The woods ate their mother first.
That was what Oggie told his little sister, and Oggie never lied about the dead. He was eleven, old enough to remember the famine's first winter, old enough to have buried their father behind the chicken coop when the coughing took him. Now Oggie studied the ash trees crowding the road, their branches knitting together overhead like fingers laced in prayer. Or in choking.
"Fenna." He tugged her hood up against the sleet. "Keep your eyes on my back. Don't look at the faces."
"What faces?"
"The ones in the trees."
Fenna was six. She saw only bark and shadow, but she gripped his hand tighter because Oggie's voice had gone thin the way it did when he smelled smoke in an empty room.
They had walked since dawn. Their stepmother — their mother's husband's new wife, thin as a nail and sharp as one too — had led them to the forest's lip at first light, promising berries, promising rescue from the empty larder, promising everything women like her promised to children they wanted vanished. Then she'd spun on her heel, her shawl snapping like a flag of surrender, and she'd walked back toward the village without looking once behind her.
Oggie had counted her steps. Seventy-three. Then the trees swallowed the sound.
"Hungry," Fenna said.
"I know."
"My stomach sounds like frogs."
"I know."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the last of his bread hoard — not bread, really, but the charred crusts he'd scraped from the oven floor for three nights, saved for this journey he hadn't known they were taking. He snapped a piece, felt it crumble to almost nothing, pressed the larger share into Fenna's palm.
Something cracked behind them. Not a branch. Too heavy. Too deliberate.
Oggie turned.
The path had vanished. Where mud and frozen leaf-litter had stretched back toward home, now there was only more forest, older, the trunks fat as cottage walls, the spaces between them breathing.
"Oggie," Fenna whispered.
He didn't shush her. He was listening to the breathing too. It wasn't the trees. The rhythm was wrong — inhalations too long, exhalations carrying the wet click of something tasting air for meat.
Ahead, a light flickered.
Not warm. Not welcoming. The color of old bone seen through stained glass, it hung between two massive oaks where no clearing should exist, illuminating a structure that hadn't been there when Oggie looked thirty seconds before.
The walls were gingerbread.
He knew this story. Every child in their village knew it, told at hearthsides to teach gratitude, to teach obedience, to teach that the wild rewarded the foolish with cooking fires and sharpened teeth. But the gingerbread in the tales was golden and festive, decorated with gumdrops and innocence.
This was blackened at the seams, weeping something darker than molasses, studded not with sweets but with what looked, at this distance, like small bones worked into the dough for structure.
The door opened.
A woman stepped out, broad as a barrel, her face a moon of wrinkled dough, her smile stretching too wide and showing too many teeth in rows like a shark's, like a lamprey's, like something that had learned to wear human expression the way a wolf might wear a sheepskin — poorly, eagerly, already smelling the feast to come.
"Oh," she called, her voice carrying that same wet clicking quality Oggie had heard in the forest's breath. "Oh, my lovelies. My sweet, my precious, my long-awaited. You've found me at last."
Oggie pushed Fenna behind him.
He understood now why their stepmother had counted her steps. Why she hadn't looked back. The forest didn't eat indiscriminately. It needed to be fed specific things. Children, specifically. Children with hunger already in their bellies, with desperation already wearing down their caution, with nowhere else to turn.
The woman gestured with hands that had too many joints.
"Come in, come in," she sang. "I've just stoked the oven."
Oggie looked at the chimney. It wasn't smoking.
It was screaming.
A thin sound, almost beyond hearing, almost beyond hope, almost almost human. Then cut short. Then beginning again from a different throat.
"No," Oggie said.
The woman's smile flickered. Her eyes — black, wet, reflecting nothing — fixed on his face with the concentration of a butcher reading a carcass.
"No?"
"Fenna." Oggie didn't turn, kept his eyes on the woman, on her hands, on the door behind her gaping like a mouth. "When I say run, you run. Not back. Not the way we came. Left. Always left at every choice. Count your turns. Promise me."
"Promise," Fenna breathed.
The woman was moving now, faster than her bulk suggested, her feet silent on the needle-carpet, her arms spreading wide to gather them in.
Oggie reached into his pocket and found the remaining bread crusts. He threw them at her face, not to hurt, to distract, to buy one heartbeat, two —
"Run!"
Fenna ran.
Oggie ran after, grabbing her sleeve, pulling her left at the first fork, left again, the woman bellowing now, the sound no longer almost-laughing but something ancient and ravenous and wrong, and behind them the gingerbread house was moving, heaving itself from its foundations, growing legs of snapped bone and lurching after them through the dark.
They ran until Fenna's count reached seventeen lefts.
They ran until the trees began to look like trees again, until the breathing faded behind them, until they collapsed in a hollow where the moon, just rising, showed them something worse than pursuit.
A village.
Their village.
They had run in a circle. Or the forest had turned them. Or the path simply ended where it wanted them to be.
And on the edge of the tree-line, watching them with her nail-thin body and her shawl pulled tight, stood their stepmother. Waiting.
She didn't look surprised to see them.
She looked patient.
"Oh, my darlings," she said, and her voice had that same wet click, that same too-wide quality, that same familiarity. "Back already? She wasn't to your taste? Never mind. Never mind. The forest has such appetites. Such specific appetites. We'll try again tomorrow, won't we? We'll walk a little deeper next time. We'll find what wants you specifically."
She held out her hand.
Behind her, the village slept on, innocent, hungry, complicit in a way no child could name but every child could feel in their marrow.
Oggie took Fenna's hand in his.
He had no more bread crumbs.
He had only his memory, and his promise, and the beginning of a plan that would need seventeen left turns and something burned in an oven before it could breathe free.
He took his stepmother's hand.
And he smiled the way she smiled, showing all his teeth, learning finally how the wolf wore its sheepskin.
Learning how to wait.