Holly Black - The Darkest Part of the Forest

“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 the 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.