keeps warily watching him.

"Poor life choices," he sighs.

"Figuratively," he confirms. "I can show you the goods and tell you the story if you want, but it's not quite as funny as the adventure of the laughing squirrels."

"Will it take long enough to delay you leaving?"

"You're very keen on that, aren't you. No, it probably won't."

"Okay then. What's in the bag?"

"No. I'm getting the sense that you'd be upset about it, and you probably don't have anything that would sell for a substantial amount, and I'm not going to go looking to see if you do because I definitely get the sense you'd be upset about that. In case you're getting the wrong idea about the world beyond your forest hermit tower, by the by, most people's lives are not nearly this exciting. I just happen to be very adventuresome."

"Do most people not get upset about it if you take their stuff?"

"There's kinds and kinds of upset. Most people get annoyed about it if I take their stuff. I don't mind annoying a rich person who did not really need that fifth set of silver-plated teacups. I mind making people upset upset. Which is why taking the crown was such a terrible idea. But trying to put it back would probably be a much worse one, so here I am."

"If I had to guess, I'd say it goes something like this: The first set is to use, so all your friends know you're rich enough to use silver plated teacups. The second set is so you can have bigger silver plated tea parties and impress more people. The third, fourth, and fifth sets are because you keep finding out your neighbour has more silver plated teacups than you."

"Why does your neighbor have that many, then? And couldn't they just tell their friends how much money they have if they want them to know for some reason?"

"Well, see, it's impolite to just brag about how much money you have. The proper way, for those kinds of people, is to buy lots of obviously expensive things and show them off without ever saying that that's what you're doing. And of course, the neighbour saw that their neighbour had two sets of silver-plated teacups, so they had to buy three. It's all very silly, but that's how it works."

"You know," he says, "I never thought of it that way, but I kind of like the perspective. As far as I know, it's not impolite to complain about thieves stealing your teacups."

"Well then." Pause. "But someone actually needs the crown for something?"

"I'm not sure needs is the right word. It belonged to the princess who disappeared as a baby. It's not really doing anybody any good sitting on a pillow in some room of the palace or other and going out to get polished every so often, but the king and queen are probably still going to be pretty broken up about losing it."

"Oh, that's what those lanterns every autumn are about," recalls Rapunzel vaguely.

"Yeah. It's a sad story. I wonder sometimes what happened to the poor girl, but there's really no good way to find out."

"I suppose people must get more excited about disappearing babies when they're princesses."

"Well. Yes. Certainly more people hear about it in that case. But it doesn't really happen that often to begin with," he says.

"No?" asks Rapunzel skeptically.

"No," he says. "I've heard of babies being stolen - but there aren't that many people in the world who will steal a baby, and even fewer who'll do it more than once, and they tend to get caught if they live close enough to where they took the kid from. I've heard of babies just plain vanishing inexplicably - but mostly just the princess. And someone could have stolen her too, for all I know. It makes more sense than thinking she dissolved into sunshine or crawled out in the middle of the night never to be seen again. The other few times I've heard of a kid just plain disappearing like that, it turned out something else had happened to them and somebody was lying about what."

"I was assuming disappeared usually meant stolen. Or possibly eaten by wild animals."

"I have not once heard of a baby being eaten by wild animals," he says. "And I travel a lot."

"...What, never? I am fairly certain that wolves and bears and so on all exist."

"Yes," he says. "Both of those sorts of things live in this very forest, in fact, although not a lot of either. You might have noticed that none of them have ever eaten you. Wolves and bears don't usually bother people unless the people bother them first, or unless they are unusually hungry and there's absolutely nothing else around to eat. From a wolf's perspective, people are mysterious and best avoided. Now, sheep, wolves will happily eat sheep all day long if they can get at them. But babies are much harder to get to, since they tend to be kept indoors or at minimum accompanied by other, bigger people."

"They couldn't get in the tower to eat me," explains Rapunzel.

"Yes. And they can't get into people's houses to eat their children, either. In fact, I only think I've ever heard of one bear so much as entering a village at all, and it didn't eat any children. An incredible amount of fruitcake, I'm told, but no children."

"They were having a fair," he adds, "which is why there was so much fruitcake to be had in the first place."

"Did they have to run away from the bear to let it have the fruitcake so it wouldn't hurt them?"

"Well, they kept out of its way, but I gather it didn't seem aggressive so much as hungry and confused. It had its fruitcake, took a nap, and then wandered back into the forest. Not that exciting, all in all."

"I don't think wolves are as omnivorous as bears though."

"True. Like I said, they can be pests when it comes to sheep. But they don't even try to eat people unless they're already starving, and that's rare."

"I used to be pretty scared of the world, myself," he remarks. "But once I really got out there, I found out that even the scariest things weren't as scary as they used to seem. Maybe it's different for you, though. You don't seem like you'd enjoy living the way I do. I don't get to bake nearly as many muffins as I might if I settled down in one place with a reasonably honest job."

"I'm disinclined to spend my time stealing teacups, there is that. Even if it is socially acceptable to complain about it."

"There's other things you could do. But I don't know if you'd like them more than you like staying in your tower designing berry bags for owls."

"I don't - accessorize owls."

"I figured. But it's fun to imagine you do."

He shrugs. "Well, you won't tell me what you do do, and I don't want to pry. So I think up something that I know isn't true, but that sounds funny, and then you aren't giving anything away if you disagree."

"So that's why you're a flying forest hermit who talks to squirrels and accessorizes owls." He pauses consideringly, then adds, "That and also I'm very silly."

"I can see that."

"Are you about ready to go? You really can't be here."

"I couldn't explain where I got it. Leave it with someone honest who ever leaves their house, I guess."

He flashes a smile at her over his shoulder. "Okay."

Rapunzel waves awkwardly.

She advances further into her room when he has gone out the window and she supervises his descent.

Rapunzel is alarmed - she could throw him her hair but it's mostly downstairs - she hauls on it but he's on the ground before she can even see the ends.

"You're welcome don't tell anyone please," she says, hair halfway up.

"...Are you secretly a vanished princess??"

"What? No."

"My birthday is in the summer and my name is Rapunzel and I have a mom!"

"People steal babies sometimes!"

He pauses to catch his breath again, then adds, "King Cearl and Queen Ranae are really upset about losing their daughter! The queen still cries about it, it's really sad!"

"I'm a forest hermit because if I leave people are going to kidnap me and abuse my hair! You could be making this up!"

"Does your mom use your hair? Do you have any way of telling if she's been making things up?"

"Of course she uses it! I use my hair when I get hurt too - I'd let everybody do it if I could trust anyone! She's raised me my entire life!"

"Raising you your entire life doesn't mean someone's not lying to you! Believe me, I know!"

"It's better credentials than breaking into my bedroom half an hour ago with something you stole from the king and queen who you're so concerned about now!"

He throws up his hands. "Fine! Stay in your tower, magic glowing flower girl! Just tell me, if you'd let everybody use your hair, what are you afraid of somebody doing—keeping it all to themselves?"

"I'm afraid of being tied up and force-fed so I don't escape while half-willing soldiers are marched past my hair twenty-four hours a day to keep wars going longer and cheaper and for less reason! I'm afraid of being a bargaining chip in international politics with no say in the matter! I'm afraid someone will chop it off my head and it will stop working and then no one will get to use it at all and one day I'll die! It doesn't sound from your description like the queen's really responsible with healing magic if she ate that flower instead of going to visit it!"

"The queen was too sick to get out of bed! People went and got the flower for her because they like her and they didn't want her to die and leave the kingdom without an heir which by the way it has been for eighteen years anyway! Here's an idea, wait until she's about to die again and then come flouncing into the capital, no one's going to use you as a bargaining chip when they're busy making you fucking Queen! That was a sarcastic suggestion in case you can't tell with all the yelling! It'd work but it'd be a pretty awful thing to do to her!"

"Are you angry at me?" exclaims Rapunzel.

"I'm frustrated because you won't see what's in front of you and you remind me of me when I was a little kid! I grew up in an orphanage! They were pretty awful! They told us we'd be worse off anywhere else and I believed them until I ran away and figured out it was much better out here! Maybe you'd think the same thing and maybe you wouldn't but you're never going to find out for sure from in there! And all this yelling is hard on my voice!" he yells.

"I promise not to kidnap you or do anything to your hair, and I'll come up if you promise to send me back down with it when we're done so I don't fall and break my legs again! Once was enough for the day!"

Rapunzel flings him her hair and wraps the high end around the hook so he doesn't overbalance her. "Hold on, you're heavier than Mother," she calls.

He holds on.

"Yeah," he sighs, sitting inward-facing on the windowsill with a remarkable lack of concern for the height given how recently he fell from it and his avowed desire not to do it again. "But can you see how - if it's just my word against your mom's about things out there in the world and you just decide to trust her and not me because you've known her for longer, if she is lying you're never going to find out about it? I really, truly don't have any ambitions whatsoever about your hair. I'm just particularly concerned about the king and queen right now because I'm upset about stealing the princess's crown, and they're a good king and queen and I like them and so do a lot of other people, and I really don't think any of the things you're afraid of are going to happen. That's not to say they couldn't, there are people in this world who'd do those kinds of things and sometimes they get their way, but the fact that you're the vanished daughter of some very nice people who also happen to be royalty makes it damn unlikely that the nasty folks would get anywhere with you. They've gotten a lot more security-conscious since losing you the once."

"Losing pursuers, in the forest or otherwise, is one of my particular talents," he says. "If you're going to be running away from things, you couldn't ask for a better companion. Hmm... the capital's pretty close. Would asking the king and queen themselves suit your need for proof? It would sure suit my sense of dramatic timing, with the lantern festival coming up so soon. I could even give them the crown back, or better yet have you give them the crown back, and then I bet they wouldn't have me arrested."

"It seems like a possibly bad idea to combine returning the very definitely stolen crown with suggesting that I ought to be wearing it. Unless it'll supposedly magically fit only my head, or something. What I want to know is if I can go, and check, and if the answer is no safely get back before Mother gets home."

"It's not a bad idea at all if you return it after they agree that you're obviously their daughter. Timing is key. When is your mother going to be home? Travel time to the capital and back, with a stop in the middle to ask the queen or somebody else for the flower story, should be a few days at most, but if your mom's coming back tonight that's not much help. You could probably get the story from just about anybody in the capital who was old enough at the time to remember it, but I don't know that for sure because the guy I happened to hear it from was one of the guards who helped bring back the flower, so he might have known some details the general public is missing. You can definitely get a good idea of how nice the king and queen are from just about anybody you pass in the street - ask ten people, maybe one of them has a problem, two if you're in a bad neighbourhood. In case that's also something you want to know."

"She left a batch of muffins before you showed up and expected to be gone for three days."

"Then we can be there and back with plenty of time to spare if we hurry, and somewhat less time to spare if we don't."

"I'll go have another muffin," he says agreeably.

Rapunzel points at the stairs and starts writing.

Down the stairs he goes, in search of tasty muffins.

There are tasty muffins! There are ten of them left, mostly cool now, sitting on the counter.

He eats a muffin. Rapunzel seemed to be pretty heavily implying that she wanted to do her thinking alone, so he's going to stay put in the kitchen until she comes and gets him.

"That looks like a fun way to get around," says Rolan.

"Rolan," he supplies. "Rolan Quick."

"Claribel. Daughter of Queen Ranae of Corona and King Cearl whose country of origin I don't remember off the top of my head. Might be here, might not. He married in, anyway. Or did you know that stuff already?"

"I didn't."

"Well, now you do."

"Fill up on muffins, I don't think they'll travel well," sighs Rapunzel. She takes another herself.

"You're right, they don't. But they don't get much less tasty until they're pretty beat up; we could take some along as long as we make sure to eat them first. If we get full before we finish them all here." Nom nom.

"I guess." She gets another sheet of paper and folds little origami holders for the extra muffins.

"Nice," says Rolan.

He takes the stairs pretty quickly.

And then Rapunzel sets up her hair for him to go down to the base of the tower on the outside.

Down he goes! Her hair is much easier than freeclimbing that wall.

"If I had hair like that, I'd like climbing around even more than I already do."

"Yep!" He sets off into the forest.

Rapunzel follows him, marveling quietly at the unfamiliar view of the scenery.

"Pretty, isn't it?"

"Yes. It really is. Although I'll be much less keen if a wolf attacks us."

"If we run into a starving wolf, I'll fight it off and then you magic me better, deal?"

"Yes. Can you actually fight off a wolf?"

"Never tried. I'd expect to be better at it than you, though."

"Probably. Unless I managed to lasso it."

"There is that."

"Are we going to wind up sleeping outside?"

"Possible but not likely. I know somewhere we can stay the night on the way if we don't make it there by nightfall, and there's even more places to stay once we're actually in Corona City."

"Okay. I'm not especially fast on foot. I can't really run."

"I guess there's not enough room to do much running in that tower anyway, except up and down stairs, and you have a way better method of going between floors."

"If I try to run I trip," Rapunzel explains.

"Also an explanation."

"I remember it being true since I was very little even before my hair got so ridiculous, so I don't think it's that."

"Ridiculous is a good word for it. How long is it, have you measured?"

"Seventy feet last time Gothel checked it."

"Well, I'm impressed."

"I don't know if it's ever going to stop, actually, but it's easier than it should be to move around with it dragging from my head, so maybe it won't be impairing even if it just keeps going. It's been slowing down since I was about fourteen."

"Now I'm imagining it just keeping on going until it fills up the whole tower."

"I suppose we'd have to move if it got to be that long."

"Seems like it doesn't like to tangle, but it would probably be harder to avoid getting it in knots if you had to crawl through drifts of it to go anywhere."

"It does do best with some maintenance. Which is merely tedious now, but could certainly get worse."

"Yeah, brushing a couple miles of hair doesn't sound like a picnic. Well, when you're a princess you can probably hire people to brush your hair for you."

"I think I'd be nervous that someone would cut it."

"Yeah, you mentioned something about that."

Rapunzel fishes around above her ear. "If it's cut it -" She finds the lock of short-trimmed hair. "Turns brown and doesn't glow. I don't seem to need all of it for it to work, but if someone cut enough of it..."

"I see what you mean."

"So if it turns out I'm a princess I'm going to be very strict about sharp objects near the magic hair."

"Sensible!"

"Thanks."

He smiles at her.

"I guess it would be. I can't imagine. If I had to go my whole life only talking to one person I'm not sure I'd survive."

"...How would that possibly kill you?"

"It wouldn't, not directly. But it would hurt. I know there's plenty of solitary people in the world, but I'm not one of them. Even if it's just saying hi to them in the street or watching them from a window, I'm a lot happier with people around. I can live without 'em when I have to, but I couldn't do it forever."

"Almost useless?"

"I have a lot of hobbies, but most of them just - fill time. Or they're useful a little bit for me and Gothel and that's it, I sew us clothes or bake us muffins or whatever. I don't get to heal huge numbers of people who need it, nobody else listens to the music I write or looks at the art I do, and if I read a book and have a really good idea about how how something ought to be run I can't tell anyone."

"Sounds like princess is pretty much your dream job."

"Kind of."

"Kind of?"

"By which I mean rather exactly."

He giggles.

"The king and queen are good, huh? At their jobs?"

"Yeah. People are happy here."

"Yeah. Well, I don't know them either, but I can tell you things about them if you want."

"I'm not actually sure if it would be more or less awkward to encounter them with - filtered opinions from a third party."

"Maybe, maybe not. But I prefer telling stories to giving opinions anyway. I could tell you about things they've done."

"They made laws that all children under fourteen have to be sent to school to be taught and fed - out of the Crown's pocket if nobody closer to home is paying for it - and can't be made to work anymore. They shut down the place I came from when it kept trying to dodge the rules - this was a year or two after I got out, so I didn't get that much out of it, but there were kids my age who did. And I went to school a few times before I got too old. They managed to charm the Duke of Orimere well enough to get a trade agreement that cut the prices of some foods almost in half - I can never remember the list, and it was years ago now, but it was pretty amazing at the time. The Duke of Orimere isn't known to be very charmable. And there was a local baron of a couple of villages and a pond who kept treating his villagers like crap after they kept fining him for it, and they got fed up after the third time around and revoked his title and exiled him."

"Yeah. I was eleven or twelve; you would've been... nineish? I think you can get an exception at twelve if you're in a registered apprenticeship, but somehow I don't think you got one of those. I mean, not that I'm one to complain about illegal things just because they're illegal. But I think those schools are a big help to a lot of kids."

"I mean, Gothel teaches me things and brings me books, but I was not formally apprenticed, no."

"Yeah. And the schools are good for other stuff - making sure all the kids get enough to eat even if their family might have a hard time affording it, giving them a chance to tell somebody if something's wrong at home."

"And - to clarify - most of the kids are neither starving nor having problems at home? I think I have been - either through Gothel's sincere personal biases or deliberate misinformation - led to believe excessively badly of the outside world. Assuming you aren't putting on an elaborate persona of some kind, anyway."

"Most of them aren't starving, most of them don't have problems at home. Some of them could probably even learn plenty of stuff if they weren't getting taught - you did, I did. But the way they've put it together, it really only works for everything if they can get as many kids into it as possible, even the ones who don't have problems. Because you can't always tell which ones do or don't until you've seen them a few times."

"Wouldn't the ones who were starving or terrorized act hungry or scared as the case might be?"

"Sometimes families that don't have enough money for food are too proud to admit it, and it might be the parents who're starving to feed the kids, and hiding it from everybody. And a scared kid might not act scared in front of their parents - they might've learned it's not safe to."

Rapunzel shivers.

"It was like that at the orphanage sometimes, that's how I know. The scared thing. Nobody ever went hungry to feed us."

"I'm sorry."

He smiles. "Thanks."

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

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

"We can probably find some."

"How do you do that?"

"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."

"Okay, good."

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

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

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

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.

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

"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."

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

"And I would be harder to catch."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"And after I have excused your crown-borrowing you, what, go back to stealing idiotic silver teacups?"

"Probably. While paying more attention to making sure no one's going to be heartbroken over that particular teacup. Or I might find something else to do, I don't know, I've been a thief for a long time but I'm not married to it."

"What else would you do?" Rapunzel wonders.

"Who knows! There's so many possibilities, I don't hardly know how to pick one. Well, and a lot of them are probably harder than thieving. I could be a cook, though, or a half-decent tailor, I know how to do both of those."

"I can cook, and sew, too. I like cooking better of those. Sewing's slow."

"Sewing's fun. When I don't have to worry about money for a while and have the time to sit down to something like that, I like to make my own clothes."

"Did you make what you have on now? I made my dress."

"It's a nice dress! Nah, I bought this. I haven't had one of those good times in a month or two - I was just settling into one when I dropped it all for the crown thing - and with all the running away I do, it's not often I can keep more than a couple sets of clothes for more than a few months. I always end up in whatever I was wearing when I last ran away."

"That sounds - disquieting."

"Hmm? What do you mean?"

"Not being able to hold onto possessions reliably."

He shrugs. "I'm used to it. I don't get all that attached to individual things."

"Huh. I guess. I've lived in - been in - the same building for as long as I can remember. I get used to stuff."

"Makes sense. I got used to not having any stuff that was mine, as a kid. Just being able to wear clothes I picked out myself was pretty amazing for a while."

"That sounds really hard."

"It was, I guess. I don't know. It wasn't the worst thing by any means. I think I'm just the kind of person who doesn't mind that kind of thing as much. Like how you're apparently the kind of person who doesn't mind being practically alone most of the time."

"Mother's usually home. But sometimes she goes on long errands like the one she's on now. I wouldn't have liked to grow up entirely alone, but I don't think it hurt me, except for the - limited information source maybe."

"The limited information source definitely seems to have been a thing."

"I don't know that for sure yet. But I'm - checking."

"I'm pretty confident by now that your mother was wrong about a lot of things, even on the off chance she didn't mean to be. But I guess you'll see."

She nods.

"She isn't - she's not the sort of person where it's easy to believe that she'd lie to me. She's by and large really good to me."

He shrugs. "People can be nice and still lie. I'm nice to most people and I still lie to some of them. Granted, about things like whether I've seen any silver teacups recently, not so much anything with this kind of - scope."

"...for which recommendation of your character I have exactly: your word."

"So? It's the same word you've had all along for anything else I've said. I'm not trying to prove anything about myself, I'm just using it as an example. Saying that I sometimes lie about some stuff but mostly for immediate practical purposes and not anything that big doesn't make me less trustworthy, does it?"

"I understand. I'm mostly - reminding myself."

He shrugs. "Okay."

"Anyway, I'm not sure if I'd actually sum up Gothel as nice? I said she's good to me, it's not exactly the same, I think."

"Well, what's she like, then?"

"Tell stories," he suggests. "What kinds of things does she do? What do you mean when you say she's good to you, what kind of good is she?"

"She does all the errands because I don't leave - except today - and she always remembers to get what I ask for, and things she thinks I'll like. I go through a lot of paper and a lot of books and it's heavy - she managed to haul me a xylophone, in pieces - when I was little I was clumsier because sometimes I'd try to run or dance or something and if I was crying too hard to make my hair work she'd do it for me and kiss me on the head - she tells me precisely what she thinks about things I get up to in my spare time, music or craft projects or recipes, she doesn't lie to me because it might make me feel better - when I don't understand things in my books she explains them to me."

"Okay. I see what you mean about the difference between 'good' and 'nice'."

"Yeah."

Rapunzel slips off one of her shoes and starts rubbing her foot after she's had all the muffins she cares to.

"You okay?"

"I think so. It's normal for feet to be sort of uncomfortable after a lot of hiking, right? I don't think I've broken anything. If it gets worse I can heal myself but it won't cure ordinary tiredness."

"Yeah, it's normal, especially if you're not used to it."

"I thought so. I read a lot."

"What do you read?"

"Whatever Gothel brings me, pretty much. Novels and folk tales and some history and I have an illustrated bestiary of the continent. Some of my sheet music has lyrics. It doesn't exactly substitute for life experience but I know some things like 'one's feet will hurt if one walks a lot and this doesn't imply grave injury'."

"Useful. Well, not until now, I guess."

"Yep. I also know a lot of things about plants, but that's not because of books, that's because that's what Mother does for a living is pick and sell plants and a lot of them she brings home to dry or chop up first."

"Any kinds of plants in particular, or just plants generally?"

"I guess she could have," he agrees.

"Yeah."

"Though this doesn't necessarily say anything about how long she was visiting the flower before people took it for the queen."

"...She's older than she looks. If she's gone on a very long errand I can tell the difference, and then she looks young again, not even that much older than me, after she uses my hair. I'm not that old yet but I'm assuming it'll work on me too, the rest of it does."

"Mm. So you really don't know how long she was visiting that flower."

"...Do I sound old-fashioned to you? I learned to talk from her, we should have similar speech patterns. If she's that old it'd show up."

"...You sound a little weird," he says. "I'm not sure if old-fashioned is the word I would use, but it does kind of fit."

"I've asked her how old she is. She said a lady never tells. Is that a thing?"

"It's a... slightly old-fashioned thing..."

"There's generally a thing where it's considered impolite to ask a woman her age if the answer seems to be much higher than twenty, especially if she's rich or noble. But I haven't heard 'a lady never tells' except from women who were obviously old."

"And - not that I have much direct experience here - from what I can tell, it's not supposed to be impolite to ask your own family things like that. But that could just as easily be different for different people, I guess."

"You're not really eighteen yet. But you will be pretty soon."

"I suppose I would've noticed if the lanterns went up on my birthday. Even if she hadn't told me what they were for, and then I'd have noticed that she didn't want to talk about it."

"Yeah."

"Are they pretty up close? Have you seen them?"

"Yeah. I have and they are."

"I guess maybe I'll get to watch this year. Unless they stop doing it when I'm there."

"If you ask them to do it anyway, I'm sure they will."

"Keeping in mind that I've never seen them up close, and they both have brown hair... you do kind of look like Queen Ranae."

"I'll see if I can find you a good portrait of the queen somewhere."

"Well, maybe. What do you want them to call you?"

"I'm really used to 'Rapunzel'. 'Claribel' doesn't feel like my name at all. ...Rapunzel is a plant she named me after a plant -"

"...Well, that's... possibly telling..."

"I mean, it's a nice name, she likes plants, it made sense, but..."

"Yeah, but."

"There's kind of a lot of that."

"Sure seems like it," he agrees.

"I've never met her," he says. "Far as I can tell, you just really are the princess."

"Yeah. I'm... getting that."

"Maybe somebody at the Snuggly Duckling - that's the inn we're headed for, isn't it cute? - will know where to find a portrait of the queen. I don't think anyone will have one, but I guess it's possible."

"There's an inn called the Snuggly Duckling?"

"Yep. It's got a sign out front and everything. I'd say we're probably more than halfway there."

"All right." Up he gets. He's fairly tall, so it's quite a bit of up.

She is not as tall, and a bit slower and more careful about significant changes of position, but presently she is up too and following him through the woods.

Her and her seventy feet of hair. He looks back occasionally to verify that it's not getting caught on any bushes.

It is sliding quite merrily along through the forest! It's really nearly as impressive as the healing glowing part.

"Your hair is kind of amazing," he says.

"It is. I'm glad it doesn't work like normal hair only longer. I'd pretty much have to roll it up and cart it around in a wheelbarrow."

"Also I suppose it would break, and I don't know if that would be the same as cutting it."

"Yeah. Sort of seems like it's... all one thing, that way. It's magic non-breaking hair and magic stops-working-if-you-cut-it hair, and if it was only the second thing that wouldn't make as much sense."

"Yeah. I think it's also lighter than it should be, but it's hard to weigh normal amounts of hair to get an estimate of how heavy it 'should' be."

"No kidding."

"Do people ever normally have yellow hair? I thought so but it just occurred to me that my sources might all be fairy tales and those might not be reliable about normal hair colors. Mother has black hair, like you, but she's as pale as I am."