Snow nods to Jack, who summons forth a patch of nettles to prove her point. He’s a little taken aback by Hex’s expression. The man stops struggling out of his underwear and stares at the nettles. From his hurt expression, it’s as if Jack has just sent Hex a deeply personal and offensive insult. Before Jack can so much as react to Hex’s sudden and mysterious umbrage, the other man’s face warps. Black feathers sprout, his nose lengthens and hardens to a jagged beak. His eyes move to the sides of his head, but otherwise remain the same, which is frankly upsetting to look at. Jack winces away from the sight, and turns his attention back to the standoff between Gilde and Snow.
‘You also ain’t got all your people with you,’ says Gilde. She cocks her head. ‘What happen – you forget about your Ghost, or just think we might not count her again?’
This is a terrible moment for Jack to realise he hasn’t seen Patience in ages.
‘Uh oh,’ he says. To himself, obviously.
Gilde pulls a small glass bell jar out of her furs. Trapped inside it is a tiny little translucent monochrome figure, which would look like Patience if Patience were only five inches tall.
‘Just picked this up in the trees. You don’t get to live in a cursed forest as long as I have without learning how to make your own Ghost traps.’ Gilde smiles.
‘What have you done?’ barks Snow.
‘Just a lil casual hostage situation, Majesty,’ Gilde replies. ‘Same as you did with our poor Hexy when you demanded we hear you out. Well, we heard you out enough to know your plan’s too risky to all of us. Kind of backfired on you there, huh?’
Inside the bell jar, Patience is so furious that she’s fast becoming invisible behind swirling fronds of frost on the glass. Snow lunges forwards, makes a grab for the icy jar. Gilde pulls it out of range of her grasp swiftly. Close by in the gloom, a giant bear lollops and softly growls.
‘Nuh-uh, Majesty,’ Gilde trills. ‘You also don’t get to live in a cursed forest this long without learning to perform an exorcism or two.’
‘Don’t, Snow,’ Buttercup warns.
It’s not Snow who raises her hands in surrender first, but Gretel. This means, reasons Jack, that either Gretel’s completely out of ideas as to how to get all of them out of this latest situation, or she’s already come up with a plan to get them out of it, but it depends on them being made prisoner by this horrible old woman first. Either way, it suggests to Jack that he should probably go along with her.
He also raises his hands, closely followed by Buttercup and Trevor, who lifts up four legs in a show of willing. Snow and her Dwarves don’t raise a thing, but Snow sighs dejectedly, and makes no attempt to fight back when Scarlett corrals her back towards Gilde’s cottage, with apologetic, doggish eyes.
Jack tries to meet Hex’s gaze, to try to gauge exactly how happy or otherwise he might be about this new development of actual hostage-taking. Hex, still in full bird form, won’t even look at him. Buttercup notices, and shoots him a sad, sympathetic little smile, which doesn’t exactly make matters better. When a young man tries to flirt, the last reaction he wants is one of pity from somebody who’s just spent most of the night up to her eyebrows in a hole in the ground.
All in all, he thinks to himself, it’s hard to imagine anyone having a worse night tonight than they are.
13
In Which Hansel is Having a Worse Night Than Jack
Hansel knows that he said yes to going with Morning. He knows that it meant ‘yes, right now’. He knows. He understands. He wants to help, really he does… only the hand on his wrist is so tight, and Morning moves so fast with her huntsman team, through the twisted, dark, narrow side streets of the Citadel, nothing but continuous looming walls and clattering cobbles to Hansel. He feels the magical terror rise up in him again. It seems so much louder, here in this place, with so little sky, so little air, so very many people. He swallows the thrashing magical power back inside him with such a force that it makes him feel dizzy for a moment.
Morning has been talking almost nonstop since they started hurrying through the alleys. Hansel is able to catch only snippets of it through the crackling haze of his own anxiety.
‘I don’t want you children to worry about your safety; I think you’ll find a lot more sympathy here for your village than you’re probably expecting…’
He tunes out again, the scream in his head temporarily drowning out her words. When the swell of magic ebbs down enough for him to take in what she’s saying again, the scaffold is in sight.
‘…of even the huntsmen don’t see Nearby’s rebellion as part of any kind of aggressive act,’ Morning is saying, ‘rather, an example of how the current system is failing to live up to our initial expectations.’
They’re at the scaffold. Morning pauses briefly, and gives both of them a quick, tight hug. The sensation of being hugged by a huntsman is a singular one for Hansel – no huntsman he’s ever crossed paths with before has been the particularly huggy type – and with the figure hugging him still swathed from head to toe in robes, her face totally masked in serene porcelain, it has a decidedly off-putting element to it. It’s like being hugged by an idea, and somebody else’s idea, at that.
Without another word, she climbs the scaffold. Her cohorts – Hansel can’t tell, in the darkened confusion of bodies, which is Richard, which is Grey and which is Fennel – nudge Hansel and Daisy onto the steps to follow her.
Hansel is surprised by the level of applause that greets Morning when she steps to the front to address the crowd. The banners around the stage are still orange – this is just her rebuff statement at the end of the other candidate’s big speech, he recalls. He notes that there are quite a few green handheld flags being waved in the audience. There’s something else, as well. The atmosphere shifts when she steps forward. It feels as though thousands of people in the dark just had a window onto bright sunlight opened for them. There’s a sense of relief, of warmth, a brief spark of elation, even. Other feelings break through, too. Sharp flashes of anger and hatred are suddenly illuminated by the light she seems to cast over the crowd. There really are a lot of orange flags out there too, Hansel notes.
Morning casts her arms wide, as if trying to embrace the air around the crowd.
‘Friends,’ she calls cordially, ‘and brethren.’
There are a handful of boos from the crowd.
And’ – here she pauses, for dramatic effect – ‘those of you who will not call me “friend”.’ Another pause. ‘Yet.’
The boos are drowned out by amiable laughter.
‘You’ve heard what my brother the orange candidate has to say, and I know that many of you will be as concerned by his plans as I. Creating yet more abominations to hold our fellow human citizens in fear is not the way forward. That was our fallen head huntsman’s way, and we all know where that led us.’
Hansel feels the whisper rippling through the crowd. ‘Nearby.’
‘It led us to Nearby,’ says Morning.
An uneasy murmur issues from the crowd. Hansel spots that some of the huntsman masks at the front of the crowd have turned towards himself and Daisy. It’s sometimes hard to tell with a huntsman whether they’re looking directly at you from behind their mask or not; that’s part of the point of the masks in the first place.