‘Where did she go?’ asks Gretel. ‘How could she have got so far away? She was only out a few seconds.’
‘’Tis witchcraft,’ Hex suggests.
‘’Tis not her witchcraft,’ argues Snow. ‘She just does bread and cakes; her powers don’t stretch to anything like invisibility or teleportation.’ Snow starts to worry her hands over one another with an irritating clatter of metal on metal. ‘What could have happened to her?’ She turns to Scarlett sharply. ‘Wolves?’
‘My pack would never,’ replies Scarlett indignantly. ‘Not to a guest.’
A horrible thought grabs Gretel. ‘When’s Bin Night round here?’
‘Not till next Wednesday,’ Hex tells her. ‘We’re fortnightly here; they don’t like coming up this far.’
‘See?’ says Scarlett. ‘She’ll be fine.’
‘What if she’s not?’ frets Snow. ‘What if she’s fallen into a hole in the ground somewhere out in the dark and she can’t get out?’
‘Come on now, mate,’ says Trevor soothingly. ‘Buttercup was the first of us, remember? She used to live in the woods all by herself, she put the squad together, yes she’s a bit of a softie but she’s a lot more capable than a lot of you bipeds give her credit for, and—’
‘Help,’ comes Buttercup’s muffled voice from somewhere off in the darkness. ‘I couldn’t see where I was going and I fell into this hole and I can’t get out.’
‘OK,’ adds Trevor, ‘but she’s capable of doing lots of things that not all of us round here are, like… like wearing shoes.’
‘And one of my shoes has come off,’ calls the voice of Buttercup.
Trevor sighs, defeated. ‘Let’s just rescue the big lovely, shall we?’
10
Green
Hansel tries his hardest not to panic when the mysterious huntsman grasps his and Daisy’s shoulders and ushers them away from the crowd. He absolutely mustn’t lose control or containment over his powers, not here, not now. The results could be catastrophic.
‘It wasn’t us,’ attempts Daisy as the huntsman pushes them down a side street.
‘We’ve never even been to Nearby,’ adds Daisy as the huntsman drags them around a dark corner into a deserted, pitch-black alley.
‘We didn’t set fire to anyone,’ is her last-ditch attempt as the huntsman unlocks a door and pulls them inside.
‘I know you didn’t,’ the huntsman tells her. ‘I just said – I was there. Rosier, our fallen brother, may he rest in righteousness, was a zealot who’d got himself worked up into a frenzy. He was going to get us all killed. I take it he decided to go into the Darkwood on a Monday?’
Daisy nods. ‘After setting fire to his robes.’
The huntsman sighs, and in a small, quiet voice, adds, ‘Idiot.’
‘What?’ manages Hansel, just about swallowing down the thrashing, crackling magical anxiety.
‘Oh! Sorry, you missed all of that, didn’t you?’ says Daisy. ‘A Ghost came and said she’d been killed because the forest is more dangerous than usual on a Monday and then the Head Huntsman set himself on fire and then went into the woods anyway.’ She turns to the huntsman. ‘Hansel wasn’t even there, he was locked up the whole time, and I was tied to a bonfire; whatever you think we might have done, we’re innocent, I swear.’
‘What you’ve done,’ says the huntsman, ‘is you’ve given the huntsmen the wake-up call we all desperately needed.’
‘Oh no,’ mutters Hansel.
‘When you stood up to us, when you said “no, no more”, when you pushed back, you sparked something extraordinary that may end up changing the whole course of Myrsina’s future.’
‘Definitely “oh no”,’ Daisy agrees. ‘Please believe us, Your Huntsmanship, we didn’t mean to spark anything or change the whole country. It was just that…’ She tries to trail off, but the huntsman simply stares at her, mutely and blankly. Daisy stumbles on, anxiously. ‘Well, as you said, he was a bit of a zealot. He locked us up, and he was going to kill us, and my friend Gretel… she’s not even a witch, is she, Hansel?’
Hansel shakes his head silently.
‘She was just clever,’ babbles Daisy helplessly. ‘He didn’t like clever girls, even though he forced me to invent weapons in secret, and… and… we didn’t do anything wrong…’
The huntsman lays a calming hand on Daisy’s arm. ‘You’re right, Daisy. You didn’t do anything wrong. You showed many of us huntsmen that we’d lost our way. It’s no wonder some of the more remote villages have started to rebel against us if this is how we treat half of the ordinary population – false witchcraft accusations, abominations, duckings… it needs to stop. All of it. You are the ones who showed us that if we don’t, this wave of anger will rise and rise, and we’ll lose Myrsina altogether. You’re heroes. You and your poor, lost sister Gretel.’
‘What?’ asks Hansel. In all of his anxiety-riddled nightmares following the battle to free Nearby, the words he had imagined the huntsmen using about his friends and family had mostly been about treachery and how slowly they should all be burnt to death. They’d never included anything so much as approaching a term like “hero”.
‘Is that really true?’ the huntsman asks Daisy. ‘About you making the weapons in Nearby?’
Daisy nods. ‘Gretel too, to protect the village from the Darkwood at first, and then of course…’
‘We can use that,’ mutters the huntsman thoughtfully. ‘The great, untapped resource – female engineers. Could even use it for the new machines… We can show how much we’ve already used women’s work, in secret, and how much more useful to all it would be if we got rid of all these ridiculous abomination laws, if we all worked together, as equals…’
Daisy exchanges glances with Hansel. ‘Did we really make actual huntsmen start thinking all this stuff just by doing tricks with spare masks and a collapsible rack?’
‘Some of us have been thinking it for a while,’ admits the huntsman. ‘You were the spark, but many of us have been feeling for some time now that we can’t carry on like this. Something’s building, can’t you feel it? Something bad.’
Hansel’s eyes widen. The huntsman’s blank face turns on him almost instantly.
‘You feel it too,’ she adds, ‘don’t you?’
Yes, he feels it. The oppressive fear. Fear, and something behind that, too. Anger. Divisiveness. And then, that all-consuming image again. A huge beast, with a hundred heads, a thousand, more, marauding through the streets of the Citadel, breaking through the gates and galloping out into the rest of the country beyond, screaming and roaring with a thousand voices.
He nods, glad at least that the vision didn’t make him black out this time.
‘Something’s coming,’ says the huntsman. ‘Unless we change our ways and stop it now, we might not be able to stop it at all.’
Daisy looks from the huntsman to Hansel and back again, the penny dropping.