Blythewood (30 page)

still
couldn’t stop shaking because a part of me was still standing in the snow watching the shadow-thing turn and fix me
with its red eyes, open its mouth, and say my name.

I AWOKE TO the calls of mourning doves. With my eyes still
closed I could imagine myself in our Fourteenth Street apartment, my mother spreading breadcrumbs on the window ledge
and talking to the pigeons, her voice low and murmurous as the
birds. I used to lie in bed listening and imagining I would learn
my mother’s secrets by eavesdropping on her morning talks
with the birds, but she spoke so low I never could catch a sound.

Only I wasn’t in my apartment on Fourteenth Street. As
the events of last night came back I felt a slow, dawning horror
creep over me. I’d been taken by a Darkling. He had cast a spell
over me. He had made me see visions in a teacup. My hand was
cut and bandaged. I was in his lair now. The Bells knew what he
was planning to do with me. I opened my eyes.

Raven was perched on a window ledge holding out a handful of crumbs to a flutter of doves, their wings a blur as they
crowded around him.

“There’s plenty for everyone, dovelings,” he murmured.
“What was that?” He tilted his head as if to listen to a fat gray
dove that had landed on his shoulder. The dove puffed up its
chest and trilled a long histrionic tune. Raven listened gravely.

“Can you really understand what they’re saying?” I asked,
sitting up.
Raven turned to me, his lips quirking into a smile at the
sight of me. Too late I realized what I must look like. I patted
my hair and found it a tangled mess full of twigs and feathers.
He looked politely away as I tried to put it to rights, giving his
attention back to the doves.
“Mourning doves are quite easy to understand. They usually say the same three things over and over again: ‘Woe is me,’
‘Where’s the worm?’ and ‘Who are you?’ This one, though, is
upset about the shadows she’s seen massing in the forest. She’s
afraid it means that it will be a hard winter. I’m afraid it means
something worse than that.”
He stroked the dove’s ruffled feathers until they lay flat
again. “Don’t fret, doveling. I’ll go into town and buy extra seed
to see your entire
dule
through the winter.”
The dove bobbed its head, cooed contentedly, and then
took off in a flutter of wings. Raven brushed his hands together
to scatter the remaining crumbs out the window and turned to
the kettle that had begun to whistle on the stove. While he made
tea I finger-combed the twigs out of my hair, picked feathers off
my jersey, and straightened my clothes, none of which solved
the more pressing issue of my toilette.
“I thought we’d take the tea in a thermos flask groundwise
and have our breakfast there,” he said, pouring tea into a silver
flask. “You might . . . er . . . like to be on solid ground.”
“Yes, that would be nice,” I replied, embarrassed but relieved.
“There’s a ladder right there.” He tilted a chin toward an
opening in the floor I hadn’t noticed last night. “You go on
ahead. I’ll catch up.”
I slithered through the hole, found worn but solid ladder
rungs with the tips of my toes, and climbed down, trying not
to hurry. When I reached the ground I danced around until I
found a downed tree that afforded me some privacy and gratefully crouched behind it. Raven’s tree house was cozy, all right,
but I’d miss indoor plumbing.
When I was done, though, I looked around the forest and
saw how beautiful it was in the early-morning light. A thin layer
of ice coated each branch, giving a pearly sheen to everything.
The first rays of the sun streamed slantwise through mist, turning the ice to fiery opals. Birdsong filled the upper canopy—a
sound that made me feel curiously safe.
Because the birds wouldn’t be singing if there was danger
nearby.
When had I leaned that? I wondered. Was it something Miss
Swift had taught us?
The hunter must become the thing she hunts,
Gillie had told me. That’s why we studied birds. But when had
it become second nature to think like one . . . ?
A branch snapped behind me and I turned to find a doe
standing only a few feet away nibbling the lichen off a fallen
tree. She lifted her head and looked at me out of gold-flecked
eyes. Her fur was the color of the last brown leaves clinging to
bare branches and the rough bark of the trees. Her eyes were
the color of the sunlight streaming through the morning mist. I
didn’t feel like a hunter. I felt as much a part of the forest as she
was.
“She likes you.”
Raven’s voice came from close behind me. I hadn’t heard
him approach. So much for my survival skills.
“Why isn’t she afraid of me?” I asked.
“Because you smell like the forest.” He plucked at my sleeve
and held up a black feather, one of his that had been stuck to my
jersey. “You smell like a Darkling and the creatures here know
we won’t hurt them.” He reached inside the canvas bag strapped
across his chest—he was wearing a shirt, wings tucked beneath
it—and brought out an apple. He held it out toward the deer.
Her black wet nose twitched and then she stepped forward, delicate as a ballet dancer
en pointe
. She stretched her long graceful
neck toward Raven’s hand. She pulled back her lips, revealing
white blunt teeth, took the apple out of his hand, and crunched
into it. The crisp scent of apple made my mouth water.
“Here, we might as well share our breakfast with her.” He
sat down on the fallen log where the deer had been nibbling
and took out the thermos flask from his canvas bag and poured
milky tea into two tin cups. I sat beside him and took the cup
and a roll stuffed with cheddar cheese. We sat side by side, eating our rolls and cheese and apples in quiet, the doe crunching
her apple companionably beside us, as the bands of sunlight
widened in the morning mist.
“It’s hard to believe it’s so peaceful after all I saw last night.”
“But you know it was real, don’t you?”
I looked down at my bandaged hand. “Yes,” I said. “I do. I
know because that man . . . that
thing
 . . . I’ve seen him before.
He was at the Triangle.”
“The Shadow Master,” Raven said in a low growl that
frightened the deer away. “Yes, the creature who came for you
at the Triangle was the same kind of monster, only in a different
body—a body taken over by the shadows, or the
tenebrae
as we
call them. The Darknesses.”
“What are they?” I asked, shivering.
“Pure evil,” he answered. “Hatred, murder, envy, greed,
disembodied evil that has lurked on the edges of the world
since time began. They lodge in animals, especially crows and
wolves and snakes, but then can lodge in anything alive, human or fairy, as long as there’s already a chink of darkness to
let them in.”
“What happens to the creatures they take over?”
“Usually the
tenebrae
burn out their host in a few years, but
sometimes they find a vessel strong enough for them to live inside for decades, even centuries. That creature you saw became
a shadow master—he can control the
tenebrae
, drawing them
into other life forms and controlling them. The prince became
a shadow master who ravaged the countryside for years, infecting the creatures of Faerie and the Darklings. Only the knight
and sisters were able to fight them off with their bells—that’s
why your Order thinks that the fairies are evil. They don’t understand that it’s the shadow master controlling them—not
even when the
tenebrae
infected one of their own kind.”
“What happened?” I asked, chilled at the thought that the
shadow creatures could creep through the stone castle walls
and spells of the Order.
“Merope destroyed him. Only a chime child can destroy a
shadow master. That’s why this one is trying to capture you before you can become strong enough to destroy him.”
“Capture me?”
“If he’d wanted to kill you, he would have. He set the factory on fire as a distraction to snatch you. I should never have
let you out of my sight for a minute.” He swore under his breath.
I stared, horrified.
“A distraction? A hundred and forty-six people were killed!
Are you saying it was all my fault? And why were you there? To
snatch me away before he could?” Raven laid a calming hand
on my arm, but I shook it away and stood up. “And what will
you do to me now?”
Raven stood and faced me. His wings were struggling to
unfold beneath his shirt. “I will not
do
anything to you. All I’ve
ever done is try to keep you safe. But yes, you’re valuable to us—
and to the Order and to the Shadow Master.”
“So that’s why you took me last night? To use me as tool
against the Shadow Master?”
“I was also trying to save you from those goblins.”
“Oh, it’s pretty convenient, isn’t it, you always being around
when I’m in trouble!” I wasn’t sure why I was so angry. Perhaps
it was because it sounded like Raven was only interested in me
because I had some special ability to defeat the Shadow Master.
Which shouldn’t have bothered me. So why was I storming off
from him as if it did?
“Ava,” he called as I plunged through a mote-filled sunbeam. “Wait!” He grabbed my arm and held me back. Although
my feet were planted in several inches of snow I was teetering
on the edge of a green meadow surrounded by gently swaying
willows and starred with a million wildflowers.
“A bit of Faerie,” Raven said softly. “At this time of year the
barriers between this world and Faerie are thin. Look, you can
see the Riding of the Gentry.”
The sunbeam widened to reveal a procession of men and
women on horseback. The horses were all white and decked out
with gold saddles and bridles and silver ribbons braided in their
manes. A beautiful woman in green rode on the lead horse. Her
hair was the same color as the horses’ manes and braided with
bells that made a lovely sound, a silver tinkling that was nothing like the iron clanging of
our
bells. The sound was so lovely
I was drawn to it. I stood up and took a step toward her . . . but
Raven’s hand tightened on my arm.
“Unless you don’t mind leaving your friends behind for a
hundred years, I wouldn’t go any farther. Time is different in
Faerie—in fact, they don’t have ‘time’ as we know it. Once you
go in there, there’s no telling when you’ll come out again—if
ever.”
I longingly watched the procession as it passed by me. The
woman in green turned her head and looked at me out of slanting green cat’s eyes. Looking into those eyes I felt everything I
had learned at Blythewood slipping away. It wasn’t that those
eyes looked innocent—far from it. Those eyes saw everything.
They saw
me
: my doubts and fears and everything that had
happened to me. They saw my mother laughing and telling me
fairy stories and they saw me going to the chemist for her bottle
of laudanum. They saw Tillie Kupermann flirting with the law
students and the Triangle girls jumping from the ninth-floor
windows. They saw the cocoa parties with Daisy and Helen,
and Miss Frost’s specimens. They didn’t judge. The woman in
green came from a place that was beyond time—and therefore
beyond judgment of what we called good and evil.
As I gazed at her I heard her voice inside my head.
Come,
chime child,
she said,
this is where you belong.
I wanted with all
my being to go with her—to belong somewhere finally—but
Raven held me back until the procession had moved by us. Following the men and women on horseback were many other
creatures—the tiny lampsprites, fur-covered goblins, lumbering trows. And at the end of the procession walked a slim girl
dressed in a flimsy white dress with wispy blonde hair falling
loose around her shoulders who looked up at me out of wide
gray eyes and opened her mouth to say something . . . but then
the sunbeam dissolved into mist and once again I was looking
at the winter woods.
“That girl,” I said, turning to Raven, “I think she might be
Nathan’s sister. Her name was Louisa. Her brother thinks she
was abducted by one of you.”
“Nathan? Is that the frailing who tried to stab me with his
little blade last night?” Raven asked, his voice thick with disdain.
“Only because he thought you were going to hurt us,” I said,
not liking to hear Nathan so summarily dismissed. “And because he thinks one of your kind took his sister. Is it true?”
“No!” Raven got up abruptly. “A Darkling would never take
a human girl against her wishes.” He brushed crumbs from
his trousers and stuffed the thermos and cups into his bag and
started walking briskly away. “As I will demonstrate by taking
you back right now.”
“You needn’t get all huffy,” I said, getting up. “You can’t
blame Nathan for wanting to find out what happened to his
sister. And after all, all our books tell us that you are dangerous—”
“Not all your books. There’s a book called
A Darkness of
Angels
that tells the truth about the Darklings and how our
curse can be lifted. He stopped when he saw my startled look.
“What?” he asked. “Have you heard of it?”
“Yes, that was one of the books my mother used to ask for
at every library we went to—and then later she would send me
to the library to find—only they never had it.”
“You see,” Raven said. “Your mother was looking for it to
prove the Darklings aren’t evil. It will also tell you how a chime
child can use her power to destroy the
tenebrae
and it might
even tell you how to get your friend’s sister out of Faerie and
how to lift the Darkling curse.”
“Is that what you want?“ I asked. “To be free of your curse
so you can go back to Faerie?”
He studied my face, not answering right away. In the morning light I saw that his eyes, which had looked black last night,
were really a deep midnight blue with swirls of gold inside
them. Looking into them was like staring into a night sky full
of stars. They made me feel a little dizzy. I’d almost forgotten
my question by the time he answered.
“I suppose it’s what the sisters of your Order would want—
for us to leave this world forever. And it’s what my elders want.
There is less and less room for us in this world. But for myself . . .” He faltered and looked away.
“What?” I asked, reaching out to touch his hand. “What do
you want?”
His wings rippled beneath his shirt at my touch. We had
reached the edge of the woods. He turned to answer me, but
then the bells of Blythewood began to ring the matin changes—the peal to banish the shadows of the night. Raven looked
toward the tower. His wings strained beneath his shirt as if he
wanted to take to the sky.
“Do the bells scare you?”
He shook his head. “No, they merely make us sad. They remind us of all we’ve lost.” He looked down at me, his dark eyes
studying me. Then he reached out his hand and ran one finger
down the side of my face. “It doesn’t matter what I want, Ava.
Try to find the book. Just be careful. We think that the Shadow
Master has a spy at Blythewood.”
I should have asked how the Darklings knew there was a
spy, but instead I asked, “Will I see you again . . . I mean . . . in
case I have news?”
He smiled. “I’ll figure out a way.” Then his wings fanned
out behind him, blue-black and iridescent as a peacock’s tail in
the morning sun. The sudden rush of wind from their movement blinded me for a moment. When I opened my eyes he was
gone—a flicker of darkness in the pine boughs as he soared upward. I stared into the shadows of the pinewoods for a moment
longer, reluctant to turn my back on them. But then I recalled
that he was somewhere in those shadows watching and felt reassured.