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Gingerbread woke in a foul temper. Her side hurt. Her head throbbed. And she had the overwhelming feeling she was supposed to be dead.
"I think I would have preferred it if I was. Oh . . ." She sat up, holding her head with one hand. Her brain beat itself against her hard skull with every heartbeat.
"Evergreen?" The word emerged as a salt-water gargle. Gingerbread coughed and groaned when everything hurt. "Blast you, I told you not to save me!"
He didn't answer. When she managed to peel her aching eyes open, Gingerbread found herself alone.
She huffed. "Immortals."
I hope.
But he had saved her, and since she wasn't going to croak in the next few minutes, she might as well get up off the ground.
Grunting and grinding her teeth, Gingerbread rolled herself to her knees, then up to her feet to catch her breath. She bent over double, puffing while it came back. "If this is your idea of healing I'm double glad I didn't let you finish. Hf!"
With a final shove, Gingerbread propelled herself upright. The world wobbled, and Gingerbread wobbled with it, but she managed not to fall.
She wrapped her arm around her middle, flinching at the soreness of her broken ribs. Only the breaks she remembered from earlier had smoothed out, leaving one or two tender bumps in their place.
Frowning, Gingerbread prodded them with her fingers. A sharp ache prodded back at her and she winced. "Not broken now," she said to herself, "but they definitely were."
A suspicion snuck into her head and Gingerbread pulled apart the lower buttons of her coat to get a better look at herself.
Holes where Dearie's ice had pierced her riddled her dress beneath, blood staining their edges in a hideous patchwork. Gingerbread wrinkled her nose. "This one's past saving." She sighed. That meant spending coin on a new one.
Fresh scars showed through the holes, most only pinpricks of sandy-pink. The larger ones still pinched when she touched them.
"You sneaky little tree herder," Gingerbread said as she poked her fingers through the holes in her underdress, finding no bleeding breaks in her skin beneath any of them. The unicorn hadn't healed her, at least not all the way. She would still need time to do the rest herself, but he had saved her life.
Probably what all that breathing on me was about. And . . . ?
Gingerbread's fingers paused doing up her buttons. He'd done something else, before he came back to her. What was it?
She finished her buttons and crossed the clearing to where she remembered him stooping over the snow. "He was right about . . . here."
Her sword lay where she had dropped it, the blade dull and gray and the basket hilt winking at her. It looked the same as always, except for the sprig of holly now nestled tight against the hilt. Three green leaves clustered together around the base of her sword, three red berries growing where they met.
Holly protects more than the home, her mother's alto voice drifted back to her. Holly shields the soul. It remembers sacrifice, and with it, protects us from bleak wintry lives.
Gingerbread lifted her sword, peering at the holly. It grew from itself and held on tight.
She raised her white-hot eyes to the wood. Nothing moved between the trees, leaving a world of white and green.
"Thank you," she said, knowing he heard.
* * *
THE WINTER WHITES HAD not changed in the few hours since Gingerbread had found her way to their heart. Ice still hung thick to the trees and their lower branches bristled with blue-white icicles, but the ice light had faded into a dim blue glow, relieving the ache in Gingerbread's eyes.
No phantoms either, she thought as she stepped through a snow bank. She nodded her head. Good.
No holly boughs guided her back to the tinker camp, but she found the edge of the woods on her own. Fireflies speckled the outermost trees and somewhere ahead, one or two of the braver birds peeped in curiosity.
Frostlight Bridge was nowhere near as quiet. Animals snorted and called to each other, the chickens squawking panicked questions from their cages. The human voices sounded subdued, but grew louder as she approached.
Gingerbread stepped free of the Winter Whites and blinked at the green and yellow wagons waiting beyond the gray stone bridge. Clatch did it . She sighed, her lips pulling up in smile. I'd have liked to see that.
Enough of the tinkers had woken that their noise reached Gingerbread on the other end of the bridge. Mostly they asked the expected questions.
"Where are we?"
"How did we get here?"
"I don't remember either, but I think I fell asleep."
"We all fell asleep. But why?"
"How?"
"Enough I said! I'll explain everything later, but I'm going back for Gingerbread. She's facing a witch and there's this unicorn and- and I'll explain everything later just let me through-"
Clatch broke through the crowd and stopped at the sight of Gingerbread waiting at the opposite end of the arching stonework. He was armed for the hunt in dull browns and greens and had a quiver full of crossbow bolts slung over his back, the crossbow itself hanging at the opposite diagonal. His hatchet hung from his belt and jangled against his inventor's hammers and absurdly small screwdrivers that couldn't fit a pin. His eyes shone with hard light, but the shock of seeing her standing there wiped most of the shine away, leaving behind his pale blue eyes.
"Ginge?" Clatch stumbled. Then he ran forward. Gingerbread met him halfway across the bridge.
Clatch looked her over, mouth hanging open a second before he managed to say the obvious. "You're alive."
Gingerbread rolled her eyes. "Barely," she said. He took her hands and turned them over, inspecting them with care. Gingerbread let him.
"The unicorn?" His eyes rose to her face.
She smiled. "The same. He's in there somewhere." She jerked her head back at the Winter Whites. "No doubt removing any lingering traces of Dearie."
The skin above Clatch's bright eyes tightened. "And . . . her?"
Gingerbread closed her eyes and swam in watery relief. "Gone."
A laugh escaped before she realized it was inside her. "Sorry," she said, shaking her head at herself. "I never thought I would get to say that, not ever." She marveled at her new freedom.
Gingerbread opened her eyes and realized Clatch still her held her hands. She took them back, glancing down at his boots and distracted herself with his crossbow peeking past his elbow. She grinned as she crossed her arms, hiding her hands in the folds of her cape. "What's with the get up? Were you coming in after me?"
She said it to tease him, but Clatch blinked in confusion. "Of course I was. What did you think I would do? Leave you in there to fight her off alone?" He was so straightforward about it, Gingerbread blushed instead. "Though it looks like I'm too late to do any good."
Her face burned redder as he looked her up and down. "Tackling her on my own sounds a little more foolhardy when you put it that way," she mumbled to try to distract him from it.
Clatch made a face. "I think you meant 'stupid'."
Gingerbread cocked her head at him, but found she didn't want to tease him now. Gingerbread glanced down at her bare hands. Her gloves were at her belt, stiff with dried blood.
"I'm glad you were," Gingerbread said. "Late, I mean. I needed to face her on my own."
Clatch's eyebrows sunk over his eyes. "I still think that sounds like another word for 'stupid'," he groused.
Gingerbread snapped her eyes to his. "I fought her off my whole life. Every waking, sleeping, miserable hour of it. Taunting me, pestering me with how useless I am. How weak and silly for fighting her off." Her eyes hardened. "I was starting to believe her. But I finally got my chance to tell her what I thought, to pester her for once. I had to show the both of us I could take her."
Gingerbread realized she was staring past Clatch's ear and centered her gaze on his. He waited with silent interest. "Does that . . . still sound stupid?" she asked him.
Clatch thought of something, but Gingerbread couldn't read his mind and he didn't share, only shook his head. "No."
Her shoulders lost some of their tightness just as Clatch's forehead screwed up with thought lines. "What I don't understand is how you saw her and none of us could. We could see her illusions like the witch-eyed unicorn, or Katri could anyway, so I know she was there, but I never even saw her shadow."
Hadn't she explained that earlier? Gingerbread wondered, but couldn't remember. "Because the Dearie I fought in the Winter Whites when we found Katri was one of her echoes, almost her phantom, except she wasn't wholly dead yet. What was left of her was encased in ice by the unicorn at the Heart of the Wood but, tricky snake, she learned to cast echoes of herself out through the ice of the trees." She looked up, wondering out loud, "That might be why the trees all glowed, now that I think on it."
"Echoes, huh?" Clatch said with care.
Gingerbread nodded, her buoyed spirit sinking. "It fits. People say old sins cast long shadows, but I heard her more than I saw her. She echoed about my mind. Tch," she spat. "Morbid old stick. She was determined to stick around." Her eyes flashed.
Clatch nodded very slowly. "Maybe . . ." he said, tapping at the blonde whiskers stubbling his chin. "But . . . echoes fade. The longer they go on, the less sense they make, until they're just far off noise."
Gingerbread stepped off Frostlight Bridge, turning that idea over in her mind like a coin between her fingers. "Echoes fade . . ." she repeated to herself.
The tinkers had seen her and Clatch standing on the bridge and ran to them in a rush of confused voices. Nikolas led the charge. "Girl Gingerbread! What is this? I woke for breakfast, everyone of us woke for breakfast, and now camp is gone, the woods are behind us, and you've gone and come back again from some witch battle? Tell me what's happened!"
A grin bunched up one corner of her mouth at the irony. "What are you asking me for Nikolas? You're the storyteller." She grinned at him and placed her weight on one foot. "And no doubt you will make an entertaining mess of this one by the time we reach the audiences waiting in Tannen Town. You will have them all agog, by what I do not know."
But she did know three things. There was always a wood and there was always a witch.
And sometimes, Gingerbread thought as she fingered one of the holly leaves at her side, there is a gift as well.
––––––––
End