The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(57)
Then I was myself again, feeling the jar of it in my hands as it went through her like a shovel through dirt, gritty. There was no blood, just her sigh, and silence. My stomach lurched, and the back of my throat tasted like a broken battery. Something hard pattered to the ground between the dead woman and my feet. It lay glittering there, carrying the smell of ozone. The moon’s tears. I felt too dirty to touch them.
The bone shrank so quickly I almost dropped it, till it was the size of my littlest finger. I laid it carefully on the dead woman’s chest. She already looked less than a woman. She was a golem, crumbling back into dry earth. Did that make what I’d done easier to live with? I couldn’t decide.
Nobody waited for me in the trees. The aviatrix’s friends had slunk off like cowards. I looked back at the hill to orient myself, then pointed my step toward the Hazel Wood.
The woods grew darker, and the air began to lighten. Around the time I realized it was getting close to dawn, I broke free into an orchard. The trees were low, planted at intervals. They reminded me of the two months Ella and I had spent living and working at an All U Can Pick apple farm.
I had a semi-suburbanite’s understanding of trees—maple, birch, crabapple, oak; willow and pine are easy—but I’d stopped caring to identify what I’d walked around and under and been whipped, tugged, and scratched by hours before.
These trees were different. Their branches were made of something soft and glimmering. When I got close, I could see each trunk, branch, and leaf was cast in a thin, flexible metal.
Silver trees. They looked like Etsy jewelry on steroids. I walked slowly under their branches, glad the sun hadn’t come up yet. When it did, the grove would be blinding. The silver trees gave way to gold, followed by copper, with blood-colored leaves that clattered together with a sound like bones. And I remembered the rhyme.
Look until the leaves turn red
Sew the worlds up with thread
If your journey’s left undone
Fear the rising of the sun.
In the east, if this was still a world where the sun rose in the east, a wedding band of white-gold light inched over the horizon. I started to run. The trees rustled their branches as I passed, flinging down metal leaves to tangle in my hair. I felt the cheap canvas of my sneakers rubbing my heels bloody.
I ran so fast I almost pinwheeled over the edge of the ravine when I reached it. Below my feet, a fall so endless I saw clouds. Ahead, green iron gates, a hazel tree picked out across them. I caught my breath, held it.
Between me and the gates was a stretch of thin air. The sun was edging upward, the sky gathering color. My hip burned hot where the feather nestled in my pocket. I pulled it out and held it before my eyes.
It was gold edged with green, speckled haphazardly with eyes. It shivered to attention in my palm and sent its tickling fibers coursing up my left arm. I squicked out at the sensation, itchy and warm and intimate, like someone sewing a sweater onto my body at the speed of sound. The tickle skated across my back and down my right arm. Before the sun was halfway risen, I had wings as wide as I was tall. They unfurled without my asking them to, lifting me a few inches off the ground. When I panicked, they dropped me on my ass.
The metal trees were blatantly watching now, chattering advice I couldn’t understand in their rickety typewriter voices. I stood and let my shoulders relax. I listed to one side as my left wing perked to attention, then my right, and exhaled as my toes left the ground.
Setting my sights on the Hazel Wood gates, I let the wings carry me into open air.
22
My feet thumped crookedly to Earth. I whipped around to look for the red-leaved trees, to see if the sun had reached them yet, but a thick bank of fog had sprung up between me and the other side.
Another fairy-tale lesson learned: don’t look back.
The dream I’d been living in for the past hours was fading away. I could remember everything I’d done, but it felt flat as a picture book. The mermaid, the moon. The bone that slid so easily into the aviatrix’s chest. Was that really me?
I didn’t want to end up like Ness, trapped in a room by memories, so I decided it wasn’t. The story I’d lived through was just that: a story.
As if it agreed with me, a gust of wind blew the feathers off my arms in one great puff. They swirled into a winged shape and flew away. My pockets were empty: I had no tricks left. Maybe that was why the Hazel Wood let me in. I reached for the gates, and they swung open without a sound.
And there it was. The grass cropped close as green velvet, racing toward the distant steps of the house. Althea’s estate was pillars and white brick and gabled windows. It was a flat swimming pool set like a lucid blue brooch against the lawn, trimmed in glittering stone. It was exactly as my mind had built it, right down to the electric feeling in the air, of some wonderful thing about to unfold.
It chilled me to my marrow. Life never turns out how you imagine it will when you’re young. Everything is smaller than you think, or too big. It all smells a little funny and fits like somebody else’s shirt.
But this version of the Hazel Wood was perfect. It was mine. It was being pulled from me, from daydreams I’d thumbed over so often they were creased, and the preserved pages of Vanity Fair. I closed my eyes and opened them again slowly, half-expecting to see a tumbledown ruin, the truth behind the fantasy. But my vision held up.
The air smelled like crushed grass and chlorine, with the held-breath quiet of the hottest day of summer. I walked over the dewy cheek of perfectly stage-directed grass, past geometric flowerbeds and a faintly rustling fountain I was dying to drink from, but you’d have to be dumber than Persephone to drink anything in fairyland.