The Forest Grimm, page 21
“They will if you talk in plain enough terms,” Henni replies, as if she’s known them for ages. “I think they’re twins,” she adds, like that somehow illuminates her point.
I reach for the raspberries, pluck a handful of them, and pop one in my mouth. A burst of incredible flavor lands on my tongue, and my eyes grow round. “Did raspberries always taste this wonderful?”
“Nope,” Axel says. “Nothing has ever tasted this good.” He’s cracked open a melon and is scooping up its soft flesh with his hand. “Not lamb chops, not roast goose. Most definitely not squirrel meat.”
The girl, Gretel, snaps up her head. “Meat?”
Axel nods, talking around mouthfuls of melon. “We tried to catch a squirrel in that cage there.” He points a sticky finger at our ramshackle creation, which I’ve knotted on top of my pack. “But no luck. Not that I’m complaining. Like I said, what you have here”—he digs out more melon—“is unsurpassable.”
I’m too busy inhaling raspberries to add my hearty agreement. The fruit is better than iced gingerbread and plum dumplings and peppermint sticks, all the sweet things I remember eating as a child when sugar wasn’t so hard to come by.
Axel’s ramblings and my gorging seem to be lost on Hansel and Gretel. She looks to her brother, who really must be her twin for how similarly they look in age and appearance. They both even have a thin streak of red hair among all their shocking white-blond locks. She repeats the word she said a moment ago: “Meat.”
A wrinkle forms between Hansel’s brows. He nears the squirrel cage we’ve brought. Gretel follows behind, traipsing lightly on her toes like she’s anticipating a wonderful surprise. Hansel shakes the cage and peers inside it. He turns to Gretel. “No.”
She waves an impatient finger at my pack. “Meat.”
Hansel clumsily fidgets with the cinch.
“We don’t have any meat.” I pluck a cucumber and tear my teeth into it. “Or any food, for that matter. That’s why we’re so”—I choke on a large swallow of crisp perfection—“grateful.”
Hansel ignores me. He finally succeeds in prying open my pack, and he dumps its contents on the ground. I should probably be upset, but all I care about is getting more food in my belly.
Gretel kneels beside Hansel. They curiously pick through my belongings: the red veil, my shoe, my tin of lures, my flint kit, my obsolete map, my last candle, and my emergency apothecary supplies. They prod things, shake things, even bite things.
They have to be the strangest people I’ve ever met. “We really don’t have any meat.”
Gretel stands and marches toward me. I shrink back, surprised at the fire in her coal-dark eyes. She grabs my hand and yanks me toward the other side of the room, where a nook breaks away from the circular chamber we’re in. It’s also encaged in roots, but the ground is covered with … “Bones.” My voice croaks, though I’m not sure why I’m so disturbed. They’re just tiny bones, small creatures that Hansel and Gretel must have eaten before collecting their remains.
“Meat,” Gretel enunciates, and points at them, like she’s the one who has to speak plainly to be understood.
I nod, but ease a step away from her. “Clearly you like meat, but I promise we don’t have any. No meat.” I cut my hand through the air for emphasis.
Hansel stalks toward me. I retreat another step, feeling the sick crunch of bones beneath my bandaged feet. “Axel, tell him we don’t have any.”
Axel finally looks up from his clean-picked melon rind. His brows slant down when he sees me being cornered. “Whoa, what’s going on?” He wipes his hands on his trousers and strides toward us.
Henni scurries over too. “I’ll help Hansel and Gretel understand.”
“I think they already do,” I say. “They understand ‘no’ and ‘meat,’ and they don’t seem very happy about it.”
Axel glances behind me at the bones. “We didn’t catch any squirrels,” he tells Hansel again. “No. Squirrels.”
Gretel whirls on him. “Meat,” she demands.
Henni raises her hands, trying to calm everyone. “No meat,” she tells Hansel and Gretel as if talking to small children and not teenaged strangers. “But we have medicine, how about that? Med-i-cine.” She pantomimes injuring her hand and rubbing a salve on it. “Medicine is good. You like medicine?”
Gretel’s nostrils flare. She speaks through clenched teeth. “Meat!”
The edge of Hansel’s mouth curls in a wicked grin as his gaze rakes over Henni.
My friend’s confidence shrivels, and she tucks closer to Axel for protection. “I think you were right, Clara,” she hisses. “I saw a black cat.”
“Don’t worry.” I elbow past the twins to reach her. “Now that we’ve found you, we can leave.” I face our hosts. “Thank you for the food, but we have to be going now.”
Henni doesn’t wait to see how they respond. She scrambles for my pack and stuffs the red veil inside it. Axel takes my hand, and we creep backward without removing our eyes from Hansel and Gretel. As simpleminded as they may seem, their threatening looks are very real and deadly.
Axel squeezes my hand twice, some kind of signal. I don’t understand it. I meet his gaze. Shake my head. Whatever subtlety he was going for is lost as he shouts, “RUN!”
We whirl and race for the archway. Henni sprints with us.
Slam.
A thick tree root stomps in front of us and blocks our exit. We backtrack, but another root lashes out and snatches Axel’s knife from his belt. We dart in every direction, but the tree moves faster. More roots lurch up, snap down, and encircle us. In mere seconds, we’re trapped in a woody cage in the center of the room, an inner enclosure of roots within the outer claw of Hansel and Gretel’s home.
Standing outside the trap, the twins wear smug grins. Gretel reaches inside the cage and pinches Henni’s upper arm. “Meat.”
CHAPTER 28
“The red rampion didn’t protect us,” Henni says mournfully.
“We knew it couldn’t keep us safe forever.” Axel rams his shoulder against one of the roots of our cage. Like all the other roots he’s been testing, it doesn’t snap or budge.
Several hours have passed. It’s morning now. Grayish light seeps in the chamber beneath the pine tree, squeezing in through tiny gaps between the draping vines.
The rain let up a few minutes ago, and once it did, Hansel and Gretel stepped outside to do who knows what. Perhaps discuss in their fragmented language how they plan to devour us for breakfast.
I shudder and work faster at digging the escape hole I’ve been making. So far it’s only a few inches deep, and at the rate I’m going, it could take days to finish. The earth is packed hard, and I worry that Hansel and Gretel don’t have the patience to let us starve to death before nibbling on our flesh. If that were the plan, they probably wouldn’t have let us gorge ourselves on their food to begin with.
I blow a lock of hair out of my eyes. “Maybe the red rampion is still protecting us more than we realize.” I hope against all hope that it’s true. “The roots aren’t fighting us anymore. Perhaps the tree only attacked us in the first place because Hansel and Gretel willed it to.”
Henni shifts away, turning more of her back to me. “I don’t think that’s how the forest’s magic works. People can’t control it.” Her mood dwindled soon after we became trapped. Whatever kindness and forgiveness she had granted me has vanished.
“Maybe people can’t, not fully anyway,” I relent. “But I wasn’t wearing my cape when I first found Ella, and she told me the forest wouldn’t harm me in her hollow because she had made peace with it. What if she was the one holding the forest back from hurting me?”
“Then why didn’t she make it attack you when you ran away?” Henni asks.
I note how she says “you ran away” instead of “we.” “Maybe that requires more magic, and hers wasn’t strong enough. Fiora’s magic seemed to be powerful enough,” I add, “at least with the way she could control her hair.”
“Fiora has been in the forest longer than Ella,” Axel adds. He shifts to lie on his back and pushes against another root with his legs. “It has to have something to do with that.”
“I’m sure it does.” As soon as I agree, a knot forms in my stomach, and I regret the words. If Axel’s logic is true, then my mother would be more powerful than any of the missing villagers, and the longer a person lives here, the more powerful—and more mad—they become.
“I don’t see how any of this helps us,” Henni mutters. “We don’t have magic.”
What if I do? What if Ollie spoke truthfully and I can see the past like my grandmother sees the future? But even if I could, how would that benefit us?
“You know what would help?” Axel snaps at Henni. “You lending a hand in getting us out of here instead of sulking over there and feeling sorry for yourself.”
Henni flinches. Her eyes start to water, and she presses her lips in a stiff line. She crawls over to where I’m sitting and starts digging the hole with me, her gaze downcast.
The three of us fall quiet. Axel’s jaw remains hard, but his neck is flushed red. He’s never lost his temper with Henni. Until now, they’ve only bickered in a harmless brother-sister way. I’m sure he feels bad about it, but I don’t blame him. If I wasn’t trying so hard to make amends with her, I might have snapped too.
Henni is the first to break the silence, her voice small and trembling. “I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself, Axel. I was feeling sorry for Ella.” A tear slides onto the bridge of her nose and rolls down it. “It’s my fault she became Lost.”
He lets go of the root he’s been wrestling. “What do you mean?”
She worries at her lip and picks at the dirt beneath her fingernails. “The night before you and Ella were supposed to marry last summer, Mother and Father asked me to take some of the wedding gifts to the little house you and Ella were going to live in together. You had already moved in, but when I knocked on the door, you didn’t answer. So I went inside and…”
She breaks off, her fingers shaking. I stop digging and hold her hands to steady her.
She sucks in a deep breath. “I found a letter you had written to Ella.”
Axel’s brows knit together. “I burned that letter.”
“You tried to. It was at the edge of your hearth, but it was only half burned. I saw Ella’s name on the envelope and I…” She squeezes her eyes shut. “… I read it.”
Axel goes as still as the roots encaging us. “And you showed it to her?”
She nods, her tears streaking faster. “I’ve never been sorrier for anything.”
Axel remains motionless, struggling to absorb what she’s told him.
My gaze shifts between my friends. “What was in the letter?”
Henni wipes her nose on her sleeve. “Axel confessed he didn’t love Ella. He said he didn’t want to go through with the wedding.”
I turn back to Axel, confused. “But you told Ella the same thing for yourself that night.”
“He hadn’t told her yet.” Henni sniffs.
“And that wasn’t all the letter said.” Axel kneads the back of his neck. “I wrote it as a way to work up the courage to tell her something more—something I didn’t think I could admit in person. But then I decided against it and threw the letter in the fire. It would have only caused her more pain. So I never mentioned that part to her … though if she did read my letter, I’m not sure why she stayed silent about it.”
“She didn’t want to believe it could be true,” Henni murmurs softly, brushing away more tears. “That’s what she told me. Before I gave her the letter, I’d been helping her try on her veil. She looked so happy and beautiful and…” Henni hangs her head. “Maybe I resented her for that. Everything always came so effortlessly to Ella. She didn’t have to try to be noticed. She was loved by everyone, my parents most of all, and I was just the quiet girl, the girl easy to forget. And when Ella became Lost, I became even more invisible.”
“Oh, Henni.” I hug her. “You’re my best friend. You were never invisible to me.”
She smiles sadly and wipes her eyes again. The dirt on her hands smears onto her cheeks. “That’s why I never told you about the letter.”
I pivot back to Axel. What aren’t they telling me? “What did the letter say?”
His blue eyes hold mine, warm but also pained. “I wrote to Ella that I didn’t love her … because I was in love with someone else.”
His words fall whisper soft, but they crash through my chest and stab my heart. I’m partly to blame for what happened to Ella? As hard as it was to lose my mother, at least it wasn’t my fault that she left Grimm’s Hollow.
The cage seems to spin. I struggle to steady myself. “But you couldn’t have loved…” I stammer, unable to say “me.” “Not back then.” Not back when Ella was perfect and breathtaking and didn’t possess a shred of madness. Not when I was sixteen instead of seventeen and ten times more awkward and graceless.
“It wasn’t your fault, Clara,” Henni says. “If I hadn’t shown Ella the letter, she would have fought for Axel. She would have persuaded him to follow through with the wedding.”
I still can’t fathom everything they’re saying. How could Ella have been so threatened by me? “I never meant to…” I scoot backward and press the heels of my hands to my eyes.
“You didn’t do anything wrong.” The cadence of Axel’s words treads between confidence and vulnerability. “I’m responsible for the way I’ve always felt about you.” Always? “Even if it took me too long to realize it,” he adds quietly.
He must be exaggerating. How could he have loved me that long when I’ve locked the deepest part of myself inside me? When I’ve set limits on my life since I was a child, back from the time Mother first gave me the acorn from the Grimm oak?
It’s only been in the last few weeks that I’ve caught heart-wrenching glimpses of what my life could be like if I allowed myself to live within the warmth of Axel’s love.
But it’s a life I can never have.
“No!”
Gretel’s voice startles me. I flinch as she comes through the archway of the root chamber. Henni shifts to block the hole we’re digging, and I rapidly cover it with a fold of my cape.
Hansel marches inside after his sister and forges a straight path for our packs. He’s left them by the archway, just out of reach of our cage. He digs inside Henni’s pack and pulls out Axel’s knife. He stowed it there last night.
“What is he doing?” Henni squeaks.
Without warning, Hansel wheels around and raises the knife on us. The roots of our trap draw back and widen, making room for him to enter.
“Don’t even think about it!” Axel launches himself across the cage to protect Henni and me.
“No, Hansel!” Gretel stomps her foot. The roots tighten again and prevent her brother from reaching us. “They sleep.” She points at us. “They die. We eat after.”
He growls, but she isn’t flustered. Chin lifted, she pries the knife out of his hand.
Seething, he shoots a dark look at us and storms outside.
Gretel spares us a glance that’s just as withering. “Sleep,” she commands, and leaves the chamber, following Hansel.
CHAPTER 29
We refuse to sleep, even as two more days pass and we remain imprisoned. Clearly we’re meant to die before Hansel and Gretel eat us—hardly a comfort—and we don’t know if sleeping will kill us directly. Perhaps the food we ate was poisonous after all, and we have to be in a slumber before it takes effect. Or maybe we’re meant to slowly starve to death, a “sleep” we won’t wake up from.
My stomach rumbles as I keep digging the hole with my friends. The raspberries and cucumbers I ate two nights ago didn’t satiate my hunger, and without any water to drink, the pangs in my belly grow more brutal by the hour.
It’s the middle of the night now. I can barely see Axel or Henni, but I feel their hands moving in tandem with mine as we work together.
The biggest problem with the hole we’re digging is that we keep running up against underground roots. We’ve had to start over twice now, seeking a spot that’s unencumbered.
Then there’s the problem of hiding the dirt. We’ve been spreading it out evenly across the ground, adding it to the earth of our floor. So far Hansel and Gretel haven’t noticed the gradually rising foundation of our cage. They peek in on us from time to time, occasionally grabbing fruits and vegetables to eat, their faces sour as if it pains them to swallow the food.
They never stay for long. Maybe we’re too tempting to be around. When Gretel isn’t clenching her jaw, she’s licking her lips. And Hansel, who has taken to wearing Axel’s knife tucked in the waistband of his trousers, keeps massaging its hilt with a sweaty hand.
Henni’s fingers stumble around mine as she scoops out another handful of dirt. “We’re going to die before we ever finish this hole. I can literally feel myself wasting away.”
“We’re not going to die,” I assure her. I won’t allow Hansel and Gretel to be my Fanged Creature. I’ve resigned myself to death, but not to letting two cannibalistic strangers eat the flesh off my bones after my heart stops beating. “We just need to keep digging and stay awake.”
Staying awake is our most difficult task.
As we weaken with hunger and fatigue, each of us starts to nod off. My head careens onto Axel’s shoulder, and he jostles me awake, only to collide with me a moment later as he dozes off. Then when Henni’s hands don’t return to the hole, I paw around in the dark and find her planted facedown on the ground and quietly snoring.
Over the next hour or so, in a blur of half-consciousness, I realize the three of us have piled up on each other, our bodies limp but occasionally flinching as we vainly strive to fight off sleep. I’ve blanketed myself over the hole while Axel’s arm and one leg are draped over me, and Henni has crashed on top of him.
Who knows how long we sleep for, but when my eyes crack open again, it’s light outside—our third day in the cage.
