The Darkest Part of the Forest Read online

  “Jack,” she shouted. “Jack!”

  Her voice was swallowed up in the night.

  Just like that, he’d said. But the thorns hadn’t parted for her, and the poem was unlikely to work. The words weren’t right. The green hill wasn’t where she’d been born. She wasn’t one of the Folk. She didn’t have any magic.

  Was this some kind of test? Pushing to her feet, Hazel climbed the stairs again. She wasn’t very good at rhymes, but maybe if she altered the poem a little, maybe then the hill would open for her? It was a terrifying sort of magic. Stomping three times on the ledge, she took a deep breath and spoke:

  “Lords and ladies who walk unseen, lords and ladies all in green, three times I stamp upon the earth…” Hazel hesitated and then gave the only reason she could think of why the Folk might grant her entry to their revel. “Let me in for the sake of mirth.”

  Squinching her eyes closed, she stepped through the archway. She fell, just as before, but this time she fell into the grass, the earth beneath her opening up. She struggled, the rich, mineral smell of dirt all around her, her nails scraping at the tiny rocks, at the weeds, digging in, trying for purchase. She took one last breath, one last shuddering gasp, and then there was only darkness closing over her.

  A scream came unbidden to her lips. Her stomach lurched. She spiraled in the air once, the world below her a blurry streak of mad sights and sounds. Then she was caught, suspended in a net of roots, pale and long and hairy. Below her was the revel, lit by tiny moving lights and leaping fires. There were dancing circles and banquet tables, there were faeries covered in furs, in armor, in great swirling gowns. A few looked up, pointed, and laughed, but most didn’t notice her hanging above them like a living chandelier. And then she saw, resting on huge tiles of gray stone, a throne that seemed to be shaped from the rock itself. It was covered in pelts, and a man in armor was seated upon it. A page whispered in his ear, and he turned to look her way. He didn’t so much as smile.

  She’d come to the Alderking’s court on a full-moon night. She couldn’t possibly have done anything more foolhardy if she tried.

  Hazel pushed with her feet, trying to get her bearing on the roots and, maybe, to begin to climb. But as she did, the roots let go. Hazel fell again, this time hitting the ground hard. After a moment of nerving herself to do more than blink up at the domed ceiling, she pushed herself to her knees. A hand on her arm steadied her.

  “Thanks,” Hazel said automatically, opening her eyes.

  Then she realized her mistake. Never thank them.

  A monstrous creature stood in front of her, its black eyes wide, a look of disgust on its face. Pale fur grew from the top of its ridged nose and the tips of its cheekbones to a crest above its head, fur that dusted over its shoulders and midriff. It was clad in an asymmetrical leather piece stretching across its waist. It let her go as though it had been touching something foul and strode off, leaving her stunned and blinking after it.

  “Sorry,” she called, not sure if that made what she’d done better or worse.

  The revel was like nothing she had imagined, not even her dreams of where the horned boy came from. It wasn’t the way stories told in town had made it seem. Music rang through the air with an aching sweetness. She was left breathless and reeling.

  Creatures spun on the earthen floor, some with long-limbed liquid grace, others tromping or gamboling. Small faeries flitted through the air on tattered moth wings, baring their teeth at Hazel. Short folk in heath brown clothes, with hair that stuck up from their heads like the pistils of flowers, played at dice games and drank deeply from ornately blown glass goblets and wooden cups alike. Tall beings, shining in the gloom as though they were lit up from the inside, whirled in their dresses of leaves, in cleverly shaped corsets of bark, in exquisite, silvery mail.

  Other creatures, far less human-looking, walked among them on stilt-like legs or loomed over them with faces as gnarled as the knots of trees.

  They were terrifying and beautiful and horrible, all at once. All of them.

  In their midst, seemingly oblivious to the danger, were people she recognized. People from Fairfold. Ms. Donaldson, who taught kindergarten, dancing barefoot with an owl-faced creature. Smiling Nick, a long-haired guy who did odd jobs like sharpening knives door-to-door, stumbled among the throng, dressed in black, silk scarves streaming behind him. Beside him was a young guy whose name Hazel didn’t know but whom she’d seen before. He worked at the general store in town, mostly stocking shelves. She had once seen him juggling apples in the produce aisle. Not many humans, but here and there she spotted human clothes, even if she couldn’t see faces in the crowd.

  Were they really human, though? Or were they faeries who went among humans and wore their shapes? And if they were human, did they know they were here, or would they wake with muddy feet, as Hazel had, and no memory of the night before?

  It wasn’t just humans she recognized; she knew one of the creatures, too. Sitting in a corner, overgrown with hair and munching on golden beetles, was an ogre called Rawhead. She’d heard of him, heard of his taste for human flesh, and even figured out where his lair might be, back when she was a little girl with a big sharp sword. Rawhead grinned in her direction with his red smile as if maybe he recognized her, too.

  Move, she told herself. Don’t just stand there gaping. Move.

  Hazel started walking in a random direction, just putting one foot in front of the other, propelling herself along without any sense of quite where she was going. She didn’t see Jack yet, but he had to be somewhere close by—and as frightening as it was to move through the revel without him, as shaky and scared as she felt, she had to find out what she could about the horned boy and the monster and the mysterious messages from the mysterious Ainsel. Otherwise, all the terror and danger were for nothing.

  Trying to stay far from the dancing, she made her way through the hollow hill. Gillyflower, roses, and sage scented the air, making her dizzy as she went.

  “Will you take a drink?” asked a small, long-nosed creature with a stubby tail and eyes that were black as a crow’s. It held up a small tray of tiny, carved wood cups with some liquid inside, barely a thimbleful in each. “I swear by the corn and the moon that you’ll never taste a sweeter drop.”

  “No, tha—” She stopped herself from thanking another one of them, shaking her head instead. “I’m okay.”

  It shrugged and kept moving, but the encounter had given her the jitters. Hazel knew all the rules, but obeying them was turning out to be hard. It was so easy to do the wrong thing automatically, way easier than she could have ever guessed.

  A laughing woman with thick plaits of russet hair paused as she went past with a goat-headed companion. “Didn’t you sketch me once?” the woman asked Hazel, surprising her.

  For a moment Hazel didn’t know what she could possibly mean. Then suddenly the old story came back to her, the one that had always been about Ben. “You’re thinking of my mother.”

  The woman frowned, looking puzzled. “Can it really have been so long? Why, you must be my musician, then, grown! Will you give me a song in recompense for my blessing?”

  Hazel shook her head. “That was my brother. I wasn’t born yet and I’m awful at music. You wouldn’t want me to sing.” She wondered if she should tell the faerie woman how little joy Ben had gotten from her gift, but Hazel suspected that would violate those rules about politeness. “But, um, I’ll tell Ben I saw you.”

  “Do,” she said. “Tell him to come and play for Melia and I’ll make rubies fall from his tongue.”

  That sounded more like a threat than a promise, but Hazel nodded and, not sure what else to do, made a little bow before backing away. Then she walked fast, elbowing through the merry crowd; past pipers and fiddlers; past stick-thin faeries with powdery wings; past willowy green women with black mouths and tongues in dresses fine as mist; past long-fingered girls with crowns of twigs woven into the nimbus of their loose hair; past sneering boys with the feet
of lions; past crow girls laughing all together; past large, misshapen creatures with moss growing on their massive limbs and mouths full of teeth that appeared to be more cracked rock than bone.

  Someone grabbed her arm. She wheeled around with a cry, pulling against his grip, before she realized who was holding her.

  “Hazel.” Jack looked out of breath and a little panicked. “I didn’t know where you were.”

  “You left me.” Her voice came out more sharply than she’d intended.

  “You were right behind me,” he insisted. “I thought you’d just follow me through the way you’d followed me up the path.”

  “Well, I couldn’t,” Hazel said.

  Someone was with Jack: a tall and spindly faerie woman with skin the silvery brown of bark. Her eyes changed color; lustrous gold igniting with green.

  She couldn’t be anyone but Jack’s elf mother. Her eyes were just as they’d been in the stories.

  “Red hair,” she said, turning her head side to side, observing Hazel. Plucking up a lock, the elf woman gave her hair a sharp tug. “They used to say that meant you were a witch. Are you a witch, child?”

  “No, ma’am,” Hazel told her, remembering, at least, the value of politeness.

  “And what brings you here? Or should I ask who?”

  “Ainsel,” Hazel said, hoping the name would mean something.

  “Well, aren’t you a wit?” the elf woman said, scowling.

  “So you know who that is!” Haze exclaimed, barely able to breathe for eagerness. “Please, tell me.”

  “How can it be that you don’t recall?” Her frown seemed to signal Hazel to silence. Then she turned, pointing a long finger at Jack. “And I think that this is the boy who brought you. This boy, and this boy alone. He was very wrong to do so. Whatever you’re looking for, this is no place for you.”

  Hazel wasn’t sure how to answer that without referring to Fairfold, when Jack had warned her against it, not sure how to direct the conversation back to Ainsel. “Jack? Sure, he brought me, but…”

  The faerie woman circled them both, and Jack moved close to Hazel, as though ready to impose his body in front of hers if the woman grabbed for Hazel again. His mother’s voice rose. “Jack? Is that what she calls him? Jack of what? Jack of Hearts? Jack of Diamonds? Jack of Weeping? Jack of Woe?”

  “I don’t bother with all that fancy stuff—I just go by Jack, these days,” he said, and Hazel laughed—a short awkward bark that she instantly regretted. It had just been such a surprise, his casual, quotidian response to her anger.

  “Why should I care if he wishes to idle time away in Fairfold? If he wants to play at being a human child, what is it to me? He can eat mortal food and sleep in a mortal bed and kiss a mortal girl, but he will never be human. He will always be playing.” She was directing her speech to Hazel, but the words were clearly for Jack’s benefit. Hazel wondered how many times they’d had this conversation.

  He grinned. “You’ve got to grow where you’re planted.” It was a human saying if Hazel had ever heard one, but it had an odd resonance right then.

  His elf mother’s attention didn’t waver. Her eyes stayed on Hazel. “So have you come to pull him down off his white horse like in a ballad? Have you come to save him from us?” the woman asked, long fingers gesturing out at the vast knotwork of roots across the domed ceiling. “Or is he here to save you?”

  “Stop,” Jack said, putting an arm in front of Hazel. “Enough, okay? Stop talking to her that way. It’s enough and more than enough.”

  “Just remember, blood summons blood,” she said.

  One of the tall knights in shining silver armor—one with shoulder plates crafted to look like screaming faces picked out in shaped gold—approached them with a shallow bow and turned his gaze toward Hazel. “The Alderking would greet her.”

  Jack’s elf mother nodded and cut a look at Jack. “He honors you,” she said, but her tone belied the words.

  Hazel had heard stories of the Alderking, of course. Each solstice, townsfolk left special offerings out for him. When the weather was bad, they said he must be angry. When the seasons didn’t turn fast enough, they said he must still be asleep. She’d never quite imagined him as real. His power seemed great, and he seemed too distant for her to imagine him as anything but a legend.

  “Lead on,” she told the knight.

  Jack made to come with her, but his mother grabbed his arm, twig fingers digging into his skin. Although she tried to hide it, there was genuine terror in her voice when she spoke. “Not you. You remain with me.”

  He turned to her, head held high, and even in his human clothes managed to convey some of the haughtiness of his lineage. “Marcan here isn’t exactly known for his fair dealing with humans.” His gaze went to the knight. “Are you?”

  “No one requested your presence, changeling.” The knight smirked. “Besides, Hazel doesn’t mind coming with me. We’ve crossed swords before.”

  Hazel wasn’t sure what he meant. Maybe he’d had something to do with one of the creatures she’d fought when she was a child? Whatever it was, Jack looked ready to object. His hand slid into the back pocket of his jeans as if he was reaching for a weapon.

  “It’s okay,” Hazel said. “Jack, it’s fine.”

  Jack’s elf mother leaned her long body toward him, to press a kiss to Jack’s forehead. Hazel had never thought her as longing for her lost son, never wondered if there was another side to the story of how Jack came to live with the Gordons, but she couldn’t help wondering then.

  “Mortals will disappoint you,” she told him, almost a whisper against his skin.

  Jaw set, fury in his eyes, Jack stepped back and allowed Marcan to lead Hazel across the earthen floor of the underhill.

  The Alderking was seated on the great stone throne she’d glimpsed when she’d hung above the revel. Horns like those of a stag rose from a circlet at his brow, and he wore a shining coat of mail shaped from small bronze scales, each one tapering to a point, all of them overlapping like how she might have imagined the scales of a dragon. He had green eyes so clear and bright that they made you think of poisonous drinks or maybe mouthwash. On every finger of his hands, he wore a different, intricately shaped ring.

  Across his lap was a golden sword with an ornate crossguard. For a moment she thought it was her own missing blade and took a half step toward it before realizing that her sword had a plainer hilt. All his knights wore similar swords—forged from bright metal, they gleamed like polished sunlight in their obsidian scabbards.

  Resting at the Alderking’s feet was that pale and naked creature she had bargained with so long ago, the pale catlike one with crimson-tipped skin. It regarded her lazily, through half-lidded eyes. Then it waved a long-fingered hand, all claws.

  Her careful questions about memories and monsters flew from her head. She went down on one knee. As she did, she saw something shimmer among the intricate tiles of the floor, like a dropped coin catching the light.

  “Sir Hazel,” said the Alderking, leaning forward and peering down at her with those startling eyes. As handsome as any fairy-tale prince, he was beautiful and awful, all at once, despite the cruel twist of his mouth. “I do not remember commanding you to come here.”

  Hazel looked up at him, baffled. “No, I—”

  “In fact, I have explicitly told you never to come to a full-moon revel. And last night, though you were most grievously needed to hunt with us, you ignored my summons. Have you forgotten our bargain so quickly? Defy me to your peril, Hazel Evans. Have I not given you the deepest, dearest wish of your heart, an unasked-for boon? Have I not made you one of my company? Know that I could take it from you just as easily. There are far more unpleasant ways to serve me.”

  “I—” Hazel opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out.

  Suddenly the Alderking began to laugh. “Ah,” he said, looking not unlike the faerie woman upon realizing she’d mistaken Hazel for her mother. “You’re not my Hazel, are you?
Not my knight. You’re the Hazel Evans who lives by day.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Hazel thought that maybe she should stand, but she felt rooted in place. The party seemed to fade to a buzzing in her ears.

  Sir Hazel, the Alderking had called her.

  Jack’s elf mother had asked Hazel an odd thing, too. So have you come to pull him down off his white horse like in a ballad? Have you come to save him from us? Or is he here to save you? She knew the ballad where someone got pulled down off a white horse. It was Tam Lin, where a human knight was forced into the service of a queen of Faerie and saved by a brave mortal girl, Janet. Tam Lin was a human knight.

  Hazel thought of the message in the walnut. Seven years to pay your debts. Much too late for regrets. And there was the odd thing the knight had said to her when he’d brought her over, that they’d crossed swords before.

  Words deserted her.

  “How…” she forced out anyway.

  “You do not remember the bargain you made?” The Alderking leaned toward her, the horns on his circlet tipping forward.

  “I promised you seven years of my life. There’s no way I could forget that.” Hazel took a deep breath. She was getting her nerve back. Pushing herself to her feet, heart pounding, she steeled herself for a battle of wits. Here, in some fashion, were the answers she needed. She just had to ask the right questions in the right way. “But—you’re saying I’ve been paying my debt to you? I don’t remember—I don’t remember doing so.”

  He smiled patiently. “Am I not generous to take those memories from you? Every night, from the moment you fall into slumber until your head touches your pillow again near dawn, you’re mine. You are my knight to command and your own daylight life is unaffected. You always had potential—and I have guided that potential. I have made you into one of my number.”

  Hazel was pretty sure that people who went without sleep for weeks died. Years was ridiculous. And it was equally incredible to think that she’d been trained by the knights here under the hill—trained to be like them. She glanced to the three who stood to one side of the Alderking’s throne, looking as though they’d stepped out of paintings from a time that never was. “That doesn’t seem possible.”