The Darkest Part of the Forest

by Holly Black

  Hazel stood her ground. When she’d seen Sorrow in the glass, she’d imagined her as hideous, something foul and twisted, but her appearance was that of a living tree, one covered in moss and dried, decaying vine. She had branches instead of bone, and roots spreading from her feet like the train of a dress. From her head rose a wild thicket of tiny branches, sticking up along one side, matted with thick clumps of dirt and leaves. Black eyes peered out of knotholes in the wood. Sticky reddish sap wetted her face, running from the knotholes of her eyes, mimicking the paths of tears. She was as beautiful as she was terrifying.

  She towered over them, at least a foot higher than anyone in the room.

  “Sorrel,” Severin said, taking a hesitant half step toward her. Even he seemed awed, as though whatever she was when he’d been shut away from the world had grown more terrible as he slept. “Sister, please.”

  She didn’t even seem to see him. A voice, thick with tears, spoke from throats around the room, a chorus of her grief. “I loved him and he’s dead and gone and bones. I loved him and they took him away from me. Where is he? Where is he? Dead and gone and bones. Dead and gone and bones. Where is he?”

  More people fell prey to the weeping. Sobs racked bodies.

  Sorrow took a step toward her brother, knocking a side table to the ground. When she spoke, she sounded more like the wind blowing through trees than any human voice. “I loved him and I loved him and he’s dead and gone and bones. I loved him and they took him away from me. Where is he? Where is he? Dead and gone and bones. Dead and gone and bones. My father took him. My brother killed him. Where is he? Dead and gone and bones. Dead and gone and bones.”

  “You would not wish this,” Severin said. “You would not do this. Sister, please. Please. Do not make me try to stop you.”

  Deeper into the room she went, Hazel and Severin moving to either side of Sorrow. People shrieked. Ms. Kirtling, in a panic, ran across the room, right into the monster’s path. A long arm with willow-twig fingers reached out and brushed Ms. Kirtling aside as one might brush a spiderweb away. But that small gesture sent Ms. Kirtling hurtling into the wall. Plaster cracked, and with a moan, she slid to the floor.

  In the new-formed crack, moss and mold began to spill into the room, like water into the hull of a leaking boat.

  On the other side of the room, a woman began to cough up dirt.

  Without any idea of what else to do, Hazel slammed her saber into the monster’s side.

  All her life, she’d heard about the monster in the heart of the forest. She’d imagined that if only the monster was slain, then faeries would go back to being only tricksy and magical. She’d imagined it enough times that even though she knew better, some part of her believed that when her blade hit the monster’s flank, it would cut deeply.

  It left no mark at all, but it did make Sorrow turn toward her, long fingers reaching. Hazel ducked, feeling the brush of dry leaves and smelling fresh-turned earth. She wasn’t quite fast enough to keep Sorrow from catching a clump of her hair. A few strands ripped out and drifted through the air like sparks. The monster used the rest of it like a rope, to hurl Hazel, toppling her into a sofa, saber flying from Hazel’s hand to clang against the floor.

  Bruised, she pushed herself up. Her head hurt and her bones felt jangly, as if they no longer fit together. She made herself cross to where her saber was, made herself lift it and turn toward the monster.

  Severin had leaped onto her back, holding on to the branches and vines, but she shook him off, then thundered toward where he fell. He rolled and rose to his feet, moving with a swiftness and sureness she had never seen equaled. His blade whirled through the air. He was a magnificent swordsman. And still his blade glanced off her. And still she knocked him back.

  It was just then that Jack’s dad came running down the stairs, a hunting rifle gripped in his hands. He set the butt against his shoulder pocket and gazed down the sight, aiming for Sorrow.

  “Please, no,” Severin called from the floor, but Hazel wasn’t sure Mr. Gordon even heard him. He pulled the trigger.

  The gun was loud in the room, like thunder, rocking Hazel back onto her heels. But the bullets struck the monster’s bark and slid off as though they were mere pebbles hurled by a child. Sorrow went for Mr. Gordon.

  Carter intercepted, swinging a candlestick at her, but the creature wrapped its long fingers around him, pulling him to her. Hazel raced toward them, slamming her saber into Sorrow’s back. The monster didn’t even seem to notice.

  “Hey!” Jack yelled, and then something spattered the monster. The stinging smell of alcohol filled the air. He’d thrown brandy at her, brandy from his parents’ now-open liquor cabinet.

  “I’ll set you on fire,” he said, holding up a book of matches in trembling fingers. “Get away from them. Get out of here.”

  The monster seemed to regard him for a long moment, letting Carter slump to the ground. He was unconscious, a green stain spreading across his lips.

  It had happened so fast.

  Hazel heard her mother scream from the other side of the room. She glanced to one side and saw that Ben was dragging her behind the old upright piano.

  Jack struck a match.

  The monster rushed at him, fast enough that the flame flickered out in his hand. Hazel threw herself between them, raising her saber, going for the creature’s eyes. The blow grazed Sorrow’s cheek, but no more sap ran.

  Jack fumbled to light another match, but as he did, the room became full of rushing wind. Somewhere in the distance, crows called to one another.

  With a howl, Severin launched himself onto her back again. Holding on to her branches, he pressed the saber to her throat, clearly hoping to still her, clearly hoping she might be afraid. But she shook herself, trying to throw him off. Hazel tried to slash at her, tried to cut her arms, her sides, even her impossibly long twig fingers. No blow made a single mark. Hazel was batted against a wall, thrown into a small knot of people who screamed as she fell against them.

  She was sore all over. Standing took a great effort. Her head rang, and dizziness threatened to overwhelm her. She blinked blood and sweat out of her eyes. She was bleeding from a dozen cuts she didn’t recall getting. She had no idea how many more times she could do this.

  Severin crashed against the floor, rolling into a stand. He was still moving, but Hazel could see that some part of him had given up.

  Then she heard the sound of the piano.

  She turned, and Sorrow knocked her off her feet again. Hazel hit the wood floor of the house hard, slamming down onto it, the breath knocked out of her. She turned on her side and saw her brother sitting on the bench, his broken fingers splayed across the keys. Playing music.

  The notes swelled around them. It was as though Ben was playing the sound of weeping. Sorrow howled into the air.

  Then he seemed to slip. The music faltered. He couldn’t do it. His broken fingers, the ones he’d never let set right, the ones he’d never let heal, weren’t nimble enough for the piano. She shouldn’t have been staring in astonishment; she should have been using that frozen moment he’d given her. Hazel pushed herself to her feet, hoping it wasn’t too late.

  She ran for Sorrow, but the monster was ready for her. It snatched her up and threw her down onto the sofa so hard that the legs cracked. It rolled backward, taking Hazel with it. Dazed, she looked up at the creature leaning over her. Branches and moss and shining eyes.

  “Dead and gone and bones. Dead and gone and bones,” Sorrow said softly. A long arm shot out toward Hazel.

  Then Ben started to sing. Formless notes, like the ones he might have played had his fingers worked, rose from his throat. It sounded almost like weeping, like her wails. It was grief, terrible and immobilizing. Despite the knot in her hair and Jack’s spell, Hazel felt tears in the back of her throat, felt them burn the backs of her eyes.

  A keening, terrible sound came from Sorrow. She thrashed back and forth, knocking down chairs. The sharp broken ends of bran
ches ripped the upholstery of the couch. She howled with grief.

  “Ben,” Hazel yelled. “You’re making it worse.”

  But Ben didn’t stop. He sang on. People wailed in despair, in rage. Tears wet their clothes, soaked their hair. They collapsed in heaps. They slammed fists against the walls. Sorrow thundered toward the piano, knocking it to one side. It fell with a terrible crash. Her branching fingers covered her face. The monster’s shoulders shook with weeping.

  And then Hazel understood. Ben was taking her through the storm of grief. He was singing her through the rage and despair. He was singing her through the terrible loneliness, because there was no way to shut off grief, no way to cast it aside or fight against it. The only way to end grief was to go through it.

  As she realized that, his song began to change. It grew softer, sweeter, like the morning after a long cry, when your head still hurt, but your heart was no longer broken. Like flowers blooming on a grave. One by one, around the room, the weeping stopped.

  The monster grew still.

  Ben ceased his singing. He slumped down onto the piano bench, exhausted. Reaching up, his mother twined her fingers with his. Mom was still crying.

  For a moment there was only silence. Sorrow looked around her with her strange knothole black eyes, as though waking from a long dream. Severin pushed himself to his feet and walked to her.

  She stared down at him, reached out with her long twig fingers. This time she seemed conscious, aware. Her expression was unreadable. Hazel had no idea whether she would strike at him or not.

  He reached up a hand and touched her mossy cheek. For a moment the monster leaned into his touch, almost nuzzling. Then, pulling away, she clomped out through the doorway, past the smashed furniture and stunned townsfolk and was gone.

  CHAPTER 19

  Hazel dropped the saber. It made an echoing clang. Her knuckles felt bruised. Everything felt bruised, but at least her bones were intact. The sitting room of the Gordons’ house was a mess of broken frames, ottomans ripped open, leaves and dirt strewn across the scratched wood floor.

  A woman was moaning from one of the corners. Someone else was weeping, sobs that no longer sounded forced from her throat. She was crying all on her own.

  “We need the monster’s blood,” Jack said to her from the floor, where he was cradling an unconscious Carter. Hazel turned toward him, startled, because he wasn’t normally so vicious. Seeing her expression, he shook his head. “That’s what you said would wake these people up, what’s going to fix Carter. We need her blood.”

  Hazel nodded. Of course. That was what the Alderking had told her. It was a puzzle, the math kind you got in school: To get the blood of a monster, you need a magical sword; to get a magical sword, you need to know whom your secret night self is in league with; to know whom your secret night self is in league with, you need to know who’d want to free Severin; to know who’d want to free Severin, you needed…

  “Come,” said Ben. His voice sounded low and rough, as though he’d hurt it singing as he had. He reached out a hand toward Jack, gripping his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here. We’re all looking for the same thing now, and we don’t have much time to find it.”

  “Heartsworn,” Severin said. He nodded toward Hazel, a dip of his head, an acknowledgment. “You fought well.”

  Instinct had propelled her into moving in a way she hadn’t known she could. So long as she didn’t think too much. The moment she considered why she was holding the blade at a certain angle or what she was going to do next, she’d faltered, all the momentum gone out of her. Fear had done a pretty good job of keeping her attention on the present, but now that she wasn’t scared, she couldn’t make her body do any more tricks.

  Jack stood up reluctantly.

  All around them the people of the town were standing too, coming down from the second floor or out from where they’d hidden, fleeing across the lawn, to their cars, to their homes, away away away. “Ben’s right. We should get out of here.”

  At the door, Hazel looked back. Across the room, Mom was standing, hand on a wall sconce, using it to keep herself upright. She stared at her children as though she’d never seen them before. Hazel turned to Jack. He was watching his own parents kneeling over Carter, his mother trying to lift her son’s body. Hazel could see the anguish on Jack’s face. His father had said the town could burn for all he cared, but she was sure he’d never meant Carter.

  “It’s not your fault,” Hazel told him.

  Jack nodded, and they walked out, past the deep, muddy tracks Sorrow had left in the grass, so different from the trample of footprints. Looking back at the house, at the sagging, broken boards of the porch, Hazel wondered how the town would explain this. Would the residents of Fairfold have to confront the bargain they made living there? Face that not all faeries were content to sup milk from chipped bowls; some wanted blood.

  “You okay to ride in a car again?” Ben asked the horned boy as they got closer to his Volkswagen.

  “Your car?” Severin asked, following Ben’s gaze. The wariness on Severin’s face nearly made Hazel laugh, despite everything. Finally, he inclined his head. “If that is to be my fate, then I accept it.”

  The horned boy got in on the passenger side, and Hazel and Jack slid into the back. She took Jack’s hand and squeezed it.

  He squeezed back once then let her fingers fall from his.

  They drove back to the house quietly. The more time passed, the more Hazel’s head throbbed, the more her arms felt bruised from where she’d hit the couch. One of her ankles was swollen and a little unsteady. Her body hurt, and at nightfall, if she slept, she would become someone else. Someone with different memories and maybe different allegiances.

  She couldn’t help thinking of the dream she’d had, of herself as one of the Alderking’s company, just as cruel as the rest. Hazel wasn’t sure she would like the person she became at night.

  Once they got through the door of her house, Hazel went to the sink and took a long drink of water out of the faucet. Then she pulled herself up onto the counter.

  Ben put the kettle on the stove and got down honey from the cabinet, then went to the bathroom for peroxide and bandages.

  “What you did back there,” Hazel told him softly. “That was amazing.”

  He shrugged. “I’m surprised it worked.”

  “That makes it even more amazing.” She wiped her hands on her jeans.

  Severin went to the table and straddled a chair backward, sitting on it as one might sit astride a faerie horse. A bruise was blooming along his jaw. Jack stood in the middle of the room, looking lost.

  “So, Heartsworn,” Severin said finally. “But there’s more you’re not telling us, isn’t there, Hazel? I said you fought well and you did. I gave you the other sword because I saw from your stance that you could fight. Better it to be in the hands of someone with a little training than none. But the way you fought, I recognize it. It’s no mortal way of fighting.”

  Hazel reached up into one of the cabinets and took out a bowl. She poured peroxide into it and wet a kitchen towel to rub over her cuts. This was the moment she’d dreaded, the moment when everything came tumbling out. She didn’t look at any of them as she started to speak. “At the revel, I discovered I’ve been in the service of the Alderking for the past five years. As soon as I go to sleep at night, I wake up and I’m someone else. And that person, I don’t know what she’s done, but she’s been trained to fight, and I guess my body remembers that, even when the rest of me doesn’t.”

  At least Jack already knew. At least Jack wasn’t staring at her the way Ben was, as though she’d become a stranger.

  “You have to understand,” Hazel said, forcing herself to go on. “I made a bargain a long time ago, but I know—”

  “You made a bargain with the Alderking?” Ben shouted, surprising her into flinching. “You grew up in this town. You know better.”

  Hazel watched the washcloth turn pink with blood as she drew it
over her arm. “I was a kid. I was stupid. What do you want me to say?”

  “Why did you do it?” Ben asked. “What did you bargain for?”

  On the stove, the kettle began to howl.

  After a few long moments, Hazel hopped down from the counter and turned off the stove. “Back when we were hunting faeries and having adventures,” she said, turning to her brother. “I didn’t want to stop. You know I didn’t want to stop.”

  She expected him to look angry, as he realized how stupid she’d been. She didn’t expect him to look afraid. “Hazel, what did you do?”

  “I made a bargain so that we wouldn’t have to stop. You said that if you were better at music, we could keep going.” There was a child’s pleading in her voice and she hated it.

  “You did this for me?” Ben asked, horror plain on his face.

  Hazel shook her head ferociously. He’d got it all wrong. “No, I did it for me. I didn’t want to stop. I was selfish.”

  “You got me that scholarship. That was you.” His voice had dropped low. He almost sounded as though he was saying the words to himself.

  “Ben…”

  “What was the exact nature of this bargain?” Severin asked, his cool indifference a relief.

  “I promised that I would give up seven years of my life. I thought it meant I would just die sooner. Like years of life were something they would shave off the end and bottle up somehow.”

  Severin nodded, his expression grim.

  Ben didn’t look as if he thought dying seven years too soon made for a better bargain. He looked like he wanted to shake her. Hazel wished she could just stop talking. She wished she could make all her mistakes go away.

  “That’s why you wouldn’t tell me any of this,” he said.

  “That’s why I wouldn’t tell you any of this. It doesn’t matter why I did it. And anyway, I obviously ruined everything that was supposed to happen in Philadelphia anyway. I ruined it and it doesn’t matter what I intended, because I ruined it.”