The Hazel Wood: Chapters 19–24

If he was going through some existential fan dilemma, I wanted no part of it.

“Oh, no,” he said, the words bottomless and bleak.

My chest was a bellows with the air squeezed out, but I tried to run anyway.

Finch’s body was limp over the boy’s shoulder as he stepped into the bright green gloaming.

She hummed a song that at first seemed tuneless, before it resolved into something that lilted and spun back on itself in an eerie round.

I lunged at the door and was thrown back as it rocketed into a wall of trees. They parted obligingly, then sealed back into place as neatly as a curtain.

They felt cool in my hand and gave off an electric, intangible hum, like tuning forks. I looked around furtively and shoved them back in my pockets.

Its muddy hair was braided, its mouth almost prim.

I thought of the paintings of mermaids I’d loved to look at when I was little—bird-winged women crawling over doomed ships, pensive Waterhouse girls running silver combs through their hair.

Green maps threaded with silver rivers, castles and towns marked in ruddy ink.

A Queenswood labeled in looping script was sheared away from a tiny ivory castle, its ramparts bristling with spikes.

Their blades were short and blunt, made of a glittering metal. They moved lazily, feinting and jabbing, the rest of their party laughing and applauding impressive dodges.

She already looked less than a woman. She was a golem, crumbling back into dry earth.

It was gold edged with green, speckled haphazardly with eyes.

The metal trees were blatantly watching now, chattering advice I couldn’t understand in their rickety typewriter voices.

It was a flat swimming pool set like a lucid blue brooch against the lawn, trimmed in glittering stone.

It was a flat swimming pool set like a lucid blue brooch against the lawn, trimmed in glittering stone.

Between the flights was a pink stone fountain so big you could swim in it. Three stone women glared impassively from its center.

Now it was a brighter place, shorter, ending in a glass-ceilinged conservatory flooded with green.

I ran from the room—
And slid to a stop in a dingy yellow kitchen.

A trio of women with bodies like fronds wound around each other in a way that looked boneless, their edges meeting and melting together in a watercolor blur.

Before I could respond, a mulish voice from the bed beat me to it. "No."

When the queen found her, she very convincingly shared her plight—she was a master of words, too—and soon the storyteller whispered the secret of escape into the queen’s ear.

Cherry blossoms had fallen into her bassinet. The baby squeezed them between her little fingers, staring up at the princess with her black, black eyes.

“Look at you.” Her laugh was an ugly thing. “Still feral after all these years.”

She smiled at me coquettishly, a ghost of what she once looked like, back when hers was a face to look at.

“So you made it through the woods without a guide. Life out there hasn’t rendered you completely helpless. You must be a bit like her—like Ella.”

I’d landed with my back against a trunk as wide as a car, front to back, its bark covered in knots that suggested an implacable face.

It dropped a rain of seeds into my lap. They were crescent-shaped and pinkie nail-sized, burnished the color of a harvest moon.

Flowers furled into pellets or went lurid as I passed, sending out vapor trails of scent—cardamom, iced tea, Ella’s shampoo.

Everything had a revelatory crispness, like a new day seen through the lens of a coffee-fueled all-nighter.

And I was in an alien world, surrounded by trees whose sentient interest in my passing ranged from distant friendliness to a ruffled annoyance that made me picture a dog smelling someone else’s pet on your clothes.

The light was an ambient, suffused gold, and it did something funny to the shadows: they looked like black stamps.

The light was an ambient, suffused gold, and it did something funny to the shadows: they looked like black stamps.

It was almost too picturesque, lined with berry brambles and flowers that wept fat, furry petals onto the packed dirt.

The light started to change, going tawny as the sharp shadows lengthened.

She looked spry enough to outrun me, honestly, but I wasn’t about to argue.

A bushel’s worth of apples rained down. The woman put up a pink silk parasol and waited it out.

Her wrinkles dropped away, leaving a face as fine-etched as a cameo.

“You were kind to me when you thought me an inconsequential old woman,” she droned, like a waitress going through the specials for the last table of the night. “I will repay that kindness by granting you a wish. Only one, so choose wisely.”