Free The Fairest of Them All by Carolyn Turgeon

I knew how to read, of course, Mathena had taught me that, but I had not done very much book learning before then. Now I welcomed the relief the words offered me, the opportunity they gave me to disappear, atleast a little, the promise they gave me of forgetting everything altogether.
    I came upon spells I had not encountered before in our practice. Spells to change the color of one’seyes, to call forth a storm, to enter someone’s dreams, to transform a stone into gold, a leaf into a feather, a rose into a bird. There were endless spells, and the more they meddled with the substance of a thing, or sought to change a human fate or heart, the more difficult they were to decipher. Warnings abounded, scribbled throughout. Do not cast this spell during the full moon, or while thecrops are being harvested. Do not cast this spell with a black heart . I came, too, upon new spells for things I had seen plenty of times before: spells to seduce, to call a love to you, to end a pregnancy or help create one.
    It was something I saw in one of those spells that first made me suspicious of Mathena, and the teas she had fed me while I was pregnant. When women came to see us desperateto end their pregnancy, we’d always given them pennyroyal and mugwort, with their distinctive, sharp scents. In the book, I saw herbs like tansy, parsley, cotton root bark, and had a visceral memory, the spice of parsley on my tongue. She would have been very careful, wouldn’t she? Feeding me herbs I did not know, in small amounts. Would she have done that to me? I knew I had had parsley, andthe more I read about tansy and cotton root bark, the more I suspected that these were the herbs I’d been given. I stole into the root cellar and sifted carefully through the baskets of dried herbs we kept there. But I did not find what I was looking for.
    When I confronted her, she denied it.
    “Why would I want to harm you, Rapunzel?” she asked, looking at me. “When I have given up my whole lifefor you?”
    I remained silent after that.

    A s spring shifted to summer, our garden became more and more lush, filled with vegetables and fruits so large and bright they were almost obscene. We kept the garden watered and fed and were able to start harvesting, filling baskets with bright vegetables and storing them for colder months.
    And every day I visited my baby’s grave.Soon enough, a twisting, green-leafed plant grew from that spot, with beautiful crimson flowers bursting from it, like hearts. I stroked its leaves and petals, whispered into its roots, watered it with my tears.

    I n the fine weather, women started appearing at the house regularly again. We were constantly working to tend to them as well as the garden, which everyone whocame to us whispered had to be the work of pure magic. No one could imagine vegetables like that growing from the earth on their own.
    I threw myself into my work. What else was there for me to do? I knew now the grief of those women, with their unrequited loves, their fatherless children, their falls in fortune, their barren gardens and fields.
    It occurred to me one day to take down a lock ofmy hair and brush it along the arm of a woman sitting in front of us, her sick child on her lap. I moved my hair from her to her child, and it happened just as it had happened with the prince and the man in the forest: I could feel them. The woman, who until that moment had been like any other woman from one of the kingdom’s villages, now had a life and soul to her as vivid as Mathena’s or my own.I could see her memories, the years she’d spent caringfor her sick mother, her sick children, her husband who’d gone into the king’s army and never come home. I could feel their hot, wet foreheads under her palms, under my palms. I could feel the illness that even now was wending its way through her boy’s body, draining him of the little strength he had left.
    Without even thinking I told herwhat to do. “Wash him with vinegar and