Trevor pauses sulkily.
‘…which made her bitter batter better,’ he murmurs.
‘I’m fine,’ Snow tells them all. ‘And it isn’t so bad out here, is it? It’s just another load of cursed forest, like we deal with every day. Nothing’s changed, not really.’ She clears her throat. ‘And we’re still hours away from Bear Mountain, so we should push on.’ She glares at Trevor, who is now waving a foreleg aloft, and sighs. ‘Yes, Trevor?’
‘My knees are still tingling.’
‘Well, I’m sure whoever’s talking about you must have a lot to say.’
‘It might not be that, though,’ Trevor adds. ‘It might mean… trouble.’
Snow rolls her eyes. ‘Come on.’
Gretel locks gazes with Trevor as they all push ahead through the forest. ‘It’ll be fine.’
‘You always say that,’ Trevor tells her, ‘and sometimes, it isn’t fine.’
‘Well, it will be fine this time.’
They continue heading north.
High up in the branches above where they’d been standing, something rustles amongst the leaves. Something big. Very, very big indeed. Foliage scatters to the ground, boughs creak, and a giant mass of sleek, oil-black feathers takes off into the sky, following them at a leisurely pace with great flaps of almighty, inky wings.
5
Such Big Teeth
Gretel adds to the map as they go, filling in the blank area with natural and magical landmarks. There are fewer small magical creatures in the north, she notes, but besides that, the northern woods reassuringly continue much the same as ‘her’ part of the forest. She is struck by the fact that, over only a couple of months, the Darkwood has gone from being a foreboding place that must be fenced off and guarded against, to being something almost normal, almost like home.
As ordinary as this part of the woods seem, still the Dwarves appear uneasy. She speeds up her pace to catch up with Snow, in the front.
‘What’s up with the Dwarves?’ she asks.
‘Same as the pigeons and rats,’ Snow tells her.
‘They’re scared of predators, too?’ Gretel asks. ‘But they’re not even that bothered by the Bin Men.’
‘They’re used to the Bin Men,’ Snow explains. ‘They know how to avoid them. This is different. They can smell something new and they don’t like it. Oi!’ She kicks away a Dwarf trying to cling anxiously to her leg. ‘I already told you, I’m not carrying you, mate.’
The Dwarf growls.
‘Oh, stop whining. People are going to think you’re a cowardy-custard.’
The Dwarf snarls and spits through razor teeth.
‘Pack it in. We’re nowhere near Bear Mountain still, this is just more forest, it’s not like anything’s going to happen now…’
‘Oh, don’t say that,’ mutters Trevor from Buttercup’s hair, behind them.
‘What now?’ Snow groans.
‘It’s tempting fate, dear,’ Buttercup tells her gently. ‘It’s never a good idea to tempt fate, especially in a cursed forest.’
‘Yeah, trust someone who’s done a fair amount of haunting,’ Patience adds. ‘If I were about to jump out and shout “boo”, I’d definitely do it at the exact moment some Smart Herbert went “I’m telling you, there’s no such thing as Ghosts”.’
‘Nothing’s going to happen!’
‘Stop it, Snow,’ chimes in Jack.
‘For crying out loud, guys!’
Even Gretel, for all her love of science, has to admit that in the current magical landscape, fortuity counts for a lot, and that Snow is definitely pushing it right now.
‘Snow… we can’t know who’s listening, right now.’
Gretel also has to admit that implying to Snow that she should maybe stop doing something is a huge mistake, since it will only make her do it more. Princesses.
‘You as well, New Girl? Little Miss “Everything’s Probably Going to Be Fine”? I thought I could at least count on you to be rational. I’m a hunter. I’m used to being out on my own in the wilderness, I’m massively attuned to these woods, and I say…’ She blinks. ‘Oh, fruit. Yeah, something’s definitely about to launch a stealth attack on…’
Suddenly, noise and movement burst out everywhere around them. Big things – the size of adult humans from the sounds of cracking wood and trampled leaves, but much faster – surround them, still unseen amongst the foliage, both on land and up in the branches.
‘Yummy,’ snarls the Dwarf that had been trying to climb Snow, its voice dripping with resentment.
‘Oh, don’t you start!’ snaps Snow.
A large grey wolf leaps from the darkness of the trees, teeth bared, powering towards the group, all sharpness and sleek muscles. In the space of a breath, Snow drops and rolls, drawing an axe in each hand as she goes, the Dwarves scattering and grasping at their own blades at her cue.
Gretel’s mind whirls. She hasn’t come unarmed, but her portable propulsion device is still in her backpack, and isn’t really a melee weapon, anyway. In the split second that sees the wolf still sailing in one great bound towards them, her brain presents to her another option – the dynamo-on-a-stick idea she had once crafted out of an electrical torch to rescue Jack from Swamp Mermaids. The zap from its charged wires wouldn’t incapacitate a wolf as it had the smaller, slimy Mermaids, but it would give it a nasty sting, possibly enough to drive it back. Unfortunately, the dynamo-on-a-stick is also in the backpack. She tells herself that if she survives this ambush, the lesson to take from it will definitely be ‘always have a melee weapon to hand when you’re trudging around in wolf territory and the princess you’re with keeps loudly tempting fate’.
The space of that single gasp of breath continues, the wolf still leaping, Snow and the Dwarves still rolling and sprouting axe blades, Gretel frozen with no means of self-defence to hand. There is a heavy step behind her, of someone lunging forwards. It’s Jack, his hands clenched outwards. His shoulder slams into hers and she loses balance. She topples, and as she falls, she sees a line of gorse spring up between them and the airborne wolf.
The wolf hits the thorny bush. It yelps. Gretel herself cries out as she hits the ground hard on her side.
Snow spins, a throwing axe already poised over a shoulder.
‘Behind you,’ she shouts to Buttercup, who instinctively ducks.
Snow’s throwing axe whirls gracefully over Buttercup’s head, and then not quite so gracefully goes straight through Patience and wings a second wolf, emerging from the thicket.
‘Fruit.’ Snow reaches for a new axe at another cracking sound from the thicket. ‘It’s a whole pack of them.’
Cursing and winded, Gretel fumbles in her bag for her dynamo-on-a-stick. Two more wolves leap from the undergrowth simultaneously. Jack pushes a fist out again, and a poison oak erupts into sudden existence. One wolf hits its head on it, and three of the Dwarves scramble up its boughs, issuing sharp ‘yummy’s of pain as they go, to throw sharp flints down at the other beast.
Gretel is finally able to yank the dynamo-on-a-stick from her bag. She rolls up onto her knees, furiously winding up the dynamo. It’s still only half-charged when another creature comes crashing out of the trees, practically on top of her. Still winding, she looks up at the beast looming over her. Such big eyes, such big teeth and oh trousers, that’s not even a wolf at all.