The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(23)

The men who solved the puzzle were two brothers from the north, their skin nearly as pale as the ice they carried. They packed it in sawdust and carved it into bits before entering her father’s hall.

When the older brother showed her it had been done, she went still. The color drained out of her face. It made him smile.

“But which one of you will she marry?” the king asked.

The brother smiled again. Everyone present was beginning to understand it wasn’t a nice thing when the brother smiled. “We don’t want a wife,” he said. “We want a housemaid. She’ll bake our bread, and clean our house, and bear the children who will serve us after she’s dead.”

The girl said nothing. Instead, she took her little purse of ice and tipped it down her throat. In moments, frost bloomed on her arms. Her skin went blue, her eyes iced white, and she froze solid. Her father shouted, her mother screamed, and the two brothers argued, deciding finally to take her as she was, intending to decide what to do with her on the road.

They set off that night, the two brothers and the girl, tied to a horse her father gave as her dowry. Her mother watched her go, and it was as if the sliver of ice that had lodged in her heart the day the girl was born melted away.

The brothers rode until the stars were nearly faded, then stopped to make camp. They lay their bedrolls on the ground, and lay their stiff bride under a tree. They slept.

The younger brother had terrible dreams, about a fox with holes for eyes, and a child who laughed while drowning in an ice-cold pond. As the sun bled over the horizon the next morning, he woke to find his brother dead. The man’s skin bristled with frost, and his mouth and eyes were frozen open in horror. The girl was as still as ever. Her cold body didn’t respond even when the remaining brother kicked it sharply with his boot.

He thought fast. He left his brother where he lay, packed up camp, and tied the girl’s stonelike hands and feet with strong rope—just in case. He left her behind with his frozen brother, and rode away like the devil was after him.

As he rode he kept hearing a sound like wind through icy branches, and thumps of wet snow sliding to the ground at night. He rode faster. When his horse was covered in froth, and he was too hungry and exhausted to continue, he stopped and made camp. He sat up all night holding a knife to his chest, keeping a small fire alive. Nothing came for him in the night, and he felt foolish.

Until the sun rose and he turned and saw his horse. The animal was dead, its eyes colored over with a membrane of frost, and its mane had ice crystals in it.

The younger brother continued his journey on foot. The trees he moved through were so thick the sunlight could barely break through them, and he met no one on his way. The air he breathed tasted frozen in his throat, and chilled his eyes till they ached, though it was spring thaw all around him. It was barely dark when he lay down to rest, so tired he couldn’t summon up the strength to feel afraid. When his eyes had closed, the princess came out from behind a tree hung with creeping vines. She laid her hands on his eyes and placed her mouth over his. When he was dead, she stood up tall. The ice was still in her, and her eyes swirled like cirrus clouds.

She turned. There was a scent in the air of cold lilacs, a late freeze on an early bloom. It was the smell of her mother’s perfume. The black-eyed girl felt her parents’ distant castle like the pulsing heartbeat of an animal she wanted to kill. She set her path back toward it.





10


Finch stopped talking. The diner rustled around us, spoons chiming on cup brims and plates set to tables with a smack. I felt a sharp sting and looked down: I’d ripped the cuticle on my right index finger to bloody shreds.

“Is that it?” I asked, finally.

His eyes were worried, staring over my shoulder. “No, it’s just—” He half-stood, then sat again. “I thought I … never mind.”

“What is it?” My head pulsed with a three-a.m.-black-coffee feeling, and my teeth chattered twice before I clamped my jaw shut. I jerked a look back over each shoulder but saw nothing out of the ordinary: three girls younger than us drinking coffee and wearing sunglasses at night, a table of old men in work jackets, a dark-haired woman biting into a sugar cube.

“What did you see?” I whispered.

He ran a hand through his hair, made it bigger. “Nothing. I’m on edge.”

I took a last look around. Nobody looked back.

“You remembered a lot,” I said.

He’d jammed another wedge of sandwich in his mouth and was chewing mechanically, his eyes darting around. “When I love a book,” he said around the sandwich, “I read it more than once.”

“How does the story end?”

But Finch was out of storytelling mode, his eyes still flicking past my shoulder every few seconds. “Bloody revenge, obviously.”

“Revenge for what?”

“The usual. Neglectful mom, criminal dad. Shades of ‘Thousandfurs,’ in case I didn’t make that clear.”

“Coffee?” Finch and I jumped as our waitress swung by with a fresh pot.

“You’re more on edge now,” I said when she was gone. “Telling the story—it made you nervous.”

“I’ve never told one of them out loud. It made me … it almost made me think I was seeing things.” His head twitched as he checked out the table behind us: a college-aged guy and a woman in her forties, neither of them talking.