Hazel believed she’d found the sword for a reason.
By the time she was ten, Hazel and Ben had discovered two more monsters—two more faeries with tourist blood on their hands, two more creatures hungry to entrap them. Ben lulled them with his music, while Hazel crept up and struck them down with her sword—by then, honed and polished, gleaming with mineral oil, and painted over black to hide all the bright gold.
Sometimes they heard solitary Folk following them home from school, rustling at the edges of the woods. Hazel waited, but they never bothered her. Faerie morality isn’t human morality. They punish the unmannerly and foolhardy, the braggarts and cheats, not the brave, not tricksters and heroes. Those, they claim for their own. And so, if the Alderking noticed the children, he chose to bide his time, waiting to see what they might yet become.
Which left Hazel and Ben to go on hunting monsters and dreaming about saving a sleeping prince, until the day Ben’s playing faltered. They’d been tromping through the woods when a black-furred and flame-eyed barghest barreled toward them from the shadows. Hazel held her ground, drawing her sword from the scabbard she’d made, her eyes wide and teeth gritted. Ben began to play his pipes, but, for the first time, the notes sputtered out uncertainly. Surprised, Hazel turned toward him. It was just a moment, just a small shift in her body, just a glance toward her brother, but enough that the barghest was on her. Its tusk dug into her arm and she only slashed its side shallowly before it was past her. Panting, bleeding, she tried to keep her balance, tried to heft the sword up and be ready to strike again.
As it swung back around, she expected Ben to begin his song, but he appeared frozen. Something was very wrong. The barghest’s hot breath steamed toward her, stinking of old blood. Its long tail swept the ground.
“Ben—” she called, voice shaking.
“I can’t—” Ben said, nearly choked with panic. “Run! Run! I can’t—”
And they did run, the barghest just behind them, weaving between trees like a leopard. They ran and ran until they managed to wedge themselves in the hollow of an oak tree, where they hid, hearts thumping, breaths held, listening for the sweep of a tail or the pad of a heavy step. They stayed hidden there until the late-afternoon sun was low in the sky. Only then did they dare creep home, balancing the odds the creature was waiting for them against the worse worry of being discovered by it in the woods after dark.
“We’ve got to stop—at least until we’re older,” Ben said, later that night, sitting on the steps behind their house, watching Mom grill burgers in cutoff shorts and an old, hole-pocked CBGB shirt. “It’s harder than I thought it would be. What if something else goes wrong? What if you got hurt? It would be my fault.”
You started this, she wanted to say. You made me believe we could do this. You can’t take it away. But instead she said, “I’m not the one who messed up.”
He shook his head. “Well, okay, that’s worse. Because I could mess up again and doom us both. Probably I will. Maybe if I managed to get into that school, if I could learn to have more control over the music, maybe then…”
“Don’t worry about me,” she told him, bare toes digging in the dirt, chewing on a strand of her own red hair. “I’m the knight. It’s my job to take care of myself. But I don’t want to stop.”
He let out a breath. His fingers tapped anxiously against his thigh. “We’ll take a break, then. Just for a little while. Just until I’m better at music. I need to get better.”
Hazel nodded. If that’s what he needed so she could stay a knight, so they could continue their quest, so everyone could be saved, so they could be like characters from a story, then she vowed she’d find a way to get it for him.
And she had.
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.”