Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [31]
Hansel looked first at his sister's hands. "You have no tray," he said, his own hands describing a small, despairing arc in his lap. "I thought she might have sent you in her stead." Then he noticed her expression. "Why, girl, what is wrong? You look as though you see a haunt."
But it was no ghost Gretel stared at in disbelief. Her brother had far too much flesh on him to be a messenger from the other world. In fact, he was one of the stoutest people she had ever seen. In a few short months he had ballooned to twice his former size and lay propped on his pillows like a miniature pasha.
"You ... you look ... well fed." In fact, nothing that grew or walked or swam, nothing that Gretel could imagine, was meant to be so large. In a shameful moment, she even wondered how it was the witch could think her prize was not ready for the oven. "You must not eat any more, Brother." Hansel turned his cold, disapproving look on her, but she raced on, "Each bite you take puts you in greater danger. I hardly know how to tell you. The witch, she plans to—"
"Witch?" He looked even darker. "Mother is no witch. Though I suppose if she does not fancy you, she may seem so."
"'Mother'?" Gretel said the word aloud, and somehow speaking it herself was less horrible than hearing it on her brother's tongue. "'Mother'?"
"She has asked me to call her that, and so I shall if it pleases her." He leaned back, otiose, languid, and picked up a chocolate drop. He considered the candy, his expression almost fond, then popped it in his mouth.
"But how can you think she means you well?" Gretel was amazed that her brother had no idea what the crone was about. "We must run, Brother. We must leave here at once." She reached for one of his plump hands, but he pushed her away.
"Leave here?" Hansel sat up now, turning over a twig wagon filled with stone marbles. "Why should we leave someone who treats us with more kindness than our own parents?" He picked up a chapbook and opened it. "Why, she has even taught me to read." He lowered his head over the small volume. "This word is raven. See where it flies out of the pie?"
The more Hansel was content to sit and read, of course, the fatter he would grow. Gretel watched him pick up several more books, pointing proudly to pictures and to the single words that described them. "Even our own mother, girl, never taught us such wonders."
Gretel was fairly dancing with impatience. She had to convince Hansel of the danger they faced. And she had to do it before the old hag missed her. "You must understand. You must listen," she told him. "She feeds on human flesh."
"Ay." Hansel grinned ludicrously. "And this be a grand fellow I am eating, too." He pulled a gingerbread man from a chain of cookies strung beneath his window. Hugely, raucously, he chomped off its feet first, then its head.
"She means to eat you, too." There. Gretel had said it at last. She heard her own terrible words in the long silence that followed, that flowed like a thick current between them.
Until Hansel laughed. He even left off savaging the ginger man's body. He put his hands on his knees to steady himself, then rocked back and forth, roaring. The tears streamed from his eyes and down his newly dimpled cheeks. Back and forth, back and forth he rocked, until the room filled with his mirth and Gretel feared the witch would hear.
"Stop!" she commanded. "Stop and hear me." When he slowed a bit, she pushed her words in between the spasms of laughter. "Does she not feel your wrist each day?"
"Ay," he told her. "'Tis but to take my hand. She is wont to pat me often." He glared at his sister, but his tone was softer, almost a purr. "She cannot see at all well, Mother. She must touch where others look."
"She wants you fat enough to cook." Gretel was no longer careful how she put the matter.