The Darkest Part of the Forest

by Holly Black

But then she saw that the woman’s ears rose to slim, delicate points and realized she was one of the Folk of the Air, tricksy and dangerous. As is the tragedy of so many artists, Mom was more fascinated than afraid.

“I can’t change his nature, but I can give him the gift of our music. He will play music so sweet that no one will be able to think of anything else when they hear it, music that contains the magic of faerie. It will weigh on him and it will change him and it will make him an artist, no matter what else he desires. Every child needs a tragedy to become truly interesting. That is my gift to you—he will be compelled to art, love it or no.”

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.

Flirting didn’t mean anything to her. There was no plan, no goal. It was just a little rush, just a way to be seen in a place where it would be easy to drown in invisibility. She never meant to hurt anyone. She had no idea that was even possible.

“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.”

Grimsen mentioned

“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.”

“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.”

“Did you know there are different names for different moons? This month it’s going to be the Hunter’s Moon, but March has the Worm Moon and the Crow Moon. May has the Milk Moon, July the Mead Moon. February has the Hunger Moon and late October the Blood Moon. Aren’t they lovely names? Aren’t they something, Hazel? Aren’t they warning enough?”

Hazel could hear the weeping in the liquid drum of her heart. In her every breath. It pricked the back of her eyes. It was so much—so sad, as though all the sorrow she’d ever felt woke in her at once.

Of all the boys she’d kissed and how the names she remembered first were of the ones who’d hated her after, because she remembered things that hurt more easily than anything nice.

The hardest thing about being wanted was the hardest thing about wanting—wanting badly enough that it gave you a stomachache, wanting in the way that was partly about kissing and partly about swallowing whole, the way a snake gulps down a mouse or the Big Bad Wolf gulps down Red Riding Hood—wanting turned someone you felt like you knew into a stranger. Whether that person was your brother’s best friend or a sleeping prince in a glass prison or a girl who kissed you at a party, the moment you wanted more than just touching your mouth to theirs, they became terrifying and you became terrified.

“Take Molly and head for the front. Your brother is worried about you. My brother is worried about you.” In the flickering light, the boys seemed different. Robbie looked sallow and a little frantic, the hollowness under his eyes made prominent. Carter looked more like Jack than ever, his face sharpened by shadows. If she tried, she might have been able to pretend he was his brother. For a horrible moment she understood why someone might do what Amanda did. It would be like kissing Severin’s casket. It wouldn’t be real. It couldn’t hurt. “Why don’t you get out?” she asked him, not particularly nicely, since she didn’t appreciate being condescended to and she didn’t like where her thoughts were going.

In that moment, Jack looked every bit like a normal human boy, unless you noticed the points of his ears. Unless you believed the stories. Then he looked eerily like something playing at being human.

Faerie hills are hollow inside, she’d once heard Mrs. Schröder say. Hollow like faerie promises. All air and misdirection.

Sir Hazel, the Alderking had called her. Jack’s elf mother had asked Hazel an odd thing, too. So have you come to pull him down off his white horse like in a ballad? Have you come to save him from us? Or is he here to save you? She knew the ballad where someone got pulled down off a white horse. It was Tam Lin, where a human knight was forced into the service of a queen of Faerie and saved by a brave mortal girl, Janet. Tam Lin was a human knight.

“That doesn’t seem possible.” “And yet,” the Alderking said, gesturing to the air as though that was all the explanation needed. Magic as both question and answer.

There were so many things she couldn’t be honest about that she understood the allure for him to be able to be honest about this.

“Hey, whoa!” He grabbed her again, pulling her farther from the dance, causing her to have to stagger to her feet. “Hazel, don’t. Come on, sweetheart, time to get going. I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would get you so bad.” Sweetheart. The word hung in the air, pulling her halfway out of her fugue. But, no, he couldn’t have meant anything by it. Sweetheart was what you called lost cats and adorable toddlers and dames in old-timey movies.

The blush started on Ben’s skin. It was all too much. He realized that Severin was going to hurt him worse than he’d ever been hurt before, because Ben had already set the blade to his chest, had already wrapped this stranger’s hand around the hilt. He loved Severin and he barely knew him.

“You don’t have to say that,” she told him. “If I had to say it, it wouldn’t mean much.” His grin was quick.

Her heart beat triple-time. Jack was clever, clever enough to figure out that she’d omitted things, maybe even to guess at what she’d omitted. The idea that someone could see through what she wasn’t saying, could guess at her secrets, tempted her to tell him everything. She was so tired of being alone.

As her hands fumbled with his shirt, trying to get it up and over his broad shoulders, as she pressed her cheek against smooth brown skin, and as he made a soft sound in the back of his throat that seemed to be his way of holding in check some other, less polite sound that Hazel desperately wanted to hear, she couldn’t help thinking of how strange it was to be doing this with a friend. She pulled back, looking at him, his mouth swollen, his breaths ragged. His eyes were closed. “Hazel,” he started to say, and she realized that whatever it was he was about to tell her, she didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want apologies and she didn’t want excuses and she didn’t want to stop.

Hazel’s face went blank; she could feel the momentary pause where her panic showed. And even though she tried to smile to cover it, it was too late. He knew her way better than she thought. Way better than she was comfortable with being known.

He looked at her with an expression she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen on his face before, hungry and a little desperate. “I thought about kissing you so many times at parties. I imagined pressing you back against the bark of a tree, shoving aside those boys you didn’t care anything about. I thought you might like the laugh of it, me being your brother’s best friend and all.” “You think I want to hurt Ben?” Jack shrugged. “I think both of you always want a little bite of whatever the other person’s got, that’s all.” It unnerved her, how not wrong he was.

Severin studied him for a long moment, then leaned forward and pressed his mouth to Ben’s. It was a searching, hungry kiss. His hand wrapped around Ben’s head, holding on to him instead of the tree. Ben’s hand fisted in Severin’s hair, brushed over horn, rough and cold as the back of a seashell. A few moments later, when he pulled away, Ben was trembling with some combination of lust and anger and fear. Because, yes, he’d wanted that. But he hadn’t wanted it thrown in his face. “Is it wrong that I like that you tremble? That you flinch?” Severin asked. Ben swallowed. “I’m pretty sure it’s not ideal.”

Severin shifted, making the trees rustle. His eyes were green as deep groves and forgotten glens, his hair falling around his face. “My problems are yours as well. All of Fairfold is blessed with my problems, and they do not lessen your own. You and your sister are very dear to each other. To show your regard, you give each other lovely bouquets of lies.” “It’s not like that.” “I know you, Benjamin Evans,” Severin said. “Remember?”

It wasn’t fair that he knew Ben like that. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that Severin could play on all of Ben’s petty insecurities, petty insecurities dating back years to deliver a series of swift surgical cuts so sharp and sure that Ben felt as though he might bleed out before he realized the depth of the wounds.

“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.”

My life has always been a powder keg waiting for a match.” “Well, hello, match,” Hazel said, pointing to herself with both thumbs, but she smiled as she did it, hoping to take the sting out of the words. “Hello, match.” Somehow his snagged-silk voice gave them an entirely different meaning. She thought about waking in the forest, about the smell of the pine needles in the air and the feeling of his mouth on hers with the uneven ground rough against her back, and squirmed.

You will see how easily we will take back the Eastern Court, wrest the throne from the upstart knight who rules it.”

Cardan??