“They live!” someone shouted, and they were swarmed by people, slapping their backs, rubbing their heads, embracing them.
“You did it!” they cried. “You survived!”
“And you saved us!” It was the man who had been hiding behind the tree. The woman was next to him. She beamed at them.
“Most of us,” someone said. The cheers began to fade.
“And the dragon?” another asked. Now all became silent.
Hansel and Gretel stared at the people, their faces expectant, hopeful.
“It lives,” Gretel said, shaking her head. “The dragon lives.”
A long, heavy sigh passed through the room.
“We’re sorry,” Hansel said. “We tried.”
“Oh, well that’s good!” There was a young man sitting in the corner. He had a long fresh cut across his face that was yellow with balm. “The children tried! Well, that makes it all better!”
Hansel and Gretel stared at the young man and his grotesque, raw scar.
“They had a cute little idea,” he went on, “and they gave it a shot! Good for you two!” His tone suddenly changed. “Do you know I nearly died out there? Do you know that we all nearly died!”
“We didn’t, though,” said a large man with a beard.
“We didn’t. How many did? How many dead are there?”
There was silence. In their minds, Hansel and Gretel saw the bodies scattered among the trees. Gretel thought of the woman whose hair looked like a halo.
“They’re children!” the scarred man shouted. “Children! We followed children to fight a dragon? What were we thinking? What were any of us thinking?” He put his head in his arms on the table.
A woman nearby placed a hand on his shoulder. She glared at Hansel and Gretel.
The man with the beard stepped up to them. “Don’t listen to them,” he said. “You did good. Most of us lived. No one has ever survived a fight with the dragon before.”
“And what’s this on you?” said a woman, gesturing at Gretel. Gretel looked down. She was covered in the black blood of the dragon.
“We hurt it,” Gretel said. “We took two of its toes and cut the side of its face.” She did not explain that the moon had bitten half of its cheek off. She wasn’t sure they would understand.
Her news was met with a louder roar than the one that had met them when they’d entered.
“Hurt it!” “Took two toes!” “Gashed its face!”
The bearded man squeezed each of their shoulders with a meaty hand. “You see? This was just the first battle. We’ll get it next time. And now that we know we can beat it, you’ll have a thousand more recruits. Ten thousand more!”
“And it will be a thousand times smarter!” the young man shouted from the corner. “And ten thousand times angrier! How many more people will die for this ... this childishness? And now it will be worse than before. It will take revenge on all of us. On everyone.”
There were scattered murmurs of agreement from around the tavern.
“What have we done?” he moaned.
Gretel’s face was scorching. Hansel’s lips were pressed together so hard they had turned white.
“There are dead in the forest,” Hansel said at last.
“Yes,” said the veteran. “We’ll tend to them. You go home now.”
The children turned and walked out of the tavern. As the door closed behind them, something hit it and clattered to the floor.
They walked back to the castle as the eastern horizon was just beginning to change from black to deep, deep blue. The moon had set. The air was cold and moist. After a while Gretel said, “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”
“So?” Hansel answered sullenly. “It did.”
“But how?” Gretel replied, shaking her head. “It must have known somehow.”
“Known what? What knew?”
“The dragon.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It knew the plan. It saw the apples, and then it came through the woods to take us from behind.”
“It didn’t know,” Hansel scoffed. He felt cold. He rubbed his arms up and down.
“It did. About everything except the wine.” Gretel kicked the road. “Who knew our plan?”
“It didn’t know,” Hansel repeated. “Maybe it figured out the apples were a trap.” His stomach twisted. “It was a stupid, childish plan.”
“No,” Gretel said. “No. It knew.”
At the palace, the queen rushed up to them and took them in her arms. “Oh, my dears! You’re safe! Oh, thank God you’re safe!”
They told her what happened, and her face grew long and serious. “It isn’t so bad. You wounded it. No one has ever done that before.”
The children nodded.
“You did a very brave thing. Very brave.” And she pulled them to her. When she released them, Hansel said, “Where’s Father?”
“He locked himself in his room while you were gone,” the queen replied. “He was so scared for you both that he was shaking. He said he tried to shave, but he cut himself. Quite seriously, it seems.
“Will he be okay?” Gretel asked.
“I’ll be fine.” Their father’s voice echoed from across the hall. He limped toward them, a bandage wrapped around his head. He took them in his arms. “Foolish of me, shaving at a time like this. It calms me down when the barber does it.... But forget about your foolish father. You’re all right?” He saw the dragon-blood on Gretel. “What happened to you? What is that stuff?”
So they all went and sat before the fire, and Hansel and Gretel told him about it, too. “You were very brave,” he said when they’d finished. “And you nearly did a very great thing. You nearly saved this kingdom from the dragon.”
“Nearly.” Hansel and Gretel repeated the word together, and it stuck in their throats like a lump. Each saw, in their minds, the dead strewn across the forest floor.
At last, the king and queen took the children to bed, with Hansel helping his limping father up the stairs. Once in bed, their father kissed them both, and then their mother did, and then they closed the door and went away.
When their footsteps no longer sounded in the hall, Gretel sat up and opened the window curtains. The sun was beginning to come up. She opened the window and let the cool morning breeze blow in. She shook her head to get the terrible images of the night out of her mind. And the weight, the old weight, had returned.
“It knew,” she said. “It knew our plan.”
Hansel sat up. He felt the weight, too. Heavier than ever. As if every person in his family were standing on his chest. And every person in the Kingdom of Grimm on top of that. “Come off it,” he said irritably. “It saw us, or heard us, or something. No one knew the plan until we were deep in the forest. And none of the soldiers ran off.”
“Mother and Father knew it.”
“Oh, please,” Hansel said. “Mother and Father told the dragon?”
Gretel admitted that sounded ridiculous.
She sat, looking out the window. The kingdom spread out before her under the rising sun. Maybe the dragon had seen the golden apples and figured it out. It had been an obvious trap. A stupid trap. A childish trap.
But then ...
“Why did Father have a bandage around his head?” Gretel asked suddenly.
“You heard. He cut himself.”
Gretel nodded. After a moment, she said, “Why was he limping?”
“Because—” Hansel said, and then stopped.
“Was he shaving his toes?”
“Wait ... I don’t understand,” said Hansel.
Gretel stood up. “Father,” she said.
“What about him?” Hansel asked, staring.
“Father is the dragon.”
“What?”
“When did the dragon first appear?” Gretel said. “When Father was away, looking for us. When did it kill the kingdom’s army? When Father wasn’t leading the army. Who knew of our plan? Mother and Father.”
“But the wine—you said the dragon didn’t know what was in those barrels.”
Gretel paused, but then she replied, “When did we decide to bring the wine?”
“After we told them—”
“After we told them. And now he has a bandage on his head, and he’s limping.”
“Not.”
“It’s him.”
“He’s our father.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Gretel said. She went to the clothes she had worn for the battle, lying in a bloody pile on the floor, and drew from her belt the small dagger. She walked over to the door to the hall and opened it. She turned to Hansel. “I am going to kill the dragon.”
Gretel walked slowly down the stairs and through the hall to their parents’ room. She opened the door. The king stood in his nightclothes beside the bed. His foot was thickly bandaged, and blood was seeping through the wrappings.
“Where’s Mother?” Gretel asked.
The king turned, surprised. “I thought you would be sleeping,” he said. “She’s in the chapel. Why?” And then, “Gretel, why do you have that dagger? What’s wrong?”
“You are the dragon,” she said.
“What?”
“You are the dragon!” she shouted. She took a step toward him. He took a step back. She stepped toward him again. Then she charged.
“Gretel!” he cried as she thrust the dagger at his chest. He stepped to the side and grabbed her arms. “Gretel! Stop! Stop! What are you doing?”
Just then, Hansel arrived at the door. He watched his father holding his sister’s slender wrists with his strong hands. She was shouting at him, “You’re the dragon! You’re the dragon!” and trying to hit him with the point of the dagger. He shook her—violently—and the dagger came loose from her hands. It clattered to the floor. He kicked it, and it slid under the bed.
He held her wrists tightly. “Gretel, what are you doing?”
Gretel’s face was red and twisted with fury. “You did this to us!” she cried. “You cut off our heads! You’re the dragon! You killed those people! It’s your fault! Yours!” And she lifted her little foot and brought it down on his bandaged toes as hard as she could.
He threw his head back and screamed in pain.
She stomped on the bandage again and again. The bandage began to slide off. Still she stomped.
“Gretel!” Hansel shouted. “Stop! You’re hurting him!”
But Gretel fell to the ground. “He’s missing two toes!” she said. “He’s missing two toes!”
Her father looked up at her. His eyes were not his eyes. They were golden, with neither whites nor pupils. “Hansel!” Gretel cried.
Hansel had seen. He was looking for a weapon. Hanging on the wall there was a sword. He took it down and moved toward his father—the dragon. His father stared at him through golden eyes. “I’m sorry, Father,” Hansel whispered.
“It’s not your fault,” Gretel said.
And then Hansel’s sword cut through the air toward their father’s neck, and at that moment both Hansel and Gretel remembered just what it had looked like, just what it had felt like, when it had been them, not him. And then Hansel’s sword took off their father’s head at the neck and sent it rolling across the floor and into a corner of the room. The king’s headless body fell on top of Gretel.
And just like that, everything was still.
Gretel cradled her father’s body. Hansel’s bloody sword tip touched the stone floor. The light in the room was yellow like the morning. The birds outside did not sing.
Then, out from where their father’s head had once been attached to his body, two tiny claws emerged. They were quickly followed by spindly black legs, and then the golden eyes and head of a miniature, wormlike dragon. Its long, thin, black, blood-covered body slipped out of the king’s neck and scrambled down his shoulder, and, before she could even move, over Gretel’s lap and onto the floor. It skittered frantically toward the sewage grate, its claws scratching and scraping against the bedroom’s flagstones.
Gretel shrieked and Hansel flung himself at it, striking at its skeletal body with his sword. One furious blow broke its back. The next decapitated it completely. But Hansel didn’t stop. He raised his sword and brought it down again and again and again, until the evil little creature was nothing more than a mess of black, pulpy pieces on the floor. Hansel, breathing hard, eyes aflame, took the ash shovel from the fireplace. He collected the tiny beast’s mangled remains and threw them into the fire. The flames roared in greeting, and as they did a long, high, terrible scream pierced the air—just like the screams Hansel and Gretel had heard in the woods.
A moment later, all was silence again, and golden smoke drifted lazily from the blazing fire into the chimney, and then out onto the morning air.
The dragon was dead.
Hansel looked to Gretel. She sat, bent over her father’s lifeless body. She was crying. Hansel came to her side and hugged her. And Hansel and Gretel, brother and sister, sat on the floor of their parents’ room and thought of all they had seen, and all they had done. And they wept.
The End
Almost.
“Quick,” Gretel whispered through her tears. “Bring me his head.”
Hansel looked to the corner where it had come to rest. He went to it and—gingerly, trying not to look—he picked it up. Then he brought it to his sister.
From her pocket Gretel had taken out the warlock’s twine. It was nearly nothing. Just a frayed strand, no thicker than a hair.
“Hold his head on,” she said.
So Hansel put their father’s head on his neck. Then Gretel wrapped the twine around it and, fumblingly, tied it. As she untied it, the twine snapped. She let it fall to the ground.
They watched the skin on their father’s neck creep together, healing before their eyes. But he did not move.
Gretel began to cry harder. Hansel cried, too.
“We forgive you,” Gretel said.
“We do,” Hansel agreed. Their tears fell on him.
And he moved. Gretel nearly threw him off her, she was so surprised. The king groaned.
“Father? Father!” Gretel cried. He groaned again. His eyes opened slowly.
“Hello,” he said.
Hansel and Gretel fell upon him. “Oh, Father, you’re all right! You’re all right!”
Gretel said, “We wish we hadn’t had to do that.”
Hansel said, “But we did have to.”
He took hold of them both. “I understand,” he said. And then, blinking at them as if he had just walked into the sunlight after a long time in the darkness, he said, “I under-stand, my children.”
Just then they heard footsteps in the hall. The queen’s. Hansel looked at his father, covered in blood.
“Father,” he said, “did Mother know you were the dragon?”
“No,” their father replied. “I didn’t know myself, until just now. I just kept waking up in strange places. I really did think I was shav—”
“Okay. Get in the wardrobe.” So their father got in the wardrobe. Just as he did, their mother entered the room.
“Did you have a nice time praying, Mother?” Hansel asked.
She took her children in her arms. “Oh, I can barely pray. I think only of the dragon, and of our poor kingdom.”
Gretel said, “What if we told you, Mother, that we knew who the dragon was, and that the only way to stop the dragon would be to kill that person?”
The queen looked back and forth between her two children. “You know who it is? Then we must do it! Right away!”
“No matter who it is?” Hansel asked.
“No matter who it is.”
“It’s Father,” the children said at once.
The queen gasped. She fell to the floor and wept bitterly.
After a long time, she said, “If you’re sure it’s him, if you can prove it—then yes. I couldn’t do it. But I would understand.”
The children looked at each other, and th
en said, at the same moment, “Are we glad you said that!” Then they walked over to the wardrobe and let out their father, all covered in blood.
The queen screamed. Then Hansel and Gretel explained it all. The queen wept and beat the king’s chest with her hands. But after that she laughed through her tears and threw her arms around all of them. Then she wept some more.
“You’re all okay?” she asked, as tears streamed down her face.
“We’re all okay,” they said together.
And they all held one another—one big, happy, sad, complicated family—as tightly as they always should have.
The End
Nearly.
I’m sorry. Before I tell you the very, truly, absolutely end, I’ve got to interject one last time.
For fun.
Or to help you, if I can. (Though I wouldn’t count on it.)
Why did this patricidal beheading have to happen? Why something so awful? So gruesome? So upsetting? Why was their father the dragon? And did they really, really have to cut off his head?
And what about everything that came before that? All this blood and this pain. What sense does any of it make? Is there any sense at all?
I don’t know.
I mean, what does under-standing have to do with returning to your family? Or cutting off your finger have to do with turning into a wild beast? What does an old crone with a shackle on her leg have to do with Faithful Johannes? Or three black ravens with cages full of white doves? Why is the moon creepy and cold, when the stars are bright and kind? Why was the widow a good parent, and yet no more able to protect Gretel than the bad parents? What did all of this mean—these strange, scary, dark, grim tales?
I told you already. I don’t know.
Besides, even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.
You see, to find the brightest wisdom one must pass through the darkest zones. And through the darkest zones there can be no guide.
No guide, that is, but courage.
As Hansel and Gretel and the queen and king held one other, the final golden fumes of the dragon drifted from the chimney and out onto the morning air. The gold mingled with the sunrise and slowly suffused itself over the whole kingdom. As people woke that morning, they saw it. They were drawn out of their houses by it, by the beautifully golden smoke that floated beneath the clouds. They followed it. Without wondering, without saying a word, they followed it. As if they knew, upon seeing it, that something had happened. Something important. And that, to find out what it was, all they had to do was follow the golden smoke.