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.”