Chapter I.2
Chapter Two
Fifteen Years Before the Wedding, Continued
Greta had no memory of crying herself to sleep, but the next thing she knew, she was waking up in a world that was distinctly wrong.
The blankets around her were soft and warm, and the air smelled fragrant with flowers and something else—sweet and unfamiliar.
The sensations were almost enough to lull her back to sleep, almost enough to overpower the awful certainty in the back of her mind that this much comfort could not be trusted.
Her eyes were raw and heavy when she opened them, and she gasped.
The last, peaceful tendrils of unconsciousness slipped away like the blanket when she sat up and glanced around.
The shutters on the room’s single window had been cracked to let in light.
It was scant but enough for her to see by, and there was so much to see.
Aside from the bed—a large bed, bigger than her father’s and covered not just in finer blankets but softer pillows, as well—there was a lone chair and an ornately carved trunk.
The wall behind the bed was covered in a tapestry that appeared to be made of flower petals that swooped and swirled in shades of light to the darkest pink.
When Greta tentatively touched them, they felt like petals, too.
The room was roundish, and opposite the bed was a bigger hearth than any Greta had ever beheld.
Its enormous chimney climbed high into a tall ceiling, and there were no doors or walls on either side of it, only curtains that had been pushed aside, offering hints of another room beyond.
If she’d cared to, she could have run in circles around the hearth.
Greta rubbed her fingers over the pillow’s silky embroidered fabric.
The design showed a solitary brown owl on a tree branch, and the pillow yielded gently against her chest as she pressed it to herself, neither lumpy nor scratchy like the thing she’d made do with at home.
It smelled of lavender as she crushed it.
Home. The terrible sense of wrongness in the back of her mind finally made sense as yesterday’s memories rose to the surface and sucked the breath right out of her. She had run, but somehow she’d ended up in the witch’s house. In her bed.
It seemed a strange place to put a prisoner, but what did Greta know? She wasn’t a witch.
Greta’s lip trembled, but she remembered Hans’s parting words. “Stay close to me.”
She’d tried, yet he hadn’t stayed close to her. Had he escaped? Had he made it home? Or was he in the other room, also a strangely kept prisoner?
There was no sign of the witch at the moment, and only one way to answer these questions. Perhaps she could try to escape again. Yesterday’s attempts hadn’t gone well, but maybe if the witch wasn’t watching and couldn’t thwart her with magic, she could find the pebbles …
The witch must have removed her shoes while she slept, but they sat at the foot of the bed, and Greta squished her feet into them, wincing. Quietly as she could, she peeked around the other side of the central chimney.
This side of the cottage was larger still.
Two chairs, each decorated with more fine pillows, faced the hearth, and a large table, simple but clean, took up much of the room.
It was covered in pots and pitchers and jars, as were the shelves built into the white-washed walls.
The shelves held stacks of books too, thicker ones than the book the priest carried at the chapel.
Greta hadn’t realized the world contained enough words to fill so many.
Herbs and flowers hung from the tall ceiling, and more light seeped in through long, unshuttered windows.
The room looked cozy, and with a definitive shortage of blood and bones and all the horrible things the witch was said to collect.
Since there was still no sign of her brother nor the witch herself, Greta crept in deeper.
The coals on this side of the hearth were lit, and the scent of food emanated from an oven so large she could have crawled into it.
Greta’s stomach growled, and she ignored it.
Yesterday, she’d wanted to be good, and she had failed.
She wouldn’t make the same mistake with the raspberries again.
If she got out of here, she would ignore the garden and its promise of food, and just run.
It was harder to ignore the lure of the strange items on the table, though.
One bowl was filled with blue liquid the color of the afternoon sky.
Another jar contained spheres in a rainbow of colors.
Their glow reminded her of the wish the witch had given her father.
Were these magic spheres then? If she took one when she escaped, could she use it to find the path—
Home. Find the path home. The thought’s final word strangled her with its meaning, closing her throat. She had no home anymore. Nowhere to go if she escaped. She’d been traded away.
Tears threatened, and her hands curled into fists. She wanted to leave. It wasn’t fair.
The cottage door swung open, and Greta backed up into the curtained doorway.
“Awake at last, I see.” The witch’s hair was wrapped today in a black scarf, and she carried a basket that she set on the table. “Good.”
Greta glanced around, her hopes of escape withering as her heart beat faster. Could she dash past the witch? Yesterday, she’d seemed to move so fast; Greta wasn’t sure.
It didn’t matter, for the witch seemed able to read her thoughts. “Calm yourself, child. Let me show you something.”
Curiosity and fear kept Greta’s feet rooted to the meticulously swept wood floor as the witch pulled one of her many jars off a shelf. “Here, take a look.”
When Greta didn’t move, the witch sighed and brought the jar to her. Greta shrank back farther, but there was nowhere left to go.
The witch unstopped the jar and held it closer, and Greta was unable to stop herself from peering inside.
Color swirled within the glass—more reds than anything else, but also blues and purples.
Some was so dark it might have been black.
It was more magic, clearly, but something about it felt familiar.
In a strange, unfriendly place, the substance in the jar was like finding her favorite socks or the doll her grandmother had made her years ago, before she died. A bit of familiarity.
“These are your emotions,” the witch said, putting the stopper back.
“All your rage, all your fear—it’s full of power.
I captured it for you as you ran around and screamed like a panicked chicken, and I’ll store it here for you.
So, you see, your misery isn’t gone. You can have it back anytime.
If you want to hold onto it now, you can.
All I ask is that you leave it bottled for the moment so we can have a calm, reasonable talk. Can we do that if I give this to you?”
Up close, the witch’s skin was neither as unblemished nor as fair as Greta recalled it appearing, but lightly brown and slightly wrinkled.
Tucked among the silvery gray of her hair were a few strands that remained even darker than Greta’s own.
She looked older than she had in Greta’s memory, yet stronger for it and less frightening.
The creases around her eyes lent them a kindness that Greta was afraid to trust.
The witch offered Greta the jar, and she took it, instinctively.
There had to be some trick here, but she didn’t know what it was.
All she did know is that whatever was in that jar felt like it belonged to her.
She wanted to hold it, and more—she wanted to understand what the witch was talking about, but she barely knew what to ask.
Greta clutched the jar to her chest. It was faintly warm in her hands, and it gave her the courage to speak. “Are you going to steal all my blood?”
The witch rolled her eyes. “I hope we are going to do a good many things together, but your blood will always belong to you.”
“What are we going to do?” Eat her? Some people whispered that the witch had a pet monster, and after she took your blood, she would feed your remains to it.
Greta had seen no signs of a monster yet, but she hadn’t gotten very far today.
And as she’d already noted, she could easily fit in the witch’s oven.
“First, we are going to feed you,” the witch said. She opened the oven and removed a small pan from within. “You’re nothing but skin and bones. Sit.”
Although the smell of food grew stronger, Greta hesitated. “Where’s Hans?”
The witch slid something out of the pan onto a trestle, and she patted the seat in front of it.
“Back home with your father, I imagine. Whether the man will be pleased to see him is another story, and not my problem, though I’d have liked to help him if he gave me the chance.
Both of you need to put some flesh on your skeletons, and with a father like that …
Bah. But your brother was less valuable than you, so I couldn’t bear to keep him here when he was determined to leave. ”
A weird sensation settled in Greta’s chest. Hans had made it home, but without her.
She thought she should be happy about that, but then she remembered how he’d sounded like their father as he yelled at her to hurry.
The way he hadn’t waited, as though his patience for her shortcomings could only go so far—farther than their father’s, but not far enough to risk himself for her sake.
She didn’t feel capable of happiness, and her lip quivered, and she clutched the jar more tightly.
“Put the jar down,” the witch said, not unkindly. “I told you—it’s yours. But there’s nothing worse than cold eggs when they’re supposed to be hot, and goodness knows, you need better food than whatever scraps your father was feeding you. Come on.”
Greta inched forward, urged on by her stomach and the increasing certainty that she was not going to be able to escape, but she didn’t sit.