The Girl Gingerbread in the Woods of Winter White

by Bethany R. Lindell

  "Wait!"

  Gingerbread went still. Her eyes still showed her the dark lady leaning over her, her features untouched by the red of the fire surrounding them, but the voice had changed.

  "Clatch?"

  The figure dipped its head, and shreds of the shadows blew away like dandelion seeds. The hair was bright, not gray, and sleep-tousled instead of rigorously pinned in place. Gingerbread squeezed her eyes shut, blinking the lingering nightmare out of her vision.

  Clatch's face appeared out of the gloom and Gingerbread wilted into her bedroll. Her sword gleamed silver between their necks.

  She scowled and shoved Clatch away. "You idiot." She slammed her sword home and Clatch exhaled, touching his throat. He gasped when Gingerbread's balled up blanket hit his face.

  "What did I tell you about my nightmares? Let me sleep through them or I might come out thrashing. I could have slit your throat Clatch!"

  "I noticed," he told her, one eye appearing over the blanket as it slid to the ground. He sounded more like himself, but his face was still pale, the skin around his eyes tight. She didn't think he'd slept. "But something's happened."

  Gingerbread narrowed her eyes. "All right, fine. What was worth almost getting your head chopped off?"

  Clatch's hand fell away from his neck and the light dimmed further in his eyes. "Katri's gone. She crossed the line and disappeared into the Winter Whites."

  THE TINKERS HAD ALREADY searched the wagons for the missing girl, and found nothing. She could only be in the woods.

  Katri's mother's hands shook as Gingerbread and the tinker men gathered at the edge of Numina's line surrounding the wagons. "She won't be out there," the woman kept insisting, the only strength keeping her standing her sister's arm wrapped around her shoulders. "We're wasting time. I told her not to leave the wagons and she's a good girl!"

  "That's probably what made it so appealing," Gingerbread said. An elbow tapped her side, and she found Clatch watching her. He shook his head.

  "Of course she is." Nikolas stepped from the gathered crowd of green and braced the little woman with a hand on either of her arms. He smiled gently, his black beard rising to frame his rosy cheeks. "But you know how she hares off after every animal she sees. She probably chased a rabbit and got lost. We will go and make sure she is not nearby in the trees while you stay here with Edeara in case Katri finds her own way back to us, yes? There's a good girl."

  He glanced at the woman's sister and Edeara nodded, rubbing her sister's back. Tears leaked down over her nose as she bit her lip to keep from sobbing. Nikolas turned to the tinkers gathered at Numina's edge and began to issue orders. Gingerbread tuned him out as she wiped out the part of Numina's line they had trampled over and redrew it.

  Clatch stayed as well. He frowned at his step-father's broad back with crinkled eyes and pursed lips.

  "What's with you?" Gingerbread asked as she tested Numina's defenses and nodded when her hand met resistance in the clear air. Beyond the curtain of starlight the girl's mother threw off Edeara's arm and stalked away, the whole scene overlaid by the incandescent ribbons of Numina's shield.

  Clatch answered her in a low voice. "Nikolas. He shouldn't lie to her."

  Gingerbread kept herself busy watching the spaces between trees for signs of Katri, or she would have rolled her eyes at him. "You think he should have told her the truth? That her girl was taken by evil and it will probably never let her go? How would that help us, or her?"

  Clatch shook his head, his features stretched into a grimace. At first Gingerbread thought he couldn't think of an argument.

  "You think Frau Abel doesn't know her girl was taken? None of us have seen so much as an insect since we entered these woods, and Nikolas expects she'll believe Katri took off after rabbits? Ignoring her fear won't make it easier to bear."

  Gingerbread stopped, her boots sinking to her ankles in snow. Easier to bear? It couldn't be easier because no part of this was easy to begin with. "Neither will acknowledging it," she said.

  Clatch began to shake his head, his grimace growing deeper. "Girl Gingerbread," Nikolas's deep voice interrupted their argument. His face looked unnatural drawn into its somber expression. "Can you see Katri now?"

  The other tinkers shuffled their feet, suddenly finding the icicles fascinating. The hairs on the nape of Gingerbread's neck rose, but the tinkers only fidgeted at the reminder she could see what they couldn't.

  She searched through the unseen world. It was a part of their own, not some separate place like so many liked to think, and little signs of it speckled her vision. Hints of people and animals flickered, although they had not walked this ground in years.

  But no small girls wearing green and brown. Gingerbread shook her head. "No."

  Nikolas frowned like a crack in a boulder, but another of the tinkers sighed. "Good. If little Katri's ghost was near, Madira would break."

  Gingerbread scowled at him, making his relieved sigh jump back into his mouth. Belatedly she recognized him as Katri's uncle. "I don't see ghosts," she bit out. "I see after images of the dead. Phantoms."

  Katri's uncle stood there frozen, her stare overpowering his ability to speak. A friend laid his hand on the man's shoulder. "Hardly a difference, Fraulein."

  Gingerbread's mouth screwed up into a corner. This is why explaining is too much trouble, even to people that don't want to hang me for a witch. "Phantoms aren't people. They're just images they leave behind them, like your footprints in the snow there. They offer warnings, but only if you know how to read them." Gingerbread's chin moved half an inch letting her pin him in place. "Ghosts can watch you back. You should be glad I've never seen one."

  "Enough of this." Nikolas's voice cut through the silence weighing on their shoulders as a chain-link curtain. "We will not squander the girl's chance of survival by standing around arguing. Arm yourselves and search the area around the camp. She could still be close." He eyed each of the men. "And stick together. No one goes alone."

  The tinkers did as he said, breaking into groups of two and three. Gingerbread struck out without waiting for a partner, picking a direction the tinkers instinctively avoided.

  A flurry of crunching caught up from behind her. "You heard what Nikolas said, Ginge. No one goes off alone."

  Gingerbread slid her eyes up to the boy walking next to her, and decided she was almost touched by Clatch's sentiment. "He was talking to the rest of you," she said. "The Piping Witch likes to play tricks on people the deeper they wander into her wood. You can't trust your own eyes in here." She shrugged. "But if you insist on going in . . ."

  She glanced back in time to see him flinch. A mean smile stretched out Gingerbread's mouth. "Ah . . ." She circled Clatch, hands clasped behind her back. "You don't want to go in, do you? You made up your mind to, but your feet have different ideas."

  Wind hushed through the trees as Gingerbread rounded Clatch's back. It set their hair flying back and pinched their cheeks with stiff fingers, but the trees remained still in their icy coats.

  "Do you feel that?" Gingerbread whispered. "The hairs pricking up on your arms? The way your feet have turned to leaden blocks? How every whisper of wind skitters over your nerves and sets your teeth to aching?" Gingerbread stretched on the toes of her boots to whisper to Clatch's stiffened shoulder. "Do you know what that is? It is every survival instinct you have screaming at you not to enter the deep wood."

  Clatch's eyes rolled down to her, obviously annoyed, but his throat bobbed in a nervous convulsion. "You're worse than Nikolas," he said as he took a stiff step toward the deep wood. The next step took more effort, and the next.

  "You're going to freeze there if you don't get a move on," she said to Clatch's back.

  "Are you coming or not?" The ice broke beneath his foot and his shoulders jerked at the noise.

  Gingerbread shrugged and followed Clatch. "I don't need you holding my hand out here. I have more experience with her, defenses you don't have. You're only human, so there's no sh
ame in it."

  Clatch plunged on, his spine as rigid as one of his wind-up soldiers. "So are you," he said.

  Gingerbread caught up to him and walked backwards to give him her best wolf's smile. "Who says?"

  Blue eyes met her own without hesitation. Gingerbread drew back an inch, her steps hesitating in their rhythmic crunch crunch through thick layers of ice and snow. "I do. I know your deepest secret Ginge. You're as human as I am."

  He flung the words out over his shoulder, not bothering to look back at her, but they stopped Gingerbread hard in her tracks. Human? Her? Did he go snow blind? Had her eyes changed back?

  She looked around, her breath huddled beneath her collar where it caught in the top of her chest. The trees ringing them still glowed with their ephemeral light, but the shadow of the deep wood lay just behind them, turning the world into the flattened scenery of one of the tinkers' stage productions. Nothing moved beyond the ice light . . .

  She rubbed at her eyes and sparks popped against her fingers. Her mouth soured. "Why do you still hope?"

  One of her phantoms raced forward on small legs, her arms outstretched before her. At first Gingerbread thought she ran from something chasing her, but the girl never looked behind her.

  "Ginge?" Clatch's voice pressed against her awareness, but did not break her concentration. She lifted a finger, asking for silence as she searched the trees where light met the dark of the deep wood. Where did she go . . . ?

  A cloud of brilliant white plumed upward at the tree line ahead and to the right of them, the glitter of a small universe of stars catching Gingerbread's eye where they hovered before dwindling into nothing.

  "There." Gingerbread darted for the spot, hand on the hilt of her sword. She knelt next to the uneven snow disturbed by the girl's tumble hours before. She still heard the girl's dismay, although no cry lingered in the air.

  "Katri fell here," she told Clatch. His warmth touched her back as she searched the shadows for the girl's path. Ribbons danced bright against the deep wood's darkness, but she found the girl's phantom again by the trail of starry snow she kicked out behind her as she ran.

  "This way!" she cried, already running after the not-Katri. "She's chasing something."

  "What?" Clatch asked as he kept up a step behind her, gripping his hatchet. He left enough free space between them they wouldn't accidentally eviscerate each other if they had to fight.

  Gingerbread shook her head. Stray hairs wrapped around her face, catching in her mouth, but she kept her eyes fixed on Katri's phantom. "I don't know. I can only catch a glimmer somewhere ahead. I can't see like I usually can."

  They burst through a pair of trees wrapped in black ice and Gingerbread skidded to a stop, Clatch cursing as he goose-stepped to keep from mowing her down.

  "What?" he asked. "What is it?"

  Gingerbread's eyes flicked across the tree trunks, the darkness between them, the snow glimmering like hungry eyes under a brilliant white ocean, and she never saw a one.

  "The phantoms," she rasped out of her tight throat. "I've never seen so many."

  They crowded the deep wood, wrapping themselves around trees and through the icicles until the air above them glowed with hazy light. Gingerbread found woodsmen and minstrels, runaways and young lovers, all uttering their last words without sound, but none of them had their full life shapes. They were glimpses in the corner of her eye, half formed, that dissolved when Gingerbread tried to follow them.

  Clatch laid his free hand on her shoulder and Gingerbread spun toward him, her mouth dropping open in a cry she managed to keep silent. The phantoms heard her, sensed her, something. She didn't know how it worked. They fluttered back like frightened birds caught in molasses.

  She tried to ignore them but couldn't possibly succeed. "Can you see them too?" she whispered.

  Clatch shook his head. "Only the trees, but . . . I feel something."

  Gingerbread's eyes followed a ghost light that wound its way right in front of her. It passed, and she caught the edges of the young boy from the edge of the Winter Whites. A dog followed close to his side, its hackles raised. She wanted to grab him, yell that he turn back now, but she swallowed the urge down past the rock she didn't remember swallowing. Phantoms don't fear death . . . she reminded herself.

  She swallowed again, and the rock in her throat shifted. "Small wonder," she told Clatch. "The witch has lived here a long time. She's collected a large following."

  Clatch's eyes roved the lowermost branches of the trees above them, but he didn't see the phantoms even when they swam past his nose. "Are they all-?"

  His mouth shut before the word could escape. Gingerbread understood. There were some places so haunted you couldn't speak of it while they surrounded you. To speak of death where the dead could hear would mark them.

  She nodded, pulling her stray hair from her mouth with a shaking finger. "Yeah."

  Clatch's mouth tightened. "And Katri?"

  Gingerbread exhaled, the air quivering as it left her chest. "I don't think so. The missing leave their own trails. At least for me." She frowned, trying to find the girl through the sea of phantoms. "I'm having trouble seeing her though."

  He squeezed her shoulder and tried to joke. "Well I can't see her at all, so you'd better lead."

  Gingerbread gave him an injured sniff. "As if there was any doubt."

  Clatch's chuckle sounded breathless and strained, but it still eased some of the tightness squeezing Gingerbread's lungs. She breathed deep, closing her eyes as air reach back into their depths. When she opened her eyes again, there was not-Katri.

  "Come on."

  They followed the girl's trail through the deep wood, losing her amid the other phantoms only to find her again when she ran, arms open to catch whatever she chased. Gingerbread tried to find what the girl was after, but never caught more than a shining glimpse.

  "The Piping Witch must have lured Katri with some kind of illusion. I can't tell what she's following."

  Clatch huffed out white air. "Probably a white rabbit then. Or one of her own goats."

  Gingerbread grunted low in her throat. The not-child's face was barely more than the reflection of light on water, but Gingerbread still sensed Katri's urgency hours after the girl had gone. She had to catch whatever ran in front of her, more than she had to breathe.

  Phantoms dropped away as Gingerbread and Clatch passed their final resting places. The young lovers frozen together under a large pine. The woodsman falling over from exhaustion as he traveled unknowingly in circles. The boy vanished so effectively Gingerbread found a sign of him, although they did pass his dog waiting for him beside a tree, panting out white clouds of worry. There was nothing special to mark these places, no landmarks and every tree looked the same.

  The air remained clear of them for most of an hour before Gingerbread stopped. "I lost her."

  Clatch stopped behind her and looked around them as if he could pick up the girl's trail. He shook his head, his empty hand resting on his laden belt. Why he had brought all his tools, Gingerbread couldn't fathom, but they tinkled together, creating silver sounds the stiff icicles envied. "I'd be surprised if she made it this deep into the trees. Are you sure she came this way?"

  Gingerbread's eyes flashed to him, sparking heat in the cold air. Clatch stiffened, and held up his hands, mindful of the hatchet's blade. "She's only a mite, and even goats can outrun little girls."

  Gingerbread scowled at him another heartbeat before relenting. "If you say so," she said. "It sure would explain why she's forever chasing that old billy goat."

  She searched the shadows peering out from behind the tree trunks, but found nothing worth following. "We could have lost her as much as a mile back. We still might catch her before sunup if we hurry back."

  She turned on her heel and Clatch followed with a glance at the sky, its rare patches through the woven limbs of the pines showing deep black. "How can you tell how much time we have?"

  "The same way you avoided w
alking through any of the phantoms." Gingerbread flashed him a sly smile over her furred collar. "Instinct."

  Clatch screwed up his face at the thought of disturbing the dead. "If that's not a good reason to stop asking you questions . . ." Gingerbread stopped so suddenly Clatch walked a few steps without her. "Ginge? What's wrong?"

  He lowered his voice and hefted his hatchet, eyes scanning the wood for a danger he could fight, but the boy standing in front of them, barring their way back, stayed invisible to him.

  Gingerbread stared at him, refusing to blink as the fine hairs on her arms rose. It was the boy they had passed earlier, the one with the dog, only he had changed. He was . . . looking at Gingerbread. Not through her or at something that had once stood where she did, but at her. Almost like . . .

  Almost like he can see me.

  Gingerbread tilted her head and his eyes followed hers. She took a slow step to the right, meaning to circle around him, and he turned his head.

  "Ginge?" Clatch pressed.

  She had to swallow hard to wet the desert in her mouth enough to answer him. "The boy . . ."

  Clatch waited a breath before guessing. "The one with the dog?"

  Gingerbread nodded slowly, eyes still on the boy, his still on her. "He's here."

  Confusion touched the air as Clatch tried to reason out why that frightened her. "So?" he asked.

  "He's watching us." She couldn't think of a better way to explain. It chilled her blood, but she couldn't pinpoint why beyond it had never happened before.

  Clatch lowered his voice to a whisper. "I thought you said they couldn't see us, that they were just footprints in the snow."

  Somehow, Gingerbread triggered the muscles that made her nod. "They are." They always had been before.