CHAPTER 76

He stood, the trees screaming even as the puppy wiggled with joy. They writhed in pain as the foreign magic of the Gentleman and the Queen ate at the natural way like an acid.

And there was nothing the Woodcutter could do.

The House continued to become more and more material.

The pines became poisonous apple orchards. Manicured gardens of wisteria and foxglove rolled out over the wild, replacing ferns with tended topiaries. The redwoods merely faded into blue sky.

The Woodcutter’s mortal body lay prone on the ground. He tried to climb back inside of his skin. He tried, but his hand passed through his own flesh.

Quickly! screamed the trees.

The Woodcutter knew that if the Queen recovered his body, it would be destroyed. Since he had not made it to the doorway of light, he would be forced to walk the earth for eternity.

Help! the trees cried with their dying breaths. Help! they echoed to any ears that could hear.

The Grandmother stood in the doorway. Her soul blurred between the mortal and immortal world.

“Woodcutter!” she spoke.

And her eyes saw him.

She knelt by his body and, in a swift movement, lifted him as gently as a baby. “Oh, child, we must get you away.”

“Stop!” a voice commanded.

The Queen appeared on the steps of the Vanishing House, the Gentleman beside her.

“He is mine,” said the Queen.

The Grandmother stood defiant. “Your power is not yet complete.”

The Queen laughed, “A mere two Kingdoms, which shall soon be ours.”

“Three,” the small girl with golden curls stated.

A child of eight years should not have held the power that she did. The Woodcutter could see it, could see the ebbs of magic flow in loving currents around the one he had thought needed his protection.

The Queen blanched.

The Gentleman sneered. “We have carefully marked our Kingdoms.”

The air shimmered and the Twelve Dancing Ladies appeared upon the steps of the Vanishing House. Their eyes were glazed, their skin too pale. They swayed slightly as they stood.

The Dancing Lady of Orange took a weakly struggling pixie from her purse.

Cold iron hung around its neck.

She brought the creature’s leg to her mouth and sucked off the dust before putting the faerie back in her satchel.

Little Red Riding Hood spoke. “The Prince of the Thirteenth Kingdom still lives.”

“Impossible. There is no prince,” the Queen spat.

“Asleep, but alive, the Prince lives. Queen Rapunzel, Iron Shoes, and Maid Maleen have found their true loves. The Lady in Blue stands free. And the Princess Snow White, who is protected by a power mightier than you.”

The Gentleman smiled. “But, child, Prince Jack’s land was a new annex. It no longer counts. We have the majority and now hold the Wood.”

“You forget my Kingdom,” said the child from beneath the depths of her red cape.

The Queen bit her lip, a trickle of blue blood dribbling down her chin.

The Gentleman looked at her with a smile and then turned to the small girl. “Oh, Little Red Riding Hood, you know that we did not.”

The Queen caught her blood upon her palms. Two drops. She threw two drops upon two of the Dancing Ladies.

Their bodies shifted, and they cried in pain. Their smooth skin was replaced by fangs and fur. Their flawless faces shaped into snouts. Their arms lengthened into legs. Their cries were replaced by snarls, and two wolves leapt from the stairs of the Vanishing House at Little Red Riding Hood and her Grandmother.

The Woodcutter cried and lifted up the ax borne by his father and his father’s father and his father before that. He lifted his ax. He lifted it and brought it down upon the creatures.

His ax fell through the enchantments, slicing the transformation in half.

The coats of the wolves split in two and fell to the ground, leaving two very mortal women in their place.

The Dancing Ladies looked at one another, their eyes clear of all dust.

The Queen screamed in anger, “This enchantment did not come from you, little girl. Who is your ally? Who dares to attack me, Queen of the Fae by way of this Wood and Empress of the Thirteen Kingdoms?”

Little Red Riding Hood smiled. “You are not Queen of the Wood yet.”

The Gentleman gripped the Queen’s arm in fear while the Queen spat, “He’s dead. His magic is gone from this place. He is powerless.”

Little Red Riding Hood looked at the Woodcutter, her eyes seeing through the veil of death.

The Woodcutter understood what he was to do.

He gripped his ax in both hands and walked over to the grounds of the Vanishing House.

He raised his ax and brought it down. In the gaping cuts in the illusion, the Wood reappeared.

A leafy frond touched his ankle gently.

He raised the ax again and sliced another hole through the dimensions. He ripped away the illusion like a sheet of wallpaper. A giant hole now scarred the entrance to the House.

“It cannot be!” the Queen cried.

The blonde girl smiled and shook her curls childishly. “But it is. I am afraid the Woodcutter lives on a plane that neither you nor I can touch without crossing into the immortal world.”

The Woodcutter cut through the stone wall marking the boundary of the House.

“I believe he has no intention of stopping,” said Little Red Riding Hood as the poisonous orchard disappeared.

The Gentleman hissed at the Queen, “Stop him! He is destroying everything.”

A tree of golden apples fell to the ground, replaced by a pine that reached to the sky.

The Queen pulled out a dagger and sliced through the palm of her hand. She flung the blood upon the ten remaining Ladies.

“He may have been able to stop two, but how does he deal with ten?”

The wolves leapt, and the Woodcutter stopped his work.

Flashing, his ax fell upon them. Snarling and snapping, the wolves tried to fight past an invisible wall that somehow transformed them from animals back to human.

Two slipped by.

The Woodcutter saw them through the corner of his eye, but his ax was deeply buried in the pelt of one of the girls.

He spun, trying to get to them.

He watched as the wolves raced to the child.

The child with small hands.

The child with blonde curls.

Blonde curls covered by a red cap.

The small body swathed in the red cape.

The child with flowers she picked within the groves of his Wood.

Always too late.

Always too late to save the child.

His legs stretched.

He raced.

It was as if time had stopped in the widening of the small girl’s eyes.

The wolves leapt.

And Little Red Riding Hood threw back the hood of her cape.

With her other hand, she threw the flowers she held at the wolves.

And where the tiny petals touched, the enchantment fell away.

The wolves were replaced by two more bewildered girls with no memory of how they had come to the Wood.

The Woodcutter turned and sliced through another wolf as she flew toward the house.

The Queen screamed in frustration.

The Woodcutter felt the anger of the forest return with each cut to the enchantment; he felt it with each blow of his father’s ax. He felt it and continued to cut…

And then he felt the Gathering.

The power of the Wood was no longer sealed.

The fae had returned.

They streamed in through the dimensional slashes to reclaim that which was not willfully given.

They streamed in with the anger and malice of an ancient race that laughed at the struggles of mortals.

They were the race that had graciously allowed mortals to live.

There was a reason that mortals began to leave bowls of cream and bits of bread outside at night to please the faerie.

It was not to keep the fae as happy servants.

It was a humble apology for any offense.

It was because of the fear of faerie anger, anger seen in only the merest sliver compared to the malice that rode toward the Queen and the Gentleman.

An army of immortals was led by two fearsome creatures that did not hide behind the niceties they sometimes wore. Queen Titania and King Oberon rode beasts with eight legs whose feet were flames, whose mouths were filled with rows of fangs, whose intelligent gray eyes trained upon the Queen and her Gentleman.

Queen Titania’s face twisted as an inhuman cry tore from her throat.

The Woodcutter did not stop cutting.

The Twelve Dancing Ladies quaked in fear, but only the Lady of Orange, the Lady who held the pixie in her satchel, went mad. With the small bit of dust touching one who should never have such contact, her mind split and froth foamed from her mouth.

She reached in her satchel and threw the pixie to the ground.

The sound stopped everything.

The sound of a pixie touching the earth.

The strike rang, a booming echo. A booming echo that carried with it the weight of all the sadness in the world. A million screams. A million pains that the pixie had lifted from mortal shoulders.

That was the weight carried in the tiny bodies of the tiniest of the fae.

Their purpose.

Their gift.

All the unhappiness the pixie carried since the dawn of time fell upon the earth, fell and hung there as the pixie lay, its slender neck unable to lift the weight of the cold iron.

The Queen dropped to her knees, and the Gentleman’s stomach emptied its contents upon the steps of the Vanishing House.

The Woodcutter saw the eyes of the faerie people upon him, eyes of anger and rage—and pleading. Pleading for the life of the smallest of the small, one that they could not help, because of the cold band of iron.

The Woodcutter walked to the pixie’s side.

Too many…

Too many…

The pain swept through the glen, the screams still filling his ears.

His tears streamed down his face, and he placed his invisible hands upon the ring, but his spirit hands could not command the metal to spring away, for he was no longer a spirit of the earth, but now a spirit of the air.

He looked down at his side.

There was one gift that could destroy the Vanishing House. Or could free the tiny one.

His ax.

The humble gift from his father and his father’s father and his father before that.

The ax that was now his.

It would be spent forever.

But he knew.

He placed the ax against the ring, and it melted through the cold iron.

The wooden handle crumbled into dust; the metal head dis-integrated into rust and time.

But the pixie was free.

As it lifted itself from the ground, so returned the fury, a fury that made the earlier anger seem like a child’s tantrum.

Fury aimed at those who would cause a faerie to touch the earth.

The Queen, faced with a power beyond her imagining, reached into the pocket of her dress.

She pulled out a horn.

A horn, she had been told, that would call an ally. As it neared her mouth, the sky darkened and the wind swept, cold and biting.

She hesitated, but the Gentleman placed his hand upon the bottom of the horn and pushed it to her lips, eyes never leaving the nearing host.

And she blew.

The darkness fell in an instant.

The fae stopped their forward progression. Then, one by one, they let out a horrible laugh.

The Queen looked at the Gentleman in fear.

From the sky came the sound of dogs baying and thunderous footsteps. The trees cried, Stay to the middle of the road!

The Queen shook her head. “No…no…”

“What?” the Gentleman quaked.

“We must run. We must run now,” she wept.

With that, she hiked up her skirts and leapt from the steps, leapt from the steps and ran from the Wood.

The Gentleman looked to the sky in confusion.

Then his eyes fell upon a horned helmet and a hunt made of demons.

He turned and ran, and the Twelve Dancing Ladies took off, fast behind.

Odin stopped before the Woodcutter.

The Woodcutter picked up the silver hellhound puppy, which was now rolling in the dirt of the forest, completely oblivious to the events going on.

The puppy wiggled and licked at Odin furiously.

Odin laughed a fearful sound that made the puppy wild with excitement.

Odin gave the Woodcutter a nod.

“If you want to hunt, you can join the ride,” the god invited.

You can join the ride.

His offer was to ride the sky forever…

Or face walking the earth for eternity…

The Woodcutter’s head bowed as he weighed the future of infinity, when the face of a woman, humble and strong, filled his mind. He could not leave her. She was his wife, and he would remain by her side until her last breath was done. Living as a ghost with her for the few remaining years would be his strength in the endless purgatory.

The Woodcutter bowed his head in thanks.

But his feet did not move.

Odin called back to the faerie host, “We hunt!”

Lightning crashed and flames ate at the ground as Odin charged off into the night, one arm holding the hellhound puppy and the other Sleipnir’s reins.

The army of fae fell in behind the Raging Host, and the hunt rode west and rode until dawn—dawn, wherever it finally rose.