CHAPTER 6   

During those heady, endless afternoons when Hazel and Ben had roamed the countryside, playing at quests and hunting real danger alike, Ben spun tales about how they were going to wake the prince. Ben told Hazel she might wake him by kissing the glass of his casket. It wasn’t an original idea. If someone dusted that case, they’d probably find thousands upon thousands of lip prints, generations of mouths pressed softly to where the horned boy slept. But they hadn’t known that then. In the stories, she would kiss the prince awake, and he would tell her that he could be freed only if his true love completed three quests—quests that usually included things like spotting the right kind of bird, picking all the blackberries on the bushes and then eating them, or jumping across the creek seven times without getting wet.

She’d never finish any of the quests Ben made up. She’d always leave a last berry on its branch or splash her foot on purpose, although she’d never have admitted that to her brother. She knew the quests weren’t real magic. But every time she got close to completion, her nerve failed.

Sometimes Ben told stories about how he would free the prince, with three magic words—words he’d never say out loud in front of Hazel. And in those stories, the prince was always villainous. Ben had to stop him before he destroyed Fairfold—and Ben did, through the power of love. Because, despite his cruel heart, when the prince saw how much Ben loved him, he spared the town and everyone in it.

Back then, it hadn’t seemed weird to Hazel to have the same imaginary boyfriend as her brother.

They were in love with him because he was a prince and a faerie and magical and you were supposed to love princes and faeries and magic people. They loved him the way they’d loved Beast the first time he swept Belle around the dance floor in her yellow dress. They loved him as they loved the Eleventh Doctor with his bow tie and his flippy hair and the Tenth Doctor with his mad laugh. They loved him as they loved lead singers of bands and actors in movies, loved him in such a way that their shared love brought them closer together.

It wasn’t like he was real. It wasn’t like he could love them back. It wasn’t like he’d ever have to choose.

Except now he’d woken. That changed everything.

All of that hung between Ben and Hazel as they walked back out through the doors of the school and toward his car.

And a tiny voice nagged at her, a voice that whispered it could be no coincidence she’d woken with mud on her feet the very morning after something had woken the prince. She held that secret hope to her chest, being very careful to let herself think about it for only a moment or two, the way one might look at something so precious as to be overwhelming.

“Wait!” a voice called from behind them.

Hazel turned. Jack was running down the steps. Rain spattered his T-shirt, turning the fabric spotty and dark. He’d left his jacket inside.

They went around the corner of the building together, ducking under an awning, so that teachers couldn’t see them, but it was dry enough to talk. They knew the spot because it was where all the janitors gathered to smoke, and if you didn’t report them, they’d overlook whatever shady thing you were engaged in. She wouldn’t have guessed that a good boy like Jack knew about the spot, but, clearly, she would have been wrong.

“We’re going to find him,” Ben said, grinning. He made it sound as though they were about to begin a game, but a very good game.

“Don’t,” Jack sighed, and looked out toward the football field. He seemed to be considering his next words carefully. “Whatever you think he is—he won’t be what you’re imagining.” Then he visibly steeled himself to grit out the next bit. “You can’t trust him. He’s not human.”

Silence stretched between them for a long moment. Ben raised his eyebrows.

Jack grimaced. “Yes, I know, okay. It’s ironic, my telling you that, since I’m not human, either.”

“So come with us,” Hazel said, offering up her umbrella. “Share your invaluable inhuman insights.”

Jack shook his head, smiling a little. “Mom would skin me alive if I missed my science quiz. You know how she is. Can’t this wait until after school?”

Besides mandatory family games on Sundays, his mother was the kind of parent who packed lunches in stacked bento boxes, who knew exactly how her kids were doing in every subject, who monitored television time to make sure homework got done. As far as she was concerned, Carter and Jack were headed for Ivy League colleges, ideally close enough to Fairfold that she could drive up and do their laundry on weekends. Nothing was supposed to get in the way of that.

If Jack cut school, he’d be grounded for as long as she could make it stick.

“This is the single greatest thing that has ever happened around here,” Ben said, rolling his eyes. “Who cares about a test? There will be a million more quizzes in your life.”

Jack tipped his head forward, highlighting the sharpness of his cheekbones and the silver in his eyes. And his voice, when he spoke, took on an unfamiliar, lilting cant. “There are many things I am forbidden from telling you, for I am bound by both promises and strictures. Three times I will warn you, and that’s all I am permitted, so heed me. Something even more dangerous than your prince walks in his shadow. Do not seek him out.”

“Jack?” Hazel said, stepping back from him, unnerved. Although she’d almost been killed by creatures like the water hag and the barghest, there was something about the elegant, riddling faeries that terrified her more. Right then, Jack sounded like one of them—and not at all like himself. “What do you mean, permitted? Why are you talking that way?”

“The Alderking hunts for the horned boy. The Alderking hunts for whosoever broke the curse. And he is not alone. If you help the boy, you risk much wrath. No prince is worth that price.”

Hazel thought of her hands, of the splinters, of the strangeness of her missing night and her dirt-covered legs.

“Wait, you’re saying that the Folk in the woods are trying to kill him?” Ben asked. “So you’ve known secrets about him this whole time and never bothered to tell us?”

“I’m telling you what I may,” Jack said. “Your prince may be in danger, but he’s also dangerous. Let it be.”

“But why? What did the prince do?” Hazel asked.

Jack shook his head. “That was your third warning, and I may say no more.”

Hazel turned to her brother. “Maybe—”

Ben seemed frustrated, but not astonished. This strange new Jack did not seem so strange or new to him. “I appreciate what you’re saying and all, Jack—we’ll be as careful as we can—but I want to try to find him. I want to help.”

“I expected nothing less.” Jack smiled and was himself again, at least on the surface. But that familiar grin sent a cold chill up Hazel’s spine. She’d always thought of Jack as a good boy, from an upstanding family, with good manners, one who made the occasional snarky remark and loved obscure biographies, but who was probably going to wind up a lawyer like his mom or a doctor like his father. She’d thought of his being a changeling as giving him an inner core of weirdness, sure, but in a town full of weirdness, it hadn’t seemed that strange. But as she stood in the rain, staring up at him, it suddenly seemed a whole lot stranger. “Fine,” Jack continued. “Try not to get killed by some handsome, paranoid elf who thinks he’s stuck in a ballad. I’ll try not to flunk out of physics.”

“How could you—why did you say all that?” Hazel asked him. “How could you possibly know any of it?”

“How do you think?” he asked her softly. With that, he turned and started back to the front entrance through the rain, bell ringing in the distance. Hazel watched the muscles move under his wet shirt.

Leaving her to puzzle over his words and try to figure out—

Oh. To try to figure out how he could know things that only his forest kin could possibly have told him. She watched Jack’s retreat into the school, wondering how she could have known him so long and not guessed. She’d thought he was happy in his human life. She’d thought he had only a human life.

“Come on,” Ben said to her, heading for the car. “Before someone catches us cutting class.”

Hazel slid into the passenger seat, folding her umbrella and chucking it into the back. Jack had unsettled her, but more than the danger he’d warned them about, she feared the possibility that they wouldn’t find any trace of the horned boy at all. That he would become one of those mysteries that never got solved, the kind that became a story people in Fairfold told one another and no one really believed. Remember when there was a beautiful, inhuman boy asleep in a glass coffin? they would say to one another and nod, remembering. Whatever became of him? Stories like that were will-o’-the-wisps, glowing in the deepest, darkest parts of forests, leading travelers farther and farther from safety, out toward an ever-moving mark.

Hazel had seen a surfeit of faerie awfulness, but she was still lured by stories of the beauty and wonder of the Folk. She’d hunted them and feared them, but, like the rest of Fairfold, she loved them, too.

“Has Jack ever talked to you that way before?” Hazel asked as Ben pulled out of the lot, wipers sending waves of water across the windshield. The sky was a glorious bright gray, so uniform that she couldn’t even see where one cloud ended and another began.

Ben glanced over at her. “Not exactly.”

“It was freaky.” She wasn’t sure what else to say. She was still puzzling through what had happened. He’d let his mask slip, apparently on purpose, and she felt stupid that she’d only just realized he’d been wearing a mask at all. “So he talks to them?”

Ben shrugged. “His other family, you mean? Yeah.”

Hazel didn’t want to admit how thrown she felt. If Jack was keeping secrets, they were his secrets to keep—and, she guessed, it was Ben’s job to keep Jack’s secrets, too. “Okay, if we’re supposed to find the prince against Jack’s good advice, where are we going to look?”

Ben shook his head, then grinned. “I have absolutely no idea. Where do you look for somebody who doesn’t even seem like he could be real?”

Hazel considered that, biting her lip. “Town would be strange. All the cars and the lights.”

“If he goes back to his own people, he’s dead, apparently.” Ben sighed and hunched over the wheel, maybe going through the same thoughts she’d had before, the same fear this would amount to nothing, that it was playing a child’s game they ought to have outgrown. Or maybe he was thinking about the ways magic had betrayed him before and was likely to do so again.

She was tempted once more to confess how she’d woken with mud on her feet and glass splinters in her hands, but now it seemed almost like bragging. And to explain why it wasn’t, she’d have to say too much.

In general, her family wasn’t very good at talking about important stuff. And of all of them, she was the least good at it. When she tried, it felt like all the chains on all her imagined safes and trunks started rattling. If she started to speak, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop.

“His own people are the ones who cursed him. He knows not to go back to Faerie,” Hazel said, watching the seesaw of the wipers. The familiar thrill woke in her: the hunt, the planning, the discovery of a faerie lair, and the tracking of a monster. Hazel thought she’d given up her dreams of knighthood years ago, but maybe she hadn’t given them up quite as completely as she’d supposed.

Ben shrugged. “Okay. But then where?”

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself in the place of the horned boy, rousing from long dreams, not remembering where she was at first. He’d panic, slapping his hands against the inside of the glass case. Relief would flood him as he realized jagged pieces of it were missing, the glass smashed. Blinking into the leafy dark and with whatever memories he had from before the curse pounding in his head. But after that…

“I’d want food,” she said. “I’d be super hungry, not eating for decades. Even if I didn’t need it, I’d want it.”

“He’s not like us.”

“Jack’s like us,” Hazel said, hoping it was true. “And he’s like Jack.”

Ben blew out a long breath. “Yeah, okay. But you’re not going to go through the McDonald’s drive-through. You don’t have any cash. So what do you eat?”

“I’d forage for chestnuts.” Hazel had bought a book identifying edible plants years ago during the library’s get-rid-of-everything-ancient-or-tattered-or-oddly-sticky sale for twenty-five cents. With it, she and Ben had managed not to poison each other while gathering up a whole lot of dandelion leaves and wild onions and other edible plants. “But he’d have to roast them. Bird eggs would be good eating, although they’d be hard to come by this late in the year.”

Ben nodded, clearly deep in thought. He steered the car toward the part of the wood where the horned boy had slept. “Or he could look for a hazelnut tree. You know, your namesake nut.”

Hazel snorted, but there was a place she’d gathered hazelnuts before the worms could eat them. She remembered leaving them on a rock to dry in the sun. “I have an idea.”

They parked by Wight Lake and walked from there. A hazelnut tree grew not far from the remains of an old stone building, now overgrown with vines. It was about a quarter mile into the woods, two miles from the glass coffin, and such a perfect place to hole up that her skin shivered with the possibility that she might be right.

The rain was still coming down hard, although the canopy of leaves stemmed the worst of it. Hazel was glad of her wellies while stomping through the mud and slick moss. She and Ben climbed over fallen and desiccated trunks of trees, past brambles and branches that snagged on their clothes. Past buckthorn and privet; past trout lily, closed up tight, and clumps of moonseed, its wide green leaves collecting water; past carrion flower, with Sputnik-shaped blooms bowed by the wind; past wisteria and bee balm; past jewelweed and milkweed and tufted knotweed; past dame’s rocket and creeping jenny and maidenhair ferns in profusion. She used her umbrella as much to knock vines out of her way as to keep dry.

Then the stone building came into view, covered with ivy. Its roof had caved in years ago, and although rusted-out hinges held a strip of weather-beaten wood along one edge of the frame, the rest of the door was gone. Ben ran ahead of Hazel, and as he did, she slowed her step.

Her hand went to her side automatically.

Ben looked back at her, frowning. “What are you doing?”

Hazel shrugged. She’d been reaching for something—her belt? her pocket?—but there was nothing there.

“Going for your sidearm?” Ben asked, laughed, and kept on going.

Hazel had no more known what it was, exactly, that made her pause than she’d known what she’d been reaching for. But she thought about Jack telling them to be careful, about that curdled milk slopping into the bowl, about the note in the pocket of Ben’s jacket, and about the memory of hunting faeries. With all that in her head, she closed her umbrella carefully.

Ben ducked through the doorway and then darted back out a minute later, a wondrous smile on his face. “You were right. I think you were right!”

Hazel followed her brother into the house. She’d been in the old stone building before with Ben, many years ago, when they’d been pretending to be witches and wizards just out of Hogwarts, cooking up cauldrons of weeds with a pail and some water. Rain drizzled through the remains of the roof. A weather-beaten table, gray and termite-eaten, was pressed against one of the stone walls.

On top of it were the skins of three persimmons, ripped open and scraped clean, the heady, spicy smell of them heavy in the air. A handful of bruised herbs rested nearby, of which Hazel recognized only mint. Tiny black elderberries and several chanterelles were scattered over the wood, like beads dropped from a necklace.

And beside all that was a knife, one with a handle of bone and a twisting blade of some golden metal. It reminded her of the sword she’d found when she was a kid.

“Shit,” Hazel said, reaching toward it, stopping before her fingers touched the knife. She looked at Ben. He was grinning in a crazy, awed way.

“He was really here,” she said.

“Well, he’s got to come back for that, right?” Ben said. “If we wait, we’ll catch him when he does.”

Hazel nodded, feeling giddy. She found an area by the remains of the hearth and perched there while Ben leaned against a wall. After a few minutes the cold stone had numbed her butt. She watched water drizzling into a growing puddle near the empty hole of a window and tried to calm her nerves.

“You know how they say that once you eat faerie food, nothing else will satisfy you?” Ben asked suddenly.

“Sure,” Hazel said, thinking of the pile of berries on the table.

“I wonder if Fairfold is like that. I wonder if I’d ever be happy somewhere else. Or if you would. I wonder if we’re ruined for other places.”

Her heart skipped a beat. He never talked about college, hadn’t gotten any brochures in the mail. Hazel had no idea where he was headed after he graduated next year. “If you go away and don’t like it, you can always come back,” she said. “Mom and Dad did.”

He made a face. “I’d really rather not turn into our parents. I keep hoping I’ll meet someone with an awesome life so I can just slip into it.”

Hazel remembered how a trick of the light had made it seem like she could see through him the night he came back from his last date. She wondered if that was more true than she’d imagined.

“The city’s a lot like the deep, dark fairy-tale woods of Fairfold, right?” Ben went on. “In the movies, the city’s where all the stories happen. It’s the place people go to be transformed. Where people go to start over. I figure I can be anyone there. Maybe even someone normal.”

Hazel thought of what her parents said about normal. And she thought about the fact that he was telling her this while out in the middle of the forest, looking for a lost elf prince. If normal was what he was trying for, he was going to have to try a lot harder.

Outside, the wind whipped against the trees. Hazel heard faint strains of music.

“Do you hear that?” she asked him.

Ben peered out in the direction she was looking. “Full moon tomorrow night.”

Growing up in Fairfold, everyone knew to stay out of the forest on full-moon nights—and, to be on the safe side, on the nights surrounding them. That was when the Alderking had his revel, and every nixie, pixie, and sprite, every hobgoblin, water hag, phooka, and tree spirit would come from near and far to dance their circle dances and feast until dawn.

Unless the Alderking was too busy hunting the horned boy to have his party. Maybe those weren’t the sounds of revelers, but the sounds of hunters.

They sat there for two hours in the cold drizzle, waiting. Eventually, the music faded away.

Ben yawned, then ran his fingers through rain-soaked ginger hair. His freckles stood out against his cold, pale skin. “I don’t think he’s coming back. So what do we do now?”

“We could leave him something,” Hazel said after a moment’s considering. “We could get him food and—I don’t know—some clothes. Show him we’re worth trusting.”

Ben snorted. “I guess. I mean, I don’t know if I’d prefer sweats to an embroidered doublet, no matter how long I’d been in it. But anything we could do to make him less freaked out would be good. To show we’re friendly weirdos, not dangerous ones.”

“You think he’s freaked out?” Hazel pushed herself up and started to walk toward the doorway. She looked back at her brother, still leaning against the rough stone wall, moss clinging to it like shadows.

“I would be,” he said.

Hazel raised an eyebrow at him. “I thought he wasn’t like us.”

Ben shook his head, then grinned at her. “Let’s just go get the stuff.”

Hazel ripped a piece of lined paper out of her book bag and wrote out a note with a ballpoint pen:

Hi, we’re Hazel and Ben. We’ll be back soon with some food for you and other stuff. It’s yours if you want it. We’re not asking for anything in return. We’re just glad you’re finally awake.

They were quiet on the way back, Hazel making a mental list of what they could pack: three cheddar-and-mustard sandwiches with relish, wrapped in tinfoil; a can of Coke; a big mason jar of coffee, with lots of milk and sugar in it; and two kale-granola-raisin bars. She thought there might be an old sleeping bag in the back of the attic; if it wasn’t too musty and moth-eaten, he could use that, too. Ben could give up some clothes, and Dad had a pair of old army boots he wouldn’t miss.

It all seemed like a poor offering for a lost prince of Faerie, but what else could they do?

Ben pulled the Volkswagen into their driveway. It was just after three thirty and Jack sat on the front stoop. He raised a hand in salute. The rain had stopped, but the lawn was still covered in shimmering beads of water.

Ben rolled down the window. “What are you doing here?” he called. “What happened to being forbidden from helping?”

“Not helping, just warning,” Jack said, eyes flashing silver, bright against his dark skin and darker hair. “I might come over on a normal day, so I’ve decided to pretend this day is normal.”

Hazel got out of the car.

“So did you find anything?” Jack asked, clearly expecting them to say they hadn’t.

Ben shrugged. “Maybe.”

“I just wanted you to understand,” Jack said, glancing in her direction to make it clear he was speaking to both of them. “His waking was no accident. And whatever happens next will be no accident, either.”

“Whatever,” Ben said, walking toward the house. “We get it, okay? Gloom and also doom.” The screen door banged behind him.

“What’s with him?” Jack asked.

“He’s in love,” Hazel said, forcing a smile, because she was surprised at Ben’s indifference to the warnings, too.

“You all are,” said Jack softly, as though speaking to himself. “The whole town’s in love.”

Hazel sighed. “Come on in. Help me make sandwiches. I’ll make you one, too.”

He did. He sliced cheddar and she spread mustard, while Ben went through his clothes to find some stuff he thought might fit the horned boy. He brought down a gray hoodie, a pair of jeans, and two pairs of black boxers. He held up each for inspection. Hazel found the sleeping bag and boots in the attic and shook out any spiders on the lawn. They brewed fresh coffee and packed some in a large mason jar mixed with cream and sugar for the horned boy and in smaller jars for themselves. Ben found a basket to put all that in, along with the kale-granola-raisin breakfast bars, the soda, a pack of matches that Jack helpfully wrapped in plastic, and a bag of pretzels.

When the three of them got to the stone cabin, the golden knife was no longer lying on the table. The horned boy had come and gone again.

And he’d taken their note with him.