Iron Gretel

Once upon a time, when the prince was but a wee lad, he invented a counting game. Locked in the tower by himself, it was left to the boy to conjure his own amusements. And that was how he came to make a sport of betting on the lives of his father’s huntsmen.

“How long will this one last?” the prince asked himself each time. “And what about this one? How long will he live before the trees make him their supper?”

Many a moon passed before the king grew tired of the howls issuing from deep within his woods. Many a moon passed, and many a hunter, but the prince never tired of watching the trees close in. He liked to guess how many birds would flee from the uppermost branches as oak and fir leaned in for the kill, as birch and elm made ready to strip flesh from bone.

Later, when he decided it wasn’t the trees themselves doing the killing, the prince liked to imagine what manner of beast it might be that called the forest home. What creature could so easily devour the strapping young men who presented themselves to his father—their teeth gleaming, their chins chiseled, their hair cropped impossibly close to their heads in what was then the style? The huntsmen seemed invincible to the prince, even from his high perch in the tower, even at that distance. What could best them? What in the world?

After one final try to make safe the forest, the last seven of his majesty’s hunters embarking on the quest together and never returning, the king decreed that the woods were unsafe and off limits to all. The prince watched the proclamation from the tower, counting the wrinkles on his father’s forehead, watching as the old man rubbed the back of his neck on the way down from the dais. All pretense of bravery and assuredness had gone from his weary countenance. There were three more wrinkles than the last time the prince had seen the king.

Years passed. The prince reached the precipice of manhood, his voice crackling and straining as his body stretched uncomfortably taller. He was reminded of an old tale his mother used to read to him by his bedside in the tower, the story of wing-makers, a father and son who flew too close to heaven and were struck down for their impertinence. The prince began to slump his shoulders forward, the way his father now did. Perhaps if he feigned the plight of the old, God could be tricked into sparing him their fate.

It was on the eve of his thirteenth birthday, the day he would be released from the tower, that the prince spied a most peculiar sight. Through the courtyard came a hooded figure. The figure carried a crossbow, a sword, and a heavy satchel. A hunter, thought the prince. The first to arrive in their starving, cursed country in ages. And yet, that was not what made the sight peculiar. The strangeness of the scene was made plain only when the hood of the figure was lowered to reveal not a man, but a woman.