“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.
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 then 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.
Nearly.
