Page 60 of Rapunzel's Gambit (All That Glitters)

“Show me your wing,” I ordered the moment I was steady.

It wasn’t pretty. The violently purple gel-like substance plastered against his wing was slowly eating away at the flesh. I used my skirts to wipe off what I could, but each time I touched him, he bellowed in pain again.

“Transform! Burn it out,” I told him, panicking at how much gel was on his wing. Would it kill him?

“A roof really isn’t the best place to transform,” he grumbled, but began to shimmer all the same, twisting in upon himself and shifting. But halfway through his transformation, he gave a shout of pain and slipped.

“No!” I screamed, trying to grab at him as he fell.

I was too slow. Pollox plunged to the ground—with only half-sprouted wings open to slow his descent—and landed in the very same bramble bush that Drake and I had fallen into.

“Pollox!” I screamed, staring over the edge. He had finished transforming but was lying spread-eagled in the bush. My heart attempted to break through my ribs as I watched him. Oh, scales, was he dead? “Pollox!”

He slowly raised a hand and dropped it again. Was that a good sign? Or a bad one? I stared at him, trying to determine if his chest was rising and falling at an appropriate rate, but from this height, I couldn’t tell.

Griffin must know that he had a limited window of time to arrive and kill Pollox. I had to get down and help him. If he was unable to fly me down, I would need to tie together bed sheets or something. But to my dismay, when I turned around, I saw the room’s luxurious interior slowly dissolving, shimmering until it finally faded from view.

“No,” I whispered, staring at the desolate chamber. Only a few random things remained—a couple books, a solitary shoe on the floor, and the gauzy ladder hanging from the trapdoor, much too short to get me all the way down the tower.

A thin, threadbare rug lay musty and dirty on the stone floor beside the empty fireplace. The wardrobe still stood in place, but the air was stale with neglect and wood rot, and it gave the impression of a once beautiful piece of furniture that had fallen into disrepair. No paintings adorned the walls, and all of the windows were so filthy that it was impossible to look out of them.

I pulled open the door to the wardrobe, and a tiny tingle rang through my body, a ghost of the magic that I had felt my first time opening the doors. I flung the doors wide and found…nothing. No beautiful dresses were hung, no shoes littered the floor of the wardrobe. I wrenched open drawer after drawer, desperate for anything that would help me. The only thing to see were cobwebs and dead cockroaches, their legs shriveled up and stuck into the air. If the room’s magic was fading along with Pollox, it couldn’t provide me the rope I needed, couldn’t make blankets appear that I would be able to tear into strips and braid into rope to descend.

Finally, in the last drawer, my hand brushed against something other than dust. The fine-toothed comb inlaid with jewels felt icy under my freezing fingers. I pulled it out and sank to the floor, staring at it. How long would it last before it faded too, just like the final vestiges of Pollox’s life? There was nothing I could do, no way to get down the tower without Pollox to help me.

Idly, I pulled the comb through the hair that spilled into my lap and watched as the strands lengthened. Something in the back of my mind niggled at my thoughts, trying to tell me something…but what? The comb dug into my hair again, and once again, my hair extended nearly a foot.

When the realization hit me, I jumped into the air and began digging the comb into my hair over and over. My blonde hair piled up around my feet, and I had several yards before I began twisting it into a long rope. It was a long way down, I kept reminding myself as I tugged the enchanted comb through my hair repeatedly. Frequently, I had to pause and twist my hair, tying knots where I could to help the strands stay together and strengthen each other. If this didn’t work… I didn’t want to think about the alternative.

After I had a haystack size of twisted and knotted hair, I dragged the pile to the window. Hair weighed a lot more than I expected, and I had to struggle to get it to move at all. My head felt weighed down just by the hair that stretched from my scalp to the floor, never mind the piles dragging through the dust and dirt.

Just as I prepared to shove my hair over, I paused. As intelligent as I considered myself to be, I lacked in the area of depth perception. With all the coiled hair, I had no way to measure if this much hair would be adequate or not, and the mass weighed several times what I did. If I shoved it over, I would be taken down with it. Or if I had gauged the distance correctly, the weight of my hair would be far more than what I would be able to hold up, especially with only my head. My neck would be snapped faster than Pollox could gobble up an ox.

Frustrated, I sat on the mound of golden hair, which felt far softer than any haystack, but which I sank into, my posterior dropping right down to the floor with my feet and arms still stuck up in the air and my nose jammed into my knees.

With difficulty, I extricated myself, squirming until I wiggled out of the hairy prison. I sat on the ground and studied the hair. It wasn’t enough to simply extend my hair the length of the tower. I could tie the end of my hair to the balcony railing and lower myself down, but what would happen if I had miscalculated and ran out of hair halfway down? Griffin had accurately predicted how much rope to use, curse him.

Anxiously, I brought up the comb several more times and twisted more hair. Preventing an untimely death was reason enough to ensure that I had ample amounts of my makeshift rope. Once the balcony was entirely full, I glanced over the side again. Pollox was still down below, but it seemed that he had at least rolled off the bush and was lying on the grass. How much time had passed? Well over an hour since he fell, I was sure.

I wound the end of my hair around the balcony railing, quadruply looping it around to ensure my safety, then heaving on the hair to make sure it would hold. I approached the edge. The towering height still made my head spin when I looked down, and I crouched back down, breathing deeply to slow my heart rate. There was no knight to hang onto, and no harness like before. I was entirely on my own.

After spending several minutes lecturing myself that getting scared would get me nowhere, I held tightly to the hair closest to the balcony, where it was tied. But still, my fear of falling to my death held me at bay. The short fall with Drake near the bottom had been bad enough; I could only imagine how much pain Pollox was in. He had likely broken many bones. I ground my teeth, frustrated at my cowardice. Every time I tried to build up my courage and begin my descent, my feet and hands refused to obey my instructions, and my stomach lurched back toward the room as if desperate to get me as far away from the balcony edge as possible.

In the distance, two horses with riders went galloping across the narrow stretch of dried riverbed, only momentarily visible before they vanished from view again. Had Father sent soldiers? Dragon hunters? They must know that Pollox was injured after his erratic flying. What if it was Griffin?

Anger clouded my vision. If it was Griffin, I would make him pay dearly for what he did.

Using his climbing technique as inspiration, I wrapped my left foot around the hair rope and stepped on it with my right shoe, creating a makeshift foothold so that I didn’t have to hold up the entirety of my body weight with my thin arms.

I lowered myself hand over hand as I periodically released the pressure on the hair wound around my foot and let the hair rope slide up. At least going down was much easier than ascending the rope.

How long did I have before the riders arrived? If only I’d paid more attention during my astronomy classes when the instructor had taught about tracking time based on the sun’s arc across the sky. As quickly as I could without feeling like I was in imminent danger of falling to my death, I made my way down to Pollox. The weight of the comb in my pocket reassured me. If I had miscalculated, I could always use it to continue to lengthen my hair.

Such a fear was unwarranted. My hair wasn’t quite long enough, but I had descended close enough to Pollox that I was able to release my hold on the hair and drop the last few feet to the ground. “Pollox, can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” he grunted, blearily opening his eyes, then furrowing his brow in confusion as he stared at the hair still connected to the tower. “Oh, scales.”

An odd sensation tugged at my scalp, and I looked aloft. The rest of my hair had begun to fall, slowly at first, but faster and faster as it went slithering through where I looped it through the balcony’s railing and came raining down upon me and Pollox.

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