Witch
"They mean to kill us."
Hansel is younger than his sister and this conclusion horrifies him.
Gretel moves her dark eyes to his pinched face, the tracery of fine blue veins in his milk pale skin, stretched tight over his bones. "Of course they do," she whispers.
"Don't you understand?" he demands with hysterical energy that she would tell him not to waste if she herself had the strength. "Papa, mama, they mean to kill us!"
Gretel says nothing.
He shivers. "Don't worry though," he says, crawling into bed beside her to huddle close and share their meagre body heat so that their parents do not wake tomorrow to the realisation that there is no need for murder. "I have an idea."
Hansel is bright and clever; Gretel has known always that he is the apple of their parents' eyes, that were it not for the extremes of starvation it would be her alone being led into the forest the next morning. She is too like their mother, who is bitter about something she lost or was not strong enough to keep.
"Just let them try," Hansel promises fiercely. "Just let them try!"
—
There is power in blood. There is power in the way it ebbs and flows within a woman to the call of the moon. There is power in sacrificing an animal, in drawing a knife across the throat and watching the blood splash like a spring. Runes written in blood are stronger than any other. And of all the things that linger, blood will remain longest of all.
Understand, I have no time for good and evil. I am older than the forest that surrounds me; in my time things that were good have become scorned and things that were once forbidden have become the norm. It matters not to me if my deeds are what another would call evil. If witches cared for what people thought of them they would never become witches.
So there is power in blood. This is the first truth.
The second is that there are some sacrifices that are better than others.
—
Witch.
The word haunts you.
You are thirty-nine now, a mother, a grandmother.
The whispers have increased as you age without aging, and it is true that the wrinkles and hollows of your face are created by the artful use of pastes and powders. It is true that you take care to hide your hands in your apron, or busy them with minor tasks if you are surprised. It is true that you dye your hair to hide the fact that it has never gone grey. If you manage to reach twice your current age your eyes will always be as sharp and black as they are now.
So they whisper. Just the wives, now, merely gossip, nothing more. For now the comments are merely that you are young for your age, and that your hands have remained free from rheumatism and your eyes are still sharp enough to know a pigeon from a hawk in flight from a long distance.
One day soon the words will twist in their mouths, become whispers of events so long ago when you were a girl, and stumbled free of the forest your brother's hand clasped in your own and burning tears in your eyes. The words will twist, and wistful remarks on your youth will become scarcely hidden barbs about how you don't seem to age as they do.
The words will twist, and one will be repeated above all.
—
The white pebbles gleam like silver in the light. Hansel does not question this.
He smiles bright with delight, his fair hair moon-bleached to the colour of bones. "Look sister," he says, pointing out their path of silver stone. "See how they shine! We will be home before dawn."
Ah, and what will happen then, Gretel thinks. They will try again and again until they succeed. But she wishes the pebbles to shine bright anyway, because Hansel must see this. Hansel must understand what she has kept from him.
—
Of all the animals, man is the greatest. So man's blood has more potency than any other. And innocents, theirs is best of all.
See my altar of bones? See how very small they are? My child's is among them.
—
They will talk of your potions and your poultices. They will talk about how you can read and write, an unnecessary skill that's above your station, and they will speculate on where you learned such a pretentious thing. They will talk of how you saved Margery Little's baby (and they will talk about how you failed to save Susan and her child, though you tried your hardest). Oh, they will talk.
Witch.
You will pretend you can bear their taunts, but you will keep in mind the fate of many women before you, who were wise in the ways you are wise, and yet stayed as the people they helped turned against them.
You will think of the forest, and the cottage there waiting for a new owner.
—
Twice they follow the stones back home. Twice more they are brought back to woods and left to die.
"Why?" Hansel demands, eyes desperate and wild. The bread is not where he scattered it, their path obliterated by birds as hungry as they.
"Better they live to have other children than we live to starve without a means to provide for ourselves," Gretel explains.
He does not hear her. He kicks the nearest tree with fury, and then, staring blindly, begins to weep.
—
Don't look so horrified. I chose my life over my newborn son's, is that so terrible? Do you not know how many women die in childbirth? Of fever, of blood loss, of a thousand different complications, all to bring forth one more squalling brat that has a very, very slim chance of reaching even childhood, let alone become an adult.
It was sheer practicality, my girl. Your parents understood that, else they'd not have tried to kill you. They merely exchanged the food you could eat into life for them; I exchanged a burden that would have died anyway for enough power to save myself.
I reasoned, since most of our kind grow into our power with the coming of the blood, surely an innocent babe's spilled on a moon-full night must have even more.
And I was right.
—
Gingerbread walls and sugar icing panes and chocolate shingles, mortared with caramel and glazed with honey.
Such an impractical thing to make your home, a pointless expenditure of power, and in truth you were not surprised when you woke with a heavy head the next day to find that the walls were ancient stone and the roof merely thatch. Once the mouse has been caught, there is no need to keep baiting the trap.
You remember that Hansel was in the cage but you were free, and you stared at the witch with your blank eyes and waited.
—
Hansel does not like the way the witch looks at his sister.
Gretel sweeps and cooks and cleans and does not talk. He hears the witch talking to her and hears her replying, and long hours pass where she is not sweeping, cooking or cleaning, when she talks to the witch.
He does not like the way she is changing before his eyes, the way her hair so neat and tightly bound in its child braids has become wild and tangled and suits her, the way her cheeks, so hollowed and stark, are filling with flesh that makes her look like a child well cared for, a child that someone loves, when there is no one to care for her but the witch.
Hansel is afraid. He knows the witch desires to eat him, but that is not what he is afraid of. He is afraid of the way the witch looks at his sister. More than that, he is afraid of how his sister looks at the witch.
—
I knew what you were the moment I saw your eyes. Our kind, we all have the same eyes. Red like rubies, red like the blood we take power from. Yours are dark now, but they have the sheen to them that proves you one of us. When you have lived long and overcome your squeamishness to sacrifice as I do, your eyes will be as red as mine.
Squeamish, yes that's what you are, my finicky lass. One child every three years and you are equal to the greatest of those men with their staffs and old Latin (as if a dead language is more potent than a living one, I ask you). Where they got that power in the first place I'd like to know.
And of course, you must take care never to reveal so. Men do not like to be usurped. Fah, as if they were never infants bawling upon their mother's teat. Why we even bother bringing them forth I'll never know, unless it is the acceptable risk of creating daughters.
You'll understand one day, the way I look at this world. It's in your blood, after all.
—
The witch taught you to read, write and figure. You taught such skills to Hansel when you escaped, though he was a little put off by your own aptitude. And really, what use was the ability to him? He would be a woodsman like your father, what good was it that he should be capable of writing his own name instead of merely placing a cross?
The witch taught you moon cycles and old legends and herbs, and spoke magic and power. And slowly, the longer you listened and the more you fell into the orderly pattern of her life, you grew to like her, and respect her, and even sought her out, instead of trying to avoid her.
You knew she was lulling you. You knew better than to believe she could not tell the difference between dry bone and soft finger. You knew she was merely waiting until the day you would accept what you were and could become under her tutelage, the day you would say goodbye to all you had been when you slaughtered Hansel together.
But you let yourself be lulled. The witch did not believe you were useless for nothing but marriage and babies. The witch thought more of you than your brother with his fair hair and bright blue eyes – you with your scrawny body and scabbed knees, with your pale yellow hair that had to be scraped tight back and your black eyes with their witch sheen.
So your brother was in a cage; he had always been your parents' favourite. Surely it was time he understood cruelty a little? Surely it was time he understood that not everyone would love him for his bright smile and his baby blue eyes.
But you did not wish him dead. Never that.
—
Hansel knows today is the day. His deception has been uncovered, the witch seizing his plump wrist rather than the proffered bone.
He looks to his sister, but she is grim and silent and her eyes are deep and black where she stands a step behind the witch, watching at her shoulder like a wild-haired imp the witch has called to be her familiar. Suddenly he does not know her.
"Prepare the oven," the witch says.
"Sister! Sister!"
Gretel looks, and for one moment, one stolen heartbeat of his life, her eyes are blood-covered, as red as the dawn on the morning their parents led them away for the third time.
Gretel looks, and takes a deep breath.
—
I have let myself age; I have grown weary of the constant chatter of people. So I rest here, and every two years or so I turn my house into the confection you saw the day your brother and you passed by. It brings children, it brings the blood I require.
Of course, it is not the best solution. It has been eight years since a child passed this way, eight years until you and your brother. My powers have waned with the effort of making my cottage into gingerbread every one of those years with no reward, but it is no matter. With your brother I will recover them, recover them and teach you all that you might be.
—
You move into the cottage. Your neighbours have grown restless; the whispers that run from mouth to mouth have acquired that word you so hate. So you move into the cottage and prove them right.
You think briefly of your brother, diligently pursuing the truth in the wine. You think briefly of your son, plying magic tricks before the king. You think briefly of your daughter, her new baby on her hip. You think briefly of the row of little graves that belong to you, your infants that never saw their first birthday.
Well, a woman knows when she marries that she must leave her life behind. You are only repeating a pattern you have already walked once before.
It takes a week to clean the house from top to bottom, a full day for you to scrape the oven clean. You take down Grandmother's books, and you begin to read.
—
"I don't know how to prepare the oven," Gretel says, soft and timid as she has never been. "You haven't taught me that yet."
The witch sighs with irritation and pushes her out of the way.
Hansel sees his sister's glance, and nods. Without thought, she shoves the old woman in.
They run from the cottage to the sound of her screams, Gretel blinded by tears, Hansel weak-kneed with relief.
Hansel looks at his sister, red-eyed with weeping, and hugs her tight, thinking she is grieved for killing someone, even a witch. Now that the witch is dead, Gretel will be Gretel again. All the poison the witch whispered in her ears will fade away. They'll run home, and their parents will greet them happily for the gold Gretel knew the witch kept in locked strongboxes, and everything will be well again. Everything will be fine.