Carefully watching Baby’s struggles and the faint splintering of wood, Gretel shuffles forward a little to try to manoeuvre Buttercup away from her spot close to the doorway.
‘I said,’ repeats Hex, slightly louder, ‘that’s…’
‘Baby, I said no!’ shrieks Gilde suddenly, but it’s too late.
With one last grunt of effort, the bear pushes through into the cottage like a large dog desperate to get in through a cat flap. Unlike a large dog, Baby manages to take the doorframe and chunks of the surrounding wall with him. Gretel makes a lunge to pull Buttercup to safety at the same time as Snow does, resulting in all three of them clumsily colliding with one another as well as an awful lot of hungry, honey-maddened bear. For a moment, everything is a jumble of fur, heavy flesh, limbs, claws and teeth, then Gretel’s pressed breathlessly against the floor along with Snow and Buttercup. Somewhere beyond the mass of bear flesh, people are screaming. She spots Trevor valiantly clamber from Buttercup’s squashed head onto the bear’s fur and try to burrow in for a painful bite. She can’t call out, can’t try to dissuade Trevor from what’s probably quite a bad idea; she can’t breathe. She realises with annoyance that the secret weapon she spent ages making and cleverly hiding up her sleeve would come in really handy right now, but that she’s dropped it. She hopes that this won’t be the last thought she ever has. That would be a pain.
‘Baby!’ comes Gilde’s muffled voice from beyond. ‘Over here, sugar-pie! Over here!’
The bear shifts again, and Gretel can breathe and move once more. She gets to her elbows as Snow pulls up a winded but unhurt Buttercup. Gilde is pressed against the far wall of the cottage, hurling the remaining flapjacks at the corner furthest from the broken door.
‘C’mon, cutie, get off those naughty witches, there’s good eating over here,’ Gilde continues. Gretel notices that her face is still bitterly twisted up. There are tears in the old woman’s eyes.
‘Did you just save our lives?’ Snow asks, helping Buttercup and Gretel to their feet.
The bear lumbers over to the flapjacks in the corner, smashing chairs and beds as he goes, until his huge frame stands completely between Gilde and the rest of them. Gilde regards them all furiously from between the bear’s legs.
‘I didn’t never want to kill any of youse,’ she croaks. ‘I just wanted to be left lonesome; all of you demanded to come to my little cottage, every one! And then all I did was try to keep you safe from your own hare-brained selves. And how am I repaid? You turn against me, and break everything. Well, if that’s the way you want to play it, you can all just scram. Go on, scat!’
‘Gilde, please don’t end things like this,’ Hex begs.
‘Too late, birdbrain!’ Gilde winces a little as Baby shifts and smashes his haunch into the oven. ‘You want out, well then get out! Go and get cursed again out east, or get killed by those huntsmen, see if I care, just don’t you dare ever set a feather my way again!’
‘You can come with us. Together we can—’
‘Phooey. Ain’t no “us”; seems now like there never was! Leave me alone!’
Jack tugs at Hex’s shoulder. ‘Let’s do as she says.’
‘Sure, Hex.’ Gilde’s expression hardens. ‘Do as I says. Or else. I still don’t want to hurt you, but I am so het up right now, I can’t guarantee a thing.’
‘Gilde…?’
‘Out!’ Gilde’s voice becomes a roar, the roar of a multitude of bears. At the door, Gretel notices that Mamma and Papa have stopped eating and are flanking the cottage, snarling. Even Baby looks across from his pile of honeyed treats and bares his fangs.
Scarlett grabs Gretel’s shoulders, the top half of her body already halfway between human and wolf, her hackles raised. ‘Gotta go. Now,’ she manages through a barely human mouth.
‘OUT!’ roars Gilde again, and this time the three bears roar too. Baby makes a warning lunge at Hex, further splintering a bedframe in the process.
Jack grabs Hex and drags him from the cottage. For her part, Gretel needs no further encouragement to run, and nor do the rest of the group. Snow is still in the borrowed dress, without her usual armour or axes, the poker now somewhere on the cottage floor along with Gretel’s secret weapon. The sight of Snow hitching up skirts to run looks horribly wrong to Gretel. Buttercup, startled by a too-close swipe of Mamma’s great paw, has lost a chunk of her own skirt to accidental cakeification. Scarlett, too distressed to use her hood, can’t seem to decide on a shape to take, and is escaping the bears in a bizarre, panicked gait, a few steps on human feet, transforming into a wolf for a few more strides before getting tangled up in clothes that no longer fit her canine form but which she doesn’t have time to remove, straightening back up into something more human again, only for the cycle to repeat. Patience has vanished; running from a sleuth of enraged bears is very much an activity that only concerns the living, and any attempts to spook them in this state would be extremely ill-advised. A quick check over Gretel’s shoulder reveals that Jack and Hex are still with the group, taking up the rear, with Jack throwing trees up to slow the path of Mamma and Papa as they pursue the fleeing group at a steady pace.
Mamma and Papa continue to follow them after they have stumbled and slithered down the foothills, out of sight of the smashed-up cottage. The forest around them thickens, and more animal footsteps join the chase. It takes a moment for Gretel to realise that it isn’t more pursuers on their tail, rather the rest of Scarlett’s wolf pack, joining them in their exodus from the bears’ territory. The whining wolf pack does nothing to deter the bears; in fact, it only seems to make them even more aggressive in chasing everybody away. The chase continues for what feels like miles. By the time the bears finally slow to a walk, give one final roar of warning and turn to lollop back towards the mountains, Gretel’s legs and lungs are in exhausted agony. Trembling, with limbs that feel simultaneously as weak as wet paper and as heavy as clay, she drops down onto something soft and warm, which turns out to be a collapsed wolf. Both panting as hard as the other, she and the wolf share a glance of mutual apology, without either of them actually moving from the spot where they’ve both dropped. In fact, Gretel leans the back of her head down momentarily onto the exhausted wolf’s furry flank. It makes no complaint.
Snow too has sunk to a crouch. It would look almost princessly, with her skirts pooled about her, were it not for the profuse sweating and breathless swearing.
‘My armour,’ she complains. ‘That was my best armour! And all my best axes!’
Hex is looking considerably more panicked. ‘I can’t believe we did that! Trousers, she was really angry; what have we done? That was my home!’
‘It wasn’t a home,’ replies a mostly human-shaped Scarlett. ‘It was a cage and she was the key-master.’
‘But what will become of us…?’
‘You’ll stay with us, of course,’ Buttercup tells them. ‘We can make room in the cottage, right, everyone…? Buttercup frowns around herself, with the expression of somebody who’s sure she’s forgotten something but has also temporarily forgotten what it is she may have forgotten.