Cordelia's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Cordelia shut the cottage door behind the boy. The lantern on the far bank was still small, but it was moving. She had minutes, not hours. She turned and found Hansel already at her kitchen table, satchel open, boots kicking the chair legs. He was pulling bread from his bag and setting the pieces in a curling line across her floor, one crumb, then another, marking the way back to a sister who was not here. "Stop that," Cordelia said, softer than she wanted. The boy did not stop. He looked up at her with the same green eyes from the bridge and kept dropping bread. If he cried, if he ran, if he shouted his sister's name out the window, the lantern would find her door in ten minutes flat. She needed him quiet. She needed him occupied. She crossed to the pantry and pulled down what was left of her old cottage — a tin of icing chips, a jar of peppermint dust, half a bag of hard sugar beads. She set them on the table between his hands. "Build me something," she said. "Anything you like. I need to know if my walls will hold this winter." Hansel looked at the tin. He looked at the crumbs on the floor. "I'm not staying," he said. "I'm looking for Gretel." "I know where trails go," Cordelia said. She sat across from him. She kept her voice level. "Build first. Then we talk about your sister. That is the trade." He watched her a long moment. Then he pushed the bread aside and pulled the tin toward him. He began stacking sugar beads into a small crooked hut, thatched with strips of icing, walls patched with peppermint. He worked fast, the way a boy works when he wants to prove something. Beside it, without asking, he shaped a lump of dough into a little pig and wrapped it in straw from her broom. Cordelia watched the door. The lantern light had reached her garden fence. She could hear boots now, heavy ones, not a woodsman's patrol rhythm. Someone alone. Someone who had followed the crumbs. She stood. She swept every piece of bread off her floor into her apron. She dropped the apron into the stove and shut the iron door. The trail ended at her hearth. "Keep building," she told Hansel. "Do not open the door for anyone but me." He nodded without looking up. His hands were sticky. His mouth was full of icing. He was quiet. Cordelia took her wand from the flour jar and stepped outside. The obstacle was solved. The boy was busy, the trail was ash, and her cottage was silent behind her. But the lantern was ten steps from her gate, and whoever held it had already seen her face on the bridge.