Free Pure Dead Brilliant by Debi Gliori

engulfed her as she remembered the tale of a brother and sister frozen apart by the evil Snow Queen, the brother saved from his icy fate by the tears of the sister who loved him. Gerda and Kay, Pandora thought, the names coming back to her as if she were sitting in the old nursery hearing it read to her again, over Titus's protests. Back then, she remembered, he used to
wear overalls. . . . The vision of her brother as a four-year-old caused her to smile through her tears. . . .
             
    . . . blue denim overalls with a big rusty blotch on the bib from when he'd had a spectacular nosebleed after she'd pushed him off his tricycle. He'd been about to plunge into the moat, the moron, and her one concern had been to stop this from happening, but he thought she'd done it on purpose to hurt him. . . . His nose was always running back then. And the nursery was in a different room, a blue room with big windows on the second floor. A beautiful room, always sunny, always warm and safe. Mummy said Titus had even been born there. . . .
    “Was I borned there?” Pandora demanded, gazing up into her mother's face, uncomfortably aware that her diaper was growing somewhat damp.
    “You weren't borned,” Titus snorted, looking up from a Lego tank that he was steadily chewing apart, his chubby fingers unable to separate the slippery little bricks he needed for building a tractor. “You were made in a hostiple,” he added cuttingly.
    “No I wasn't,” Pandora yelled. “I wasn't wasn't wasn't!”
    Titus turned his back on this outburst with a four-year-old's
disdain. Picking up the Lego tank, he brought his jaws down on a particularly stubborn wheel.
    “Pandora, darling, don't—”
    “WASN'T WASN'T WASN'T, SO THERE!”
    “That's enough now, don't shout—”
    To Titus's alarm, the wheel sprang off its axle and flew into his mouth. He gasped, his indrawn breath vacuuming the little plastic disk back to lodge suffocatingly in his throat. His nose, permanently blocked with mucus, allowed the passage of no air whatsoever. Eyes bulging, he instantly turned purple with the effort of trying to breathe.
    “HOBBLE, HOBBIBLE TITUS!” Pandora bawled, falling off Signora Strega-Borgia's lap with a banshee shriek and crawling toward where Titus sat with his back to her, quietly asphyxiating.
    “Pandora. For heaven's sake, calm down. NO! DON'T DO THAT!”
    Pandora raised both of her chubby little fists and brought them thudding down on her brother's back. With the sound of a champagne cork being popped, the wheel shot out of Titus's mouth and flew across the nursery floor. Signora Strega-Borgia sprang to her feet just in time to catch her son as he toppled backward, his face a deep blue but thankfully able to draw in great lungfuls of air. . . .
             
    It had been a close call, Pandora thought, recalling the many other times she'd hauled her brother back from the brink. . . . But now, for some reason, she had an uneasy feeling that Titus was in far graver danger than ever before. In the past they had quarreled, sometimes with devastating unkindness, both of them retreating to their separate bedrooms to lick their wounds . . . but after a recuperative sulk they'd always effected some sort of repair. This was different though—nastier, more bitter, and prolonged. . . . This time, it seemed as though neither of them had any idea how to even begin bridging the chasm that separated them.
    A shadow fell across the floor, and Pandora looked up to the rafters, where a giant tarantula hung swinging back and forth on a skein of spider silk.
    “Tarantella?” Pandora whispered, barely able to see through tears.
    “Absolutely,” came the languid drawl from above. “Tell me, O leaking one, is this a Robert-the-Bruce moment, or am I talking out of my fundament?”
    “Excuse me?” Pandora said, watching as Tarantella glided down from the rafters and sashayed across the floor to where she lay clutching her bolster.
    “Robert