CHAPTER 22   

Hazel woke up in an unfamiliar place, the air redolent with honeysuckle and carrying the distant playing of a harp. She was lying in a large, elaborate, carved bed with a silvery gray blanket over her that felt lighter than silk, but was warmer than goose down. She wanted to burrow back down in the coverlets and go on sleeping, although she knew there was some reason why she shouldn’t.

She turned over and saw Jack, sitting so that he was in profile. He was in a tipped-back chair, balancing it with a single booted foot against the wall. He had a book open on his lap, but he didn’t seem to be turning the pages. There was something in the way the soft light of the candles resting beside him defined the planes of his face, something in the heavy lash of his eye and the softness of his mouth that was both familiar and endlessly strange in its beauty.

Hazel realized that as many times as she’d seen Jack before, she’d never really got to look at him with night Hazel’s eyes.

Who was she? Hazel wondered. Knowing what she did, having done what she had done? Was she enough of the Hazel Evans he’d liked? Was she even a Hazel Evans she herself could like?

Once her service to the Alderking was complete, if he hadn’t tricked her into becoming his eternal servant or killed her outright, she’d assumed he’d take back all her memories of her time in his court. She’d thought of her night self as expendable, thought of what she’d endured as being scars that would simply, one day, vanish.

Now she knew they wouldn’t. But the Alderking had left her with talents, too. And knowledge.

She’d heard the story of how Jack came be a changeling so many times as her daylight self, but as she watched him, she realized she’d heard it in the faerie court, too. She’d heard his elf mother tell it, explaining how she’d chosen Carter because he was such a beautiful child, warm and sweet and laughing in her arms. Telling of the horror of the hot iron scorching Jack’s skin, the smell of burning flesh and the howl he’d given up, so anguished that a banshee would despair to hear it. How the mortals were indifferent to his pain and kept him for spite, for a curiosity to show off to their friends, how she feared they would make him the servant of their own son. Hazel had heard stories of the way the hobs would peer in the windows, making sure he was safe, how they would pile up acorns and chestnuts outside in case he got hungry at night, how they would play with him in the garden when his human mother’s back was turned and pinch Carter until he cried.

Thinking of that, Hazel took a breath and got ready to turn over and speak, when she heard someone come into the room.

“I have sent you a dozen messages,” Eolanthe said. “You have deigned to reply to none.”

“I’ve been here.” Jack closed the book and set it down beside the candles. “You knew I was here. You could have come to speak with me anytime—as you have.”

Hazel slitted her eyes to see the faerie woman, standing near the earthen wall.

“I understand your anger over my bargain with the Alderking, but you don’t see why it was necessary—”

“What makes you think that?” Jack asked. There was a warning in his voice.

Hazel knew that it was a bad thing to listen as she was, to pretend she was asleep and let them talk in front of her. But it seemed awful to sit up and admit she was awake, as though she was accusing them of saying something they wanted kept secret, when they were just talking.

Indecision kept her quiet too long, because once Hazel heard that tone in Jack’s voice, she knew they were going to discuss secrets.

“I wondered when you hesitated during your little speech before the Alderking—as though there was something you thought you might say, but then thought better of it,” Eolanthe told him.

“When I wondered if you had Heartsworn, it got me thinking about all the things that didn’t add up.”

“Yes, you thought I was the architect of all this. You were wrong, but you were right to guess I had a plan. Once I found out that Heartsworn was discovered, I thought that you and I might bide our time and wait for them to kill one another.” There was a soft sound of fabric, as though she was moving around the room. “If Severin and the Alderking were both dead, then there would be only one person poised to inherit. If you just hadn’t spoken when you had, if he had fought his son for a few more minutes, things might be very different. Don’t you want to ask me what I mean?”

“I do not,” he said.

“Are you afraid I would tell you who your—”

“I said I wasn’t asking you,” Jack interrupted her. “And I’m not. If you do tell me, I’ll pretend you didn’t.”

“Then I don’t need to tell you,” she said. “You already know.”

For a long moment, he didn’t speak.

“It is your gift,” she said, “to guess what is in another’s heart. Severin would need someone with your gift, someone by his side who knows the mortal world as you do. You need not hide any longer.”

“Nothing has changed,” he said. “I’m going home now—to my human home, to be with my human family. I don’t care who my father was.”

Hazel heard the rustle of fabric. “They will never really love you. They will always fear you.”

“It doesn’t matter. Let me have this time being human,” he said. “Over and over you tell me that I will never be mortal, that the span of one human life is so short as to mean nothing. Fine, then let me have my human life. Let all the mortals I love die and blow away to dust. Let me have Nia for a mother and Charles for a father and Carter for my brother. Let me be Jack Gordon, and when I am done, when all is dust and ashes, I will return to you and learn how to be your son.”

She was quiet.

“Let me have this, Mother, because once they are dead, I can never have it again.” In his voice, Hazel heard the eerie agelessness she’d associated with Severin and the Alderking. He was one of them, eternal and inhuman. But he was going to stay in her world a little longer.

“Go,” she said finally. “Be Jack Gordon. But mortality is a bitter draught.”

“And yet I would have the full measure,” he told her.

Hazel kept her eyes closed, trying to control her breathing, sure one of them would discover her deception. But after a few minutes of steady inhaling and exhaling, she was asleep again.

The next time she woke, it was Ben who was beside her, sitting on the other side of the bed, propped up by more of the soft pillows she’d been snuggling with. One of his hands was bandaged too heavily to use, but he was texting with the other.

She forced herself to shift into a sitting position and groaned.

“Is this Faerieland?” Hazel asked him muzzily.

“Maybe,” Ben said. “If there is such a place. I mean, if we all occupy the same dimensional space, then, technically, we’re always in Faerieland. But the jury’s still out on that.”

She ignored the second part of his statement to focus on the first. “So you’re texting in Faerieland. Who are you texting? What network are you even on?”

He made a face at her. “Mom and Dad. Mom freaked out, like everyone else at the Gordons’, and it sounds like half the town went to the big old church on Main Street with all the protections carved into the foundation. They locked themselves in with charms and canned food and whatnot. Mom thought we’d go there, too, but obviously we didn’t, because we are badasses. Dad drove down to look for us. I told her that you’d be home tonight, if you’re feeling up to it. You think you’re going to feel up to it?”

“Me?” Hazel stretched. “Where’s Jack?”

“He had to go take some more of Sorrel’s blood to the hospital. He had a hell of a time convincing them it was the antidote, but once he did and it started working, they wanted more. Sorrel let Severin cut her with Heartsworn and bled into a vial.”

“Is she still…?”

“A giant, creepy tree monster?” He mimed branches with his fingers, reaching for Hazel. “Oh yeah. Her blood was a bright green, too. But she spoke to us and she sounded—I don’t know—nice. The way Severin described her.”

Hazel yawned. For the first time, she really took in the room. The rug on the floor had an intricate pattern that seemed to shift the more she looked at it, green lines coiling like vipers and making her dizzy. She blinked and turned her attention to a sideboard carved with oak leaves and topped with a copper bowl. Beside it rested three glass decanters with different liquids in them and a goblet.

There was a large bench covered in thick green velvet with glimmering gold tacks along the edge of the upholstery set near a fireplace, where a cheery fire was burning. Atop it were folded clothes.

“So, without you saying anything about dimensions, where are we?” Hazel asked.

“In the palace of the Alderking.” Ben put down his phone and slid out of bed. He was wearing new clothes—black jeans and a rusty orange sweater the color of his hair, with a black unicorn rearing up across the front. Hazel recognized it as a purchase he’d been particularly proud of, but one she was pretty sure he hadn’t had with him the day before. There hadn’t been any reason to pack overnight bags.

He followed her gaze, looking down at his sweater. “Severin commanded a hob to go to our house and get some stuff. It picked up some clothes for you and… more stuff for me.”

Ben waited, as though expecting her to react.

Hazel didn’t like where this was going. “Does this have something to do with your telling Mom and Dad that I’d be coming home tonight, but not saying anything about yourself?”

He nodded. “I’m staying with the faeries.”

Hazel scrambled out from under the covers. Whatever had to be done, whoever had to be fought, she’d do it. She might not have Heartsworn, but she’d faced worse odds. “What did they promise you? What did you bargain for?”

Ben shook his head. “It’s not like that.”

“What is it like? Is this because of Severin?”

Ben winced. “It’s not about him. Or at least mostly it’s not about him.” His whole face blushed a deep, ridiculous red.

“He looooooves you,” Hazel crowed, dizzy with relief at being alive. “He told you he loooooooved you in front of everyone.”

“Hazel,” he moaned. It was fun to torture her brother. It made her feel like she was still herself.

She grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking him, and they fell back together on the bed, laughing.

“You better have kissed him! You better have kissed him so hard that he just about choked on your tongue. And if not, you better go kiss him like that right now.”

“Shut up.” Ben tried to pretend he wasn’t holding back a smile. “Oh my god. That’s so disgusting.”

Hazel shoved him deeper into the mattress. “But none of this explains why you’re not coming home.”

Ben sighed. “I can’t just go around with this ability to play music inside me like some unexploded bomb. I need to learn what it is and how to control it. And I’m not going to be able to learn that in the human world. I have to learn it here.”

“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 love 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 oversize 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 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.” Her parents might have been able to transform themselves, but they couldn’t transform her. She’d been too busy transforming herself.

“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.

He liked her. He liked her—or he had liked her daytime self. He liked her and she loved him. She loved him so much that it already hurt. It already felt like he’d broken her heart.

Anyone who offers up their heart on a silver platter deserves what they get.

Jack Gordon was a good boy, going to a good school far away from here. Going to have his normal, human life before he started his other, grander, immortal one.

“Hazel,” he said, jogging up to her after last period. They hadn’t spoken for three days, and she didn’t want him to know how glad she was to hear his voice. He looked different from the way he had before the defeat of the Alderking—his ears a bit more pointy, his face a bit thinner, his hair full of greenish shadows—but his smile was that same old smile, the one that twisted up her insides, the one that had never belonged to Carter, the one that was Jack’s and Jack’s alone. “Hey, wait up. I want to talk to you. I was wondering if you might like—”

Just talking made her want to smile. A jolt of happiness washed over her so intense that it was almost pain.

“I don’t think I can do this,” Hazel blurted out.

“Do what?” He looked puzzled.

She kept on going, not sure what to say next, but determined. “I’m not okay. As a person. I guess I am just starting to realize how not okay I am, you know? I keep remembering things I’ve done—and stuff that happened to me—and it all adds up to the fact that I am not someone that any normal person should have a relationship with.”

“Good thing I’m not exactly normal,” Jack said.

“I’m going to mess this up,” she told him. “I’ve never had a boyfriend before. I don’t usually do dates, no less second dates. I’m kind of a coward about love,” she continued. “I said I wished boys would show me some secret side of themselves, but you did and now all I want to do is run away.”

He reached out a hand and she took it, threading her fingers through his. She sucked in a breath, looking down at their twined fingers.

“What are you afraid of?” he asked.

“You,” she said. “Me.”

He nodded, as though that made perfect sense. Then, finally, he said, “I don’t want anyone normal. I don’t want anyone safe. I want you. I have loved you from almost the first moment I saw you, wild and fierce and brave, running through the woods, your lips stained purple from blackberry juice. I figured that just made me like everyone else loving you, but that didn’t keep me from doing it.”

A flush warmed her cheeks. “What about Amanda? You say you loved me from when you first saw me, but I thought she was the one you loved.”

Jack grinned, but then the smile left his face. “I’m a changeling, not quite one thing and not quite another, not fitting in anywhere. Amanda fits this world. I thought if she liked me, if she could like me, then it would mean something about where I fit. But she was afraid of me. People are, sometimes.”

“I’m not,” Hazel said, indignant. “I’m not afraid of that.”

“I know,” Jack said. “And I’m not afraid of your trying to figure out what it means to be your whole self, night and day together. I’m not afraid of things getting messy or messed up, because it’s us. There don’t have to be first dates and second dates. We’re not normal. We can do this any way you want. A relationship can be whatever you want it to be. We get to make this part up. We get to tell our own story.”

“How do we start?” Hazel said.

He looked down at her, lashes dusting his cheek when he blinked. “Any way you like. We could hang out after school. We could write each other long letters. You could send me on some kind of quest to win your favor.”

“Oh no,” she said, smiling at last, because he was her friend Jack, who had ridiculous cheekbones and ridiculous ideas. “If anyone is going on a quest, it’s going to be me.”

Jack grinned. “Well fine, then. I could send you out to win my favor. Possibly on a quest involving bringing a large mug of coffee and a doughnut. Or the wholesale slaughter of all my enemies. I haven’t decided which.”

“That doesn’t scare me. Not even a little. You know what else I’m not scared of?”

He shook his head.

“Come here,” she said, leaning back against the wall and pulling him with her, pressing her lips to his. He made a soft sound of surprise and then a sound that wasn’t surprise at all.

When she opened her locker to toss in her books before she headed for home, a walnut rolled out, bouncing twice on the floor. A walnut tied in silver string. She bent down to open it and found a scroll inside, made of thin and waxy paper. When she unrolled that, she found a message in her brother’s handwriting: Full moon is in three days’ time. Come to the revel. Not everything has to rhyme.

She smiled as her fist closed over the words.