The clearing's silhouette didn't change, but it was now coated in candied colors, their edges stained filthy with soot. Gumdrop greens stained the stoic needles of the pine trees, held up by chocolate trunks. The snow glimmered with their pastel blue reflections in between swirls of lavender that bled into magenta where it reached up into the bushes and fir trees, their lowermost branches fanned out like heavy green skirts.
Her eyes landed on the holly bush the Piping Witch had used to trap her. Its stems reached up in curled fingers, each studded with dozens of splotchy thorns.
Are they all passed saving? She blinked. Why is it steaming?
Little puffs streamed off a handful of its thorns, like trails from forgotten cigars. More ghosted across Gingerbread's sight before disappearing.
What's happening?
Dearie stood in front of the unicorn, surrounded by her brier of twisted holly plants. Their thorns gleamed ebony, elongated into straight pins and each pin held two or more phantoms. Gingerbread recognized some of them—the young mother that froze in the wood, hunters with their hatchets—but they were no longer the vapor-thin after images Gingerbread had seen in the wood. These poor creatures writhed on the pins' long slender points, crawling over each other to try to break free.
They know, Gingerbread thought, her breath coming in shallow gasps. They know they're trapped. They know they're dead. Katri's boy knew that too, but he's not here . . .
A handful of phantoms rose out of the brier and Gingerbread gasped. Free! Fly off!
She saw the pins trailing from their edges when they twisted through the air toward her. One of them twitched, centering the phantom man on Gingerbread's body.
She had enough time to duck her head before they crowded the air, prying at her, calling, begging, pleading in unimaginable voices. Wails and moans assaulted Gingerbread's mind. She screamed, clawing at her scalp, trying to press her palms closer to her ears. "Stop! Stop please!"
Fingers that should have passed through her held tight to her cape. More appeared on her dress, her sleeves, her legs. Pulling. Pulling her out of her body . . .
Ice cracked, the sharp, thundering sound of it shaking the phantoms loose. Black thorns broke apart, turning brittle, and smoke bled from their glossy casings. Gingerbread buried her nose in the snow, but still caught the heady scent of molasses and bad dreams. Her head threatened to float away with them, and the phantoms' fingers pulled her closer.
Something bright cut through the saccharine miasma. Something red and hot with a pulse that beat fervently against Gingerbread's inner ear. Her heart echoed it, weak at first, but determined to catch up to its steady beat. Something buried deep in Gingerbread's gut wanted it, needed it, and she let go of her ears, ducking against the terrible scratching of the moaning phantoms. She crawled her fingers forward to catch it.
Other hands followed hers, the phantoms slower to hear the beating pulse, but their heads turned, two or three at first, then in waves. They wanted it. Needed it even more than Gingerbread. This way, it called. I am here.
The hands clutching Gingerbread uncurled, finger by finger until she bobbed back up and away from the trapped phantoms. The thorns had moldered into crumbling ruins and their sickly smoke was a thin burnt smell beneath the trees. But the windows were held open now. Clean air suffused Gingerbread's lungs, smelling of pine and fir and peppermint . . .
She drank it in as her body closed around her again. Her eyes snapped open and Gingerbread gasped, gulping in air to wash out the ache in her chest. Her arms and legs hung cold and heavy, but pinpricks of feeling poked their way back into her skin. And Gingerbread saw why.
The unicorn stood before the Piping Witch, red and white and shining. No longer an evergreen, but brilliant as sun on fresh snow. Red streaked through his mane and down into his curling tail, pulsing hot and strong. Gingerbread's heart skipped to catch up to his beating. The unseen world overlaid her body's vision and for once Gingerbread did not question if her eyes told her the truth. The Piping Witch stood surrounded by her pins and needles, but red and white flecked their ebony patinas. Phantoms slid off their snarled ends gray as dishwater and soared up to the air, touched with the light of dawn.
Gingerbread craned her neck, following them up, and found other phantoms guiding them, suffused with brilliance. This way.
One of them, a boy with his dog bounding around him, caught her eyes. He stuck his thumbs in his ears and crossed his eyes to stick his tongue out at her. Laughing, he led the freed phantoms away beyond Gingerbread's sight.
A sigh leaked out of her. "So that's where you came from."
The sharp scream of a tortured tea kettle yanked Gingerbread's attention back to the battle. The witch was unraveling. Polluted grays and purples streamed away from her into the air, turning white and verdant and crimson. Gingerbread coughed out a chuckle, the pennies tasting sharper in her mouth. "You look like a sweater snagged on those pins of yours."
Steam puffed across her sight. At first, she thought it came from Dearie, but Gingerbread found something soft puddled across the snow's surface. She followed it with her eyes and it led to her bleeding stomach. Dark red blood leaked out of her, and hit the snow with another little breath of steam.
The unicorn jerked his head, tearing into Dearie's arm with a shrill scream. The red in his mane curled up his horn in a spiral, dying its light pink. Gingerbread followed the spots on his flank down the stripe in his tail.
Me? My blood did that?
The over-bright patina of the Piping Witch's holly vines soured into sulfur yellow. Gaps appeared in the brier where the hollies broke apart. Fresh sprigs curled their leafy fingers up out of the ground and snagged at Dearie's hem, their natural greens soft and dull after the witch's candied colors. The ache started to fade from Gingerbread's eyes.
The Piping Witch yanked her skirt away from them, tearing holes into the fabric and revealing something sick and twisting beneath.
Hello Dearie, Gingerbread thought, a sense of deja vu tapping her on the shoulder. Did I say that before? Huh . . . can't remember.
With a savage yank that almost finished unraveling her prim, life-like visage, the Piping Witch turned and fled. Her legs stretched in longer than possible strides, the rest of her flowing in disjointed afterimages trying to catch up.
Coward!
Gingerbread pulled her tattered strength together and buried her sword point through that ugly dress into the ground beneath just as Dearie passed her, but it didn't hold. Why would it? her slow mind snarled as Dearie ran past, her chuckle echoing in Gingerbread's ears. Since when do swords catch hold of phantoms?
The other phantoms caught hold of me. The thought trickled in like sand, itching and demanding her immediate attention. And I'm all but dead now. Just have to finish getting around to it, so perhaps . . .
Dearie's echoes ran past her like the train of a long gown. Roaring like a wounded tiger, Gingerbread latched hold of that ugly dress, digging her fingers in deep. Snow and stones bit back at her fingers, and then the fabric wrenched against her hands, nearly sliding free. Gingerbread clung on.
"I said I'm not done with you yet!"
The Piping Witch turned, all her echoing heads rippling back to Gingerbread. Nebulous shadows twisted beneath the whiteness of her skin. Gingerbread saw the fear smother the burning in her eyes just before the unicorn caught up with her.
He charged with a shout like a trumpet. The sound layered golden colors along Gingerbread's ribs until her lungs swelled with them. Even Dearie's cry as his horn ripped through her shadows couldn't squelch Gingerbread's triumphant gasp.
The unicorn's horn found Dearie's real self and sank in deep. There was a sound, like a foot sliding through a moldering pumpkin. And then Dearie was shrieking fury. She lost all semblance of her original body and unraveled into a thrashing thing with hands. Too many hands! She clawed at the unicorn's horn, his eyes, his sides, leaving long gouges that bled down his coat, and at Gingerbread and her hair and her fingers still
holding the witch in place.
"Beasts! Brats!" Her malice sucker-punched Gingerbread in the ribs, and she gargled out a wet gasp. "I'll devour you! Burn you up! Crisp you! Boil you until your bones bleach!"
Gingerbread turned her face away from all those fingers but held on. Dearie jerked, almost wrenching free.
She stopped.
Gingerbread opened one eye.
The unicorn had torn his horn free of the Piping Witch's grasping hands, leaving a rent in her that bled foul smoke and the burnt stench of human hair. Dearie's fingers stumbled along with her shrieking before she tried to filch the smoke and stuff it back into her mass. More bled out, swept away by the wind kicked up by the unicorn's charge.
Dearie's thundering threats thinned to a wail. "Come back, come back! I'll be better next time, I swear. I can't die. I won't!"
Gingerbread grinned at the last of the witch, relishing her last laugh. "You already did Dearie."
She shrunk down to the size of a toddler's ball. The lightless sparks still left pulsed. "Brat!" Dearie turned on Gingerbread with a snarl. Gingerbread lay there, not seeing much point to defending herself when she was all but drowning in her own blood. I won't close my eyes though, she thought as Dearie came. I won't give her that satisfaction.
The witch descended, leaving wispy trails of herself behind. The lines of her face pushed out of the smokey comet, contorted by the madness Gingerbread always knew hid beneath Dearie's composed features.
You killed my mother, Gingerbread thought, deciding that made a poetic last thought. But another one slipped through at the last: You smell like a sugared ham burning.
The stench of it flooded over Gingerbread's face with Dearie's fetid smoke and then . . . Peppermints. Peppermints clean and cold and biting Dearie back, until nothing of her remained.
Gingerbread blinked her eyes clear and coughed out the last of the stench from her lungs, jarring her battered ribs. She pressed a hand hard against them to keep them in place, grimacing as the breaks in their otherwise sloping edges shifted.
At least I didn't waste my last thought. Gingerbread giggled as the words tripped in one ear and out her other. That hurt just as bad as coughing.
She realized a quartet of straight white legs stood in front of her. One of the front ones stamped the ground triumphantly. Gingerbread pulled her eyes up, all the way up to the unicorn standing over her, eyes flashing in what she took for Ha! Steal my forest, would you? Go after my champion? Breha!
The unicorn snorted from his pink nostrils and a cloud of peppermint spice washed over Gingerbread's face again. She laughed softly enough her ribs didn't bend at odder angles.
"You huffed her clean away," she said. "Huffed and puffed like a wolf. Only you’re not a wolf, you're a unicorn."
A unicorn standing over her. I never thought I would see that.
"Thank you," Gingerbread said. "For saving me from her. Only . . ." She held her hands away from her side, showing the worst of the gouges left by the ice needles. Gingerbread looked down at the blood staining her bodice and trickling down her legs to dye the snow scarlet. They all still leaked, refusing to stop no matter how hard she pressed. Her eyesight blurred and her eyes stung from salt.
No tears, she told herself. What's the good of tears now?
"I'm afraid it doesn't really matter, if Dearie got me or not. I'm almost a husk as it is. Honestly, I'm surprised I held together this long." She tried to grin up at him, but all she could manage was a grimace. "I'm all right really," she said without having to lie. "I fought every hour of my life, so I knew this might get me in the end. Better than Dearie stealing my mind out from under me actually. I feel like I'm talking a lot. Can blood loss make you chatty?" she asked the unicorn.
He blinked down at her, his eyes soft and wet as afternoon rain.
Gingerbread held up a hand and touched her fingers to his nose. "So soft . . ."
He pushed his nose into her palm, letting her touch him despite the red streaks she left on his tapered head. He didn't want her to die.
"It is all right though," she told him again. "Everything ends and I'm so glad that Dearie and my story have. My life was always bound up with hers. I tried so hard to rewrite whatever she did . . . I wish I could have done more though. I should have. Maybe then Katri might not know her. Or even you."
Gingerbread shook her head, lips curling in disgust. Pink light distracted her. The unicorn's horn glowed soft as starlight at first, then bright as Numina herself.
You did enough. Gingerbread gasped at the soft clarify of his words, spoken somewhere deep inside him and leaping into that same deep place inside of her. More than enough, my girl Gingerbread.
Gingerbread's eyes flooded with tears, too many for the heat of her eyes to burn off. They trickled down the side of her nose, warming her skin.
"Thank you," she said again.
The light around the unicorn's horn grew darker, a solid pink now edging into the bright red of sunlight. Tears must magnify the world, Gingerbread decided as her vision sharpened, but why can they make breathing easier when you're full of holes . . . ?
"Stop!" Gingerbread threw herself back, her good arm flung out to keep the unicorn away. "You can't, rgk!"
Her broken ribs stabbed into the rest of her like vicious teeth. Gingerbread writhed on her back, kicking her legs and cussing like a drunken dwarf. She clamped her teeth together. Unless Dearie bit him in the ears, the unicorn heard all that.
Gingerbread peeked, face burning despite the cold, and found the unicorn watching her with his eyes deep as pools. His ears cocked in amusement. Evidently he'd heard much worse.
The pain grinding into Gingerbread's side ebbed back, and she let her head fall against the ground. Her huffing and puffing kept the pain alive, but her breath came easier now.
"You can't just fix me," Gingerbread finished her argument.
The unicorn snorted and tossed his head. His hoof flung up more snow.
"I say so." Gingerbread opened her eyes enough to stare up at the red striping his horn. "There's a vein of mortality in you now, for all you're immortal. And it came from me. I know it woke you up, my blood on the ice, and for my life I still can't think of any other way that could have worked, but don't make me the reason you die. Please, sir."
The unicorn stared at her, the red of Gingerbread's blood ran down his mane to his back, stippling the hair between his shoulders. Gingerbread followed it, glancing down at his side where Dearie had clawed at him. The gouges had gone, but pink welts stayed behind as scars.
"It's almost as bad as letting Dearie win," Gingerbread said as the red reached his tail. It finished with a final flourish.
He didn't turn his head to look, just flicked his tail and cocked one ear back. At least he's thinking about what I said. He'll see the reasoning in it, I'm sure.
Gingerbread closed her eyes and sighed out her breath. The snow falling made more sound than the unicorn's hooves as he picked his way closer to her. Warm sweet breath sighed across her face as he nosed her face.
Gingerbread smiled and lifted her hand to find his smooth cheek. How many other girls have been fawned over by unicorns? She gloated just a little.
The unicorn spied something and trotted off. Gingerbread gasped, half rising despite the sharp pains that riddled her. "Wait!"
He stopped a few feet away and flicked his tail. He lowered his head, horn glowing as he touched it to the snow.
"Will you stay with me?" Gingerbread asked in a soft rasp. "Please?"
The unicorn lifted his head, the glow of his horn dimming as he found her. He snorted, his ears swung out in confusion as he trotted back and touched his nose to her cheek, rumbling that of course he would.
Gingerbread relaxed as he settled into the snow next to her. His body glowed warm against her side, and she raised her fingers to touch his nose again. His softness was less like velvet and more like moss left growing beneath a sun-dappled tree.
"Do you think you'll ever be an evergreen
again? Maybe my mortality will fade away when I do."
The unicorn brushed his nose to her cheek and blew out his warm breath again. It plumed over Gingerbread's face, and she breathed it in as deep as she could. "I hope you still smell of peppermints even if you do . . ."
She trailed off, too weary for more words. She felt herself sinking into black sand, trickling down. Her eyes stayed open, but the black of sleep darkened around her.
Then world faded beyond Gingerbread's sight.
The Gift
Gingerbread woke in a foul temper. Her side hurt. Her head throbbed. And she had the overwhelming feeling she was supposed to be dead.
"I think I would have preferred it if I was. Oh . . ." She sat up, holding her head with one hand. Her brain beat itself against her hard skull with every heartbeat.
"Evergreen?" The word emerged as a salt-water gargle. Gingerbread coughed and groaned when everything hurt. "Blast you, I told you not to save me!"
He didn't answer. When she managed to peel her aching eyes open, Gingerbread found herself alone.
She huffed. "Immortals."
I hope.
But he had saved her, and since she wasn't going to croak in the next few minutes, she might as well get up off the ground.
Grunting and grinding her teeth, Gingerbread rolled herself to her knees, then up to her feet to catch her breath. She bent over double, puffing while it came back. "If this is your idea of healing I'm double glad I didn't let you finish. Hf!"
With a final shove, Gingerbread propelled herself upright. The world wobbled, and Gingerbread wobbled with it, but she managed not to fall.
She wrapped her arm around her middle, flinching at the soreness of her broken ribs. Only the breaks she remembered from earlier had smoothed out, leaving one or two tender bumps in their place.
Frowning, Gingerbread prodded them with her fingers. A sharp ache prodded back at her and she winced. "Not broken now," she said to herself, "but they definitely were."
A suspicion snuck into her head and Gingerbread pulled apart the lower buttons of her coat to get a better look at herself.
The Girl Gingerbread in the Woods of Winter White Page 13
