by Holly Black
When he’d gone to sleep, the window had been shut.
He remembered feeling that way in the old days, when he and Hazel were out in the woods, the hairs on the back of his neck rising to alert him that even if he couldn’t see a monster, in all likelihood, a monster could see him.
Then he heard a voice near his ear. “Benjamin Evans.”
Struggling to sit up, Ben saw the boy standing by the bed, illuminated by the full moon. A boy wearing his clothes. For a moment Ben just blinked. The hood of the sweatshirt shadowed the boy’s face, but he knew the garment. He’d left it in the woods, folded up on a worn wooden table for an elf prince to find.
“Hi,” Ben squeaked, barely getting the word out. He knew he had to do better than that. He had to say something that showed he wasn’t afraid, although he was. “Decided to kill me after all?”
Severin pushed back the hood. Sable hair curled around his cheeks, and Ben saw the very points of his horns beneath his ears. His expression was impossible to read.
He was crushingly, heart-stoppingly beautiful. And he belonged to Hazel. It was Hazel who’d freed the prince, so he was fated to love her. Hazel, whom he’d kissed. Probably his first kiss in a century. Hazel might not love him back right away, but she’d come around in the end. That was how fairy tales worked.
Ben was a sap. Ben would have loved him instantly.
“I have come to tell you a story,” said Severin, and his voice was soft. “You’ve told me so many. My turn for a tale.”
“Why?” Ben asked, still not really able to process the fact that Severin was there, in his bedroom. “What do you want?”
Even without the lights on, he was aware of the silly posters on his wall, the jeans on his floor where he’d kicked them off and never bothered to pick them up. His hamper was full of dirty clothes, and beside his dresser, tacked to a corkboard, was a tattered photograph of the horned boy, asleep. Everything about his room was embarrassing.
“What do I want? Many things. But for now, only to talk,” Severin said. “I find your voice to be… steadying. Let us discuss sisters.”
“Sisters,” Ben echoed. “You want me to tell you about Hazel?”
“You misunderstand me,” said Severin. “I wish for you only to listen.”
Ben remembered what Severin had said just before he’d kissed Hazel. The words felt as though they were burned on his skin. I know every one of your secrets. I know all of your dreams.
If he knew Hazel’s secrets, then certainly he knew Ben’s even better. It was Ben who’d gone out to the coffin nearly every day, Ben who’d talked to the boy in the coffin like he was talking out loud to himself. He’d confessed to Severin that he’d drank too much cheap André champagne last New Year’s Eve and vomited in the bushes outside Namiya’s party; he’d admitted to Severin exactly how dangerously good it felt the very first time a boy had touched him; he’d explained who at school hated each other and who pretended to hate each other but really didn’t. Maybe Hazel was right not to tell Ben anything important.
Severin took a breath and started to speak. “It is mostly solitary fey who dwell in deep forests like those that surround Fairfold, and solitary fey are not well liked by the trooping gentry from faerie courts. They are too wild, too ugly, their violence too unrefined.”
“Solitary fey?” Ben asked, trying to keep up.
“Tricksy phookas. Green ladies who will strip a man’s flesh from his bones if he steps into the wrong bog,” Severin said. “Hollow-backed women who inspire artists to heights of creativity and depths of despair. Trow men, with long hairy tails and large appetites. Prankish goblins; homely hobs; pixies with their iridescent, stained-glass wings; and all the rest. Those of us who make our homes in the wild or at a mortal hearth. Those who do not live at courts, who do not play at kings and queens and pages. Those who are not gentry like my father.”
“Oh.” The word mortal struck Ben powerfully. It was such an odd, old-fashioned word. Mortal things were things that died.
Severin brought his fingers to Ben’s cheek, cool against hot skin. The faint smell of dirt and greenery came to him as Severin’s fingers lifted a piece of hair and tucked it behind Ben’s ear.
Ben’s whole body seemed to seize up at the touch.
Severin went on, hand moving away, leaving Ben to wonder what the touch had meant, if it had meant anything at all. Severin’s eyes seemed brighter than ever, shining with intensity. “Sorrel, my sister, was born to a court lady before our father’s exile. Father stole her away with him when he fled, along with seven magical blades—including the one I seek—and the smith who forged them, a creature named Grimsen, who could craft anything from metal. Father came to Fairfold with his retinue and called himself the Alderking, for the alder tree is known as the king of the woods. But Alderking has a more sinister meaning, too. Perhaps you’ve heard this before: Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an! Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!”
Ben shook his head. It sounded like German.
Severin moved away from Ben, away from the bed. He leaned against the windowsill, shoulders against the glass. Abruptly, Ben felt as though he could breathe again.
His lips were dry and he licked them.
“My father, my father, he grabs me fast. For sorely the Alderking has hurt me at last.” Severin’s hands clenched into fists, rings still glimmering on the fingers, contrasting with the shabbiness of the borrowed jeans and hoodie. “It’s one of your human poets, writing about a man whose child dies in his arms because of the Alderking. Pain is the Alderking’s meat, and suffering, his drink. He ruled over the solitary fey here in Fairfold and even got a son on one of them.
“A son who looked enough like his father’s people, although the horns that rose from his brow were all his mother’s. My mother was one of those wild fey—a phooka. Which means that though my father’s blood runs through my veins, I am no true heir for him. I am too much made of trees and leaves and open air. Maybe if my father liked me better, it would have spared my mother.”
The horned boy really was a prince, Ben thought. He recalled what Severin had said about his mother before, about her being cut down in front of him. Because of his father?
Severin kept talking. He was a good storyteller, the cadences of his voice rising and falling like the movements of a song. “Though I wanted our father’s approval, and Sorrel cared nothing for it, he favored her all the same. I would listen as he spoke of his plans to defeat the queen, Silarial, who’d exiled him, for neither his ambition nor his rage had cooled with time. My sister would tell him that fate had brought him to this place and he should delight in it. She loved the woods and she loved the town. Which was well enough until she also fell in love with a mortal boy.”
The way Severin said the words, he made it sound as though his sister had come down with some kind of deadly disease.
“That’s bad, then?” Ben asked. He wished Severin would come back to the bed, and then he didn’t. He felt like an idiot.
The elf’s eyebrows rose. “To my father? There was little worse she could have done.”
“And you agreed with him?” Ben wondered just how loathsome he was to Severin.
“Oh, I did. The boy was called Johannes Ermann, pale-haired and broad-shouldered, who liked to take long walks through the woods, daydreaming and composing odes to dank ponds and patches of wildflowers, which he would recite to anyone who’d listen. I didn’t like him much at all,” Severin said. “In fact, I killed him.”
Ben couldn’t help it; he laughed out loud. It was right out of a fairy tale, crazy and terrifying.
Severin grinned, as though he was a little amused, too. Maybe at Ben’s reaction, maybe in recalling how funny the murder had been. His smile made him even more beautiful, so beautiful that it was suddenly easy to remember that he wasn’t human and that Ben would be very foolish to imagine he was likely to behave like a human.
“I didn’t kill him right away; perhaps if I had, things would have gone differently. My si
ster became his wife, putting aside gowns woven from moonbeams, putting aside the wild pleasures of the woods. She allowed herself to be clad in a heavy, old-fashioned, ill-fitting silk dress from Germany, lent to her by the groom’s mother, and to go to one of their churches and make their vows.”
Ben tried to imagine it. Whispering through the glass of the coffin had felt a bit like screaming to a musician up onstage, like swooning over movie stars. But what happened if you were chosen from the crowd? What happened if you were summoned to the after-party? He wondered whether that was how Johannes had felt when he brought a faerie wife home.
“My father allowed Sorrel to marry only if her new husband would submit to a geas. Do you know what that is?”
Ben didn’t. “Like a quest?”
Severin shook his head. “It’s a taboo, a prohibition. A thing you must or must not do. My father said that if my sister wept three times because of Johannes, he would never see her again. Johannes, besotted, agreed.
“Sorrel was a dutiful wife, making supper and mending clothes, tending to a garden and attending church on Sundays. She tried to create a welcoming home for her husband, but her strangeness was obvious, no matter how she tried to fit in. She stitched fanciful roses and leaves onto the cuffs of a sober coat. She made a pet of a blue jay. She added herbs to her jams and jellies as she sang bawdy songs. But she adored Fairfold—and that was what I never understood. No matter that the townsfolk looked at her askance, she loved them. She loved to play games with the children, loved to laugh at the gossip. And, for all I sneered at him, she loved Johannes.
“You must understand. We do not love as you do—once won, our love can be terrifyingly constant. After they were married, Johannes changed toward her. He became more afraid of her strangeness, no matter that she remained his loyal wife.”
“So he was a jerk?” Ben asked, propping himself higher against his headboard. There was something disturbingly intimate about sitting in bed and talking about this stuff, even if the story ended in tragedy. “Was she sorry she married him?”
“We love until we do not. For us, love doesn’t fade gradually. It snaps like a branch bent too far.”
To Ben, love was the flame in which he wanted to be reborn. He wanted to be remade by it. He understood why Sorrel had run away to start over. And for the first time, he understood what a bad plan it was. “Is that what happened?”
“I fear not.” Severin rose and turned a little, fingers against the window, profile blurred in the moonlight. Ben suspected that Severin didn’t want him watching his expression shift as he spoke. “Maybe Johannes didn’t remember the geas or didn’t consider the consequences, but my sister wept because of him. The first time, it was because Johannes reprimanded her in public for her wildness. The second time she wept was because he remonstrated her for not keeping the Sabbath. The third time she wept, it was because he struck her. There would be no fourth.”
“Of the seven magical swords my father brought from the Court in the East, two were special. Heartseeker and Heartsworn, they were called. Heartseeker never missed its mark. Heartsworn could cut through anything, from rock to metal to bone. My father gave me Heartsworn and told me to kill Johannes. I was angry enough and I despised humans enough and I wished to please my father badly enough. While Sorrel was out gathering herbs, I went to her house and struck Johannes down.”
“You killed him? In cold blood?” It was a nightmare story, the kind that kept kids up, listening for movements in the dark.
“His blood was hot enough,” Severin said, looking out into the forest. “And mine, too. I was angry that I didn’t consider what Sorrel would feel.”
“Because she was still in love with him, right? Her feelings hadn’t snapped like a branch or whatever yet.”
The elf shook his head. “I suppose that was an insufferable thing to say. Maybe we don’t love any differently than you do, maybe everyone loves until they don’t—or maybe everyone loves differently, humans and faeries alike. Forgive me. I grew up on my father’s boasting about the superiority of my people, and although I have listened to your kind for decades upon decades, it still hasn’t chased out all my worst habits of presumption.”
Ben, who’d been perfectly serious when he’d asked about Sorrel’s feelings changing, was mortified that Severin thought he’d been implying anything else. “No, I—”
“I didn’t understand,” Severin said. “I thought because Johannes was human, his life didn’t matter. How could his death matter? It seemed ridiculous that my sister could love such a creature, no less be hurt by him. If he wasn’t good to her, why not merely get another? I had no idea how long a single day could be. I didn’t know that the span of a single mortal life would seem interminable as I lay unmoving in that case. I didn’t know.”
Without quite deciding to do so, Ben slid off the bed. Although it was clearly the worst idea in the world and he thought he might faint or die, Ben put his hand on Severin’s back, feeling the corded muscles under his fingers, the brush of silken hair at the nape of the boy’s neck.
Severin tensed and then let out a long, shuddering sigh. “Maybe envy moved my hand, for Sorrel was my confidante at court. She took my side against our father. She made up silly songs for me when I was sad. Without her, I was alone and I wanted her back. We are all capable of great self-deception when it serves us.”
Ben was still touching him, not sure what to do with his hand—it seemed bizarre to leave it where it was, but incalculably daring to move it over to Severin’s shoulder or down to his chest. Ben inhaled the crushed-grass smell of him, took in the warmth of his skin.
Once, Ben had brought a boy out to Severin’s casket and made out with him on top of it, pretending it was the horned boy he was kissing.
He’d told Severin that, too. And it wasn’t even the most humiliating thing he’d told him. Ben didn’t move his hand.
After a moment, Severin spoke again. “She grieved, endlessly did she grieve for her dead husband. She abandoned her home, lying in a patch of moss in the woods and weeping. So terrible was her grief that beetles and birds, mice and stags, all wept with her, rotting away to fur and bone in their misery. Rocks and trees wept with her, cracking and shedding leaves. I went to her and begged her to put aside her sorrow, but she hated me for what I had done and would not. I threw away Heartsworn and begged her to revenge herself on me, but she would not listen even to that. Her grief transformed her. She became a monster, a nightmare creature of grief and sorrow, all because of me.”
“Your sister is… the monster?” Ben stammered.
“Yes,” Severin said. “The creature loosed on your town was once my sister. That’s the story I came to tell you. And you must understand that if I can save her, I will. But you should also understand the danger you’re in.”
Ben understood about sisters. And he understood about stories. But he didn’t understand what he’d done to merit being told this one.
“So you came to warn me?”
“When I heard your voice that night, I recognized it instantly. It’s a voice I know better than I know my own. For countless years, I have not spoken aloud. Now I can. It’s you I would speak with. You to whom I owe a great debt.”
“A debt?” He felt like a particularly stupid parrot, repeating the last thing Severin said.
“You know, it nearly drove me mad to listen to so many voices, a cacophony of sound, of words I didn’t know piling up, of time slipping in skips and jumps. And then you, speaking to me—to me. I started to know the length of a day in the interval between your visits.”
The blush started on Ben’s skin. It was all too much. He realized that Severin was going to hurt him worse than he’d ever been hurt before, because Ben had already set the blade to his chest, had already wrapped this stranger’s hand around the hilt.
He loved him and he barely knew him.
Severin told him the rest, how his father was troubled by Sorrel’s monstrous form, but yearned to find a way to harness her
power. How he ordered Grimsen to craft a casket that would hold her until he could find a way to have control of her. Severin described the making of the casket, the forging of the metal frame from blood-quenched iron, and the crystal spun from tears. And he explained how he stood against his father, refusing to let the Alderking lock her away. The Alderking had railed at him, telling him that he wished Severin and Sorrel had never been birthed, swearing that should he beget another child, he would cut its throat rather than have it grow to betray him as they had. Severin would not back down, no matter how his father shouted. He would not let him put his sister in the casket.
But then Alderking drew his magical sword, Heartseeker, the blade that could never miss. And since Severin had thrown Heartsworn away, he was screwed. He got trapped in the casket instead of her, and there he remained until Ben’s sister effected his release.
Ben tried to focus on the story, tried to focus on the words and figure out what it all meant, but all he could think of was how he was lost.
CHAPTER 16
Wake up,” Jack was saying, his voice floating somewhere above Hazel, his hand on her cheek. He sounded hoarse, as though he’d been shouting. “Please, please, please. Please, wake up.”
She struggled to open her eyes. It was as though they had been glued shut. When she finally managed to blink, she found Jack looming over her, looking angrier than she’d ever seen him. He punched the ground and closed his eyes for a long moment, drawing breath.
“What were you thinking?” he shouted, voice echoing off the trees. It was then Hazel realized that they were still in the forest, that there was a bed of grass and moss underneath her, and that the sky overhead was the pale gray of dawn.
She tried to sit up, but she was too dizzy. “I don’t know,” she said miserably. “I was—I don’t know. I’m sorry. What—what happened?”
“You mean before or after you tried to drown yourself in an underground lake?” Jack paced the carpet of pine needles, resting his head against the trunk of a tree and looking up at the clouds as though he couldn’t quite believe he’d been saddled with such an enormous burden. “Or how about how you recited prime numbers instead of speaking words? Or how you threatened some hulking, hairy grim with a knight’s sword, a sword, by the way, that I have literally no idea how you swindled away from him? Or how you passed out and I couldn’t wake you up and I was really worried, because there’s a lot of that going around right now?”