The Darkest Part of the Forest

by Holly Black

  He nodded. “I’m staying with the faeries.”

  Hazel scrambled out from under the covers. Whatever had to be done, whoever had to be fought, she’d do it. She might not have Heartsworn, but she’d faced worse odds. “What did they promise you? What did you bargain for?”

  Ben shook his head. “It’s not like that.”

  “What is it like? Is this because of Severin?”

  Ben winced. “It’s not about him. Or at least mostly it’s not about him.” His whole face blushed a deep, ridiculous red.

  “He looooooves you,” Hazel crowed. “He told you he loooooooved you in front of everyone.”

  “Hazel,” he moaned.

  She grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking him, and they fell back together on the bed, laughing.

  “You better have kissed him! You better have kissed him so hard that he just about choked on your tongue. And if not, you better go kiss him like that right now.”

  “Shut up.” Ben tried to pretend he wasn’t holding back a smile. “Oh my god. That’s so disgusting.”

  Hazel shoved him deeper into the mattress. “But none of this explains why you’re not coming home.”

  Ben sighed. “I can’t just go around with this ability to play music inside me like some unexploded bomb. I need to learn what it is and how to control it. And I’m not going to be able to learn that in the human world. I have to learn it here.”

  “But—” she began.

  “I need to stop fantasizing about running away to some other life and start figuring out the one I have.”

  “You could come home first,” Hazel said. “Explain things to Mom and Dad. Say good-bye to people at school.”

  “Maybe.” Ben nodded, as if she was making sense, but he still wasn’t going to agree. “But in all the stories, you have a single chance; and if you miss it, then it’s gone. The door isn’t there when you go back to look. There is no second invitation to the ball. This is my chance.”

  Hazel wanted to protest, but this wasn’t about her. Maybe the music could live again for him. Maybe he could love it the way he’d never let himself before, because it was too terrifying to love something he couldn’t control, because it was too awful to hurt people and have loved what hurt them.

  “I’m going to miss you like crazy,” he said, looking down at her, his hand pushing hair out of her face. “I’m sorry we weren’t honest enough before.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” she said. “We might not be sharing the same bathroom, but I’ll still see you, won’t I? I mean, I spent half of the last five years of my life in Faerie, so it’s not like I don’t know my way around, and your boyfriend is more or less in charge now, so that’s got to count for something.”

  “More or less,” Ben said. “Yeah, of course we’ll see each other. I didn’t mean we wouldn’t. But things will be… different. Just promise me you’ll try to be happy.”

  Maybe, Hazel decided, maybe they could both learn how. Not just making-up-stories-in-which-you’re-happy happiness, but the real thing. She leaned across the bed and hugged him with all the strength in her limbs, hugged him until her bones ached. But no matter how hard she hugged him, she knew it would never be enough.

  “I promise,” she whispered. “I’ll try.”

  Ben left her in the room to get dressed. She stripped off the doublet, revealing a map of bruises and slashes across her torso. She splashed water into the metal basin and cleaned off most of the blood and dirt. She washed her mouth with an elixir that tasted of pine resin and combed her hair with a golden comb that magically turned her tangles into soft ginger ringlets.

  The hob had chosen leggings, a black T-shirt with a steaming mug of tea on the front, an oversized gray button-up sweater, and a pair of bright green chucks. Hazel put the clothes on, glad to be in familiar things. She left the tattered remains of her knight’s uniform on the bed. Even if it could be repaired, she couldn’t imagine ever wearing it again.

  Without anywhere else to go, she started for home.

  She stepped out of the room, into long, branching passageways with strangely sized doors, some massive, some tiny, some slender, and others wide. Knobs and knockers were shaped into silver goblin faces with sinister smiles and pointed ears or golden branches dripping berries. Sometimes she heard music or laughter, sometimes it seemed as though there were voices muttering in the distance.

  Soon she came to steps that spiraled up into the hollow of a massive tree, and she found her way out through a long, narrow opening in it, like the mouth of a cave. Overhead, the sky was bright and the air sharp. Hazel pulled her sweater more tightly around her shoulders, wishing that the hob had thought to bring her a coat.

  She trudged through piles of fallen leaves, through brush and bracken, until she came to her house. The front door hung from a single hinge. There was a splintered crack where a faerie knight’s boot had hit it.

  When she stepped through into the kitchen, her father and mother both stood up from the worn wood table, coming toward her.

  “Oh, kiddo,” her father said, putting his arms around Hazel’s shoulders. “Kiddo, we’re so glad that you’re home.”

  “Ben’s gone,” Hazel blurted out, because it seemed cruel to let them be relieved when they weren’t going to get to stay that way. “He’s not coming back. He’s going to stay with them.”

  “Come sit down,” Dad said. “We know about your brother. He called and told us himself. Said to imagine Faerieland like an exclusive boarding school in Switzerland. I told him it was more like an exclusive boarding school in hell.”

  “You’re okay with that?” Hazel asked, but she let herself sit. He’d probably told them it was for the good of his music. They would have accepted that, even if they didn’t like it.

  “No, we’re not okay with it,” Dad said. “But other than telling him we’re not thrilled with his decision, there’s not much we can do.”

  Mom frowned, pressing her finger to a burn mark in the wood table. “We have some questions for you, though. You fought alongside the horned boy from the casket in the woods, whom you and your brother appeared to know? Hazel, how did you know to fight like that? How did you get involved in all this?”

  “It happened a long time ago,” Hazel said. Her parents had changed so much since the day she’d found the dead boy and the sword in the woods. They’d become the sort of parents who could never have spawned a child like Hazel.

  Maybe that was why it was so hard to tell them just what kind of child she was.

  Mom shook her head. “We’re just relieved you’re both okay. We were so worried.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me—not now. There’s no point. It’s too late to worry.”

  “It’s never too late to worry,” Mom said, reaching across the table and taking Hazel’s hand.

  When she squeezed it, Hazel squeezed back.

  School reopened a few days later. The administration sent home slips reporting that the recent crisis used up all available snow days for the academic year and if there was another closure, students would be attending Fairfold High through the end of June. There were still some cracks in the walls and the roof was still greenish with moss, and occasionally, a stray spiral of wind would blow a single black feather or a clump of dried fern down a hallway, but most of the rest of the vines and leaves had been removed.

  Carter and Amanda were back in classes. Amanda was making much of her newfound celebrity, giving scandalous details of things she’d overheard while in her magical sleep. She and Carter were no longer dating.

  Everything seemed as if it was normal again.

  Everything seemed as if it was normal again, except that people called out to Hazel in the halls. People, even Robbie, wanted to ask her what the horned boy had really been like, how she’d found him, whether she’d been the one to free him from the casket. Tom Mullins wanted to see her fighting moves, using a borrowed mop from the janitor’s closet. Three separate times over lunch, Leonie forced Hazel to tell t
he story of Ben and Severin getting together, and Molly wanted endless reassurance that Sorrow wasn’t coming back to get her.

  Everyone had something to say to Hazel, and no one had much to say to Jack. She saw people turn away from him in the halls, as though their fear and guilt had combined to make him invisible. But Carter was still beside him, shoving his shoulder and laughing and making their friends laugh, too, making sure he was seen. Talking about colleges and the next football game and where they were going that Saturday night.

  Everyone would get over their fear of him soon enough. They would forget that he had magic in his blood.

  But not Hazel. When she caught his eye, his gaze had a fathomless intensity that made her feel as if she were drowning. His mouth tilted crookedly, and she felt it like a blow.

  He liked her. He liked her—or he had liked her daytime self. He liked her and she loved him. She loved him so much that it already hurt. It already felt like he’d broken her heart.

  Anyone who offers up their heart on a silver platter deserves what they get.

  Jack Gordon was a good boy, going to a good school far away from here. Going to have his normal human life before he started his other, grander, immortal one.

  “Hazel,” he said, jogging up to her after last period. They hadn’t spoken for three days, and she didn’t want him to know how glad she was to hear his voice. He looked different from the way he had before the defeat of the Alderking—his ears a bit more pointy, his face a bit thinner, his hair full of greenish shadows—but his smile was that same old smile, the one that twisted up her insides, the one that had never belonged to Carter, the one that was Jack’s and Jack’s alone. “Hey, wait up. I want to talk to you. I was wondering if you might like—”

  Just talking made her want to smile. A jolt of happiness washed over her so intense that it was almost pain.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” Hazel blurted out.

  “Do what?” He looked puzzled.

  She kept on going, not sure what to say next, but determined. “I’m not okay. As a person. I guess I am just starting to realize how not okay I am, you know? I keep remembering things I’ve done—and stuff that happened to me—and it all adds up to the fact that I am not someone that any normal person should have a relationship with.”

  “Good thing I’m not exactly normal,” Jack said.

  “I’m going to mess this up,” she told him. “I’ve never had a boyfriend before. I don’t usually do dates, no less second dates. I’m kind of a coward about love,” she continued. “I said I wished boys would show me some secret side of themselves, but you did and now all I want to do is run away.”

  He reached out a hand and she took it, threading her fingers through his. She sucked in a breath, looking down at their twined fingers.

  “What are you afraid of?” he asked.

  “You,” she said. “Me.”

  He nodded, as though that made perfect sense. Then, finally, he said. “I don’t want anyone normal. I don’t want anyone safe. I want you. I have loved you from almost the first moment I saw you, wild and fierce and brave, running through the woods, your lips stained purple from blackberry juice. I figured that just made me like everyone else loving you, but that didn’t keep me from doing it.”

  A flush warmed her cheeks. “What about Amanda? You say you loved me from when you first saw me, but I thought she was the one you loved.”

  Jack grinned, but then the smile left his face. “I’m a changeling, not quite one thing and not quite another, not fitting in anywhere. Amanda fits this world. I thought if she liked me, if she could like me, then it would mean something about where I fit. But she was afraid of me. People are, sometimes.”

  “I’m not,” Hazel said, indignant. “I’m not afraid of that.”

  “I know,” Jack said. “And I’m not afraid of your trying to figure out what it means to be your whole self, night and day together. I’m not afraid of things getting messy or messed up, because it’s us. There don’t have to be first dates and second dates. We’re not normal. We can do this any way you want. A relationship can be whatever you want it to be. We get to make this part up. We get to tell our own story.”

  “How do we start?” Hazel said.

  He looked down at her, lashes dusting his cheek when he blinked. “Any way you like. We could hang out after school. We could write each other long letters. You could send me on some kind of quest to win your favor.”

  “Oh no,” she said, smiling at last, because he was her friend Jack, who had ridiculous cheekbones and ridiculous ideas. “If anyone is going on a quest, it’s going to be me.”

  Jack grinned. “Well fine, then. I could send you out to win my favor. Possibly on a quest involving bringing a large mug of coffee and a doughnut. Or the wholesale slaughter of all my enemies. I haven’t decided which.”

  “That doesn’t scare me. Not even a little. You know what else I’m not scared of?”

  He shook his head.

  “Come here,” she said, leaning back against the wall and pulling him with her, pressing her lips to his. He made a soft sound of surprise and then a sound that wasn’t surprise at all.

  When she opened her locker to toss in her books before she headed for home, a walnut rolled out, bouncing twice on the floor. A walnut tied in silver string. She bent down to open it and found a scroll inside, made of thin and waxy paper. When she unrolled that, she found a message in her brother’s handwriting: FULL MOON IS IN THREE DAYS TIME. COME TO THE REVEL. NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO RHYME.

  She smiled as her fist closed over the words.

  EPILOGUE

  Down a path worn into the woods, past a stream and a hollowed-out log full of pill bugs and termites, is a glass coffin. It rests right on the ground and in it sleeps an elf with a golden circlet on his head and ears as pointed as knives.

  The townsfolk know there was once a different boy resting there. One with horns and brown curls, one whom they adored and whom they have begun to forget. What matters is that they have a new faerie, one who won’t wake up during the long summers when girls and boys stretch out the full length of the coffin, staring down through the panes and fogging them up with their breath. Who won’t wake when tourists come and gape or debunkers insist he isn’t real, but want to take photographs with him anyway. Who won’t open his poison green eyes on autumn weekends while girls dance right on top of him, lifting bottles high over their heads, as if they’re saluting the whole haunted forest.

  And elsewhere in the woods, there is another party, one taking place inside a hollow hill. There, a pale boy plays a fiddle with newly mended fingers while his sister dances with his best friend. There, a monster whirls about, branches waving in time with the music. There, a prince of the Folk takes up the mantle of king and embraces a changeling like a brother; with a human boy by his side, he names a girl his champion.