The interior of the house was not laid out in any way that made sense. There were no doors, only open doorways. Every room had several of them, but they opened mostly onto other similar rooms, parlors with haphazardly arranged tables and chairs. Ian could almost taste the sweetness in the air. He’d never had much of a sweet tooth in any case, but here the candy furniture had a strange allure, even while the cloying sweetness was ever-present and unpleasantly overpowering.

  “Don’t eat the furniture, Jamie,” he sad.

  Jamie gave him an annoyed look. “I’m not stupid, Ian.”

  “No, but I think it’s enchanted to seem exceptionally desirable. So remember that if you find yourself starting to consider it.”

  Everything was ornately decorated with peppermint trim, and the rooms were filled with brilliant colors. But it was all dark, except where the flickering firelight illuminated, which made the colorful cheerfulness lose some of its shine. Shadows danced ominously.

  If it weren’t for the smell, Ian would feel right at home. It was almost a proper Villain’s lair. The creepiness seemed at odds with its use as a lure.

  “I think breaking in instead of eating anything outside means the enchantments aren’t really working against us,” Ian suggested.

  “So where’s the witch?”

  “I think we’re looking for the Captain. Esme must be the other life force we sensed.”

  “No, not that witch. The gingerbread witch.”

  “...the what?”

  “Haven’t you ever read a fairy tale, Ian?” Jamie told him about the story of the witch living in the gingerbread house in the woods, luring children, and how often the image was repeated through storytelling tradition.

  Fey did love stories. “I think we’re still dealing with fairies, then. I wouldn’t expect a witch.” As they were talking, the nature of the rooms they drifted through changed. All was still dark and silent, everything was still brightly colored with peppermint trim, but they started coming to rooms that seemed more like work spaces. Not all of them really belonged in a house, though. They found woodworking space, though the wood was gingerbread and the tools were peppermint. They found a sewing room, where a half-completed doll was stitched out of fruit leather with candy floss for hair. But they also found a glass-blowing room, where a furnace implausibly made of peppermint heated sugar to form hard candy. Which was very silly, as sugar would scorch at glass-melting temperatures.

  Probably. Ian thought that sounded right, but he had never made candy any more than he’d made glass. Either way, it wasn’t a room one would expect to find in a house.

  “We only sensed one life force here, anyway. It may be a purely magical trap, left here to snare travelers passively.”

  “I found a hat!” Jamie stood triumphantly, brushing sugar off of himself after sprawling on the floor to reach under a work table. It was Montague’s hat, the big one with the feather.

  It did not bode well that she’d lost it and not noticed. She seemed quite attached.

  “She’s been through here, then.” Ian hurried forward, Jamie dashing to catch up to him.

  Finally, they came to a kitchen. A massive kitchen. Jamie did not need to point out to him that this room was wider than the house. It was, substantially, but also longer and with ceilings far too high.

  Did they shrink? Extradimensional space? It seemed unlikely they had been transported to a real, distant location. A trap like that would have tried to lure them through a door that would contain the portal. They’d entered through a wall.

  Jamie rubbed his eyes. “Is this a dream?”

  “Pinch yourself and see.” Of course, that wouldn’t necessarily rule out dream magic. Magic, obviously, did not necessarily follow all of the rules of how things worked naturally.

  “I’ve heard that you can’t read in a dream, either,” Jamie offered, moving towards a book shelf, tracing the spines of gingerbread-covered cookbooks with a finger. “...they don’t have titles.” He took a book off the shelf and opened it. “The pages are blank. I guess in a gingerbread house, everything is just decorative.”

  Ian shook his head. “If this was some kind of dream spell, you could probably still read anyway. If it’s true that you can’t read in dreams”—Ian couldn’t remember having tried—“I would hypothesize that’s because the words don’t exist before your brain decides what they are. But if this is a magical dream created by an enemy, then your brain isn’t actually creating the environment, the enemy did.”

  Jamie gasped and pointed past a row of shelves full of peppermint pots and pans. “There’s someone there!” he said, his voice halfway between an urgent whisper and a frightened squeak.

  Ian held the fire high, prepared to cast a spell with his other hand. There was a person sitting in a chair by a table, waiting for them in silence in the darkness.

  They didn’t move. After a few moments, they still didn’t move.

  “Who are you?” Ian demanded, “If that’s you Montague, speak up!”

  At the command, the figure at the table responded: they didn’t move.

  Ian and Jamie waited in silence, but they continued not to move. “Go poke them.” Ian gave Jamie a little push on the shoulder, his eyes fixed on the figure at the table.

  “You go.” Jamie gave him a withering look. The Boy was really getting too comfortable with their relationship. “You’ve got the light.” That was, perhaps, fair.

  Ian edged forward, ready for the figure to lunge at them, until the light fell more cleanly on their face.

  It was a life-sized gingerbread man cookie. Given all the magical sweets around them, this did not necessarily mean that it was non-threatening. Ian gave it a shove. It toppled off of its chair and broke when it hit the floor. Apparently it really was non-threatening.

  Then Ian’s fell on the plate in front of it on the table. It was made of peppermint of course, like a peppermint button candy pressed flat. On it was the handle of a peppermint fork that looked like the end had been bitten off, along with crumbs of some baked good. Ian raised one of these to his nose. “Spice cake, I think.” He popped the bit of cake into his mouth.

  “Ian, don’t eat it!”

  Ian spat on the table. Ugh, that lure spell was really insidious.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Jamie shuddered. “I don’t like magic that messes with your mind.”

  “I really do not care for it,” Ian agreed, “being used against me.”

  Kneeing before the broken gingerbread cookie, Jamie laid a hand on one of the pieces. “Do you think this was a person?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “I can’t feel any life.”

  “That’s… probably better than the alternative.”

  Jamie stood, resolute, brushing sugar off of his hands and robe again. He glared into the darkness and marched forward, Ian hurrying after him.

  They wended around banks of shelves, and rows of ovens. Jamie had been right to suggest this place was dreamlike, though “labyrinthine” would also have served. Occasionally they passed a table with an oversized gingerbread man or two, sitting in front of empty plates of cake.

  “She’s here somewhere,” Jamie insisted, as though Ian had suggested otherwise.

  “Seems likely.” Wandering around randomly didn’t seem that effective a strategy, though. “Let’s try the life sensing thing again. Nothing else here is living, so it should be easy.”

  Jamie closed his eyes, but they almost immediately snapped open again. “There! But it’s so weak…”

  Montague sat at a table next to two gingerbread men. She did not respond to their presence. Her eyes looked glazed and her hair was unkempt. In her hand was a peppermint fork, and in front of her was a peppermint plate bearing two-thirds of a piece of spice cake. Ian nudged her; her shoulder was sticky.

  “Can you heal her?” he asked Jamie.

  The acolyte shook his head. “She’s not injured, she’s cursed. More your department.”

  “She hasn’t finished the cake, so the curse isn’t complete. She’ll recover if we get her away.” Though that would be a challenge if she wouldn’t move.

  Ian picked up her plate, at which point she finally moved, making angry wounded noises that weren’t quite words, she stabbed him with her fork.

  “Ah!” Ian dropped the plate, and his light went out. He heard it crack when it hit the table.

  “No!” shouted Jamie, then “Ian, we need the light!”

  Obviously. Ian conjured more light, to see Jamie and Montague wrestling over her fork. He picked up the pieces of her plate again and hurled hem, cake and all, away into the darkness.

  She bellowed at him, a sound that did not, quite, sound like the word “No.”

  “Jamie, give her her hat!”

  “What, but—”

  “Just do it!”

  Jamie pushed Montague back off of himself. She fell out of her chair onto the floor, scrambling on the floor after the cake, when Jamie called for her and presented the hat.

  She froze, her eyes fixed on it, recognition starting to dawn there.

  She’d had the hat a lot longer than she’d had Jamie and Ian with her. The connection to it was stronger. She put out a hand. “My?” Jamie gave her the hat, and she stared at it for a long while before slowly, jerkily, moving it to her head. “Hat.”

  Ian found the chunk of cake on the floor in the darkness. This time, instead of just chucking it away, he held the fire to it and burned it to ash.

  “But,” said Montague haltingly, “the cookies.”

  “We don’t need any more cookies, Captain. Let’s get out of here.”

  “But th’cookies,” she slurred as Ian hauled her to her feet. She was very heavy. Or maybe he just didn’t have much upper-body strength.

  “Let’s not worry about the cookies right now.”

  “The cookies!” Montague insisted, getting her feet under her.

  She obviously wasn’t well, so it probably wasn’t fair. But then, a Villain like Ian was not known for his patience. “I don’t care about the d—”

  Something collided heavily with the back of his head, knocking the both of them to the floor.

  “Ian!” shouted Jamie, “The cookies!”

  The gingerbread men were all looking at him now as they stood up, knocking over their peppermint chairs, which splintered. There was rage drawn upon their frosted faces.

  “I don’t think they liked it when you burned the cake,” said Jamie. He touched Ian’s elbow where it had hit the floor, and the pain of the mild bruising stopped immediately.

  “Yes Jamie, I can see that.”

  “I still don’t feel any life from them,” Jamie said urgently, pulling on Ian and Montague, trying to get them up, “Do you have any spells that work well against non-living constructs?”

  “Run!” said Ian. The moment he let go of Montague, she faltered and stumbled back to the floor. He grabbed her and tried to haul her up. Strength was not his strength. “Really need you to pull your weight here, Captain,” he said through gritted teeth, “Literally, I mean, though your sword might come in handy too.”

  Her hand touched the hilt of her blade, but slipped off without grasping it.

  “Wonderful.”

  Jamie had found a doorway, but looked around apprehensively. “I don’t know where to go. I don’t think this is where we came in.”

  At least the baked horrors lumbering after them were hardly moving fast. Ian hurled his handful of fire at one of them, but then needed to reignite it again before they could see. There was now an overbaked cookie lumbering after them.

  They were slow, and they didn’t seem very powerful, but more of them were emerging from around the shelves all over the kitchen. It seemed like every one of them had awoken when he burned the cake, and neither he nor Jamie were particularly suited to fighting this enemy. Especially with one hand holding the light and the other holding the Captain.

  “You take her!” said Ian, shoving Montague towards Jamie. She collapsed on top of him, dragging him down. She was quite a bit taller, after all.

  But it freed a hand. Ian hurled more fireballs at the dangerbread men, succeeding in melting some of their icing. They weren’t alive so he couldn’t drain them.

  Ian crouched down and touched the floor. Were they still in the forest?

  This created an excellent opportunity for him to be hit from behind again, smacked by a big, soft, sugary arm. And then walloped across the face by another one. The cookies were big, slow, and stupid, and their attacks weren’t all that effective, but they were starting to appear in numbers Ian was not equipped to handle. “You know Jamie? I don’t think these are transformed people after all, at least not all of them. The forest can’t have this many victims.”

  He’d felt it, though. The forest floor beneath the layer of gingerbread. He reached out and grabbed it, and the pulled it forth. The cookie floor cracked as an earthen spike shot through it, impaling one of the cookie soldiers, which fell to pieces.

  Elemental magic was really working for him recently. “Jamie, get under the table.”

  He did not need to be told twice. He did need a few moments to drag Montague back over, though. “What are you going to do?”

  “Gingerbread is not a strong construction material. I’m going to bring the house down. If this is an extradimensional space, we may just be getting out of the frying pan here…”

  It didn’t take much effort. The cookies crumbled as earthen spikes and fists smashed through them easily. Bits of gingerbread rained down on the table above them. Ian shattered the closest wall, and then the next one and the next. And then—sunlight. He had broken though to the outside.

  The light fell on their faces, and then quite suddenly Ian found himself lying on his back in a clearing in the forest. An empty forest. There was no sign that the house had ever been there, though Jamie insisted that it had.

  After an interminable several seconds, Ian pushed himself upright again. “Come on you, two. We still have to find Esme.” He staggered back into the woods, Montague and Jamie following behind.