Holly Black - The Darkest Part of the Forest

Looking out at the green water, trying not to stare at the red ruin of Adam’s eyes, Hazel thought of all the knights in the book she’d read that afternoon. She remembered that she was supposed to be one of them and tried not to throw up.

Whiskey’s barking got more intense and more frenzied.

Hazel was trying to shoo him back when a damp claw closed around her ankle. She screamed, fumbling for her machete, stomping on the grasping, toad-pale hand with her free foot. The hag rose up out of the muddy water, her face sunken like a skull with cloudy eyes and long green hair that spread out, floating on the surface of the lake. The touch of her hands burned like cold fire.

Hazel managed to swing the blade as the hag yanked on her leg. Hazel went down on her back, hard. Flies blew up from Adam’s body in a black cloud. As Hazel felt herself dragged toward the water, she noticed with dim and terrible satisfaction that the hag was bleeding from a slash in her cheek. Hazel must have struck her.

“Little girl,” the hag said. “Barely a mouthful. Stringy from running. Relax, little mouthful.”

Closing her eyes, Hazel swung the machete wildly. The hag made a hissing sound like a cat and grabbed for the blade. It sliced into the hag’s fingers when she caught it, but she held on, wrenching it from Hazel’s grasp and tossing it into the middle of the lake. It landed with a splash that made Hazel’s stomach turn.

Whiskey bit the hag’s arm and growled.

“No!” Hazel shouted. “No! Go away, Whiskey!”

The dog held on, whipping his head back and forth. The hag lifted her long green arm high into the air. Whiskey rose, too, his hind legs off the ground, his teeth still embedded deep in her flesh, as though pressed against bone. Then the hag’s arm came down, slamming him against the ground as if he weighed nothing, as if he was nothing. The dog went still, lying on the bank like a broken toy.

“Nononono,” Hazel moaned. She reached out a hand toward Whiskey, but he was just far enough to her right to be out of reach. Her fingers clawed at the mud, digging runnels into it.

Strains of distant music floated toward her. Ben’s reed pipes. He had slung them around his neck on a dirty string a week ago, calling himself a bard, and hadn’t removed them since. Too late. Too late.

Hazel tried to crawl toward Whiskey’s body, kicking against the cold grip of the hag. Despite her efforts, her feet hit the lake. Water splashed high into the air as she struggled.

“Ben,” she shouted, her voice cracking with panic. “Ben!”

The piping went on, closer now, beautiful enough to make the trees bend low to hear him better, and utterly useless. Tears sprang to Hazel’s eyes, fear and frustration combining into panic. Why didn’t he stop playing and help? Couldn’t he hear her? Her legs slid into the water, slime coating her skin. Hazel sucked in a breath, preparing to hold it as long as she could. She wondered how much it hurt to drown. She wondered if she had any fight left.

Then suddenly the hag’s fingers went slack. Hazel scrambled up the bank, not bothering to notice why she got away until she was over a log and leaning against an elm tree, her breaths coming hard. Ben stood near the water, looking pale and scared, playing the pipe as though he was playing for his life.

No, Hazel realized. He’d been playing for her life. The water hag gazed at him, rapt. Her fish eyes didn’t blink. Her mouth moved only slightly, as though she was singing along with the notes he played. Hazel knew the Folk loved music, especially music as fine as Ben’s, but she’d had no idea it could do this to one of them.

She saw Ben notice Whiskey’s body, saw her brother take a staggering half step forward, saw his eyes close, but he never stopped playing.

Hazel’s gaze went to the bank where she’d fallen, the gouges her scrambling had made in the mud, Adam’s rotting body and her dog’s limp one beside it, the buzzing of flies in the air above them, and something else, something that shone in the sunlight like a hilt. A knife? Had Adam brought a weapon with him?

Slowly, Hazel crept back down the bank, back toward the water hag.

Ben looked over at her, eyes wide, shaking his head in warning.

Hazel ignored him, making her way to the knife in the mud, feeling numb and angry. She gripped the hilt and pulled. The mud made a sucking sound as the blade slid free. It was metal, blackened as though it had been in a fire, and gold underneath. It was much longer than she’d expected—longer even than her mother’s biggest kitchen knife, with a groove down the middle. It was a sword . A real sword, the kind a grown-up knight would carry.

Hazel’s mind was racing, but she kept going, concentrating on repeating over and over: I am a knight. I am a knight. I am a knight. A better knight could have saved Whiskey, but at least she could avenge his death. Wading into the silty water, she hefted the heavy sword like a baseball bat and brought it down, bashing the edge against the monster’s head. Her skull split like a rotten melon.

The creature slumped over in the water, dead.

“Wow,” Ben said, walking closer, dropping the pipes so that they hung around his neck again, tilting his head to one side and bending down to inspect the red mess of bone and lichen-covered teeth, to stare at the clumps of hair floating in the water. He pushed at it with his toe. “I didn’t think you’d really kill it.”

Hazel didn’t know how to reply. She wasn’t sure whether he thought what she did was bad or whether he was just surprised it had worked.

“Where did you get that?” he asked, pointing to the sword.

“I found it,” Hazel told him, sniffing brokenly. Tears kept flooding her eyes, no matter how many times she tried to blink them back.

Ben reached out like he wanted to take the blade from her. Maybe he was thinking of his broken He-Man sword and how the one in her hand would make a good replacement. Hazel took a half step back.

He made a face, acting like he hadn’t wanted it anyway. “With your sword and my playing, we could do something. Stop bad things. Like in stories.”

Despite the dog’s death, despite her tears, despite everything, she smiled and wiped the blood spatter off her nose with the sleeve of her shirt. “You think so?”

Children can have a cruel, absolute sense of justice. Children can kill monsters and feel quite proud of themselves. Even a girl who carries spiders outside instead of stepping on them, a girl who once fed a tiny fox kit with an eyedropper every two hours until wildlife rescue could come and pick it up, that same girl can kill and be ready to do it again. She can take her dead dog home and bury him and cry over his cooling and stiffening body, making promises as she digs a deep hole in the backyard. She can look at her brother and believe that together they’re a knight and a bard who battle evil, who might someday find and fight even the monster at the heart of the forest. A little girl can find a dead boy and lose her dog and believe that she could make sure no one else was lost.

Hazel believed she’d found the sword for a reason.

By the time she was ten, Hazel and Ben had discovered two more monsters—two more faeries with tourist blood on their hands, two more creatures hungry to entrap them. Ben lulled them with his music, while Hazel crept up and struck them down with her sword—by then, honed and polished, gleaming with mineral oil, and painted over black to hide all the bright gold.

Sometimes they heard solitary Folk following them home from school, rustling at the edges of the woods. Hazel waited, but they never bothered her. Faerie morality isn’t human morality. They punish the unmannerly and foolhardy, the braggarts and cheats, not the brave, not tricksters and heroes. Those, they claim for their own. And so, if the Alderking noticed the children, he chose to bide his time, waiting to see what they might yet become.