Gretel Brauner's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Gretel stood at the cottage window, watching the woman emerge from the tree line with a basket hooked over one arm. Not a hunter. Not one of the woodcutter's family. This woman walked through the forest like she knew which roots would hold and which would give, her steps certain even where the path disappeared into undergrowth. She stopped at the boundary where the candy willows began, their branches hung with peppermint drops that Gretel had coaxed into being just that morning. The woman set down her basket and pulled out a blue cauldron, smaller than the one inside the cottage but marked with the same silver stars. She built no fire beneath it. Instead, she added honey from a jar, then crushed something between her fingers that made the mixture glow. Gretel pushed open the cottage door and stepped into the clearing. The woman looked up but didn't startle. Her eyes went to the book tucked under Gretel's arm—the one with the sugar work diagrams—and something like recognition crossed her face. "She taught you the holding spell first," the woman said. Not a question. She stirred the cauldron once, and the honey began to spin itself into threads. "She taught me that one too, twenty years back." She glanced past Gretel toward the cottage, then at the wooden structure she'd built just beyond the tree line, simple and solid. "I didn't think anyone would claim this place. But here you are." Gretel closed the book and held it against her chest. The woman's camp was real—a cottage of her own, a cauldron already working, a place to stay. This wasn't a visit. The forest had sent someone who knew what the witch had been, and now Gretel would have to prove she could be more.