The Darkest Part of the Forest

by Holly Black

  “You’ve freed me.” He looked back at her—and for a moment she thought that underneath all his cold fury, there was something else. “And you are likely to pay for your kindness in most grievous coin. Why did you do it?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t even know for sure I was involved until tonight. You said you heard my voice—was there anyone else there? Anyone giving me orders?”

  He shook his head. “Only you. But by the time I came awake—truly awake—the sky was bright and you were gone.”

  “I don’t remember that. I don’t remember going anywhere last night,.”

  He sighed. “Try to remember. Consider the fate of Amanda Watkins, who, by the way, I know you didn’t like. Still, the next victim might be someone you do care about.”

  She startled at his saying that. He was a stranger, yet the way he spoke and the press of his fingers against her arm were oddly intimate. She’d imagined a scene so very like this so many times that to walk beside him in the dim woods had become half nightmare and half fantasy, all unreal. Hazel felt dizzy, as though she might faint. She kind of wanted to faint, so she didn’t have to deal with any of it. “Just because I don’t like her doesn’t mean I want her to die.”

  “Well, then,” he said, as though that settled everything. “Perfect. She’s not yet dead.”

  He didn’t even glance in her direction. He just kept walking.

  They left the road, wading through the brush. Her heart felt as if it were going to thud its way out of her chest.

  The phone in her pocket buzzed, but she couldn’t risk looking at it. She felt better knowing that Ben must have received her message, that someone was going to find Amanda.

  “We left you some food and stuff,” she said, trying to fill the scary silence of their walk and disguise the sound of her phone, which buzzed again. Ben must be calling her. “My brother and I, we’re on your side.”

  He didn’t need to know she had doubts about his story.

  A pained expression flashed across the horned boy’s face. “I am no hob or hearth spirit, to be obligated by gifts.”

  “We weren’t trying to obligate you,” she said. “We were trying to be nice.”

  Given the Folk’s obsession with manners, she wondered if he might feel at least a little bit bad about dragging her through the forest. She hoped he felt awful.

  The horned boy bowed his head slightly, a thin smile on his face that she thought might be self-disgust. “You may call me Severin,” he said. “Now we are both nice.”

  Which was as close to an apology as one of the Folk was likely to give, given that they prized their own names highly. Maybe he really did feel bad, but Hazel got the sense that it wouldn’t matter. Whatever drove him, its hooks bit deeper than courtesy.

  Time slipped by as they walked, her stumbling and his walking beside her, catching her arm if she moved too far or too fast, her body still sore from crashing her bike, her mind buzzing. They plodded on until they returned to the grove.

  Severin let go of her and went to the remains of the casket. “Do you know what this was? Not glass,” he told her, sliding his hand inside, running his fingers over the lining. “Nor is it crystal. Nor is it stone. It’s made of tears. Almost impossible to shatter. Made by one of the finest craftsmen in all of Faerie, Grimsen. Made to hold a monster.”

  Hazel shook her head numbly. “You?”

  He snorted. “No one tells the old stories anymore, do they?”

  “What are we doing?” Hazel asked him.

  He took a deep breath. “You need to recall who has Heartsworn. Who gave you the blade and guided your hand? Who told you how to break the casket and end the curse?”

  “I can’t—”

  “You can,” he said softly. He brought up one hand to her cheek. His fingers were cool against her hot skin, brushing back hair from her face. She shuddered. “For all our sakes, you must.”

  She shook her head, thinking of the sword she’d found beside Wight Lake all those years ago, the one that had disappeared from beneath her bed. “Even if I had the first idea where the sword was, what makes you think I would tell you?”

  “I know what you want of me,” he said, coming closer. Everything else seemed to melt away. He lifted her chin, canting her face toward his. “I know every one of your secrets. I know all your dreams. Let me persuade you.”

  And, pressing her back against the blackened trunk of a tree, he kissed her. His lips were hot, his mouth sweet. And inside her, a warm, numb darkness flooded her thoughts, making her skin shiver.

  Then Severin moved back from her, leaving her to smooth down the front of her pajama top.

  “Benjamin Evans,” he called into the darkness. “Come out. Don’t worry about interrupting us.”

  “Get the hell away from her!” Ben’s voice, shaky but determined, came from the other side of the grove.

  It was the worst thing about being a redhead, Hazel thought, the way blushes splashed up onto her cheeks and down her neck until she practically felt as if her scalp were burning.

  Ben stepped farther out of the shadows, looking flushed, too. He was carrying an ax their mom used sometimes to chop kindling for the stove in the art studio. “Hazel, are you okay?”

  Her brother had come to save her, like in the old days. She couldn’t quite believe it.

  The elf knight smiled, and there was an odd light in his eyes. He stalked toward Ben languorously, spreading his arms wide in invitation. “Going to split me open as though you were a woodsman in a fairy tale?”

  “Going to try,” Ben said, but there was a quaver in his voice. He was tall and gangly, all loose limbs and freckled skin. He didn’t look dangerous. He didn’t even look like he could heft the ax without straining.

  She felt a hot wave of shame that Ben had seen the horned boy kiss her, when for so long he’d been something they’d shared between them.

  “Ben,” Hazel cautioned. “Ben, I’m okay. If anyone’s going to fight, it should be me.”

  Her brother’s gaze flickered to her. “Because you don’t need anyone’s help, right?”

  “No, that’s not—” She took a step toward him, before Severin drew his golden knife.

  “It would be better if neither of you fought me,” Severin said. “You’ve got the range and your weapon may bite deeply, but I’ll wager I’m faster. So what are you to do? Will you run at me? Will you swing wildly and hope for the best?”

  “Just let her come home,” Ben said. His voice shook a little, but he hadn’t backed down, not an inch. “She’s scared. It’s the middle of the night and she’s not even dressed. What do you think you’re doing, grabbing her like that?”

  Severin slid a little closer, moving as lightly as a dancer. “Oh, you mean instead of grabbing you?”

  Ben flinched as though he’d been slapped. “I don’t know what you think you’re—”

  “Benjamin,” Severin said, his voice dropping low. His face was inhumanly beautiful, his eyes as cold as the sky above the clouds, where the atmosphere is too thin to breathe. “I have heard every word you’ve ever said to me. Every honeyed, silver-tongued word.”

  Ben’s mortified blush deepened. Hazel wanted to call to him, to say that Severin had tried the same thing on her, to tell him the same thing had worked on her, but she didn’t want to be a distraction. Ben and Severin had begun to circle each other warily.

  “I’m not going away without Hazel,” Ben said, bringing his chin up. “You can’t embarrass me into leaving my own sister.”

  He was going to get himself killed. He was no longer quick-fingered, no longer carrying a set of pipes hanging around his throat on a dirty string. He couldn’t play, and he’d never fought with a blade. She had to do something—she had to save Ben.

  Hazel hefted the biggest stick she could find. The weight was oddly comforting in her hand, and the stance she went into was as automatic and easy as drawing breath. As soon as the fighting started, she was going to rush Severin and hopefully catch him off
guard. It might not be honorable, but it had been a long time since she played at knighthood.

  “Don’t be foolish,” Severin told her brother. “I was trained to a sword when I was a child. I watched my mother butchered in front of me. I have cut and I have killed and I have bled. You can’t possibly win against me.” He glanced at Hazel. “Your sister at least seems to know what she’s about. Her stance is good. Yours is abysmal.”

  So much for catching him by surprise. She was just going to have to hope for dumb luck.

  “If you’re going to kill me, then do it,” Ben told him. “Because if you want to take her, that’s what you’re going to have to do.”

  For a frozen moment Severin brought up his blade. Their gazes caught, snagged silk on a thorn.

  Hazel held her breath.

  With a snort, the elf knight sheathed his knife. He shook his head, looking at Ben oddly. Then he made an elaborately formal bow, his hand nearly sweeping the ground.

  “Go, then, go, Hazel and Benjamin Evans,” Severin said. “I release my claim on you tonight. But our business is not done, our affairs are far from settled. I will come for you again; and when I do, you will be eager to do as I wish.” With that, he turned from them and walked deeper into the woods.

  Hazel looked at Ben. He was breathing fast, as though from a physical fight. The ax slipped from his fingers onto the forest floor, and he regarded her with wild, wide eyes. “What just happened? Seriously, Hazel. That was insane.”

  She shook her head, equally baffled. “I think you impressed him with the sheer force of your stupidity. How did you find me?”

  A corner of his mouth curled up. “When you weren’t on Grouse Road, I tracked the GPS in your phone. You were close enough to the casket that I thought you might be headed there.”

  “What is that quote?” Hazel said, walking to him, too glad he’d come to object to the danger he’d put himself in. “The Lord protects fools, drunks, and dumbass ax wielders?”

  He touched her shoulder gently, running his fingers against the fabric of her pajamas and sucking in his breath, as if he was imagining how much all her scrapes had hurt. She realized she was covered in dirt from her fall—dirt and blood. “Are you really okay?”

  Hazel nodded. “I crashed my bike when I saw him and Amanda. I’m okay, but I don’t think she is.”

  “I called the sheriff’s department, so they must have sent someone over by now. Are you going to tell me what you were doing on Grouse Road?” Ben asked.

  Following you, she wanted to say, but the words stuck in her throat. If she told him that, he’d ask her about the earring and then ask all the questions that inevitably followed.

  She got into his car instead, resting her head against the dashboard. “I’m really tired. Can we just go home?”

  Ben nodded once and walked over, squatting down beside her, inside the open door, visibly swallowing his questions. His blue eyes were black in the moonlight. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  She nodded. “Thanks to you.”

  He grinned and pushed himself upright. One hand moved to smooth down her hair. “Our prince really was something, huh?”

  Hazel nodded, thinking of Severin’s mouth against hers. “Severin,” she said. “Our prince’s name is Severin.”

  Once, Ben had told Hazel a tale about a great wizard who took his heart and hid it in the knothole of a tree so that when his enemies stabbed him where his heart was supposed to be, he wouldn’t die. Ever since Hazel was small, she’d hid her heart in stories about the horned boy. Whenever someone hurt her, she comforted herself with tales of him being fascinating, a little bit awful, and desperately in love with her.

  Those stories had kept her heart safe. But now, when she thought about Severin, when she remembered his moss-green eyes and the horrible, shivery thrill of his words, she didn’t feel safe at all. She hated him for waking up and being real and stealing her dreams of him away.

  He wasn’t their prince anymore.

  CHAPTER 10

  On the car ride home from the woods, Ben had a barely contained nervous energy that caused his hand to tap against the steering wheel and to fiddle with the radio. They’d passed Grouse Road and saw the flashing lights of the sheriff’s car and an ambulance, shining in the dark with reassuring steadiness. Someone had come to fix things, to fix Amanda, who Severin had claimed was still alive.

  “We have to stop,” Hazel asked. “What if she’s—”

  “Are you really going to tell them what happened?” Ben asked, eyebrows raised, turning the wheel to take a different route home.

  In her mind’s eye, Hazel saw Severin circling her brother, a hungry expression on his face, a shining blade in his hand. And then a shudder went through Hazel when she thought of the awful sprawl of Amanda’s pale limbs in the patchy grass. Amanda had not seemed alive. No, Hazel wasn’t sure she knew what to explain to the police, even in a place like Fairfold.

  “Go ahead and stop,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to tell them, but I have to tell them something. My bike’s there.”

  She had no idea if they’d believe her or not. But when Ben showed up with the ax in his hand, she was reminded of all the reasons he stopped hunting years ago. He’d understood how dangerous it was and how vulnerable they were back then, even if she hadn’t.

  She didn’t ever want to put him in that position again. Just because he’d gone looking for the prince didn’t mean he wanted to get dragged back into danger.

  Looking at her like she’d gone crazy, Ben pulled up several feet behind the ambulance. Hazel got out. Paramedics were bent over Amanda’s body.

  An officer looked over at her. He was a young guy. She wondered if he’d grown up in Fairfold. If not, she was about to really freak him out. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “You better get back in your car.”

  “I saw Amanda earlier tonight,” said Hazel. “With the horned boy. You’ve got to look for him—”

  He walked closer, blocking her view of the stretcher and the paramedics. “Ma’am, get back in your car.”

  Hazel got back in Ben’s car, slamming the door behind her. Her brother shook his head at her as the officer shone his flashlight inside. “Please roll down your window. Who’s in there with you?”

  She cranked down the passenger-side window.

  “I’m her brother,” Ben volunteered. “Benjamin Evans. You were talking to Hazel.”

  The policeman looked at them like he didn’t quite know what to make of the situation. “You both have identification?”

  Ben handed over his driver’s license. Hazel got out her check card. The officer looked at them and then handed them back.

  “And you say you saw someone?”

  “The horned boy. With Amanda. She was already unconscious, but he was here. And now he’s out there, and if he did this, then we’re all in a lot of danger.”

  The cop looked at them for a long moment. “You two better get on home.”

  “Did you hear me?” Hazel demanded. “We’re in a lot of danger. Fairfold is in danger.”

  The policeman stepped back from the car. “I said, you better get on home.”

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” she asked him.

  He looked back at her, uncertainty in his face for the first time. Then his eyes hardened and he waved them on.

  “At least tell me if Amanda’s okay?” Hazel called after him, but he didn’t answer.

  Ben drove home with the sun rising in the east, gilding the tops of trees.

  As they pulled onto their street, he turned to her. “I didn’t expect you to do that.”

  “It didn’t work,” Hazel said.

  “Tonight,” he said, keeping his voice light and conversational with clear effort, “kind of got out of control, huh? Everything about it was unexpected.”

  “Yeah,” she said, leaning her cheek against the coolness of the window, her hand on the latch of the car door.

  He pulled the car into their drivewa
y, the tires crunching over gravel. “I’m your older brother, you know. It’s not your job to protect me. You can tell me stuff. You can trust me.”

  “You can tell me stuff, too,” Hazel said, opening the door and stepping out. She expected him to take the earring out of his pocket and confront her with it, demand an explanation. But he didn’t.

  For all that they’d claimed they could tell each other stuff, they told each other nothing.

  Hazel walked into the house. It was entirely dark. Even the lights in the outbuilding were off. She began to climb the steps.

  “Hey, Hazel?” he called softly in the upstairs hall, and she turned. “What did he kiss like?” There was a confusion of emotions on his face—longing and maybe a little jealousy and a whole lot of curiosity.

  She snorted a surprised laugh, her bad mood dissolving. “Like he was a shark and I was blood in the water.”

  “That good?” he asked, grinning.

  She’d known he’d understand. Brothers and sisters had their own language, their own shorthand. She was glad to be able to share the weird, ridiculous impossibleness of it with the only person who knew all the same stories, with the person who’d made up those stories in the first place. “Oh yeah.”

  Ben went to her, slinging an arm over her shoulder. “Let’s get you fixed up.”

  She let him lead her to the upstairs bathroom, where he sat her on the edge of the tub and then doused all her cuts with peroxide. Together, they watched the liquid hiss and froth over her skin before it swirled down the drain.

  Then, kneeling awkwardly on the cracked beige floor tiles, he wrapped her legs and arms in gauze, the stuff they’d called “mummy bandages” when they were little. The old phrase rested on the tip of her tongue, making her remember times they’d come in here after a hunt, cleaning their skinned knees and binding up wrists or ankles.

  The house was usually full of people back then, so it was easy to slip in and out. People were always dropping by, come to pose for a piece or to borrow some canvas or celebrate someone booking a job with a bottle of bourbon. Sometimes there wasn’t any food but a weird, boozy trifle left out on the counter, or a can of cold ravioli, or cheese that smelled like feet.