CHAPTER 5
Once upon a time, a little girl found a corpse in the woods.
Her parents had raised the girl and her brother with the same benign neglect with which they’d taken care of the three cats and dachshund named Whiskey that already roamed around the little house. They’d have their long-haired, alt-rock friends over, drink wine, jam on their guitars, and talk about art late into the night, letting the girl and boy run around without diapers. They’d paint for hours, stopping only to fix bottles and wash the occasional load of laundry, which even clean managed to smell faintly of turpentine. The kids ate food off everyone’s plates, played elaborate games in the mud outside by the garden, and took baths only when someone snatched them up and dumped them in a basin.
When the little girl looked back on it, her childhood seemed like a glorious blur of chasing her brother and her dog through the woods wearing hand-me-down clothes and daisy-chain crowns. Of running all the way to where the horned boy slept, singing songs and making up stories about him all afternoon, and coming home only at night, exhausted, wild animals returning to a den.
They saw themselves as children of the forest, creeping around pools and hiding in the hollows of dead trees. They glimpsed the Folk sometimes, movements out of the corners of their eyes or laughter that seemed to come from every direction and nowhere at once. And they knew to wear the charms, to keep a bit of grave dirt in their pockets, and to be both cautious of and polite to strangers who might not be human. But knowing the Folk were dangerous was one thing, and finding the remains of Adam Hicks was another.
That particular day, Hazel had been dressed up like a knight, a blue dishrag tied around her neck for a cloak and a scarf for a sash around her waist. Her red hair whipped behind her as she ran, shining with gold in the lazy, late-afternoon sun.
Ben had been sword fighting with her all day. He had a plastic He-Man sword that their mother had brought home from the secondhand store, along with a book on King Arthur’s knights with stories about Sir Pellinore, who’d supposedly been one of the Folk himself before he joined Arthur’s court, the story of Sir Gawain breaking a curse on a loathly lady, and a list of the virtues knights had—strength, valor, loyalty, courtesy, compassion, and devotion.
Hazel had received a baby doll that, if you filled it with water, you could squeeze and make it pee, even though she’d wanted a sword like her brother’s. Ben, delighted to have the better present, chased her around, knocking sticks out of her hands with the plastic blade. Finally, frustrated, Hazel went into their dad’s toolshed and found a rusty old machete in the back. Then she smacked Ben’s plastic sword so hard that it cracked. He stomped back to the house for glue while she danced around in nine-year-old triumph.
She spent a while whacking at a patch of dried-out ferns while pretending they were the terrible monster of legend, the one that lurked in the heart of the forest. She intoned a few lines of the rhyme under her breath, feeling quite daring.
After a while, she got bored and went looking for blackberries, sheathing her machete in her sash and skipping through the tall weeds. Whiskey followed her at first, but then wandered off. A few moments later he started barking.
Adam Hicks was lying in the mud of the bank beside Wight Lake, his lips bluish. Hollow pits where his eyes should have been stared up at the sky, maggots squirming inside, pale as seed pearls. The bottom half of his body was submerged in the water. That was the part that had been eaten. White bone peeked out from flesh that hung in tatters and ribbons, waving in the water like ripped strips of cloth. There was a smell in the air, like when she’d accidentally left raw hamburger overnight on the counter.
Whiskey was running back and forth, sniffing the body, howling as if he thought he could wake Adam up.
“Come away from there,” Hazel tried to call, but her voice came out like a whisper. She knew that not enough time had passed for her brother to be on his way back yet. She knew that it was just her and the dog alone out there.
She began to tremble all over.
Adam’s parents had moved to Fairfold a year before, making him not quite a tourist, but not local, either. Dangerously indeterminate, tempting to the Folk. They are twilight creatures, beings of dawn and dusk, of standing between one thing and another, of not quite and almost, of borderlands and shadows.
Looking out at the green water, trying not to stare at the red ruin of Adam’s eyes, Hazel thought of all the knights in the book she’d read that morning. She remembered that she was supposed to be one of them and tried not to throw up.
Whiskey’s barking got more intense and more frenzied.
Hazel was trying to shoo him back when a damp claw closed around her ankle. She screamed, fumbling for her machete, stomping on the grasping, toad-pale hand with her free foot. The hag rose up out of the muddy water, her face sunken like a skull with cloudy eyes and long green hair that spread out, floating on the surface of the lake. The touch of her hands burned like cold fire.
Hazel managed to swing the blade as the hag yanked on her leg. Hazel went down on her back, hard. Flies blew up from Adam’s body in a black cloud. As Hazel felt herself dragged toward the water, she noticed with dim and terrible satisfaction that the hag was bleeding from a slash in her cheek. Hazel must have struck her.
“Little girl,” the hag said. “Barely a mouthful. Stringy from running. Relax, little mouthful.”
Closing her eyes, Hazel swung the machete wildly. The hag made a hissing sound like a cat and grabbed for the blade. It sliced into the hag’s fingers when she caught it, but she held on, wrenching it from Hazel’s grasp and tossing it into the middle of the lake. It landed with a splash that made Hazel’s stomach turn.
Whiskey bit the hag’s arm and growled.
“No!” Hazel shouted. “No! Go away, Whiskey!”
The dog held on, whipping his head back and forth. The hag lifted her long green arm high into the air. Whiskey rose, too, his hind legs off the ground, his teeth still embedded deep in her flesh, as though pressed against bone. Then the hag’s arm came down, slamming him against the ground as if he weighed nothing, as if he were nothing. The dog went still, lying on the bank like a broken toy.
“Nononono,” Hazel moaned. She reached out a hand toward Whiskey, but he was just far enough to her right to be out of reach. Her fingers clawed at the mud, digging runnels into it.
Strains of distant music floated toward her. Ben’s reed pipes. He had slung them around his neck on a dirty string a week ago, calling himself a bard, and hadn’t removed them since. Too late. Too late.
Hazel tried to crawl toward Whiskey’s body, kicking against the cold grip of the hag. Despite her efforts, her feet hit the lake. Water splashed high into the air as she struggled.
“Ben,” she shouted, her voice cracking with panic. “Ben!”
The piping went on, closer now, beautiful enough to make the trees bend low to hear him better, and utterly useless. Tears sprang to Hazel’s eyes, fear and frustration combining into panic. Why didn’t he stop playing and help? Couldn’t he hear her? Her legs slid into the water, slime coating her skin. Hazel sucked in a breath, preparing to hold it as long as she could. She wondered how much it hurt to drown. She wondered if she had any fight left.
Then suddenly the hag’s fingers went slack. Hazel scrambled up the bank, not bothering to notice why she got away until she was over a log and leaning against an elm tree, her breaths coming hard. Ben stood near the water, looking pale and scared, playing the pipe as though he was playing for his life.
No, Hazel realized. He’d been playing for her life. The water hag gazed at him, rapt. Her fish eyes didn’t blink. Her mouth moved only slightly, as though she was singing along with the notes he played. Hazel knew the Folk loved music, especially music as fine as Ben’s, but she’d had no idea it could do this to one of them.
She saw Ben notice Whiskey’s body, saw her brother take a staggering half step forward, saw his eyes close, but he never stopped playing.
Hazel’s gaze went to the bank where she’d fallen, the gouges her scrambling had made in the mud, Adam’s rotting body and her dog’s limp one beside it, the buzzing of flies in the air above them, and something else, something that shone in the sunlight like a hilt. A knife? Had Adam brought a weapon with him?
Slowly, Hazel crept back down the bank, back toward the water hag.
Ben looked over at her, eyes wide, shaking his head in warning.
Hazel ignored him, making her way to the knife in the mud, feeling numb and angry. She gripped the hilt and pulled. The mud made a sucking sound as the blade slid free. It was metal, blackened as though it had been in a fire, and gold underneath. It was much longer than she’d expected—longer even than her mother’s biggest kitchen knife, with a groove down the middle. It was a sword. A real sword, the kind a grown-up knight would carry.
Hazel’s mind was racing, but she kept going, concentrating on repeating over and over: I am a knight. I am a knight. I am a knight. A better knight could have saved Whiskey, but at least she could avenge his death. Wading into the silty water, she hefted the heavy sword like a baseball bat and brought it down, bashing the edge against the monster’s head. Her skull split like a rotten melon.
The creature slumped over in the water, dead.
“Wow,” Ben said, walking closer, dropping the pipes so that they hung around his neck again, tilting his head to one side and bending down to inspect the red mess of bone and lichen-covered teeth, to stare at the clumps of hair floating in the water. He pushed at it with his toe. “I didn’t think you’d really kill it.”
Hazel didn’t know how to reply. She wasn’t sure whether he thought what she did was bad or whether he was just surprised it had worked.
“Where did you get that?” he asked, pointing to the sword.
“I found it,” Hazel told him, sniffing brokenly. Tears kept flooding her eyes, no matter how many times she tried to blink them back.
Ben reached out like he wanted to take the blade from her. Maybe he was thinking of his broken He-Man sword and how the one in her hand would make a good replacement. Hazel took a half step back.
He made a face, acting like he hadn’t wanted it anyway. “With your sword and my playing, we could do something. Stop bad things. Like in stories.”
Despite the dog’s death, despite her tears, despite everything, she smiled and wiped the blood spatter off her nose with the sleeve of her shirt. “You think so?”