ACT 1: SCENE 5
Cold sunlight and birdsong streamed through the small study window. Nettlewart slowly, achingly grumbled into consciousness. She shivered, and when she did, her spine cracked in five different places. She felt about herself for her blanket and opened a dry, stinging eye when she couldn't find one. Ah. She had fallen asleep in her study chair again. She prized herself out of the armchair. Everything hurt. Her brain pounded. She had failed. That girl! The girl was too clever. She rubbed at the errant lipstick that had smeared across her cheek overnight and stumbled into the kitchen. The fire was going again. The Boy's corner was empty. She heard sweeping outside, but no singing this time. Maybe he had risen early or maybe he hadn't slept at all. She had no way of knowing since it was hard to tell whether a heap of blankets and hay looked slept in or not. She dunked the kettle into the water barrel and put it on the stove, then took another couple of cupped handfuls of cold water to wash her face. She kept her cold, wet hands pressed over her eyes. They felt swollen and hot. Had she been crying? She couldn't remember.
She reached to the shelf above her head without looking and pulled down a large earthenware jar. She prized open the lid with a rusting teaspoon. The tea smelled musty and sweet, like an October dawn. Memories of snail tracks silver on crunching, russet leaves underfoot, dewed spider webs shining in bramble bushes like so many diamond necklaces. She doled a heaped spoonful into her cup and poured in the boiling water. She had never cared for teapots. Tea was such a solitary affair. She dipped the spoon into the liquid and began a slow and rhythmic stir. A tiny whirlpool began to whirr in the cup's centre. The tea leaves sprang up around it and danced.
"So what now?"
Within the whirlpool an image began to grow. The spiky woman and the girl again. The pile of buns on the mucky floor. But the woman was holding the girl now. Grasping her shoulders. They were both looking at a man, a tall, white haired man in red, ancient but not old. The man spoke.
"I'm sorry Mistress Snapdragon. There is nothing we can do."
The girl screamed in anguish. The woman said nothing. Her expression had not changed. But her knuckles were white, and her nails had become lost in the girl's shoulders.
Nettie winced as she felt the ten little razors dig into her again.
"What now?" She asked the woman in the teacup. "The girl's just too clever. I was tricked. The narrator wants me to fail."
The nails dug in deeper.
"No!" screamed the little girl. "There has to be something!"
"I could get the narrator to find me another family..." but Nettie gasped with pain before she could finish. She felt the nails drag across her shoulders, towards her throat. "No! No, that would be admitting defeat. A Nettlewart never gives up. But what to do? She has a way of making paths so she won't get lost. She's too clever. What to do?"
"There has to be something," cried the little girl.
"What to do?"
A hot, bitter tear rolled from Nettie's nose into her teacup with a noisy plop. The tea shifted and rippled. The whirlpool bent. Raven Snapdragon's face shot up to meet Nettie's.
"Listen" said the woman in the teacup.
And then the whirlpool broke and the vision clouded into a rather strong cup of tea.
Nettlewart looked up, and around herself in silence. She could hear nothing but birdsong. She had left her staff in the study when she had awoken, but it was on the floor by her chair now, begging to be picked up. She clasped it across her chest and listened to the birdsong. Just birdsong. No sweeping.
The Boy! She sprang to her feet but as she did, she heard a dull thud against the chimney and a familiar voice cry out.
"Bugger off!"
Cake crumbs rained down into the fireplace, exploding in little puffs of hot sugar.
A bird squalked. Then another thud.
"Go on, hop it!"
"What's going on, Boy?" yelled the witch through the wall.
"Birds pecking at the roof again," answered the Boy from outside. "I hear it's one of the biggest drawbacks to living in a house made entirely out of cakes and gingerbread that sits in the middle of a bloody forest."
The staff shook. "Listen," she heard her mother whisper.
Birds pecking at... cakes and gingerbread... in the middle of a bloody forest.
The shafts of light streaming through the kitchen windows suddenly disappear, and the inside of the cottage darkens. Outside, The Boy shivers and the birds on the digestive biscuit roof puff up their feathers as a harsh wind picks up and the morning sun is smothered in fast moving, grey cloud.
"Pathetic fallacy?" murmured Nettlewart at nobody in particular, "I've heard about this. About how it works in Panto. This is why it always rains at funerals, why a gentle breeze always blows blossom in young lovers' faces. And this..."
There is a distant rumble of thunder
"...is a sign that I'm on to something."
With a quick burst of her staff, she flew out of the front door in the most dramatic fashion she could conceive. Wind threw her hair into a medusa maelstrom and the slate cloud moaned.
"Nice," she thought.
The Boy started and turned to look at her, frozen, one broom laden arm still reaching up to poke the more stubborn birds. He relaxed. The black fire from the previous night had left her eyes. He gave the chimney another knock for good measure and carried on sweeping.
"I've got it!" cried the witch.
"Well don't give it to me," muttered the Boy through his sweeping, "I've already got headlice and rickets."
"Where do we want these kids to get lost, Boy?"
The Boy opened his mouth to respond but Nettlewart didn't pause long enough for him to speak.
"The woods, right? And what are there lots of in the forest?"
The Boy looked expectantly at Nettlewart for a couple of seconds before he realised that this particular question was not, in fact, rhetorical.
"Oh. Um..."
"Well?"
"Trees. Slugs. Lost teenagers."
"Birds, Boy, birds. And what do birds eat? Bread and cake. And what am I best at?"
"Turning things into bread and cake." They finished off the train of thought together.
"Ha!" Shouted Nettie at the sky in triumph.
"Brilliant," said The Boy, dully. His eyes met Nettie's. They were dancing with excitement, but the blackness still wasn't there, so he felt safe enough to turn back to his sweeping and mutter "I haven't a clue what you're talking about."
"Poor silly Boy," said Nettie to the world in general, "it's simple. So simple. They'll go into the woods again and the girl will take her basket of pebbles, and drop them as she goes, and get taken off her guard because she'll think she has a way home but she won't because once she's in the forest I'll turn all of her pebbles into cake and the birds in the forest will eat them..." she paused momentarily to take another deep breath "and then she won't know how to get back and then they'll be lost in the forest and then they'll have no choice but to come to me! It's genius! Genius I tell you!"
She flung wide her arms and let rip with one of her mother's very best laughs. Right on cue came the bolt of lightning, tearing the sky, so close that its thunder roared alongside it. The birds on the chimney screamed and fled. The Boy squeezed his broom the same way a nervous child would squeeze the bars of a rollercoaster carriage. Arms still outstretched, Nettlewart span around and cackled back into the house. The thunder rolled away and when she slammed the door behind her there was silence. The Boy sagged, propping himself up with the broomstick. She had the solution. And there had been none of the black fire about her, none of the wild possession. She had come up with it herself. It had been all her. He sighed and something all around him seemed to sigh with him. The tense, pregnant clouds above relaxed and released. The rain fell heavily, straight down, plastering his thin shirt to his thinner arms. He stayed perfectly still for some time, drooping and dejected and soaking wet. It just seemed right.
"Come along, Boy!" shouted the voice from the window eventually. The Boy blinked and looked up through his dripping fringe. Nettie beckoned him excitedly. "I want this place spick and span by tonight." She turned to go, and then turned to him again, her face alight with inspiration. "We're having some people for dinner!" she added proudly.
The rain had stopped. Maybe it was time to go in and get on. The Boy dragged his broom indoors and set to, dusting and polishing, making everything look clean and inviting. And then there were the pots to wash and... the cage. It took him some time to rid it of chicken feathers and disturbingly oversized rat droppings. He had lost count of the times he'd been threatened with a week or two in the cage as a child, and he'd always been very grateful to the chickens that had up until recently occupied it instead of him. Of course, since Nettlewart didn't care for chicken they had only been necessary to her when the cat had been alive. He recalled the fuss and flurry of claws and feathers whenever Nettie would free a chicken for that cat to chase. But not even witches cats were immune to the ravages of old age and in the end... they had had to do the kindest thing. He pondered over the cat's death for a while as he wiped cobwebs from the bars. That should have been when things started to change, when Nettie had no real allies left. But that hadn't been it. She had grieved and freed the chickens and then things had gone back to normal. The change had happened quite suddenly, and for no reason that he could pinpoint. One day they had just woken up and everything had changed. Pantomime had slipped into gear again and everything had become wrong. Or had everything become right? And then Nettie had taken the narrator, warped the rules, and now everything was definitely wrong. He looked inside the cage. It stank. Holding his breath, he reached to the bucket of soapwater and began to scrub at the red stains on the floor and bars. This cage had been used for more than keeping chickens. He did not remember Raven Snapdragon, since she had died shortly before Nettie had found him in the Forest.
"And a good thing too," she had told him, "because you wouldn't have stood a chance with her. Straight in the pot, matey."
Nettlewart used to tell him stories about her mother when he was younger, to scare him. Something about a girl she had kept in a tower somewhere. The girl was a bit odd and never ever cut her thick blonde hair. Raven had found out later that the girl had had a lover who used the hair to climb up to her room. She had shaved the girl's head, then tossed the hair down for the lover to climb up the next time he came along. Once he was in the tower, she had put his eyes out while the girl was made to watch. And another story about six boys she'd had turned into swans, and then told their younger sister that the only way they could be saved was for her to take a vow of silence and stitch them shirts made of nettles. Raven's plan had almost been thwarted when a minor prince had come by the girl. He had been the kind of sickening misogynist that "likes a girl who doesn't say much", because, even more vilely, mute girls can't say "no". He had married her and brought her riches, and even though she had continued to keep her silence and sting her fingers on the nettle shirts while not unconsentingly pleasuring her husband, that hadn't been good enough misery for Raven, who killed all three of her newborn sons as they slept. The finger of blame had obviously been pointed at the girl who couldn't defend herself and she had been sentenced to death. Nettlewart hadn't told him how either of those stories ended, so the Boy had to assume that, being during the Golden Age, they had been Happily Ever After, although he had no idea how, under the circumstances. Nettie had, however, told him with great relish about Raven's habit of getting children lost in the woods, then taking them and fattening them up and eating them, just as Nettlewart was planning to do herself.
"Sometimes they'd send search parties," Nettie had recounted, "but my mother either killed them too or cursed them. They'd go out of their minds until they willed themselves dead. Of course, after Panto collapsed she had much more free reign. There was nothing to stop her."
"She killed the prince, didn't she?" He would ask, time and time again, interested that as much as Nettlewart would boast about her mother's evil deeds, she could never give him a straight answer to that question. She'd just look at him coldly and say something like "That's what they say" or "So it's told". He always thought that was odd. Maybe it was because killing the prince, destroying the status quo, unravelling Pantomime itself, was such a big thing that shedidn't want to admit to it. Maybe she was trying to give the event more drama by shrouding the blunt truth, making it myth. Maybe Raven had had nothing to do with it and she just wanted to impress him.
He wrung out his cloth. The soapy water ran brown and still smelled. He wondered about Raven Snapdragon, the great and ancient Wicked Witch of the Western Woods, now deceased. He wondered how she had died. After challenging the forces of Good for so long, after causing so much suffering to the innocents of Pantoland and getting away with it, to just die... it didn't fit. Nettie never ever spoke about how her mother had died and the Boy was a little to afraid of her bad moods to ask her. He assumed that she had gone the same way as the cat. She had been immortal for so long and then the magic of Pantomime had started to come apart. Real life had begun to slowly creep in and with it, old age and unfair death. Back in the Golden Days, you were slain by heroes or villains, or you died of a broken heart. When you did die of old age it was very sudden and painless and your extensive, plump offspring would suddenly all be at your bedside. People who had done really good things had a habit of dying of laughter with their spouse on their hundredth wedding anniversary. You didn't die of cancer in those days, or heart disease, or strokes or pneumonia or meningitis or any of the other nasty, pointless ways real life had a tendency of bumping you off with. You did now. Maybe she had gone like that.
"Imagine," he thought as he scrubbed, "finding a tumour the size of a hedgehog in your guts and dying that slow, helpless death, knowing it would never have grown in you if you hadn't have killed that baby boy, if you hadn't destroyed the one thing that kept you going."
He grunted a hollow laugh as he gave the inside of the cage a final rinse. Did real life teach you lessons like that? Like Pantomime used to? Or was it just full of pointless, painful ironies? He sat back, cross legged, and examined his work.
"There," he said at last, "fit for a prince."
Throwing the vile brown water away outside, he noticed that the sun was already beginning to touch the treetops to the west. He saw Nettlewart in her study through the window, staring at the end of the sparkling staff in her hands and concentrating hard. The brother and sister had to be out there in the woods already.
"Not long now," he told them, and went inside to light the candles.