Katrina had never known the weather to be particularly stable in Greymist Fair, and she didn’t think there was a way to prove the ravens were gathering secrets, but she didn’t have any explanation for the dead creature.
Hans was pacing around the creature now, his arms crossed. Katrina wanted to tell him to stop; it seemed the creature might come alive at any moment and bite off his leg. “Can you imagine what it must be like, to have the power to create living things? To change the weather, or make animals your familiars? Do you think the witch was born with magic, or did she learn it?” Hans asked.
Katrina and Fritz glanced at each other. Fritz shrugged.
“What would you do with magic, if you had it?” Hans asked them. He’d stopped, feet planted, near the creature’s head.
“I—I dunno,” Fritz said.
“Of course you do,” Hans snapped. “Everyone knows what they would do if they could do anything. What would it be?”
Fritz, shuffling in place and looking around as if an answer might be somewhere near him, at last said, “I guess I’d make myself stronger. Then I could build a better boat.”
Hans rolled his eyes. “What about you, Katrina?”
“I would make myself like everyone else,” she said, without hesitation.
Hans’s eyebrows furrowed. “What for? It’s better to be special.”
“Well, what wouldyoudo with magic?” Katrina shot back, motioning with her basket. “Your father has provided you with a house to live in, you have fine clothes, plenty to eat. What wouldyouwant that isn’t silly or simple?”
Hans’s lips parted to reveal his crooked teeth. He spread his arms wide. “I would make myself the King of Greymist! I would hold feasts every night, and the whole village would dance and sing. I could invite anyone I wanted to my table, I could appointwhomever I wanted as my servants, I couldhaveanyone I wanted. Even my father wouldn’t be able to tell me what to do, the cruel bastard.”
He looked so young, and he sounded so serious, that Katrina started laughing. Hans dropped his arms and flushed red from his collar to his hairline. He glared at Fritz, who had to turn his laughs into coughs.
“You think the witch would teach you how to use magic so you could go and make yourself king?” Katrina wiped her eyes, barely breathing through the last of her laughter. “Well, actually, maybe she would. That would be a fast way for her to burn Greymist Fair to the ground.”
“You think she’d teachyoujust so you could make yourself like everyone else?” Hans said. “She’d turn you into a toad for such a stupid request.”
Katrina folded her hands on the handle of her basket. “Would you like to bet on that? I think she’d laugh in your face.”
“I’d happily wager my life on that.” Hans’s chest was puffed up, his chin thrust out, pride and defiance in his eyes. “You and I, Katrina, we’ll go to the witch’s home in the forest. I’ll find the way. We’ll ask her to make us students, then let her decide who she’ll take. And we’re betting our lives on it.”
Of course we will, Katrina thought, pursing her lips tokeep from smiling again. She was absolutely sure that Hans would never find the path to the witch’s home, and they would never go to her, and there would never be a winner or a loser. Hans was marching his ego around, and this grand declaration was all that would ever come of it.
Two weeks later, she was proven wrong.
Four
On a dark spring day, with the clouds scudding across an overcast sky and the orioles complaining from their hiding spots, Katrina crept after Hans past the hill upon which sat Hilda’s cottage. It looked gray and ramshackle, tiny compared to Greymist Manor, and Katrina felt like Hilda was watching them from its windows and knew what they were doing.
“I know the way. I know how to get to the witch,” Hans had said when he’d found her taking her walk through the square the week before. “I don’t know what everyone is so scared of. It’s just sometrees.Only the weak fear the forest.”
He had followed Hilda when she went on her visit. He had remained close enough so as not to get lost, close enough to call out to her if he got into danger, but the forest hadn’t seemed dangerous at all.
They had come to a cottage deep in the woods, in a clearing where all the trees were losing their leaves, as if it was fall. Thecottage was nothing to look at, he said. Like any other cottage in the village.
“She didn’t go inside. She tied some plants to a string on the door and then walked around the outside a few times. It didn’t take very long at all. It’s no wonder the witch is putting monsters in the lake—the tailor isn’t even talking to her anymore!”
Katrina’s stomach flipped as she and Hans crept closer and closer to the forest’s edge. She had never been this close to the trees before; they seemed to touch the sky, their highest branches bending to a wind she couldn’t feel here on the ground, their leaves rustling from an invisible touch. Since she had offered the bet, she had considered what she would do if she won it—whatwouldshe do with magic, besides making herself normal? And what did that even mean,normal? She still wanted to be beautiful, but she also wanted to have friends, and to be allowed to go out whenever she chose, and she wanted people to listen to her when she spoke—but she hadn’t thought that Hans would figure out how to get to the witch. Katrina had not considered the actual journey.
Fritz had refused to go, despite Hans’s nearly constant harassing. “I don’t go in the forest. Da says no forest, so I don’t go in the forest. There’s enough weird things coming out of thelake; I don’t want to see what’s in the forest. People get killed in there, you know?”
Katrina knew—even if she didn’t know about the witch, she knew the forest itself was not worth the risk for most of the villagers—and Hans should have known, but either he had chosen to ignore the warnings, or he believed they didn’t apply to him.
And now here they stood, at the first of the trees, with the village at their backs. Hans dove in without hesitation. Katrina scanned the hazy blue shadows between the trunks, listened for sounds deep from those unknown places of tunneling roots and twisting branches. There was no movement, and the sound was a low-volume hum of insects and wind broken only by the low hoot of an owl that Katrina could have imagined.
The walk was long, and the chill settled under Katrina’s clothes not long after Greymist Fair disappeared behind them. Once inside of it, she didn’t find the forest as scary as she’d expected. There were birdcalls, and the soft rustle of leaves, sounds not so different from the ones she heard out her window every morning. Hans never went too far from her, always turning to make sure she was still there, holding out a hand to help her over fallen trees and down sudden slopes.
