The Darkest Part of the Forest

by Holly Black

It was because of kissing boys like Robbie Delmonico that people believed Hazel would kiss anyone.

The funny thing was that he hadn’t seemed particularly interested in her before she lunged at him. It was as though, by putting her lips to his—and, okay, allowing a certain amount of handsiness—she’d transformed herself into some kind of cruel goddess of love.

Jack—the crush of Hazel’s younger, sillier years—looked surprised when she stumbled up, which was odd, because he was almost never caught off guard. As his mother once said about him, Jack could hear the thunder before the lightning bothered to strike.

Carter and Jack looked almost exactly alike, as if they were twins. Same dark, curly hair. Same amber eyes. Same deep brown skin and lush mouths and wide cheekbones that were the envy of every girl in town. They weren’t twins, though. Jack was a changeling—Carter’s changeling, left behind when Carter got stolen away by the faeries. Fairfold was a strange place.

Carter’s dad was from out of town, but Carter’s mom was no tourist. It took a single night for her to realize that her baby had been stolen. And she’d known just what to do. She sent her husband out of the house for the day and invited over a bunch of neighbor ladies. They’d baked bread and chopped wood and filled an old earthenware bowl with salt. Then, when everything was done, Carter’s mom heated a poker in the fireplace.

Burning a changeling summons its mother. She arrived on the threshold moments later, a swaddled bundle in her arms.

The faerie woman seemed to shrink back a little. As if in answer, she silently held out the child she’d brought, wrapped up in blankets, sleeping as peacefully as if he were in his own bed. “Take him,” she said. Carter’s mother crushed him to her, drinking in the rightness of his sour-milk smell. She said that was the one thing the Folk of the Air couldn’t fake. The other baby just hadn’t smelled like Carter.

Then the faerie woman had reached out her arms for her own wailing child, but the neighbor woman holding him stepped back. Carter’s mother blocked the way. “You can’t have him,” said Carter’s mother, passing her own baby to her sister and picking up iron filings and red berries and salt, protection against the faerie woman’s magic. “If you were willing to trade him away, even for an hour, then you don’t deserve him. I’ll keep them both to raise as my own and let that be our judgment on you for breaking oath with us.”

Give me my child and I will place a blessing on your house, but if you keep him, you will come to regret it.”

that was how Jack came to live with Carter’s family and to become Carter’s brother and Ben’s best friend. That was how they all got so used to Jack that no one was surprised anymore by how his ears tapered to small points or how his eyes shone silver sometimes, or the way he could predict the weather better than any weatherman on the news.

If Hazel took kissing boys too lightly, then Ben never took it lightly enough. He wanted to be in love, was all too willing to give away his still-beating heart. Ben had always been like that, even when it cost him more than she wanted to think about.

“It’s just kissing.” He grinned at her; his mouth twisted up on one side, and something twisted inside her in response. His smiles and Carter’s smiles were nothing alike.

She didn’t explain that she wasn’t so much wanting something to happen as not wanting to be the only one with a secret self to reveal.

He stopped speaking, and she realized how close their faces had become. Close enough that she could feel the warmth of his breath against her cheek. Close enough to watch the dark fringe of his eyelashes turn gold in the reflected light and to see the soft bow of his mouth. Hazel’s heart started pounding, her ten-year-old self’s crush coming back with a vengeance. It made her feel just as vulnerable and silly as she’d felt back then. She hated that feeling. She was the one who broke hearts now, not the other way around. Anyone who offers up their heart on a silver platter deserves what they get. There was only one way to get over a boy. Only one way that ever worked.

It seemed exactly right to close the distance between them, to shut her eyes and press her mouth to his. Warm and gentle, he pressed back for a single shared exchange of breath.

With that, the elf woman took her drawing and left my mother huddled on her blanket, weeping, arms around Ben. She wasn’t sure if her son had been cursed or blessed. The answer turned out to be both.

But Hazel, floating in the tideless sea of amniotic fluid, was neither. Her tragedy, if she had one, was to be as normal and average as any child ever born.

Changelings are fish you’re supposed to throw back. A cuckoo raised by sparrows. They don’t quite fit anywhere.

After they were married, Johannes changed toward her. He became more afraid of her strangeness, no matter that she remained his loyal wife.” “So he was a jerk?” Ben asked, propping himself higher against his headboard. There was something disturbingly intimate about sitting in bed and talking about this stuff, even if the story ended in tragedy. “Was she sorry she married him?” “We love until we do not. For us, love doesn’t fade gradually. It snaps like a branch bent too far.”

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.

“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.”