Chapter 10
BECOME A HUNTSMAN, AS YOUR QUEEN COMMANDS.
Follow your mentor into the woods.
Everything always comes back to the woods, doesn’t it?
The place where your father left you. The place where danger first snapped at your heels.
The place where witches dwell and lure weary travellers into their magic house snares.
It’s always the fucking woods, with its dark shadows and monstrous noises, each petrified tree a fang in a maw that already has you in its grasp.
But it’s different with your mentor, this huntsman who bites back.
“I wanted to be a locksmith, you know,” he says.
“Found it didn’t suit me, so I decided to learn to hunt.
The man who taught me gave me a gun that never missed when fired.
An excellent gift, to be sure—I killed three ogres with it—but a lazy gift, too.
No, Hansel, you’ll learn the hard way. It’s the only way you’ll know what you’ve got inside you is yours.
You can lose a gun, but you can’t lose skill. ”
From him you learn how to differentiate old tracks from new tracks, what animals leave what shapes behind, how to spot blood on the grass and how to follow it.
He teaches you how to string a bow, how to load a gun, how to aim, and how close a creature has to be before you let an arrow or a bullet fly.
How to command Friend to retrieve your quarry and how to make her follow a scent.
How to hit a moving target, and where to hit to end it fast. What to do when you meet a wolf, or a bear, or a bobcat, or a lynx.
How to follow the sunlight home, how to dress your own wounds, how to find water, how to survive for days and days on your own.
How to field dress, skin, debone: fish, deer, foxes, pigs, cows, pheasant, fish.
How to be a hunter and a butcher all in one.
How not to panic at the sight of blood and how to get used to the tack of it in your palm lines.
The sound of each bird. The shape of the leaf on each green thing.
How to tell when rain is coming. How to sleep in a tree.
“Look,” he says, “by the time I’m done with you, you’ll be able to put a bullet in the left eye of a fly on the branch of an oak tree two miles away.”
The days spin into weeks, into months, into years, and he teaches you how to be a huntsman.
In other words, how not to be afraid of the woods.
* * *
Three years pass.
Halfway there, Gertrude, you think. Don’t lose hope.
* * *
On a days-long trip into the woods, you finally find the courage to ask a question you’ve wanted to ask since the beginning. Laying on your bedroll, gazing skyward to identify constellations, you finally ask it.
“What about a witch? What do you do about a witch?”
The campfire crackles behind you. Somewhere in the darkness, a rabbit snaps a twig. The huntsman scrutinizes you for a long silence.
“Tricky business, witches,” he says. “Stab a witch fifty times, and she’ll walk away unscathed. Shoot an arrow through her eye and she’ll pluck it out like a splinter. Witches aren’t normal people. They’re not for the likes of you or me.”
“I don’t understand,” you say.
“If you ever meet a witch, Hansel, the best thing you can do is run away,” he says. “Only a prince or a princess can defeat a witch. Don’t ask me why. That’s just the way of it.”
But Gretel killed a witch, you think, and she was no princess. Unless…
Unless Gretel didn’t kill the witch.
Nausea tightens your stomach and warms the back of your tongue.
If Gretel didn’t kill the witch—couldn’t kill the witch—then the house made of gingerbread still stands, and the witch still lives, and Gretel alone turned to ash after tumbling inside the oven.
But how? How could anyone escape an oven unscathed?
You open your mouth to ask, but the words strangle themselves. In order to ask about the witch, you have to tell him about the witch. You’ll have to tell him you ran away when you could have saved your sister.
So instead, you ask a different question. “Have you ever met a witch?”
The huntsman surprises you when he answers, immediately, “Yes.”
“Did you run?”
“I didn’t know she was a witch until it was too late.”
Fireflies blink in and out of the shadows. Friend yawns and noses your palm for attention, which you dutifully give in the form of scratches to the base of her ear.
“What did you do when you learned?”
The huntsman offers you that strange, pitying look you’ve never been able to interpret. The shadows cast by the firelight deepen the lines of his face, under his eyes and astride his mouth. His eyes soften with pain. Then he shakes his head. He stares up at the sky, but that doesn’t hide his agony.
“I did what I had to do,” he says, “to survive.”
* * *
Another year passes. Then another.
Until, suddenly, three more years have slipped through your fingers.
At the end of this year, if Gertrude succeeds, the swans will be human again, and she will know you were taken, and maybe you will see them again.
So many nights you have lain awake on the floor, rehearsing how you will ask the Fair Queen if she will grant you leave to reunite with them.
So many mornings, you have nearly asked.
For reasons you do not understand, the request always turns to ash on your tongue.
(One day, you will be glad you never let her know who you love.
One day, you will see you were keeping Favorite safe, even at a distance.)
* * *
Though you are nearly a grown man, with dark stubble pinpricking your jaw, you cannot help but feel petulant as you help the huntsman pack for a solo trip.
“Give me one good reason why I can’t go,” you say.
“Because you’ll fuck it up,” he says. He claps your shoulder with his meaty palm and offers you a tight smile. “And because the Fair Queen ordered me to go alone.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” you say. “Shouldn’t I go? To learn from you? What are you hunting, anyway?”
He doesn’t answer.
“A dragon?” you suggest. “A monster of some sort?”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” he says. “Don’t wish your innocence away.”
“Give me a hint, at least.”
You know he won’t. You don’t know why you asked.
Sighing, you strap a saddle onto his mare. Within the hour, he’s ready to leave.
He doesn’t tell you where he’s going. He doesn’t even tell you when he’ll be back.
“Will you at least tell me what happened after you killed the ogres?”
“Eh?”
“You never finished the story.”
He strokes his beard. “Oh, I’d hoped to marry a princess,” he says with half a laugh, “but, ah… It wasn’t to be. Not in this life. I’d already pledged my loyalty to the Fair Queen. Though I did give the princess the gun for safekeeping.”
One day, it will occur to you that he gave her the gun so that she could protect herself from the Fair Queen. One day. But in this moment, you simply watch him mount his horse, disappointed with his story’s ending.
“Listen, Hans,” he says because you’re too old for Hansel now, “the queen will be married by the end of the month. She wants everything to go well. Keep that in mind.”
One day, when it is too late for you, you will understand that was your hint. It wasn’t a very good one, but it was all he could say.
* * *
The end of the month comes and goes. In an egregious display of finery, the Fair Queen marries a charming, vapid prince who cannot muster a single smile. The Fair Queen wasn’t his first choice, you hear the maids whisper. His True Love died last year; they say she was found with her heart torn out.
At the wedding feast, she raises her cup to you—you, who provided every bite of venison, every pheasant, every duck, and every goose.
The brightness of her smile shrinks your heart; you bow your head to avoid looking at her any longer.
In the skittering of your heartbeat, in the gooseflesh raising the dark hair along your arms, some inner voice says run away, run away, run away.
You swallow down the sense that pleasing her this day was an awful, awful thing.
* * *
Three months from the day the huntsman left, guards escort you to the Fair Queen’s private library, located in a hitherto forbidden part of the palace.
“You may enter,” she says, in her voice sweet as wind chimes, and the heavy oaken doors open of their own accord.
The moment you step over the threshold, the doors close, and you’re left with the sense of being swallowed by a whale.
You’ve never seen the ocean—never seen a whale—but you've heard stories of their massive jaws, how they open their mouths to swallow water and every living thing in that water, too. One moment you were sharpening your hunting knives; the next, you’re here, standing before a queen dressed in mourning black.
“Sweet Hansel,” she says. A grieved smile pinches her mouth. “Ah, but you’re too old for that now, aren’t you? Nineteen, my goodness. Nearly six years since I saved you in the woods. I’ve watched you grow from a runt into a man.”
Weaving her fingers together, she crosses from the burning hearth to stand in front of the wall-length mirror on the opposite side of the room.
Through the adjacent window, sunlight streams into the room; where it graces her skin, she gleams like porcelain.
Like a thing made, you think, not a thing born.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” you mutter in the silence. The silence stretches on. She works her jaw, swallowing down some great agony. You have never seen her this way, and you can think of no reason she would summon you to see such pain, unless—
“Have I… disappointed you, in some way, Your Majesty?”
“Oh, Hans,” she breathes, “never. Though I am afraid I am about you disappoint you. Hurt you, even. Our dear huntsman…”
Her lower lip wobbles. Dewdrop tears glisten in her eyes. She does not look at you. Instead, she looks into the mirror, into the eyes of her own reflection.