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“I was cursed by a witch. I’m not mechanical at all. Nicholas Chopper, that’s me, woodsman by trade.”

“A witch?” Rose used one of the more vertical branches to help her stand and then glanced around nervously. A forest lay on one side, and a field of stumps on the other. Not a wood like the Wild Woods, full of oak and elm, holly and ivy, but a thick stand of evergreens, their needles carpeting the ground in brown beyond the reach of the fallen limbs. Of the trees belonging to all the stumps, there was no sign, and no sign of any means by which they might have been carted away. “You’re saying a witch turned you into…that?”

“A wicked witch.” The man nodded his head with a noticeable squeaking. “We have a bit of a witch problem around here.” An unseen hinge allowed him to smile. “Less of one since your arrival, of course.”

“I…” Rose started to pat herself in an attempt to see if anything was broken. It certainly hurt enough to be broken, though the source of her pain moved from place to place as she herself moved. “I don’t follow.” She looked away from the woodsman. The sun glaring off his chest made her wince, but after wriggling through the darkness of the earth, she wasn’t going to complain about too much light. Her skirt was a ruin and her blouse torn by branches, though the skin beneath was merely scratched rather than ripped. She felt as if she were the one with a steel skin to have somehow come through such a collision unscathed.

Looking down at the tree, she was about to remark that she seemed to have hit the trunk a good ten yards above the ground, when suddenly even that pressing thought was driven from her mind. “Is that a shoe?”

“I should think so.” The woodsman leaned in to peer down at the green footwear sparkling amid the broken branches. “A boot, would you call it?”

“Oh heavens!” Again, Rose would have used a stronger word if she owned one. “It’s a— There’s a—”

“Leg. Yes.” The cursed robot nodded, squeaking slightly.

“Oh heavens!” Rose began vainly to wrestle with the tree. Whoever had been crushed beneath it seemed to have been hit dead center with the trunk obscuring their body, a leg poking out to either side. Dead center felt ominously apt. “Help me!”

“It’s a tree,” said the woodsman reasonably. “We’d need a block and tackle.”

“But you’re made of steel!”

“Tin actually.”

“What?” Rose heaved on the nearest branches but just hurt her hands.

“Tin.” The woodsman tapped his chest. “It’s not a very strong metal. I mean if I was made of steel…But then again, we really don’t want to lift the tree up, miss. It’s not going to be a pretty sight.”

“But…” Rose admitted defeat and rubbed her burning palms on her skirt, which immediately stuck to her sap-sticky skin. “Who is she?” Rose guessed at “she”—she could see a sparkly shoe and folds of a black dress or cape of some kind. “…was she?”

“A wicked witch.” Again, the mechanical smile. “I told you we had a witch problem. They’re the devil’s own business to get rid of. Their one weakness seems to be young ladies falling out of a clear blue sky, which as you can imagine doesn’t happen every day. Though last week—”

“A witch? You’re certain?” Rose wasn’t sure that absolved her. But she did find herself hoping the woman had been really wicked. “Wait. Was she the one that cursed you?”

“No.” More squeaking came as the tin man shook his head. “That was the Wicked Witch of the East. A girl landed on her last week. A whole house actually—with a girl in it. This one is the Wicked Witch of the East-southeast. You should take her shoes.”

“Ewww.”

“Green’s not my color either, but—”

“I wasn’t objecting to the color!” Though it was a bit much, truth be told. “I was objecting to looting the poor woman’s corpse before she’s even cold!”

“Well.” The tin man held up two shiny fingers and counted off the first one. “She wasn’t poor, she was wealthy and quite wicked. Not as wicked as the Witch of the East. It’s based on direction, you see. The Witch of the Southeast is neutral…” He tailed off under Rose’s stare, then rallied. “Anyway.” He counted off his second finger. “She won’t go cold. Most likely she’ll evaporate. They do that. Or melt. You’ll want to get her shoes off before she melts into them. Then it really will be ‘ewww.’ ”

“I don’t want her shoes!” Rose used the branches to steady herself, feeling suddenly dizzy.

“But they’re magic shoes…”

“What sort of magic?” Rose asked, despite herself.

“They help you get from one place to another.”

“All shoes do that,” Rose said. “It’s what they’re for.”

“These ones help you more,” the woodsman said.

Rose got unsteadily to her feet and tried to extract herself from the mass of branches. It seemed that the woodsman had cut his way to her, lopping off a considerable number of the limbs that would otherwise have trapped her, but it still proved quite a struggle.

“How did any of this happen?” Rose stood among the stumps, bent double, hands on her thighs as she tried to get her breath back.