Holly Black - The Darkest Part of the Forest

“I know that.” She did. She did know that. She’d loved Jack for ages, loved him for so long that her love was an ache that never left her body. Jack, who kissed her like nothing else mattered. Jack, who knew her too well. She’d loved him and had believed he couldn’t ever like her, had believed it so firmly that even with the memory of his saying he did, she still felt as though he was going to snatch it back, declare that he’d made a mistake.

He probably should take it back. She was a mess. She couldn’t even tell a boy she liked him the way she was supposed to.

“You don’t owe this to me,” Jack said. “And if this is because you don’t think it matters, since I won’t be here to find out you lied—”

She realized abruptly that he really didn’t believe her. Her declaration was going even worse than she’d thought. “No. No, I’m not lying.”

“Hazel,” he started, voice flat.

“Look,” she told him, interrupting, hoping she’d get it right this time. “After I made that bargain, I thought I was going to be taken away by the Folk. And I could have been! I didn’t want to get close to anyone, okay? I’m not good at getting close to people. I don’t have boyfriends. I don’t date. I hook up with boys at parties, and I definitely don’t tell them that I like them. I’m not good at it, okay? That doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “But I’ve known you all my life, Hazel. Your brother is my best friend. I hear the stuff you say to each other and I hear a lot of the stuff you don’t say, too. I know you don’t want to get close to anyone, but it’s not just because of the faeries.”

“What do you mean?”

He shook his head. “We shouldn’t talk about this.”

“No,” she said, although she felt cold all over. “Say what it is you’re thinking.”

He sighed. “I mean, you’re the one who showed me how to forage for food in the woods. We were, what, nine or ten when you showed me how to find stuff to eat? Do you remember why you’d learned that—why you were such an expert? Or how about the time that you stayed for dinner at my house and hid food in your napkin to eat later because you weren’t sure your parents would remember to feed you, but we all were supposed to pretend things were fine. The parties your parents used to throw were legendary, but I’ve heard the stories about you and your brother eating food out of the dog’s bowl. Heard you tell the story, too, like it was a joke. You talk about your childhood like it was just wild, bohemian fun, but I remember how much it wasn’t fun for you.”

Hazel blinked at him. She’d been so good at shutting out memories she didn’t like, so good at locking them away. None of what he said should have surprised her, they were only facts about her life, after all. But she found herself surprised anyway. All that stuff was so long ago that she’d felt like it didn’t matter anymore. “My parents are fine now. They grew up. They got better at stuff.”

He nodded. “I know. I just also know you always think it’s down to you to fix things, but it doesn’t have to be. Some people are trustworthy.”

“I was going to save Fairfold.”

“You can’t save a place. Sometimes you can’t even save a person.”

“Can you save yourself?” Hazel asked. It felt important, as though his answer would be the answer, as though somehow he might really know.

He shrugged. “We’ve all got to try, right?”

“So do you believe me? That I like you?” she asked. But he didn’t get to answer.

Ben strode into the room triumphantly, holding a book up in the air. “I found it. I found it! I am a genius! A memory genius. I am like one of those people who count cards in Vegas!”

Hazel stood up. “Ainsel?”

He nodded. “And by the way, Hazel, this was in your room .”

She recognized it with alarm. The spine read, FOLKLORE OF ENGLAND. It was the book she’d found in the trunk underneath her bed. Had she not understood its significance?

Her brother flipped it open. “There’s this story from Northumberland about a little kid who won’t go to bed. His mother tells him that if he stays up, the faeries are going to come and take him away. He doesn’t believe her, so he keeps on playing anyway as the hearth fire burns down. In time, a faerie does show up, a pretty little faerie kid who wants to play with him. The boy asks the faerie’s name, and she says, “Ainsel.” Then she asks the boy’s name and he says “ my ainsel” with a wicked grin.

“So they play a little more, and the boy tries to get the fire going. He stokes it, but one of the dying embers rolls out and burns the faerie child’s toe. She howls like crazy, and the huge, scary faerie mother barrels down the chimney. The boy hops into bed, but he can still hear the faerie mother demanding her child name the one who burned her. ‘My ainsel! My ainsel!’ the faerie girl howls. Apparently, ‘my ainsel’ is what ‘my own self’ sounds like when said with a Northumbrian accent, so hearing that, the faerie mother becomes very stern. ‘Well, then,’ she says, grabbing the faerie child by the ear and dragging her up into the chimney, ‘you’ve got no one but yourself to blame.’ And that’s the whole story. Ainsel. My ainsel. My own self.” Ben bowed exaggeratedly.

“But what does that mean?” Jack asked.

Myself. My own self.

“Give me a pen,” Hazel said, in a voice that trembled only slightly. She opened the book to a blank page in the back.

Ben got a Sharpie out of the kitchen junk drawer and handed it over. “What’s wrong?”

Taking the marker in her right hand, she wrote “seven years to pay your debts,” then switching hands, she wrote the words with her left.

It was the same handwriting she’d seen on the walnut messages, the same handwriting that had marked AINSEL on her wall. For a long moment, Hazel just stared at the page in front of her. The word scratched in mud on her wall wasn’t the name of a conspirator or enemy. It was a signature. Her own.

There was no one else. No shadowy figure pulling the strings, leaving clues, guiding her hand. Just herself, discovering the way to open the casket, figuring out the value of the sword she had. Just herself, realizing what the Alderking intended to do to Fairfold and trying to stop it.

My Ainsel. My own self.

A coded message, because the Alderking had forbidden her from revealing the nature of their bargain to her daylight self, so all she’d been able to do was leave a few desperate riddles and hints.

She recalled what Severin had said about being woken. He’d heard her voice, but by the time I came awake—truly awake—the sky was bright and you were gone . Of course she’d been gone, she’d had to rush to her bed and become day Hazel. She must have barely made it there—not with enough time to even clean the mud off her feet. Panicking, writing on the wall, dumping a book into the newly-empty trunk. She’d smashed the case with some plan in mind, some idea of bargaining with Severin or returning his sword to him. Whatever she’d intended, when he hadn’t woken, she must have realized that her ownership of Heartsworn would be discovered.

So she’d hidden it somewhere no one would think to look, somewhere the Alderking couldn’t find it, even if he found her.

And then—well, Hazel had stayed up through the whole next night, following Ben into the woods and being menaced by Severin. She’d only slept for a few moments, near dawn. Only long enough for her night self to write the note that Hazel had found in her book bag: FULL MOON OVERHEAD. BETTER GO STRAIGHT TO BED.

But Hazel hadn’t obeyed. She’d stayed awake throughout a whole other evening, giving night Hazel no time to retrieve the sword, no time for an alternate plan, no time for anything.