A Dark and Starless Forest

by Sarah Hollowell

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Acknowledgments

  Escape to Another World

  Books Featuring LBGTQIA+ Voices

  About the Author

  Connect on Social Media

  Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Hollowell

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Cover illustration © 2021 by Kim Ekdahl

  Cover design by Mary Claire Cruz

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN: 978-0-358-42441-3

  eISBN 978-0-358-42496-3

  v1.0821

  For Mom and Dad and Aunt Teri, and

  all the stories you gave me

  1

  The snowdrops in the gardening book are mocking me. Their white blossoms hang from vibrant green stems, all huddled together in a bunch. Laughing at me, probably, as I try to defy nature.

  I press my hand into the patch of dirt cleared just for this test. It’s been baked by the high summer sun until it nearly radiates heat, and now I have to grow a winter flower out of it. The flower’s primary season is January to April—May at a stretch—and we are quite solidly in August. The snowdrops are all asleep and they don’t want to come back just because some sixteen-year-old alchemist asks them nicely.

  I wish Frank had given me any other task except for growing a real flower. Real is always so much harder. When I ask the earth to bring plants from my imagination into being, it responds eagerly, like we’re playing a game. But with anything real, it hesitates. It seems to purse its lips and look me up and down, and find me wanting.

  Wanting for what, I don’t know. I’ve read absolutely every book on gardening and botany that we have in the lake house. I know all about snowdrops. Galanthus nivalis. Incredibly common. Native to more places than I can name, but one of them is Indiana. I’ve seen them bloom here every winter. I know that this earth knows these flowers and can grow them.

  I sneak glances away from the book, toward my audience. “Audience” is a generous term, since that would imply more than a few of them were paying attention. Only Jane and London are actually watching, with London in Jane’s lap. Winnie’s lying on her stomach, too busy tearing blades of grass into pieces to look up. Brooke and Irene are having an animated conversation in sign language that I think is about a movie we watched recently, but it’s hard to tell from this angle. Violet’s reading while Olivia braids their hair, and Olivia’s hair is being braided by Elle.

  My siblings.

  Seven sisters and Violet, who came out as nonbinary after being with us for a year. Frank couldn’t exactly kick them out by that point. Wouldn’t have, I think. Irene is trans and that’s never been a problem, so Violet shouldn’t be either. Any gender welcome except male, because Frank thinks male alchemists are prone to either being less powerful or burning out faster or both.

  Frank’s my primary source of information on alchemists, so I can’t really say if he’s right or not. Considering how much he’s helped us all grow and learn to control our magic, I’d say he knows his stuff, but . . .

  I shift my eyes toward him. Frank’s a tall white man somewhere in his thirties or forties—he’s never said, and I’m not good at ages. His lean frame towers over all of us, and when we’re outside he wears reflective sunglasses that hide his green eyes. I can still always tell when he’s looking at me. His gaze has a weight to it. It settles onto my shoulders first, then worms its way up my spinal column into my brain until the world is both too fuzzy and too sharp.

  It’s not a good feeling.

  Frank’s pacing behind my siblings, holding the iPad he uses to take notes during tests. Chatter descends into whispers or dies altogether whenever he draws close, then rises as his pacing takes him away.

  He nods at me to begin.

  I snap back to the book. I stare at the snowdrops so hard my vision begins to blur.

  Please, I think into the earth. I know this is all wrong, I know it’s too hot—it is for me, too. But could a few of you come out anyway?

  “Remember to breathe,” Frank says. “Squares. Straight lines.”

  Right. Breathe in, that’s the base of the square. Breathe out, and draw the left side. Steady, now. Build a box for the spell to grow in. Breathe in, form the top. Feel the magic and harness it. Breathe out, close the square.

  It’s not working. The earth is unimpressed. What does it care for straight lines?

  I risk another glance at Frank. He’s frowning. Anxiety bursts into my veins like a thousand microscopic bombs. I don’t want to disappoint him. Another peek toward Jane, seeking a last boost of strength, because at every test she’s there, she’s watching, and she’s smiling like she knows I can do anything.

  But Jane’s not looking at me. London still is, with those serious eight-year-old eyes, but not Jane. She’s looking over her shoulder, across the lake and toward the forest. When she turns back around, her expression is worried. My heart stutters. Is she thinking about what happened in there? Is she reconsidering our deal? Is she—

  “We don’t have all day, Derry,” Frank says.

  PLEASE, GROW.

  The magic square in my mind shatters. What comes out of the ground isn’t the blanket of snowdrops I’d imagined, the kind of dense thicket that looks like actual snow from afar. It’s no more than a dozen scattered flowers. They stand too rigid, as if they’re too proud to droop in front of us, but the blossoms are bell-shaped and white, and it’s close enough.

  It has to be close enough.

  The magic I sent into the earth flows back into me. Tiny gray flowers bloom on my shoulder and descend across the thick fat of my upper arm. It doesn’t hurt. It’s a gentle push under my skin, a tug from somewhere above it, and then I’m growing my own flowers. I barely register them in the moment. I brush them off, leaving no trace, and wait for judgment.

  “Good,” Frank says. He smiles, but it’s not a real, true smile. It’s a consolation prize. I did enough, but I wasn’t impressive. I think he knows I didn’t try hard enough to exert control with the square breathing.

  I collapse on the ground between Jane and Winnie. London reaches outside the boundary of Jane’s lap to pat my head.

  “You were great,” Jane says.

  “You were fine,” Winnie says, pulling several more strands of grass apart at the middle. Her face is almost entirely shrouded by her long blond hair. “Better than me.”

  I can’t do much to comfort her there, because she’s right. Her test didn’t go well. They rarely do. Out of all of us, Winnie’s magic is the least reliable. When it decides to show up, it’s usually fine, but it rarely decides to show up when she wants it to. She’s supposed to be telekinetic, but it primarily manifests as a breeze that hangs out near her. We call it her little pet poltergeist, because it mostly just messes around. It’s the poltergeist that’s forming her ripped-up pieces of grass in
to a tiny whirlwind.

  “You were also great,” Jane tells Winnie. “You improved from last week, and that’s what matters.”

  Anyone else would have earned a glare from Winnie for that, and probably prank-based retaliation later. One time Winnie used all the plastic wrap in the house to individually wrap every piece of my clothing, and that was just because of some stupid fight I don’t even remember the genesis of now.

  Genesis. Good word.

  Winnie got time-out for like an hour for wasting so much plastic wrap, which had to be hell. She dutifully apologized once she got out, but the way her poltergeist whipped around my face told me she wasn’t sorry at all.

  But you don’t do that kind of thing to Jane. Instead, Winnie smiles at her, and the shreds of grass settle back onto the ground.

  Jane looks over her shoulder again. It’s so quick, I doubt anyone else notices. Before I can say anything, the next test begins. Jane turns her attention full force to Violet.

  I look across the lake, toward the forest.

  We weren’t supposed to be in the forest that day. We’re never supposed to be in the forest. If Frank knew even that much—if he knew what I did—

  I lie down on my stomach, mimicking Winnie, and press my face into my hands. They’re sweaty and my face is sweaty and it’s too goddamn hot, Frank had to know I’d never be able to grow snowdrops in this heat. Maybe he already knows what I did. Maybe that’s why he set me up to fail.

  Winnie nudges me. I raise my head to glare at her.

  “Stop,” she hisses. “Whatever you’re freaking out about, stop. You’re practically vibrating, and it’s distracting.”

  “Distracting from what? All the rapt attention you’re giving Violet?” She glares, and I sneer, and Jane clears her throat. Moments later, Frank’s shadow falls over us.

  Neither of us look up at him. He doesn’t say anything. Winnie and I just stare straight ahead at Violet as they glamour their own hair from brown to purple to silver.

  Eventually, Frank walks away. Winnie sticks her tongue out at me. I return the favor, feeling like I’m ten years old but also feeling entirely justified.

  Pretty sure we only have like half a roll of plastic wrap right now anyway.

  * * *

  Tests and what comes after them take up all of Monday morning, every week. The testing part is over and we’re painfully close to lunch, but first we must deal with the flowers.

  Nine glass flowers sit on a shelf in the living room. There’s one for each of us. They glow a rainbow of colors—some more brilliantly than others. They’re meant to represent our magic. The tests are important to see what we can do, but it’s the flowers that tell us and Frank if our magic has truly grown.

  My siblings and I line up across from our flowers while Frank stands by the shelf with that ever-present iPad.

  Jane steps forward first. She takes a glass camellia from the shelf. Its pink glow is steady and strong. Dependable. She holds it with two hands, and waits.

  Jane is the oldest of us at nineteen. She’s a slender Black girl who spent the first ten years of her life on a farm in Ohio. She wound up here, like the rest of us did after her, when her magic became too much for her parents to handle.

  The camellia flashes and settles back to the same pink glow. The flash is a good sign. It means that the flower sensed some kind of growth. From the size of the flash, it’s only a little growth, but that’s normal. How much can you really grow in a week? The size doesn’t matter as much as the fact that we continue advancing.

  Frank lightly taps notes into his iPad. He beckons Winnie to come forward next. She’s anxiously braided a small portion of her hair while waiting her turn. The braid falls apart when she drops her hands and steps up.

  Winnie arrived at the lake house a few months after Jane. I don’t think she changed much from that point to when I met her two years later, or even to now. She’s still a chubby white girl with pigtails, a temper, and a Minnesota accent.

  Her glass amaryllis glows with faint swirls of red and white that refract through the glass as if a piece of her little pet poltergeist is trapped inside. She glares at it as she picks it up, as if she can threaten it into flashing.

  If anyone could, it would be Winnie. That’s probably not why her amaryllis gives the gentlest of flashes, but her triumphant smile says that she thinks it is.

  We continue on down the line. The third-oldest, Brooke, is a Deaf Mexican American. Her flower is a cluster of blue forget-me-nots that outshine anything else on the shelf. This morning during her test she signed ‘I cast Sacred Flame,’ and scorched a circle out of the grass.

  Surprising no one, her flower’s flash is bright enough to make us shield our eyes.

  Elle and Irene are twins, but not identical twins—they’re both tall white girls, but there are a million little differences, like Elle’s honey-blond hair versus Irene’s dark blond, or Elle’s face, with its thick smattering of freckles, versus Irene’s face, which tends to go red more than it freckles or even tans.

  Elle’s flower is a vivid pink snapdragon, and Irene’s a coral-red hibiscus with deceptively delicate petals. Both their flowers flash when held, but while Elle beams at Frank and waits for his approving smile before stepping back in line, Irene doesn’t even glance his way.

  My turn. The poppy near the middle is mine. Seven years ago, I sat on the floor of this living room with Jane. We held the glass poppy together until it filled up with red light.

  She’s the one who did all the magic to make the flowers ready to sense our magic. It’s something to do with her affinity for inanimate objects. Usually she can only physically manipulate them, but Frank said the glass is special. It allows Jane’s magic to reach a little farther.

  I take my poppy off the shelf. It’s solidly middle of the road—nowhere near as bright as Brooke’s, not as faint as Winnie’s. After my unimpressive display with the snowdrops, I’m half-expecting it not to flash at all. Maybe it’ll even weaken. That’s happened before, once to Elle and twice to Winnie, and it’s not an outcome you want.

  It doesn’t happen to me today. I get a little flash, comparable to Winnie’s. I’ll take it.

  Next is Violet. They’re a couple years younger than me, but already taller. I’m not that short or anything. Violet just sprouted up over the last couple years. They’re five-foot-ten, with shaggy brown hair and huge gray eyes behind plain black glasses, the same kind I wear. They’re Mexican American, like Brooke, though their skin is a little lighter than her deep brown.

  Violet came to us at eleven, and by then they’d already spent enough time researching on the library internet to figure out that the word for their gender is nonbinary, to learn that pansexual best described why their crushes spanned across and beyond gender.

  Between Violet and the big twins, we all got a chance to learn more about ourselves. To put labels on our feelings that we hadn’t learned before we came here, and certainly never would have learned from Frank. Words like bisexual and asexual and demiromantic. Words we never knew we needed until we heard them. Words to make a person feel whole and understood.

  Like every week, Violet’s patterned an item of their clothing—today a T-shirt—to have a sunflower pattern. It matches their glass flower. A good luck charm.

  Not that Violet tends to need it. They may not have the strongest, brightest glow, but their magic is rock-solid. The yellow light never wavers, and it never fails to flash after a test. This week is no different.

  Unlike the big twins, London and Olivia are identical. They’re two little Black girls with the same inquisitive brown eyes, same broad noses, same round chipmunk cheeks. They’re the youngest in the house by six years. They’re the babies of the house, and we all dote on them, but being young doesn’t get them out of our weekly tests.

  London’s apple blossom is a pale pink, but it still glows brighter than most. Olivia’s sweet pea is a vibrant, flickering fuchsia. London’s flash is always small, where Olivia’s tends to b
e brighter, because London isn’t as fierce about practicing her magic. Her powers are . . . difficult. She had a bad history with them before she came to the lake house. I wouldn’t want to practice very much, either, if I were in her shoes.

  All through the flower tests, I keep sneaking glances at Jane.

  Jane keeps sneaking glances out the living room window to the forest.

  I don’t get a chance to talk to her alone until after lunch.

  We’re in the back, watering the large garden. We grow a lot of our own produce. If I could ever master growing stuff out of season, we’d be able to grow it all for ourselves.

  I could be valuable, then. I could make my siblings safer by limiting our dependence on the outside.

  I’ve got the hose out to spray down the vegetables while Jane uses a watering can on the flowers and herbs. I direct the spray on a batch of zucchini, trying to find the courage to say something to Jane. I want to know what she’s thinking, but I don’t want to talk about what happened. I’ve spent days now trying to pretend that nothing happened. Jane and I took the secret and buried it deep inside ourselves, never to resurface, never to be known by anyone, not even our siblings.

  But if she’s already struggling to keep the secret, then I need to know. We need to talk about it.

  When I turn to Jane, I find her once again staring at the forest.

  The forest circles the lake and the house, with only the one road out. There’s a lot of tree line. Earlier, she was looking in the direction of the clearing, where the nothing happened. Now, she’s squinting into the trees nearest us, as if she sees something there other than trees.

  “Jane?”

  She keeps her gaze on the forest, but goes, “Hmm?”

  The words are right there. Are you okay?

  She finally turns to me and smiles. Her forehead is smooth again, clear of the creases from her worried squinting. The moment’s erased.

  I say, “What about conjurer?”

  Frank calls us alchemists, and as a word on its own it’s pretty good, but applying it to ourselves feels like wearing someone else’s too-small clothes. I’ve had an ongoing project to find a word we all like a little better. Witch would be the most obvious word, but Frank’s made it clear that where a witch goes, death follows. Burning. Drowning. Crushed with rocks. Buried alive. We can’t be witches without risking the same fate, so the search continues.