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Eugene knew more about being a princess than Rapunzel did.
She'd sort of expected that. She knew how to sew, read, write, figure, paint, cook, carve, preserve, light a fire with no help but the sunlight and some curved glass, understand Pascal and apparently, while the glowing hair had vanished, the thing about inspiring people to want to help her hadn't. But even she had to admit she'd never, say, worn shoes in her life. Or worn jewelry. Or worn a dress more complicated than one layer.
As for her understanding of the complicated, touchy world of nobility - earl and duke and count and lord . . . well, it was pretty much entirely derived from the few storybooks Gothel had allowed her to read.
And she still caught herself thinking Mother before she thought Gothel sometimes and had to drag her thoughts back, trading straight brown hair and worried green eyes and a worried but encouraging smile for the face that had ruled her all her life. It was hard. Maybe it would have been easier if there'd been a body, but when she and Eugene made their way out of the tower, Rapunzel had found nothing but dust and Gothel's cloak. All that was left of Gothel, really, was what Rapunzel remembered.
But the fact was, Gothel had prepared her for a life of the two of them living in the woods all by themselves, scrounging a living and never seeing or trusting anyone, while Rapunzel played dutiful golden flower and never knew there was anything else. And now she was a princess. And being a princess, it turned out, wasn't just something you were, something you could show up and exist as without any work. It was something you did. Princessing was work. Rapunzel could accept that. She could believe that. She just had no idea how to do it.
If not for Eugene she might have run away. Run away from princessing and people and the worried eyes of a new mother and the strangely adoring eyes of a father - something she'd never even thought of having - and everything else she didn't understand. Pascal helped, and Maximus helped, and even the new Mother and Father helped as much as possible, but if not for Eugene, it might not have mattered.
Eugene's magic was that he refused to take it seriously.
It wasn't that he didn't think it was important. "This kingdom," he'd said, "is the nicest kingdom I ever stole priceless jewelry from, and I think it's important to keep it that way." And he'd meant it. He just didn't take it seriously, because he was Eugene, and Eugene didn't take anything seriously unless he was literally about to die.
And even then, it was even odds.
Today he lounged on the kind of couch thing (which Mama said was called a "chaise longue" and which Eugene had translated as "long chair, made to sound fancy") in the outer room of the whole suite that was Rapunzel's, while Anna and Myrtle, the maids, helped her into a formal dress.
It felt very, very strange to have maids. At first it had been Myrtle and a woman, older than Rapunzel, named Karla, but Karla hadn't been able to adjust to the fact that Eugene would do things like set up camp in Rapunzel's outer room and eventually, after one case of Rapunzel bursting into tears after trying to find a polite way to explain that she did not want Eugene to go away and she didn't care about propriety, Mama had quietly had Karla replaced.
Anna, by contrast, was about the same age as Eugene and took him in stride. Well, sometimes she yelled at him and once she'd thrown a cushion, but she never tried to make him leave and seemed to genuinely believe his assurances that he'd rather cut off both his hands than hurt Rapunzel at all.
It still felt strange to have maids, but Myrtle had explained it one day while trying to deal with Rapunzel's still-unruly hair, which didn't seem to want to grow at all and so which required some ingenuity to decorate properly. "Look at it this way, Highness," she'd said, working in the little bits of jewelry on clips which, in Rapunzel's hair, at least made for some sparkle. "Your job is being a princess, yes? Our job is to take care of all the little things - "
"Like what you're going to wear," Anna had volunteered, "or how to do your hair."
" - so that you," Myrtle had finished, "can think about everything else."
And that had made it a little better.
Today Myrtle had picked out a green gown that Rapunzel quite liked, as it didn't need a lot of complicated underwear to look finished in. Anna was doing up the buttons while Eugene lounged outside.
"So I was thinking about something the other day," Eugene said, raising his voice to carry into the other room. Anna, who'd been fussing with the placement of Rapunzel's belt, snorted.
"Did you hurt yourself?" she called back.
"Be nice," Rapunzel said, but she was hiding a smile. On the dresser, Pascal snickered.
"Grievously," Eugene retorted, "but we all know I'll endure any pain for the Crown. Anyway, Goldie," he went on, "you've seen the cats that hang around, right? You have to have, they're everywhere."
"Of course I have," Rapunzel called back. "Mostly, I've seen them learn that it's a bad idea to try to eat Pascal."
Her chameleon looked at her innocently. Myrtle snorted a brief laugh. She liked Pascal, and the first time a cat had tried to pounce on him she'd been very upset, until Pascal had demonstrated that he was more than capable of dealing with a cat.
"Right, good, perfect," Eugene said, "so you know how right after Pascal's smacked them around a bit, they start acting like nothing ever happened and they meant to do that? You need to be more like a cat, Goldie."
Anna patted the last button and Rapunzel got up, went into the other room and sat down in a chair near the chaise. "You lost me," she said.
"You are the princess," Eugene said, reaching over to gently chuck her chin. "So stop worrying so much about whether or not you're doing every little thing right. Whatever you do, mean to do it, and that'll be right, because you're the princess and what you do is automatically what princesses do."
Rapunzel eyed him. "I'm not sure Mama would go for that."
"I think she'd go for anything that made you relax a bit at dinner," Eugene disagreed. "I can ask her, if you want."
"Don't you dare." Rapunzel wasn't sure, but she didn't think Eugene had been supposed to take her mother (no, she told her brain, not new mother, right mother) seriously when she'd said, Oh, don't stand on formality! Consider yourself part of the family. But Eugene had and nobody had stopped him yet, even if it made Rapunzel nervous.
Eugene got up and came over to drop a kiss on her head, deftly avoiding the hair-jewels and tiara. "Relax, Goldie," he said. "Nobody wants you to mess up."
Rapunzel sighed and leaned against his side. "You should marry me," she said.
"If you think royal dinners are complicated," Eugene said, "just imagine royal weddings."
"I could handle it." Rapunzel poked him in the side. "You're just . . ." and she trailed off, because she couldn't really say things like afraid or stubborn, and went with, "you."
"I should hope so," he said. He caught her hand and pulled her up to her feet. "Come along, Princess Rapunzel. Your mama's waiting with some important people in the garden and they're just dying to meet you."
Rapunzel let him drag her out of the room with only a little bit of resistance.