فصل 04

4.

In Which It Was Just a Dream

You ask too many questions.

No one knows what the Witch does with the children she takes. No one asks this. We can’t ask it—don’t you see? It hurts too much.

Fine. She eats them. Are you happy?

No. That’s not what I think.

My mother told me she ate their souls, and that their soulless bodies have wandered the earth ever since. Unable to live. Unable to die. Blank-­eyed and blank-­faced and aimless walking. I don’t think that’s true. We would have seen them, don’t you think? We would at least have seen one wander by. After all these years.

My grandmother told me she keeps them as slaves. That they live in the catacombs under her great castle in the forest and operate her fell machines and stir her great cauldrons and do her bidding from morning till night. But I don’t think that’s true, either. Surely, if it was, at least one of them would have escaped. In all these years, surely one person would have found a way out and come home. So, no. I don’t think they are enslaved.

Really, I don’t think anything at all. There is nothing at all to think.

Sometimes. I have this dream. About your brother. He would be eighteen now. No. Nineteen. I have this dream that he has dark hair and luminous skin and stars in his eyes. I dream that when he smiles, it shines for miles around. Last night I dreamed that he waited next to a tree for a girl to walk by. And he called her name, and held her hand, and his heart pounded when he kissed her.

What? No. I’m not crying. Why would I cry? Silly thing.

Anyway. It was just a dream.