The forest grimm, p.9
The Forest Grimm, page 9
Hack, hack. My hand shakes. Henni’s eyes are saucer-wide.
A few yards ahead, a ripple runs through the red path, racing toward Henni. I drop the knife. Clutch her cocooned body. Desperately try to hold her in place.
As if sensing me, the path gives a hard yank. The glossy hair slides out of my grip …
… and Henni is dragged away.
CHAPTER 10
I bolt after the red path in the direction it’s pulling Henni. “Let her go!” I don’t know who I’m shouting at. The forest? Does that even make sense? How would it have created a path of human hair?
Axel catches up with me, chasing the path too. We’re careful to keep off the hair. We can’t help Henni if we get tangled up too.
Her wrapped body is out of sight. The hair is moving faster than we can run, a rapid river of glistening crimson. My heart is in my throat. This can’t be happening. I can’t lose my best friend. The Dantzers can’t lose another daughter.
Strands of hair branch off the path and snake up trees, no doubt where more nets are strung up. It’s all a giant trap, but why? To what end?
I’m sprinting faster than I have in my life. My lungs burn. My cape flaps wildly. I’m still not fast enough. The last of the red path appears, coursing from behind us where the hair ends. In a few blinks, it flashes past us and zooms ahead, zigzagging between the trees.
“Hurry!” I call to Axel, though he probably can’t move any faster with the three packs he’s hauling. “We can’t lose the path!”
But it’s too late. The last of the red hair slips around the exposed roots of a pine, twenty feet away, and falls out of sight.
“No!” I race after it, but when I reach the pine and look beyond, my chest sinks. The path, the hair, my hope of saving Henni—it’s all gone.
My eyes burn. I scrub at an errant tear and fist my hands. I break into a run again. Enter a thicket. Fight my way past a tight clutch of branches. Kick through the tall grass.
There’s no red anywhere, none except for my cape and Axel’s scarf. A sob rises in my throat. I push it down and release a cry of frustration.
“Clara, stop.” Axel grabs my arm, but I shrug him off and keep wrestling my way through the thicket. “Stop!” He drops the packs and takes me by my shoulders, spinning me around to face him. “You don’t know which direction the path went. Getting yourself more lost won’t help Henni.”
My glare is razor sharp and filled with enough fury to burn this forest to the ground. But Axel’s eyes are gentle and rimmed with understanding. The blue in them aches for me, or maybe with me. I grind my teeth together. Empathy won’t help me right now. “We can’t just do nothing!”
“I know, but we need to think, and you need to take a breath. Where’s the careful girl who spent years making the perfect map of this forest?”
“The map that hasn’t helped us once?” I bite out.
“That’s beside the point. All I’m saying is keep your head.”
I exhale roughly, my blood hot. I know he’s right, but he doesn’t understand. In all my meticulous planning, I always meant to travel here alone. Bringing Axel was one thing—his role was foretold in Grandmère’s cards—but Henni’s involvement was never accounted for. “She—” My throat closes. Moisture clouds my vision. “She wasn’t supposed to come here.” She’s not the one supposed to die. “What if she’s already…” I cover my eyes, and my shoulders hitch with a silent sob. I try to turn away, but Axel doesn’t let go of me. He pulls me into his arms and runs a soothing hand down my hair where it pools into the hood hanging from my shoulders.
“Henni isn’t dead,” he says firmly.
“How do you know?”
“The same way I know Ella isn’t dead. The same way you know your mother is still alive.”
“Does that mean Henni is Lost?”
“Maybe.”
A tear seeps out from the corner of my squeezed-shut eyes. Lost is dead if you never see a person again. And we haven’t found another soul in this forest. “How do we find her?” How do we find anyone?
Axel thinks for a moment. “We go back to where we last saw the red hair. It would have left an imprint on the ground, like water does after it dries up in a riverbed. All we have to do is…”
He trails off as a distant melody flits through the late-morning air. I pull away from his chest and turn my ear to it. Someone is singing. A woman. It can’t be my mother. Her voice was lovely, but never that beautiful. Henni’s isn’t either.
I meet Axel’s questioning gaze and break into a cautious smile. Warmth trickles through my limbs. “We’re not alone,” I whisper, as if speaking any louder might scare the woman away.
The corner of Axel’s mouth lifts. “See? I knew something would finally work in our favor.” He hands me my pack and keeps hold of his and Henni’s, adjusting their straps on his shoulder. We change directions in the thicket and follow the sound of the voice.
Ahead, the trees start to thin where the thicket breaks apart. Shafts of sunlight slant toward us, motes sparkling in their beams like golden fairy dust. The woman’s voice comes clearer now. I capture some of the words she’s singing:
Dearest, come back to me
The honey is golden
The flowers are red
I’ll fend off the murdering wolf.
I don’t recognize the tune, but it’s in a minor key and beautifully haunting, like a lullaby or a plea for a lover to return.
I drift toward the sound, my mind whirring with whom the villager could be. Not Ella, or Axel would be rushing ahead and leaving me to chase him.
I toss him a glance. “Who do you think—?”
Something tickles the side of my face. I move to brush it away, but it sticks to my fingers and hair.
I’ve walked through a spiderweb.
I gasp. A sign of good luck. It means I’m about to meet a friend. I grin and hurry faster.
We emerge from the thicket and enter a wide clearing surrounded by colossal fir trees. A tower soars above them, perhaps once a watchtower. Its stones are ancient and covered in lichen, moss, and ivy.
No one in the village told me about a lone tower here, but the Forest Grimm is said to hold the ruins of a stone fortress. Centuries ago, a great battle took place deep in the heart of this mountain range. No one remembers the cause of the war or who fought whom. Borders of countries were different back then. But according to legend, every soldier who died here became a tree, and this dense forest took root from their blood, flesh, and bones.
It’s the kind of frightening story that always thrilled me, like the ones Grandmère read when I was a child, but also the sort I never believed. A tree could never have been a person. But some of the tale could be true. A battle could have taken place here long ago, and a fortress could be hiding somewhere in this forest. Even before the curse, villagers were careful not to wander too far in these woods for fear they wouldn’t find their way back home.
Axel comes to my side. “Look.” He points in the distance.
I’ve been so caught up in the tower’s height and ring of crenellations that I haven’t seen what he has spied until now—a ribbon of red along the ground. It’s winding its way toward the base of the tower, about fifty yards from us.
My pulse trips faster. Maybe Henni isn’t Lost after all.
We rush to the tower. It has no doors on the near side. When we round its far side, we find no doors there either. The only opening is a high window. Like a waterfall rushing backward, the red hair rises up the tower and pours into the window instead of spilling out from it.
“Henni.” My breath catches. Her cocooned body has almost reached the window. I tug against the red hair, but I can’t stop it from climbing. On impulse, I jump into it. I wrap my arms and legs in the hair and let it pull me upward. I can’t lose Henni.
“Clara!” Axel reaches for me, but I’m already too high. His fingertips skim the toe of my shoe as he leaps for my ankle.
“It’s the only way up!”
He curses but follows after me, weaving himself into the hair as it rises up the tower.
Henni’s muffled scream pricks my ears. Her nose and eyes are exposed, never having been wrapped in the hair. I suddenly see what she does, a creature crawling spiderlike out from the window and tangling in the red—no, the creature is the source of the red. It’s her hair. She’s … she’s human.
Headfirst, the woman travels down her own hair, her arms and legs fastened around it as she rapidly slithers lower, descending faster than her hair is ascending. I gape, struggling to understand how she’s accomplishing the feat.
I spy a large hook at the side of the window. A chunk of her hair is looped around it, forming a tether in case she falls. While some of the hair is anchored to the hook, the bulk of it continues to rise, being sucked up through the window. Perhaps the tower contains a pulley system that draws up her hair.
The woman is clad in black from her long-sleeved, form-fitted woolen shirt to her slim woolen leggings. Her feet are bare. Her face is feral. That animalistic expression is why I didn’t recognize her at first.
“Fiora?” Disbelief scrapes across my voice.
Hanging in the hair on my left, Axel shakes his head. “It can’t be.”
Fiora Winther was one of the first villagers to be Lost in the Forest Grimm, only four months after my mother went missing. She was always reclusive, like her hermit father, but unlike him, she did venture from home when necessary. She came to our sheep farm on occasion to purchase spun wool or to barter her services for it. Fiora was a weaver, and Mother said she had an impressive loom that had been passed down over generations in her family. She had to be in her late twenties, and she’d been weaving since she was young. From all the nets in the trees, it seems like she is weaving still.
“Imagine her hair is tucked back in a cap,” I tell Axel. Fiora was always a little shy of her stark red hair.
“And imagine it isn’t several miles long?” he adds dryly.
I shrug with a bewildered nod. I have no idea how to explain its excessive length. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is helping Henni. “Fiora!” I shout.
Continuing her descent upside-down, she has just reached Henni’s wrapped body. She clutches it possessively and peers at us below. I can’t make out her expression. We’re a quarter way up the tower, and she’s only a few feet beneath the high window. The moment she hears me call to her, the red hair stops rising. “There is no one here by that name,” she calls back. Her tone is savage and guttural, nothing like the rich soprano of her singing voice.
“I don’t think it’s her,” Axel whispers.
“Who else could it be?” No other person in the village has that shade of hair. Maybe Fiora is guarding her identity for some reason. It might help to know that I’m not a stranger. “I’m Rosamund Thurn’s daughter, Clara,” I yell.
“I don’t know you. Let go of my hair!” She shakes it hard, and Axel and I jostle and slam against the tower. I slide down a few inches and tighten my hold.
“Wait!” I shout as Fiora reaches to shake us loose again. “You may not remember me, but I remember you. I know you are Lost.”
She freezes, her limbs harsh black lines in the distance. “You know what I’ve lost?” Her voice hitches, lifting a note.
Not exactly what I meant, so I hesitate to answer.
“Say yes,” Axel hisses. Sweat beads at his temples. His grip on the hair isn’t as secure as mine, and we’re thirty feet off the ground. If he slips, he won’t survive the fall.
“Yes!” I tell Fiora.
She stalls and crouches over Henni. Again, I’m reminded of a spider in the way she suspends upside down with her arms and legs bent at sharp angles. “Then you may join me,” she finally says. She grabs Henni’s cocooned body and takes it with her, climbing back up her hair. Fiora has become impossibly strong. Another mystery like her abundant hair.
She drags Henni in through the window. Fiora doesn’t look out to spare us another glance, but her red hair draws upward again, bringing Axel and me with it.
We glide up the tower. The closer we come to the window, the more my stomach tangles into hard knots. Once we make it inside, there’s no getting out again, I realize, except by Fiora’s hair.
It’s all right, Clara.
I walked through a spider’s web before we came here. I had my sign of good luck.
Or was it?
What if the web didn’t mean I was about to meet a friend?
What if it meant I would be caught by a spider?
CHAPTER 11
There is no pulley in the stone tower. In fact, there is not much of anything besides Fiora’s river of hair. When Axel and I crawl into the round room, I expect it to be stuffed to overflowing with her locks of red. But compared to how much I know of it exists, only a modest amount lies within.
The hair coils on the floor in a fifteen-foot circle, filling the span of the room as it spins like a whirlpool. Fiora isn’t even touching it anymore. The hair moves as if it has a mind of its own.
Across the room is an open hatch on the floor, leading to whatever space exists below. The excess hair glides into it as more locks spill in from the window.
Fiora drags Henni inside a large fireplace to my left. Thankfully no logs are burning—the fireplace is empty—but that doesn’t ease my nerves. The stonework surrounding the fireplace has been carved to look like the giant face of a wolf, and the opening of the hearth forms its gaping jaws.
The Fanged Creature from Grandmère’s deck flashes to mind, except that that card represents my fate. Henni shouldn’t be the one in danger. Nothing is going as I expected. The world is muddled and topsy-turvy, and my fortune is snarled up with it.
“I did not say the boy could enter.” Fiora glares at Axel. She’s settling Henni’s cocooned body against the fireplace’s inner corner, positioning my friend so she’s sitting upright. Fiora crouches beside her like a vicious guardian.
I angle closer to Axel. “But he also knows what you lost.”
Not missing a beat, he grins, his natural charm on full display. “Axel Furst,” he says, introducing himself. “We never met in the village, but Ella told me you wove the muslin for her wedding veil.”
Fiora angles her head, studying him with her cunning hazel eyes. If anything he’s said rings a bell, she makes no sign of it. “I am Rapunzel. And if you know what I have lost, you may stay.”
“Rapunzel?” Why would she call herself that? “Is that your middle name?”
Fiora’s sharp gaze slices into me. “Rapunzel is my only name. It’s what I am.”
I sneak a glance at Axel to see if he has any clue to what she’s talking about, but from the lines wrinkling his brow, he’s just as confused as I am. His eyes seem to say, I know what this woman has lost—her mind.
Maybe she has. Maybe that’s what nearly three years in the Forest Grimm does to a person.
I think of my mother and immediately regret the thought.
“Make yourself comfortable,” Fiora says in her guttural, animalistic voice.
I scratch my arm and peek around the room as if a pair of chairs might suddenly materialize. With no furniture to sit on, Axel and I awkwardly settle on the carpet of hair, which continues to writhe as the last of it slips in from the window.
Eight feet away, I meet Henni’s hyper-alert gaze and give her a small nod, my silent promise to help her escape this predicament. “Why doesn’t the tower have any doors?” I ask Fiora, keeping my tone light and conversational. I school my features against the pain flowering through my crooked spine. Now that some of my adrenaline is wearing off, I feel the toll that all my racing and climbing has taken on my body.
“It once had doors.” Fiora tucks a few stray hairs back into the coil around Henni’s legs. “But I sealed it off with mud and stones.”
“Why?”
“So I wouldn’t lose anything,” she replies, as if the answer is obvious. She returns her focus to Henni and leans closer, studying her eyes with rapt attention. A shudder chases through Henni’s body.
“She isn’t what you lost.” I resist the urge to launch forward and peel her away from my friend.
Fiora whirls and bares her teeth at me. I can’t help flinching. They aren’t sharp like the incisors of the carved wolf hanging down from the mantel, but her expression is just as disturbing. “She’s mine unless I say differently!” she spits out. Her words reverberate into the pitched ceiling.
“Clara, the hair,” Axel whispers. He throws a pointed look at my left hand. Locks of red are sliding around my wrist like a manacle.
I quickly shake them loose and take a long breath to calm my nerves and regain my composure. “Her name is Henrietta Dantzer,” I explain to Fiora. “Her parents own a dairy farm in Grimm’s Hollow. Maybe you remember Ella Dantzer? Henni is her younger sister.”
A hard crease forms between Fiora’s scarlet brows. I’ve only confused her further. “She feels like what I lost,” she says, setting a hand on Henni’s wrapped-up shoulder. “My hair … it senses things.”
“Does it?” I swallow, even more uncomfortable with sitting on the red hair now. It undulates on the floor like a sea monster’s tentacles. “What does Henni feel like to you?”
Fiora searches for the right word. “Innocence?”
“You lost your innocence?” I ask gently.
“No!” Her limbs tense. A thick band of hair latches around my knees. Then, just as suddenly as Fiora fired to anger, the hot emotion withers away, her posture wilting with it. “Maybe.” She looks around the room like she’s fighting to remember something else, and I discreetly wiggle out of her hair, which has loosened its grip. “But I think I lost more.”
“Perhaps you had friends here,” Axel suggests.
“Friends?” Fiora slithers a few inches closer to him. At his back, her hair crests like a wave and scoots him nearer. “Do you know their names?”
“Y-yes,” he stammers, unnerved as more red locks nip at his legs, like a litter of kittens rooting for milk. “We, um … we all do.” Flustered, he gives me a pleading look, unable to summon any of them in his current state.
