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The world beyond Corona is even more vast than Cassandra had imagined.
Over the next hill is an incredible, snowy landscape. It’s only barely autumn. She has come far north, and the sparkling view rewards her for the journey.
She’s been gone for a month. In that month, she has barely begun to scrape the surface. Corona’s cartographers are skilled, and she has yet to truly cross into unknown territory, but she has only had one bare-bones travel almanac to guide her. Kingdoms have fallen and risen. Landscapes have changed. She relies on herself and her animal companions to survive, and succeeds. Cassandra adores the challenge, the sights, the people.
It still doesn’t feel like enough.
Cassandra meets a people who live here, sometimes traveling from home to home between seasons. They raise reindeer and cherish stories. Cassandra bleaches hers clean, and tells them with abandon.
Now and then, she composes unwritten letters to Rapunzel in her head. ‘Hey Raps,’ she begins. The next part falls apart quickly: 'You’d love it here.’ 'I hate you.’ 'You tried to stop me.’ 'I screwed up.’ 'Thank you.’ 'I miss you.’ 'I almost preferred death.’ The longer she thinks about it, the worse the second line gets.
Best not to consider writing at all.
They tell her to wait a few weeks, if Cassandra’s so insistent on continuing to head west from here. They offer hospitality while she waits for the river’s ice to firm up, until a horse can cross it safely. She accepts, warmly, thinking that she can learn a little from their hunters, and they can learn from her.
Part of the problem is that she never wanted any of it for herself, not truly. Without Zhan Tiri’s influence, she thinks any scrap of bitterness in her heart over Rapunzel’s role in her life would have remained just that: a scrap. But over time it had been carefully tended to and fed, until it sprouted at just the right time. Shouldn’t she have known better than to let it seed in the first place?
Unless she had wanted it.
There are a few grumbling folk who don’t like the idea of a woman, traveling alone, seemingly untouchable, staying in their homes and eating their food. They stare at her with hatred or fear from across campfires. Cassandra keeps an eye on them.
How much of it is her fault? Just because she holds no resentment towards Rapunzel now, does that make her earlier resentment a lie told by Zhan Tiri, or is that just a convenient truth for her to believe? Does it even matter? She tried to kill Rapunzel. Rapunzel will downplay it as fighting, arguing, even 'being disagreeable,’ but Cassandra knows what her hatred had been driving her to do.
If she had stayed, who was to say that bitterness wouldn’t grow again?
She hears whispers from the dissidents in passing. They sound like the word “witch.” This isn’t the time and place for Cassandra to say no, you’re thinking of my mother. She thinks Eugene would laugh.
Cassandra doesn’t know how much distance it will take for her to consider returning. To feel safe again. She tore open a rift between herself and Rapunzel, in the place where love should have been, and now all she can think to do is try to outrun it. Closing it isn’t even on the table. How could it be? On one side is Rapunzel, self-possessed and coming to know who she is with all her heart.
On her side is someone who betrayed every ideal she once dreamed of standing for, who threw away every relationship she cared about, for revenge on someone who never once meant her harm.
One of them attacks her, out of the way, in the deeper woods where Cassandra hunts the game that has been fattening itself in preparation. It takes little effort to leave him lightly injured and strung up in a way that should take him a while to escape. They don’t try to touch her again after that. She has never needed magic to make her point known.
So, she’s running away. But maybe she’s also running toward something, to make it seem a little less pathetic. Cassandra wants to know herself. To be herself. To reach her potential, and see who she can be when she isn’t caught up in who she’s standing next to. It has to be better than the alternatives. Surely she can find something out there to give her meaning.
One day, she desperately wants to close the rift.
Today, she leaves her kind hosts. They share jerky and dried fruits with her, and send her on her way, apologizing for the less welcoming people among their kin. Cassandra says farewell, warmly. She expects she’ll never see these people again. She wonders if she’ll remember their names. On this journey, she has met so many lovely people. On this journey, she has yet to make a friend.
She wonders if Rapunzel misses her hair the way Cassandra misses hers. She wonders if Rapunzel feels it too: the phantom tingles running through her from fingertip to chest, a frisson of power long gone. There were moments where sun met moon that made her feel like they should have been the same, instead of opposite. There were times when Rapunzel glowed so brightly that Cassandra wanted to be swallowed in the light and never let go.
Cassandra dreams of falling out of love, and wakes up to the sunrise, again and again, heedless of her wishes.