Cordelia's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Cordelia counted three woodsmen on the north path before breakfast. That was one more than yesterday. She watched them from her kitchen window, past the sagging icing on the eaves, past the cracked peppermint that used to catch the sun. Her cottage was half a ruin now. The gingerbread walls had gone soft with rain. The candy-cane beams leaned. She meant to rebuild every sugared inch of it, brighter and sweeter than before, until no lost child in this forest could walk past her door without stopping. But no child could reach the door. The woodsmen kept turning them back at the tree line, axes on their shoulders, whistling to each other through the pines. She pulled her wand from the flour jar. The thorned shaft was still warm from last night's work. The green crystal at its tip pulsed once when she gripped it. She did not need to fight the woodsmen. She needed to move them. Cordelia worked all afternoon at the stone counter. She melted sugar in a copper pot until it ran clear as glass. She whispered into the steam. She poured the syrup into long ribbons and cooled them on the sill. By dusk she had a coil of candy rope thick as her wrist, warm and faintly humming. She carried it past the bone-white birches to the ravine that split the forest in two. The woodsmen guarded the paths, but no path crossed here. She tapped the wand against the candy rope. It unrolled itself across the gap, arching from lip to lip, hardening into a bridge of spun sugar and starlight. Anyone small enough to be curious would find it before any grown man did. She was smoothing the last rail when she heard boots. Not a woodsman's boots. Lighter. Quicker. A boy stood at the far end of the bridge, hand on the sugar rail, green eyes taking in the whole shining span. His cloak was too big for him. His satchel hung heavy at his hip. He was already dropping something from his fingers as he walked, one crumb, then another, marking his way back. "Did you build this?" the boy called. "I did," Cordelia said. She kept her wand behind her skirt. She smiled the way she had practiced in the cracked window glass. "Are you lost?" "My sister is," he said. "I'm looking." "Come across," Cordelia said. "I have a kitchen. I have bread." Hansel stepped onto the bridge. It held. He crossed to her side, still trailing crumbs, and she saw the trail stretching back into the dark beyond the ravine, past where the woodsmen watched the wrong paths. Cordelia turned toward her cottage and the boy followed. Behind them, on the far bank, a lantern bobbed into view. Someone had seen the bridge. Someone was already coming.