The Darkest Part of the Forest

by Holly Black

  It was then that the monster’s twig fingers grasped the Alderking. Astonished, his eyes went wide and he howled, calling for his knights, screaming curses. She held him and kept on holding him until his body went slack, broken sword sliding from his grasp.

  Hazel bent down to take the what was left of Heartseeker away. As her hand closed on the hilt, the Alderking touched her cheek and sneered, “Remember, Sir Hazel. Remember, my disloyal knight. I curse you to remember. I curse you to remember everything.”

  “No!” Hazel cried out, shaking her head back and forth. “I don’t want to. I won’t!”

  The Alderking’s eyes closed, his face smoothing out into sleep.

  But Hazel kept on screaming.

  CHAPTER 21

  Once, there was a girl who found a sword in the woods.

  Once, there was a girl who made a bargain with the Folk.

  Once, there was a girl who’d been a knight in the service of a monster.

  Once, there was a girl who vowed she would save everyone in the world, but forgot herself.

  Once, there was a girl…

  Hazel remembered everything at once, all the locks come undone, all the memories rising up from the deep, murky place where she’d buried them, all of herself crashing into herself. Not just the memories that the Alderking had taken from her. Faerie curses were more powerful than that. She got back every memory she ever tried to lock away.

  The night after Hazel had slain the hag, her parents hosted a party. It went on until late, growing more and more boisterous as the evening wore on. A loud argument about the artistic value of illustration versus fine art turned into a fight about someone cheating on somebody else.

  Ben and Hazel sat outside beside their dog’s fresh-dug grave and listened to the distant sound of a bottle smashing.

  “I’m tired and hungry,” Ben said. “And it’s cold.”

  He didn’t say and we can’t go back in there, but Hazel understood that part anyway.

  “Let’s do something,” she said.

  Ben looked up at the stars. The night was bright and cold. They’d both had an exhausting and terrifying day, and he looked wary of any more excitement. “Like what?”

  “In your book, there’s a ceremony you have to go through to be ready for knighthood. A vigil. We should do that. To prove ourselves.”

  The book was on the porch where they’d left it. Her sword was hidden in the shed where the machete used to be. She went and got them both.

  “What does it say we’re supposed to do?” Ben asked, breath clouding in the air and rising like specters.

  According to the book, first they had to fast. Since they hadn’t had dinner, Hazel thought that counted. Then they were supposed to bathe to purify themselves, dress in robes, and stay up all night praying on their knees in a chapel. Then they’d be ready to be knighted.

  “We don’t have a chapel,” Ben said. “But we could make an altar.”

  And so they did, using a big rock. They found a couple of old citronella candles and lit them, giving the yard an eerie glow. Then they undressed and washed in the ice-cold water from the garden hose. Shivering, they wrapped themselves in tablecloths swiped out of the laundry area.

  “Okay,” Ben said. “So now we pray?”

  They weren’t a particularly religious family. Hazel couldn’t even remember being to church, although there were pictures of her being baptized, so she must have been. She didn’t know exactly what praying entailed, but she knew what it looked like. She tugged Ben down to his knees next to her.

  The ground was icy, but the sword slid into the earth easily. Hazel gripped the hilt and tried to concentrate on knightly thoughts. Thoughts about bravery and honor and trueness and rightness. She rocked back and forth on her knees, murmuring under her breath, and after a moment Ben copied her movements. Hazel felt as though she was falling into a dream. Soon she could almost ignore how cold she was, could almost not feel the heavy weight of her hair clumping as it froze, could almost control her shivering.

  At some point, she was conscious of Ben getting up, of telling her it was too cold and urging her to come inside. She’d just shaken her head.

  At some point, people had left the house. She’d heard cars starting, tense words exchanged, and the sound of someone noisily puking in the bushes. But no one noticed her kneeling in the back garden.

  At some point, the sun rose, turning the grass to gold.

  Hazel’s parents found her kneeling on the lawn later that morning when they stumbled out of the house, hung over and panicked at discovering her not in her bed. Mom was still in her dress from the night before, makeup smeared across her cheek. Dad was in a T-shirt and underwear, walking barefoot on the frost-covered grass.

  “What are you doing out here?” Dad said, clasping Hazel’s shoulder. “Have you been out all night? Jesus, Hazel, what were you thinking?”

  She tried to stand, but her legs were too stiff. She couldn’t feel her fingers. As her father lifted her up into his arms, she wanted to explain, but her teeth were chattering too loudly for her to get any words out.

  And she remembered another night, too, slinking home through the woods after being in the Alderking’s service, a shudder never quite leaving her shoulders.

  She had ridden with the Folk and pretended to laugh as they tormented mortals, aped their cruelty along with all else they taught her.

  Let us curse them to be rocks until some mortal recognizes their true nature.

  Now, a cold knot in her stomach, she knew she was the best hope of breaking the curse. It should have been simple; all she had to do was go out to the grove where they were and their true nature would be recognized. She would recognize them.

  But only if she remained her night self. Her day self wouldn’t know.

  Briefly, she imagined leaving a note for Ben. Maybe if she worded it right, he could break the spell. But no matter how she worded it, he would probably say just the wrong thing to her day self—a self she wasn’t sure she trusted.

  Day Hazel was her, but with all the sharp edges blunted. Day Hazel didn’t know what it was to ride beside the Folk on sleek faerie horses, hair streaming behind her. She didn’t recall swinging a silvery sword with such force that the air itself seemed to sing. She didn’t know what it was to outwit them and to be outwitted. She hadn’t seen the wild and grotesque things Night Hazel had seen. She hadn’t told the many, many lies.

  Day Hazel needed to be preserved, protected. There would be no help there.

  And so she concocted a plan. The terms of her service were simple. Every night, from the moment you fall into slumber until your head touches your pillow again near dawn, you’re mine, the Alderking had said.

  The way she thwarted him was simple, too. She put her head down on her pillow but didn’t allow herself to sleep. Instead, she got back up again—and stayed Night Hazel until dawn broke on the horizon and her memories fled with the dark.

  Some nights, she was able to steal almost an hour. Other nights, mere moments. But it allowed her to break curses, to undo damage.

  And, in time, it let her concoct a plan.

  She knew what the Alderking intended to do with Sorrow. He flaunted Fairfold’s looming destruction before her, boasted about his plans for conquest and revenge on the Court in the East. Just as he let slip details he hadn’t thought mattered, about his lost sword and the means of releasing the horned boy. Slowly, Hazel had realized the value of the blade she had found all those years ago. Slowly, she had come to see that she was the only one with the means to stop him.

  I may be stuck in his service, Hazel had thought, but if I free the prince, he could defeat his father. He’s not bound by any promises. He’s got enough vengeance in him for both of us.

  That was when everything went wrong. Hazel remembered the panic that rose in her when the casket shattered, but the prince didn’t wake. She remembered the terror of trying to hide the sword, of leaving herself hasty, cryptic hints and then rushing to her bed b
efore the first rays of light touched her.

  She’d thought she’d have more time, but she had stolen only minutes when she woke next, until finally she’d awakened in her own house, with her brother and Jack and Severin standing over her and half the Alderking’s court outside.

  “Where is it?” Ben asked her.

  That was when the first of the faeries burst through the front door. Hazel scrabbled for the Sharpie and ran up the stairs to don her armor.

  Hazel remembered all those things, slumped on the ground, as Ben told her they’d won, as Severin ordered his father’s body moved to the casket, where he could sleep away all the rest of his days, as the court crowded around the monster, as Jack said Hazel’s name over and over, until the words bled together.

  She closed her eyes and let the darkness take her.

  CHAPTER 22

  Hazel woke up in an unfamiliar place, the air redolent with honeysuckle and carrying the distant playing of a harp. She was lying in a large, elaborate, carved bed with a silvery gray blanket over her that felt lighter than silk, but was warmer than goose down. She wanted to burrow back down in the coverlets and go on sleeping, although she knew there was some reason why she shouldn’t.

  She turned over and saw Jack, sitting so that he was in profile. He was in a tipped-back chair, balancing it with a single booted foot against the wall. He had a book open on his lap, but he didn’t seem to be turning the pages. There was something in the way the soft light of the candles resting beside him defined the planes of his face, something in the heavy lash of his eye and the softness of his mouth that was both familiar and endlessly strange in its beauty.

  Hazel realized that as many times as she’d seen Jack before, she’d never really got to look at him with night Hazel’s eyes.

  Who was she? Hazel wondered. Knowing what she did, having done what she had done? Was she enough of the Hazel Evans he’d liked? Was she even a Hazel Evans she herself could like?

  Once her service to the Alderking was complete, if he hadn’t tricked her into becoming his eternal servant or killed her outright, she’d assumed he’d take back all her memories of her time in his court. She’d thought of her night self as expendable, thought of what she’d endured as being scars that would simply, one day, vanish.

  Now she knew they wouldn’t. But the Alderking had left her with talents, too. And knowledge.

  She’d heard the story of how Jack came be a changeling so many times as her daylight self, but as she watched him, she realized she’d heard it in the faerie court, too. She’d heard his elf mother tell it, explaining how she’d chosen Carter because he was such a beautiful child, warm and sweet and laughing in her arms. Telling of the horror of the hot iron scorching Jack’s skin, the smell of burning flesh and the howl he’d given up, so anguished that a banshee would despair to hear it. How the mortals were indifferent to his pain and kept him for spite, for a curiosity to show off to their friends, how she feared they would make him the servant of their own son. Hazel had heard stories of the way the hobs would peer in the windows, making sure he was safe, how they would pile up acorns and chestnuts outside in case he got hungry at night, how they would play with him in the garden when his human mother’s back was turned and pinch Carter until he cried.

  Thinking of that, Hazel took a breath and got ready to turn over and speak, when she heard someone come into the room.

  “I have sent you a dozen messages,” Eolanthe said. “You have deigned to reply to none.”

  “I’ve been here.” Jack closed the book and set it down beside the candles. “You knew I was here. You could have come to speak with me anytime—as you have.”

  Hazel slitted open her eyes to see the faerie woman, standing near the earthen wall.

  “I understand your anger over my bargain with the Alderking, but you don’t see why it was necessary—”

  “What makes you think that?” Jack asked. There was a warning in his voice.

  Hazel knew that it was a bad thing to listen as she was, to pretend she was asleep and let them talk in front of her. But it had seemed awful to sit up and admit she was awake, as though she was accusing them of saying something they wanted kept secret, when they were just talking.

  Indecision had kept her quiet too long, because once Hazel heard that tone in Jack’s voice, she knew they were going to discuss secrets.

  “I wondered when you hesitated during your little speech before the Alderking—as though there was something you thought you might say, but then thought better of it,” Eolanthe told him.

  “Things didn’t quite add up. The bargain for my safety. Your sending me away in the first place. The expression on Severin’s face when he said you had the Alderking’s favor.”

  “Are you asking me for the reason?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Are you sure? It might change what you want, knowing what you might have. Are you afraid that I will say that—”

  “I said I wasn’t asking you,” Jack interrupted her. “And I’m not. If you do tell me, I’ll pretend you didn’t.”

  “Then I don’t need to tell you,” she said. “You already know.”

  For a long moment, he didn’t speak.

  “It is your gift,” she said, “to guess what is in another’s heart. Severin would need someone with your gift, someone by his side who knows the mortal world as you do. You need not hide any longer.”

  “Nothing has changed,” he said. “I’m going home now—to my human home, to be with my human family. I don’t care who my father was.”

  Hazel heard the rustle of fabric. “They will never really love you. They will always fear you.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Let me have this time being human,” he said. “Over and over you tell me that I will never be mortal, that the span of one human life is so short as to mean nothing. Fine, then let me have my human life. Let all the mortals I love die and blow away to dust. Let me have Nia for a mother and Charles for a father and Carter for my brother. Let me be Jack Gordon, and when I am done, when all is dust and ashes, I will return to you and learn how to be your son.”

  She was quiet.

  “Let me have this, mother, because once they are dead, I can never have it again.” In his voice, Hazel heard the eerie agelessness she’d associated with Severin and the Alderking. He was one of them, eternal and inhuman. But he was going to stay in her world a little longer.

  “Go,” she said finally. “Be Jack Gordon. But mortality is a bitter draught.”

  “And yet I would have the full measure,” he told her.

  Hazel kept her eyes closed, trying to control her breathing, sure one of them would discover her deception. But after a few minutes of steady inhaling and exhaling, she was asleep again.

  The next time she woke, it was Ben who was beside her, sitting on the other side of the bed, propped up by more of the soft pillows she’d been snuggling with. One of his hands was bandaged too heavily to use, but he was texting with the other.

  She forced herself to shift into a sitting position and groaned.

  “Is this Faerieland?” Hazel asked him muzzily.

  “Maybe,” Ben said. “If there is such a place. I mean, if we all occupy the same dimensional space, then, technically, we’re always in Faerieland. But the jury’s still out on that.”

  She ignored the second part of his statement to focus on the first. “So you’re texting in Faerieland. Who are you texting?”

  He made a face at her. “Mom and Dad. Mom freaked out, like everyone else at the Gordons’, and it sounds like half the town went to the big old church on Main Street with all the protections carved into the foundation. They locked themselves in with charms and canned food and whatnot. Mom thought we’d go there, too, but obviously we didn’t, because we are badasses. Dad drove down to look for us. I told her that you’d be home tonight, if you’re feeling up to it. You think you’re going to feel up to it?”

  “Me?” Hazel stretched. “Where’s Jack?”

  �
�He had to go take some more of Sorrel’s blood to the hospital. He had a hell of a time convincing them it was the antidote, but once he did and it started working, they wanted more. Sorrel let Severin cut her with Heartsworn and bled into a vial.”

  “Is she still…?”

  “A giant, creepy tree monster?” He mimed branches with his fingers, reaching for Hazel. “Oh yeah. Her blood was a bright green, too. But she spoke to us and she sounded—I don’t know—nice. The way Severin described her.”

  Hazel yawned. For the first time, she really took in the room. The rug on the floor had an intricate pattern that seemed to shift the more she looked at it, green lines coiling like vipers and making her dizzy. She blinked and turned her attention to a sideboard carved with oak leaves and topped with a copper bowl. Beside it rested three glass decanters with different liquids in them and a goblet.

  There was a large bench covered in thick green velvet with glimmering gold tacks along the edge of the upholstery set near a fireplace, where a cheery fire was burning. Atop it were folded clothes.

  “So, without you saying anything about dimensions, where are we?” Hazel asked.

  “In the palace of the Alderking.” Ben put down his phone and slid out of bed. He was wearing new clothes—black jeans and a rusty orange sweater the color of his hair, with a black unicorn rearing up across the front. Hazel recognized it as an purchase he’d been particularly proud of, but one she was pretty sure he hadn’t had with him the day before. There hadn’t been any reason to pack overnight bags.

  He followed her gaze, looking down at his sweater. “Severin commanded a hob to go to our house and get some stuff. It picked up some clothes for you and… more stuff for me.”

  Ben waited, as though expecting her to react.

  Hazel didn’t like where this was going. “Does this have something to do with your telling Mom and Dad that I’d be coming home tonight, but not saying anything about yourself?”