Tasting Gretel Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Tasting Gretel

  Lidiya Foxglove

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Fairy Tale Heat Series

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Gretel

  I loved going to church, but not for the reasons I should. In fact, I believe that somewhere in the holy writ it said women should be humble. But no one paid any attention to that.

  Every girl in our small town of Aupenburg had one fine outfit for Sundays, the blouse edged with homemade lace, the apron perfectly clean, and the richly dyed wool dress adorned with embroidery. For an unmarried girl, it was an advertisement for her skill.

  Mine was the best. I don’t mean to be arrogant, but it was simply true. I could never just stick to the simple flowers, the time-tested patterns that girls copied from their mothers and grandmothers. Why not be different?

  As I walked in, Kurt cast his green eyes my way, and I offered him a secretive smile. He was the tallest man in the room, the brute strength of his farmer’s muscles tempered by dark curls and a sensitively curved mouth. Sadly, when I talked to him it was all “the pigs” this and “the hay” that and nothing else but I certainly dreamed of what we might do in said hay if this wasn’t such a very small town with so many wagging tongues.

  “C’mon, sit down,” Hansel said, giving me a good-natured little shove. “I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to make your eyes look like that in church.”

  He was teasing me, but he meant what he said. He didn’t like me smiling at boys.

  “It’s just Kurt. I do absolutely nothing and you act like I’m on the brink of becoming the town hussy.”

  “It’s the way you look at everyone,” he said, waving for me to keep my voice down although I was nearly whispering. “It’s not modest enough. I just don’t want any man thinking he can lay a hand on you.”

  “Well, maybe I wouldn’t mind Kurt’s hand on me.”

  “You shouldn’t think about things like that until you’re married.”

  I snorted. “What a wedding night it would be if I had never thought about it once until that day.”

  He frowned. “Let’s talk about this when we’re not at church.”

  “Very well.”

  We were the same age, Hansel and I. Twins, although we didn’t look alike. I had as much right to boss him around as he had to boss me, but somehow he always got the final say in my behavior as well as his own. And Hansel was hardly a saint himself, but I didn’t realize the extent of it yet.

  I settled in the old family pew to bask in a precious morning of beauty. All the women were as colorful as birds. The congregation sung soaring, melancholy hymns. The ceiling was painted with scenes of St. Yktrin, who had grown up in the region. She blessed the whores (who were depicted half naked with pert nipples, an odd subject to ponder during the service), cut the head off a small dragon, and died when she was torn into four pieces by an especially wicked faery king, before ascending to the clouds in a big fancy gold crown. It was quite sensational viewing. Every time I looked at those pictures, I wished I could afford paint.

  No, we were poor, but when my mother died, I inherited her box of threads. They must have been one of her wedding gifts, because she had so many colors. I knew it could not have been an everyday sort of purchase. But as long as I could remember, she had thread, and she embroidered dresses and pillows and the edges of my father’s Sunday suits.

  I continued the tradition. I had been embroidering dresses since I was a little girl, growing out of them only to improve on the next one. At nineteen years of age, I had a masterwork of a dress. It was a simple dark green but the skirt was embroidered with an entire scene: a tree spread across the back of my skirt, with all of our native songbirds perched in the branches, and a pattern of little white edelweiss and red wild roses dancing along the whole hem. The flowers were repeated on the bodice, with two falcons in flight on my shoulders.

  I remember how Hansel grinned when he saw them. “Falcons, Gretel? What message does that send? Songbirds would be a better subject than birds of prey.”

  “I just like them. And they’re beautiful.”

  I was a quiet girl, and if I really had the spirit of a bird of prey, I suppose we wouldn’t be so hungry.

  For we were hungry, increasingly so. Mother died when we were eight, and our father died when we were fourteen. Although Hansel was a tall, robust boy, he was not prepared to manage the farm. He was good at many things: telling tales, dancing the night away, managing our money, throwing a good punch. The subtleties of nature, on the other hand, eluded him. That first year, he didn’t harvest the wheat soon enough, and we lost most of the crop. He was better at hunting, and that was how we survived.

  I tried to take on the vegetable garden, but I was hopeless. I had never been very strong. Maybe it was hard to strengthen up when we never had enough to eat. The heat made me dizzy. My mind wandered as I weeded. Neighbors stopped by and I talked to them for too long, drinking cups of tea or small beer in the shade.

  That winter, we might have starved, if not for the kindness of those neighbors, and how much Hansel and I loved each other. When I was discouraged, he picked me up, and I did the same for him. One of us was always strong enough to go on, and drag the other forward.

  The next year was a little better, but we still had to sell some valuables to buy enough wheat for the winter. We talked of selling the farm and doing something else with our lives, but this was our childhood home, and we weren’t sure what else could be done. Learning a new trade and forging a new path was no easy task, and we would have almost certainly been separated.

  Every year, we improved, but we always owed someone money, and we had to carefully juggle our debts so that no one was left wanting for long. Hansel was brilliant at this, and he did everything he could to prove himself to the townsfolk that he was trying. We worked so hard. So very hard, all the time, and our bellies never stopped growling. I struggled with the hoe and the weeds by day and took in piecework at night after I had cooked our dinner. We were peasants, no better or worse off than most, in the end. But on Sundays, I looked at the falcons on my shoulders and thought, I want a big nest at the top of the tree, not a little one in the shrubs.

  There were things I wanted so badly, and I hardly had names for them. They came to me when I created things, and they came to me when I passed by Kurt working in his family fields with his shirt stripped off and his trousers tight. For some reason, it was a similar feeling in both instances. I didn’t understand why. It was like I wanted to climb into the colo
rs of the thread and I wanted to climb into Kurt’s trousers, but then…neither was quite right.

  After the service on that Sunday afternoon, I brushed Hansel off and chatted with friends and admired the summer flowers pinned in everyone’s hair. Much to my delight, Lucia invited me and some other girls to a picnic. I would get a good meal out of it, and time to relax.

  As I was walking home, taking the long way around the house to look for wild blackberries, I heard a grunting noise behind the stables. We hadn’t owned a horse in years, so this was curious.

  I peered around the corner.

  Hansel was back there thrusting his cock into Peter Bauer’s ass.

  Yes, my dear brother, who had just seen fit to give me a lecture because my eyes dared to briefly considered the physical beauty of Kurt Fischer, was screwing his best friend like a wolf in heat.

  A feeling of overwhelming fury and despair shot through me, and I ripped off my apron and threw it at them. I had forgotten the pockets were full of blackberries. They scattered everywhere. Hansel and Peter scrambled apart, poor Peter flushed to his ears.

  “Don’t tell my father!” Peter begged me. “Or my mother! Oh, God.”

  “I won’t tell anyone. Don’t you worry about that.”

  “Gretel—“ Hansel was fumbling with the buttons on his trousers. “What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here? This is our property! I’m home from the picnic. And I see you’ve been keeping busy!”

  “It’s not— Let me explain.”

  “Go home, Peter,” I said, more gently. “I promise. I won’t tell anyone.” Peter was a nice boy. I didn’t want to ruin his afternoon.

  Hansel and I walked into the house in sullen silence, our shoes thudding on dirt floors covered with layers of rushes. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon with a thousand and two things to be done in the gardens and fields, and we would be sorry later that they weren’t being done now.

  I crossed my arms. “I don’t—“

  “It’s true,” he said. “I thought you sort of knew.”

  “What, that you’re—“

  “I’ve always been—different—you know—bad with girls.”

  We both sort of faltered. I didn’t really know any words for men who liked other men, except a few I didn’t want to use on my own brother.

  “I don’t care,” I said. “That’s your business.”

  “Then why did you throw your apron at me?”

  “Because you’re so protective and critical of me! You notice every little movement of my eyes. Knowing this, I should think, you of all people would not expect me to be a good little maiden every second. I want—I want—to be touched.” I stammered. I wanted more than that. I wanted things I couldn’t explain. “I wanted to go to the spring festival in Hausach. Maybe I’d find a good husband if I could get out of the village.”

  There was a little soup left from last night. He doled some into a bowl. “If you don’t have someone to chaperone you and introduce you, you’ll only get into trouble.”

  “You think I can’t handle myself? I’m not stupid. I’ll carry a knife.”

  He snorted. “A knife? You think that’s going to stop anyone?” He took a big spoonful of the soup. He was starving, as I would have been without the picnic. Hell, I was still starving. I could have eaten every dish at that picnic.

  I thought about Peter’s flushed skin.

  “You don’t want to stop anyone, do you?” Hansel snapped. He slunk into a chair and stirred the thin broth. “You look at Kurt like you’d let him do anything to you.”

  “How long have you and Peter been doing this kind of thing?”

  He flung himself out of his chair, his face red. “If you say anything about Peter again, I’ll—“

  “You’ll what? Hit me? I wasn’t insulting Peter. I was just asking you a question.”

  Hansel would never hurt me. But he did something worse. He dashed his bowl of soup to the ground.

  Making the food stretch and turning it into something was my job, so when he ruined his meal, it was as good as a slap in the face. My jaw trembled.

  “It’s—it’s your problem if you want to go to bed hungry,” I managed.

  “Why don’t you marry Kurt?” he snapped. “He has more food than we do.”

  “As if you want me to marry Kurt.”

  “I’m fine with you marrying him. Just let him court you.”

  “I don’t even like him. He’s stupid. Well, not stupid, but he’s like everyone else in this town. He doesn’t think about anything beyond what he’s always been told and always known. We wouldn’t have anything to talk about.”

  “You’re never going to get married, then,” Hansel said. “You want someone who is rich, and handsome, and appreciates your handiwork, and indulges you in long conversations about things beyond what you know. Heavens, if such a man exists, I’ll fight you for him. You’re just going to be an old maid. At least you can marry,” he said. “Any man you like.”

  “And you can fuck any man you like. I can’t indulge my urges without risking pregnancy and being thought of as the town whore. I don’t think you understand what it’s like to have—feelings—you don’t understand, and can’t act on.”

  “You think I don’t understand that?” he snapped. “I have it worse than you, I think.”

  “But you’re a boy! Girls must be so good and obey the men, all the time. You want me to obey you; you won’t let me go anywhere on my own.”

  His mouth crumpled briefly before he mastered himself again. “I don’t want you to obey me. I just need you to—stop messing around with dreams that will never come true. I do know how it is to have feelings you don’t understand. I know more about that than you’ll ever know.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I said bitterly. “And believe me, I wish you could marry Peter. His family grows a lot more wheat than we do. Maybe if you had a husband he could salvage this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.”

  Hansel sat down, kicked the soup bowl all the way across the room, and started to cry.

  Pain shot through me at the sound. I hadn’t heard Hansel cry in years, I realized. He had always had a tender heart and he used to cry all the time when he was younger, but he had just stopped doing it, and I never noticed until this sudden reappearance.

  It was when he got close with Peter, I realized. He takes all his cares and troubles to Peter instead of worrying me.

  I took a cautious step toward him, but I wasn’t sure what to say.

  We both wanted things we couldn’t have. We had been born to a farm and neither of us were suited to it. Where did we go from here?

  I lapsed back into silence. I was comfortable in silence. Whenever we tried to talk out our problems, they only grew worse. I picked up the bowl Hansel had overturned and wiped the soup off the side with my napkin, then returned it to him. There was still some soup in the bottom he might want to scrape up.

  When he stopped crying, I said gently, “I just want to find some way we can be happy. This way isn’t working. I know neither of us want to give up this little house. All our memories are here. But—”

  “Peter is leaving town.” He interrupted me with those four words, and he spoke them like he was drowning under them.

  “Why?”

  “He says there are no opportunities here. He wants to go to Hausach and find work.”

  “He’s smart,” I said.

  “Well, maybe so.” He put his head in his hand and stared at the empty bowl. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I’m sorry, too. I didn’t know. I—I shouldn’t have said those things. You love him, don’t you?”

  “Yes…” He stood up decisively, walked over to me, and put a heavy hand on my head. “In a different way than I love you, of course, but no more. I just don’t want to leave you to the fate of so many girls who are poor and have few options. If I went to Hausach…you won’t be able to reach me if you're in trouble.”

  Sometimes
I couldn’t believe the extent of his protectiveness. He thought I would stay here alone? I knew what he was thinking; that if I went to the city, I’d get into trouble. “Hansel, if you go to Hausach, for heaven’s sake, I’m leaving too. You want to follow him?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Maybe this is for the best. We have to do something, unless we want to grow old and very, very skinny together here on this sad excuse for a farm. I’m good with my fingers. I can find a respectable apprenticeship working with thread if given half a chance, I’m sure.”

  He huffed. “I know you’re right. But this is all we have, this is all our family has ever had…”

  “I know, but…it’s not working. I wish I wasn’t right, but you know I am.”

  “All right. We’ll sell the farm.”

  I kissed his cheek.

  “You look sad now,” he said.

  “I’m happy…,” I said, taking in the small room where I had learned to sew and cook. Where my parents had laid in state before burial. Where I had sobbed into the pillow and stared out the window imagining a better life. “But sometimes it does feel surprisingly similar.”

  Chapter Two

  Gretel

  After we sold the farm and paid our debts, there was not much left. All that we owned now fit in two sacks. We set out with hard bread and hard cheese, and enough coin for more of the same. Neither of us had ever left the village, but now we had a long journey ahead to the port city of Hausach. Aupenburg was surrounded by the forests that stretched across three kingdoms. It had many names: the Secret Forest, the Green Death, and here, the Shadow-Wald.

  Hansel had bought us a map, and he kept talking about the map like it was an assurance of safety. The moment I started to wonder if the bears would smell our food, or whether we could walk fast enough to reach shelter for the night, he would say, “It’ll be all right. We have the map. We’ll stick to the Queen’s Road.”