Children can have a cruel, absolute sense of justice. Children can kill monsters and feel quite proud of themselves. Even a girl who carries spiders outside instead of stepping on them, a girl who once fed a tiny fox kit with an eyedropper every two hours until wildlife rescue could come and pick it up—that same girl can kill and be ready to do it again. She can take her dead dog home and bury him and cry over his cooling and stiffening body, making promises as she digs a deep hole in the backyard. She can look at her brother and believe that together they’re a knight and a bard who battle evil, who might someday find and fight even the monster at the heart of the forest. A little girl can find a dead boy and lose her dog and believe that she could make sure no one else was lost.
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.