The Darkest Part of the Forest Page 5

  The piping went on, closer now, beautiful enough to make the trees bend low to hear him better, and utterly useless. Tears sprang to Hazel’s eyes, fear and frustration combining into panic. Why didn’t he stop playing and help? Couldn’t he hear her? Her legs slid into the water, slime coating her skin. Hazel sucked in a breath, preparing to hold it as long as she could. She wondered how much it hurt to drown. She wondered if she had any fight left.

  Then suddenly the hag’s fingers went slack. Hazel scrambled up the bank, not bothering to notice why she got away until she was over a log and leaning against an elm tree, her breaths coming hard. Ben stood near the water, looking pale and scared, playing the pipe as though he was playing for his life.

  No, Hazel realized. He’d been playing for her life. The water hag gazed at him, rapt. Her fish eyes didn’t blink. Her mouth moved only slightly, as though she was singing along with the notes he played. Hazel knew the Folk loved music, especially music as fine as Ben’s, but she’d had no idea it could do this to one of them.

  She saw Ben notice Whiskey’s body, saw her brother take a staggering half step forward, saw his eyes close, but he never stopped playing.

  Hazel’s gaze went to the bank where she’d fallen, the gouges her scrambling had made in the mud, Adam’s rotting body and her dog’s limp one beside it, the buzzing of flies in the air above them, and something else, something that shone in the sunlight like a hilt. A knife? Had Adam brought a weapon with him?

  Slowly, Hazel crept back down the bank, back toward the water hag.

  Ben looked over at her, eyes wide, shaking his head in warning.

  Hazel ignored him, making her way to the knife in the mud, feeling numb and angry. She gripped the hilt and pulled. The mud made a sucking sound as the blade slid free. It was metal, blackened as though it had been in a fire, and gold underneath. It was much longer than she’d expected—longer even than her mother’s biggest kitchen knife, with a groove down the middle. It was a sword. A real sword, the kind a grown-up knight would carry.

  Hazel’s mind was racing, but she kept going, concentrating on repeating over and over: I am a knight. I am a knight. I am a knight. A better knight could have saved Whiskey, but at least she could avenge his death. Wading into the silty water, she hefted the heavy sword like a baseball bat and brought it down, bashing the edge against the monster’s head. Her skull split like a rotten melon.

  The creature slumped over in the water, dead.

  “Wow,” Ben said, walking closer, dropping the pipes so that they hung around his neck again, tilting his head to one side and bending down to inspect the red mess of bone and lichen-covered teeth, to stare at the clumps of hair floating in the water. He pushed at it with his toe. “I didn’t think you’d really kill it.”

  Hazel didn’t know how to reply. She wasn’t sure whether he thought what she did was bad or whether he was just surprised it had worked.

  “Where did you get that?” he asked, pointing to the sword.

  “I found it,” Hazel told him, sniffing brokenly. Tears kept flooding her eyes, no matter how many times she tried to blink them back.

  Ben reached out like he wanted to take the blade from her. Maybe he was thinking of his broken He-Man sword and how the one in her hand would make a good replacement. Hazel took a half step back.

  He made a face, acting like he hadn’t wanted it anyway. “With your sword and my playing, we could do something. Stop bad things. Like in stories.”

  Despite the dog’s death, despite her tears, despite everything, she smiled and wiped the blood spatter off her nose with the sleeve of her shirt. “You think so?”

  Children can have a cruel, absolute sense of justice. Children can kill monsters and feel quite proud of themselves. Even a girl who carries spiders outside instead of stepping on them, a girl who once fed a tiny fox kit with an eyedropper every two hours until wildlife rescue could come and pick it up, that same girl can kill and be ready to do it again. She can take her dead dog home and bury him and cry over his cooling and stiffening body, making promises as she digs a deep hole in the backyard. She can look at her brother and believe that together they’re a knight and a bard who battle evil, who might someday find and fight even the monster at the heart of the forest. A little girl can find a dead boy and lose her dog and believe that she could make sure no one else was lost.

  Hazel believed she’d found the sword for a reason.

  By the time she was ten, Hazel and Ben had discovered two more monsters—two more faeries with tourist blood on their hands, two more creatures hungry to entrap them. Ben lulled them with his music, while Hazel crept up and struck them down with her sword—by then, honed and polished, gleaming with mineral oil, and painted over black to hide all the bright gold.

  Sometimes they heard solitary Folk following them home from school, rustling at the edges of the woods. Hazel waited, but they never bothered her. Faerie morality isn’t human morality. They punish the unmannerly and foolhardy, the braggarts and cheats, not the brave, not tricksters and heroes. Those, they claim for their own. And so, if the Alderking noticed the children, he chose to bide his time, waiting to see what they might yet become.

  Which left Hazel and Ben to go on hunting monsters and dreaming about saving a sleeping prince, until the day Ben’s playing faltered. They’d been tromping through the woods when a black-furred and flame-eyed barghest barreled toward them from the shadows. Hazel held her ground, drawing her sword from the scabbard she’d made, her eyes wide and teeth gritted. Ben began to play his pipes, but, for the first time, the notes sputtered out uncertain. Surprised, Hazel turned toward him. It was just a moment, just a small shift in her body, just a glance toward her brother, but enough that the barghest was on her. Its tusk dug into her arm and she only slashed its side shallowly, before it was past her. Panting, bleeding, she tried to keep her balance, tried to heft the sword up and be ready to strike again.

  As it swung back around, she expected Ben to begin his song, but he appeared frozen. Something was very wrong. The barghest’s hot breath steamed toward her, stinking of old blood. Its long tail swept the ground.

  “Ben—” she called, voice shaking.

  “I can’t—” Ben said, nearly choked with panic. “Run! Run! I can’t—”

  And they did run, the barghest just behind them, weaving between trees like a leopard. They ran and ran until they managed to wedge themselves in a the hollow of an oak tree, where they hid, hearts thumping, breaths held, listening for the sweep of a tail or the pad of a heavy step. They stayed hidden there until the late-afternoon sun was low in the sky. Only then did they dare creep home, balancing the odds the creature was waiting for them against the worse worry of being discovered by it in the woods after dark.

  “We’ve got to stop—at least until we’re older,” Ben said, later that night, sitting on the steps behind their house, watching Mom grill burgers in cutoff shorts and an old, hole-pocked CBGBs shirt. “It’s harder than I thought it would be. What if something else goes wrong? What if you got hurt? It would be my fault.”

  You started this, she wanted to say. You made me believe we could do this. You can’t take it away. But instead she said, “I’m not the one who messed up.”

  He shook his head. “Well, okay, that’s worse. Because I could mess up again and doom us both. Probably I will. Maybe if I managed to get into that school, if I could learn to have more control over the music, maybe then…”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she told him, bare toes digging in the dirt, chewing on a strand of her own red hair. “I’m the knight. It’s my job to take care of myself. But I don’t want to stop.”

  He let out a breath. His fingers tapped anxiously against his thigh. “We’ll take a break, then. Just for a little while. Just until I’m better at music. I need to get better.”

  Hazel nodded. If that’s what he needed so she could stay a knight, so they could continue their quest, so everyone could be saved, so they could be like characters fr
om a story, then she vowed she’d find a way to get it for him.

  And she had.

  CHAPTER 6

  During those heady, endless afternoons when Hazel and Ben had roamed the countryside, playing at quests and hunting real danger alike, Ben spun tales about how they were going to wake the prince. Ben told Hazel she might wake him by kissing the glass of his casket. It wasn’t an original idea. If someone dusted that case, they’d probably find thousands upon thousands of lip prints, generations of mouths pressed softly to where the horned boy slept. But they hadn’t known that then. In the stories, she would kiss the prince awake, and he would tell her that he could only be freed if his true love completed three quests—quests that usually included things like spotting the right kind of bird, picking all the blackberries on the bushes and then eating them, or jumping across the creek seven times without getting wet.

  She’d never finish any of the quests Ben made up. She’d always leave a last berry on its branch or splash her foot on purpose, although she’d never have admitted that to her brother. She knew the quests weren’t real magic. But every time she got close to completion, her nerve failed.

  Sometimes Ben told stories about how he would free the prince, with three magic words—words he’d never say out loud in front of Hazel. And in those stories, the prince was always villainous. Ben had to stop him before he destroyed Fairfold—and Ben did, through the power of love. Because, despite his cruel heart, when the prince saw how much Ben loved him, he spared the town and everyone in it.

  Back then, it hadn’t seemed weird to Hazel to have the same imaginary boyfriend as her brother.

  They were in love with him because he was a prince and a faerie and magical and you were supposed to love princes and faeries and magic people. They loved him the way they’d loved Beast the first time he swept Belle around the dance floor in her yellow dress. They loved him as they loved the Eleventh Doctor with his bow tie and his flippy hair and the Tenth Doctor with his mad laugh. They loved him as they loved lead singers of bands and actors in movies, loved him in such a way that their shared love brought them closer together.

  It wasn’t like he was real. It wasn’t like he could love them back. It wasn’t like he’d ever have to choose.

  Except now he’d woken. That changed everything.

  All that hung between Ben and Hazel as they walked back out through the doors of the school and toward his car.

  And a tiny voice nagged at her, a voice that whispered it could be no coincidence she’d woken with mud on her feet the very morning after something had woken the prince. She held that secret hope to her chest, being very careful to let herself think about it for only a moment or two, the way one might look at something so precious as to be overwhelming.

  “Wait!” a voice called from behind them.

  Hazel turned. Jack was running down the steps. Rain spattered his T-shirt, turning the fabric spotty and dark. He’d left his jacket inside.

  They went around the corner of the building together, ducking under an awning, so that teachers couldn’t see them, but it was dry enough to talk. They knew the spot because it was where all the janitors gathered to smoke, and if you didn’t report them, they’d overlook whatever shady thing you were engaged in. She wouldn’t have guessed that a good boy like Jack knew about the spot, but, clearly, she would have been wrong.

  “We’re going to find him,” Ben said, grinning. He made it sound as though they were about to begin a game, but a very good game.

  “Don’t,” Jack sighed, and looked out toward the football field. He seemed to be considering his next words carefully. “Whatever you think he is—he won’t be what you’re imagining.” Then he visibly steeled himself to grit out the next bit. “You can’t trust him. He’s not human.”

  Silence stretched between them for a long moment. Ben raised his eyebrows.

  Jack grimaced. “Yes, I know, okay. It’s ironic, my telling you that, since I’m not human, either.”

  “So come with us,” Hazel said, offering up her umbrella. “Offer us your invaluable inhuman insights.”

  Jack shook his head, smiling a little. “Mom would skin me alive if I missed my science quiz. You know how she is. Can’t this wait until after school?”

  Besides mandatory family games on Sundays, his mother was the kind of parent who packed lunches in stacked bento boxes, who knew exactly how her kids were doing in every subject, who monitored television time to make sure homework got done. As far as she was concerned, Carter and Jack were headed for Ivy League colleges, ideally close enough to Fairfold that she could drive up and do their laundry on weekends. Nothing was supposed to get in the way of that.

  If Jack cut school, he’d be grounded for as long as she could make it stick.

  “This is the single greatest thing that has ever happened around here,” Ben said, rolling his eyes. “Who cares about a test? There will be a million more quizzes in your life.”

  Jack tipped his head forward, highlighting the sharpness of his cheekbones and the silver in his eyes. And his voice, when he spoke, took on an unfamiliar, lilting cant. “There are many things I am forbidden from telling you, for I am bound by both promises and strictures. Three times I will warn you, and that’s all I am permitted, so heed me. Something even more dangerous than your prince walks in his shadow. Do not seek him out.”

  “Jack?” Hazel said, stepping back from him, unnerved. For all that she’d almost been killed by creatures like the water hag or the barghest, there was something about the elegant, riddling faeries that terrified her more. Right then, Jack sounded like one of them—and not at all like himself. “What do you mean, permitted? Why are you talking that way?”

  “The Alderking hunts for the horned boy. The Alderking hunts for whosoever broke the curse. And he is not alone. If you help the boy, you risk much wrath. No prince is worth that price.”

  Hazel thought of her hands, of the splinters, of the strangeness of her missing night and her dirt-covered legs.

  “Wait, you’re saying that the Folk in the woods are trying to kill him?” Ben asked. “So you’ve known secrets about him this whole time and never bothered to tell us?”

  “I’m telling you what I may,” Jack said. “Your prince may be in danger, but he’s also dangerous. Let it be.”

  “But why? What did the prince do?” Hazel asked.

  Jack shook his head. “That was your third warning, and I may say no more.”

  Hazel turned to her brother. “Maybe—”

  Ben shook his head. “I appreciate what you’re saying and all, Jack—we’ll be as careful as we can—but I want to try to find him. I want to help.”

  “I expected nothing less.” Jack smiled and was himself again, at least on the surface. But that familiar grin sent a cold chill up Hazel’s spine. She’d always thought of Jack as a good boy, from an upstanding family, with good manners, one who made the occasional snarky remark and loved obscure biographies, but who was probably going to wind up a lawyer like his mom or a doctor like his father. She’d thought of his being a changeling as giving him an inner core of weirdness, sure, but in a town full of weirdness, it hadn’t seemed that strange. But as she stood in the rain, staring up at him, it suddenly seemed a whole lot stranger. “Fine,” Jack continued. “Try not to get killed by some handsome, paranoid elf who thinks he’s stuck in a ballad. I’ll try not to flunk out of physics.”

  “How could you—why did you say all that?” Hazel asked him. “How could you possibly know any of it?”

  “How do you think?” he asked her softly. With that, he turned and started back to the front entrance through the rain, bell ringing in the distance. Hazel watched the muscles move under his wet shirt.

  Leaving her to puzzle over his words and try to figure out—

  Oh. To try to figure out how he could know things that only his forest kin could possibly have told him. She watched Jack’s retreat into the school, wondering how she could have known him so long and not guessed. She�
�d thought he was happy in his human life. She’d thought he had only a human life.

  “Come on,” Ben said to her, heading for the car. “Before someone catches us cutting class.”

  Hazel slid into the passenger seat, folding her umbrella and chucking it into the back. Jack had unsettled her, but more than the danger he’d warned them about, she feared the possibility that they wouldn’t find any trace of the horned boy at all. That he would become one of those mysteries that never got solved, the kind that became a story people in Fairfold told one another and no one really believed. Remember when there was a beautiful, inhuman boy asleep in a glass coffin? they would say to one another and nod their heads, remembering. Whatever became of him? Stories like that were will-o’-the-wisps, glowing in the deepest, darkest parts of forests, leading travelers farther and farther from safety, out toward an ever-moving mark.

  Hazel had seen a surfeit of faerie awfulness, but she was still lured by stories of its beauty and wonder. She’d hunted them and feared them, but, like the rest of Fairfold, she loved them, too.

  “Has Jack ever talked to you that way before?” Hazel asked as Ben pulled out of the lot, wipers sending waves of water across the windshield. The sky was a glorious bright gray, so uniform that she couldn’t even see where one cloud ended and another began.

  Ben glanced over at her. “Not exactly.”

  “It was freaky.” She wasn’t sure what else to say. She was still puzzling through what had happened. He’d let his mask slip, apparently on purpose, and she felt stupid that she’d only just realized he’d been wearing a mask at all. “So he talks to them?”

  Ben shrugged. “His other family, you mean? Yeah.”

  Hazel didn’t want to admit how thrown she felt. If Jack was keeping secrets, they were his secrets to keep—and, she guessed, it was Ben’s job to keep Jack’s secrets, too. “Okay, if we’re supposed to find the prince against Jack’s good advice, where are we going to look?”