Dinner in the Royal Dining Hall was quiet that evening. The King was out with his Steward, Rapunzel was abnormally subdued, and Eugene and the Queen were observant enough to realize that Rapunzel did not want to be asked how her day had gone. When she failed to rejoice over the potatoes roasted with rosemary—her favorite—they both made mental notes to talk to her after dinner and find out what was wrong.
"So Eugene," the Queen asked, putting an end to ten solid minutes of Rapunzel giving the barest replies to the Queen's attempts at conversation, Eugene stealthily slipping Pascal bits of food, and the Queen pretending not to notice half of his meal wasn't making it to his mouth, "how was your meeting with the Captain of the Guard?"
"Pretty good," Eugene answered, which wasn't the truth, not exactly. The meeting had been boring and awkward, because neither he nor the Captain of the Guard was sure what Eugene was, exactly, and why the King had scheduled a meeting for him with the Captain of the Guard in the first place. So they'd ended up talking about fortifications and then, when Eugene had proposed playing a hand of cards, the Captain had ushered him out of his office.
Still, it had been the pleasantest 30 minutes he'd ever spent with him.
"How was your day?" Eugene asked the Queen, who launched into an account of preparations for the Winter Festival…which actually wouldn't be for quite some time, but the Queen lived months ahead of everyone else. She had to, after all.
It was when the Queen asked Rapunzel how the Great Hall should be decorated that Rapunzel set down her fork and asked to be excused.
"Are you feeling well?" the Queen asked.
"I'm fine, just a little tired. May I be excused?"
There was nothing to do but say yes, and Rapunzel left the table.
Pretty soon it was just Eugene and the Queen staring at each other over their rosemary roasted potatoes...and Pascal, covertly latching his tongue around one of Eugene's artichoke hearts.
"I'm gonna take a wild guess," Eugene said, "and say Rapunzel's first official day at Corona's Council didn't go so well…"
It hadn't.
When the King at last hurried into the Royal Dining Hall, their suspicions were confirmed by the grim line of his mouth. They didn't receive an account from him, however. He just asked where Rapunzel was and, when they told him she had already retired, he headed to the door.
"What about your dinner?" the Queen asked, as the servants set it out.
"Not hungry," they heard him answer. By now he was out of the room.
"Well Pascal," the Queen sighed and gestured towards the King's plate, at last looking at the lizard she had been pretending not to notice the entire evening, "go ahead."
He did. Or, at least, he ate a few more artichoke hearts before scurrying out of the room.
Eugene and the Queen looked at each other. It didn't take much intelligence to see that their after dinner plans, consoling Rapunzel, were already being taken care of by a King and a chameleon.
"Wanna play cards?" Eugene suggested.
"So I found you at last."
Rapunzel looked up from her spot in between two crabapple trees. The King's bulky figure loomed over her, blocking out the moon's white-blue glow.
"I'm impressed," Rapunzel mumbled. "I chose this spot because I didn't think anyone would find me." The crabapple trees were part of a winding extension of the palace garden, a section out of sight from the palace's windows. Prior to the King's entrance, the only company Rapunzel had was a day's worth of memories she'd just as soon forget.
"Well," the King admitted, "I only found you by following Pascal."
On cue, Pascal ran up onto Rapunzel's shoulder. Either because of the night's shadows or because of Pascal's natural camouflage, Rapunzel hadn't noticed him until then.
"He can always seem to find you," the King said and began to lower himself down onto the ground by Rapunzel, who eeped.
"I wouldn't do that!" she warned him, causing him to freeze. "The grass is covered with crabapples—I'm afraid I've already ruined my dress. I didn't notice until it was too late."
The King shrugged. "Is that all?" Then he sat down heavily next to her. She could hear the splerch of squashed fruit. "Did I ever tell you crabapples are my favorite fruit?" he asked her.
Rapunzel shook her head. She probably would have remembered something like that. "I didn't know people ever ate them."
"Most people cannot stand the taste. They think they are too sour, but I like them." The King picked up a nearby crabapple. It was brown and splotchy—not fresh enough for eating. So he tossed it into the nearby pond instead, and the glassy surface was disfigured by a series of ripples. Rapunzel, following his lead, picked up a crabapple of her own and chucked it into the pond…but the force was so great that she and the King were splashed in the process.
She sighed.
"Some days it just feels like you can't do anything right."
The King nodded. "Some days it does," he agreed.
"Some days," Rapunzel continued, "your shoe falls off as you're walking to meet a group of councilors and you don't realize it until it's lost in the crowd."
The King nodded again. "That has been known to happen."
"And then," Rapunzel went on, "you call Lord Curmegiant 'Lord Curmudgeon' the entire day and no one corrects you until afterwards because they're all too embarrassed to say anything and you don't realize 'curmudgeon' is an insult because there are still so many words you don't know!"
"And some days," the King offered as he tossed another crabapple into the pond, "do you declare yourself an opponent of the proposition to donate unused farmland to the kingdom's orphanages so they can raise some of their own food?"
"Because you've gotten it mixed up with Proposition XX.—that is, building a dam at Freeman's River? Ugh!" Rapunzel slumped against a tree trunk and heard a succession of splerches. "They must have thought I hated orphans!"
"I think most of them unraveled the mystery when you stated Proposition XX. would cause an overpopulation of green-backed swamp leeches. Giving orphans farmland probably would not affect that."
This assurance, which the King had intended to be in the style of the comforting wryness Eugene employed so successfully with his daughter, only made Rapunzel groan and slump down further. Splerch, splerch, splerch.
"I prepared so much," she said, running her hands through her hair until her brown locks stuck up on end. "I went to the river site and read volumes and volumes about all the wildlife there and studied water currents and for what? So I could look like a lunatic! I thought I would be so impressive!"
"You were impressive," the King insisted. "I was very convinced that a dam was a bad idea, even if you convinced me in the time allotted for the orphanage farmland discussion. Everybody has mix ups sometimes."
"Yeah, but why did that 'sometime' have to be today? And then I had that coughing fit and coughed apple cider all over Lord Curmegiant's new robes—why did all of that have to happen the same day?"
The King couldn't answer that question. So instead he turned the conversation to a more fruitful avenue.
"Did I ever tell you about my brother Oswald?" he asked.
Rapunzel shook her head. She'd seen him in the royal portraits, a spindly version of her father captured on canvas somewhere between childhood and adulthood. When she'd asked her mother what had become of him, she'd explained he'd died of consumption when he was seventeen and added that if Rapunzel had been a boy, they'd been planning on naming her after him. This was the first time, however, that the King had brought him up.
"Your uncle," the King began, "was born with a golden tongue. He had an anecdote for every occasion, could smooth over every social rumple, and could immediately engage the interest of everyone. And he knew it." The King's face had been difficult to read before, but now that he was recounting his brother's faults, affection radiated from him. "He was one of the vainest people I have ever known. I would call him overconfident, except that I have to admit his confidence was justified. In short," he summarized, "he was a natural at public speaking. I was not. I became nervous and sweated and mixed up names and when things really started going wrong, I had a tendency to faint."
"You? Faint?" Rapunzel had a very active imagination, but her strong father fainting was something beyond even her capacity.
"It is true. Ask your mother if you do not believe me." He held up his hand as if swearing an oath. "Anyway, I was to appear, for the first time, before the Council of Corona on my 16th birthday, and I was terrified. Oswald thought my anxiety was hilarious—he could never understand not feeling at home at a podium. But he knew I was worried sick over it and reveled quite a bit at his big brother's anxiety. He especially liked doing imitations of me where he would fall down."
"He doesn't sound very nice," was out of Rapunzel's mouth before she could help it.
The King's mustache twitched as a small grin tugged at his lips. His eyes misted over and he rumbled in a low chuckle. "He was my brother," he said by way of explanation, "brothers do things like that. At the time, though, I was not so tolerant. We got into a fight and he bet me I could not speak before the Council without fainting. If I fainted, I had to eat twenty crabapples—this was before I liked them. So I went before the Council and…" he trailed off.
"And?"
"And the next day I had to eat twenty crabapples," he finished.
Rapunzel scrunched up her nose in disgust. True, she'd never actually eaten a crabapple, but these mottled brown squashes her father was throwing into the pond did not look appetizing.
"And you know," the King continued, "the first ten or fifteen were…horrible, but eventually you develop a taste for them. You would be surprised at the things to which you can accustom yourself. When I first bit into a crabapple I thought I could not stand it, but I did stand it, and I bit again and again and again, and I grew to like them...but not that day. I did not grow to like them until next month when Oswald convinced me to make the same bet again."
It was pretty difficult for Rapunzel to miss the moral of the story, but she didn't think it applied in her case. "But it's not that I don't like talking to the Council," she explained. "In fact, I was really looking forward to it. I just wish I hadn't embarrassed myself so much."
The King shook his head. "The lesson to be taken from my crabapple story is that…" he paused and thought about the best way to word his meaning. Even after all these years, eloquence did not come naturally, "on the day I fainted in front of the Council, I thought I would never live it down. And when I started eating those apples, I thought the sour taste would never leave my mouth. But now when I think of fainting before the council, all I feel is pride that I have come so far. I do not faint anymore. I do not mix up names, I do not sweat—I have made a lot of progress. In the future, when you think back to opposing farmland for orphanages and spitting apple cider on Lord Curmudgeon, you will be proud of the progress you have made, and that will make your progress all the sweeter. And when I think of being forced by my younger brother to eat twenty crabapples, all I think of is what a foolish peacock Oswald was and how much I loved him for it. Even bad memories can have good associations. Who knows? Maybe years down the line when you think of losing your shoe in the Council Chamber, you will also think of your loving father who consoled you about it and told you that, even though you did mix up some propositions, he was very, very proud that you, humiliated though you were, stayed in the Council Chamber until the very end of the session, and did not dash out of the room like he did on more than one occasion."
The second half of the last sentence came out muffled, since at the word "proud" Rapunzel sprang at her father and gave him a tight, fierce hug.
As the King pulled Rapunzel up to her feet, he had one more thing to say. "These crabapple trees do not look like much in the moonlight," he admitted, "but if I were you, I would come back tomorrow morning when the flowers are in bloom. It is amazing how much nicer things can look after a good night's sleep."
The next morning, before breakfast, Rapunzel and Pascal made their way to the crabapple trees. She had considered asking Eugene to join them, but she suspected he would want to sleep in. He and the Queen had stayed up very late that night playing cards.
With the exception of a lot of birds, the garden was deserted at this time of day, so when Rapunzel gasped, "Oh Pascal!" only Pascal heard it.
She had seen the trees before, of course, but she had never really appreciated the soft pink blossoms laced around the branches. A stream of adjectives coursed through her mind—virginal, cloud-like, cottony, heavenly—but none of them really captured the sight before her. She would have to paint a picture, she decided. But first—
She plucked one of small, red apples from a branch and bit into it.
Urgh! Her hand clutched at her mouth as if she had been wounded and the bitten crabapple fell to the grass.
Maybe she would learn to like crabapples someday, but today was not that day.