"Ten."

"And - then what did you do?"

"Learned how to steal things. Did a lot of that. Moved around a lot, too."

"How'd you learn?"

"Practice, mostly. It helped that I did all my screwing up and getting caught while I was still little and cute and half-starved."

"'Half-starved' is an exaggeration, but... they didn't feed us enough. And when I got out, well, my main sources of food were theft and the kindness of strangers. Neither one's what you'd call perfectly reliable."

"What? You keep - smiling at me."

"In this particular case - it's nice, that you don't like thinking about me being hungry. It makes me happy that you care about me like that. In general - I smile at you a lot because I like you a lot and when I look at you I feel like smiling."

"Okay."

"You're doing it again," Rapunzel says, and she squirms a little, blushing.

"Should I stop?"

"I - don't know. It makes me feel weird, I don't think in a bad way but it's weird."

"Weird as in something unfamiliar, or...?"

"It's definitely that."

"Okay."

"Maybe I'll figure it out. But I don't want to write anything down until I'm sure I have a way to do it privately. I don't think I believe that today was the only time Gothel read my notebooks."

"Yeah, I don't believe that either. And I won't read them, but I can't speak for anybody else. Come up with a code, maybe? So you're the only one who can read it in the first place? A locked box might work too, but - well - locks can be opened in a variety of ways."

"I was thinking a code, yeah. The question is how to memorize it without leaving enough of it written down for someone else to figure out how to read it if they wanted to."

He thinks about this. "Invent it with notes on how it works, write it in a lot until you're used to it, then destroy the notes? And keep them with you all the time until you do - or with me, if you're going somewhere you can't take them along easily - so nobody else can get at them?"

"Or I could come up with some - paragraph or poem or something that I can memorize word for word, and write that in code, and know how to refer to it."

"That'll work too, if you can pull it off."