GRETHEL

SIEBEN | EDVARD

Edvard had always listened to his father's warnings of the woods. How trees had talons and dark things lurked in the undergrowth, nightmares made real. It had killed Aunt Grethel. The demon creatures that lurked between the sheets, pulled children from their beds and stole them away in the night without trace – except for the trees and the night.  The trees always stayed.

"Papa said not to go into the woods."

Edvard watched his sister, Elisabeth, two years his junior, dance at the pond's edge, her reflection an ethereal haze in the water, a naiad stepping in time with her lone waltz. Her eyes followed the trees as they swayed in the wind. She stopped.

"Papa said," she mimicked and pulled a face. "Papa isn't here half the week and mother calls him verrückt the other half."

A redness overcame Edvard and he began to shout. "Papa is not verrückt."

Elisabeth paused and an idea flitted across the dunes of her face. "I'll prove it."

"No. Elisa. You'll be punished if they find out. Elisa." But as much as he protested, she never listened. Her footsteps skirted the pond, bare on the grass, and her skirts shifted around the mud as it lapped at her feet and dragged her to the ground.

The woods would swallow his sister whole and spit her out as ivory bones and two sapphire eyes. Edvard felt utterly helpless.

"Do not, foolish girl," Brigitte snarled, and Elisabeth whirled. His eldest sister closed the distance between the two and gripped Elisa by the wrist, so hard that he saw crimson seep across her skin. Her eyes were set alight with an icy flame.  "Do not speak ill of father. Do not enter the woods. Do not disobey your elders."

Elisa huffed, but he saw the water well and glisten in her eyes. Her lip quivered but remained straight. Brigitte shook her wrist once more for good measure before letting go. She ran away with her fists pressed to her eyes. Alive, at least.

The stories papa had told of the woods gave Edvard frequent nightmares, and no matter how many times mama brushed her long fingers through his wheat-stained hair and assured him beasts existed nowhere but papa's words, he couldn't shake them from his mind. Evil things, with needle fingers to slice open prey and antlers as large as horses and sharp as knives, a hide so black even the night lost itself inside and skin so white not even Hauke und der Schimmel could match. Terrible, horrible creatures that would eat his sister for lunch. He began to cry.

Brigitte set him down on her knee and hushed the demons from his head. Her fingers made quick work of his hair, as mother's had before. "Don't cry, Edvard, the woods can't hurt you from here." Brigitte was thirteen now, a lady; Brigitte wasn't scared of monsters. Her voice was sincere but her eyes lingered on the house.

He hugged her close. "Brigitte?"

She sucked in a deep breath and looked to him. "Yes, Edvard?"

"What's in the woods," he asked, "truly?"

"Sticks and leaves and wild foxes." She laughed, but it was scattered at the edges, fraying. "Nothing can hurt you out there, Edvard, not as long as papa is around. Not as long as I am."

She removed him from her lap and smoothed out the pink cotton of her dress. Her hair had grown down her waist, more burnished than his wheat locks, the same colour as their little brass kettle, the one that whistled when it was done – papa said Grethel had the same hair. He didn't speak about Aunt Grethel much.

Brigitte smiled her beautiful smile and off she took down the garden. The words trailed after her as she shouted, but he knew them all the same. "Remember, don't enter the woods."

He would not, but a boy had to be curious.

Edvard wandered to the edge of the woods when Brigitte was out of sight and stood before it. It couldn't scare him. He was a man, like his father, and his father before him, and men weren't scared. Balling his fists and wearing the bravest face he could muster – puffing out his round cheeks, lifting his chin, and narrowing his eyes in an attempt at some sort of glare – he peered into the forest.

He could see the sticks and the leaves, but no wild foxes or their auburn hue. In fact, he couldn't hear them either. He couldn't hear anything. The trees swept away the sounds of the outer world and whispered amongst themselves, conspiring, with deep eyes sunken into their flesh, watching, and watching. All of a sudden, Edvard felt very small.

He made to back away, but the tree closest to him – he must have been their leader for he was the tallest tree and the proudest – bristled and adjusted its branches, and something caught his eye across the trunk. There, carved into the skin of the tree, a message:

you know.

Edvard stumbled away as Hansel emerged from the house.

Dinner was ready.

They ate in silence. Stew, again, but his time beef. Edvard picked at his food as he always did, and thought over what he saw. Who had carved that into the tree, and who was it for? Surely not him. Perhaps Elisabeth had carved it there, but where did she get the knife? What if Brigitte had met a boy and was hiding him away from papa?

But if Brigitte knew, she didn't let on.

"Brigitte, I heard you finished your book," mama said and sipped at her water. "Perhaps papa can buy you another."

A new joy overcame his sister and she looked longingly to papa, eyes glittering. He stared back, smiling. "Perhaps," he agreed. "And perhaps we'll end up on the streets with the expense of you women."

Petra giggled, and mama reminded him, "There's another on the way, darling, the worst is yet to come."

Their father glanced about the table. "A boy, I can feel it. How about that, Edvard? A brother to make up for all these girls, eh?"

Papa laughed, but Edvard wasn't listening. "What's in the woods, papa?"

Hansel paused and set down his knife and fork. He cleared his throat, a fragile crack in his demeanour, and he swallowed down any lie his tongue conjured up. His skin was whiter than usual. "It's okay to be afraid, son–"

"I want to know."

He hadn't meant for his voice to be so forceful, to raise his voice to such heights, but he deserved as much from his father, when truth was but a madman's whisper in his stories, and Hansel understood. He nodded all the same and a forced smile tugged at his lips.

"It's okay to be afraid."