Ravencliffe (Blythewood series) (21 page)

“She’s delirious,” I heard Helen tell Dame Beckwith when she arrived. “She must have caught a chill in the city in all this damnable rain. I should have gone with her.”

“
I
should have gone with her!” Daisy said. “It’s all because of this silly argument we’ve been having.”

“Well, now that you mention it—”

I lost consciousness while Helen and Daisy bickered, and I fell back into the sea, where I wrestled with the kraken’s many tentacles. When I awoke again I was in a clean white room. For a moment I was afraid I was back in the Bellevue Pavilion for the Insane, but the faces that floated over me like balloons were familiar—Miss Sharp, Dame Beckwith, Miss Corey, Helen, Daisy. They told me I was in the infirmary, that I had caught a fever but I was going to be all right. I tried to tell them they were wrong. I’d been eaten by the kraken, I’d lost my soul, I would never be all right again. I asked Helen to find Raven—at least his wings would keep me warm—and I heard her promise that she would look for him before I fell back into the sea and the arms of the kraken.

The creature was fighting me for my soul. That’s what it did with prey. I saw the other drowned passengers struggling in its tentacles, and then finally going limp and letting themselves be eaten. I saw one woman climb right into the maw, plunging into the circle of teeth with a kind of wild, manic glee, as if glad to finally win an end to her struggles.

And why not?
a sly voice inside my head asked—van Drood’s voice.
Why keep struggling, Ava? Your own father abandoned you when you were a baby, and now he’s done it again—he’s left a piece of your soul stuck in the kraken’s teeth like a stray bit of spinach. And your Darkling boyfriend—where’s he? Even your friends would rather bicker and fight than take care of you. Your father cared more about saving that book than you. Your boyfriend’s too afraid of the wrath of his Elders to come for you. And if they don’t care enough to save you, why should you keep struggling? This is where you belong, Ava, in the darkness, with me, warm inside the kraken’s belly.

I came close, several times, to giving in, but then I would startle awake and find Helen or Daisy or Miss Sharp holding my hand.

“Hang on, Ava,” they would say. “Just hang on.”

And so I did. But each time I struggled with the kraken I grew a little weaker and I knew it was only a matter of time before I gave myself to those snapping teeth.

It was a snapping sound that woke me. A sharp crack like gunfire; then another.

I woke in the infirmary and stared at the moonlit room. Helen was snoring in the chair beside the bed, so worn out by keeping vigil that the sound hadn’t woken her.

There it was again—a series of sharp cracks. Was Blythewood under attack? The sounds were coming from outside the window. I struggled to sit up to see better, failed, and settled on sliding off the bed and crawling to the window. But when I finally dragged myself across the floor and clawed my way up to the windowsill and looked outside, I saw a magically peaceful scene.

The rain that had been falling steadily for weeks had turned to ice. Every blade of grass on the lawn, the urns and statues, the shrubs in the garden, and every branch and twig in the Blythe Wood was coated with a sheath of ice that glimmered like opals in the light of a full newly risen moon. The cracks came from branches snapping off as they succumbed to the weight of the ice. What did it mean? Had the changelings completed their search for Rue? Had they found her? Or given up? Or been stopped by van Drood?

I heard a great volley of crackling explosions—like firecrackers going off on the Fourth of July. Something was coming through the woods, crashing through the upper branches, scattering icicles like shards of crystal from a shattered chandelier. It burst from the woods and flew across the lawn, its great winged shadow etched on the white ice like an ebony cameo laid over ivory, straight toward me.

I fell back from the window as he landed—and then he was beside me. For a moment I didn’t recognize him. His hair and wings were rimmed with ice, turning them white. Even his eyebrows were hoary with frost. He looked like a winged ice demon, but when he took me in his arms I knew it was Raven.

“What—? How—? Where have you been?” I finally managed. Even though his wings were limned with ice, they were bringing warmth back into my body.

“To find your father, of course,” he replied. “He’s with the Elders now. I’m taking you to them.”

23

RAVEN BUNDLED ME
into my coat and boots before we left, buttoning my buttons and tying my laces as if I were a child. I wouldn’t have been able to do it myself; my fingers felt weak and clumsy.

“When I saw how sick you were I knew I had to find your father. Only the Darkling who rescued you from the water could restore the bit of soul you lost,” he told me as he gathered me in his arms and launched us into the air. It was too difficult to talk while we were flying, so I snuggled into his arms, soaking up his warmth and watching the frozen woods beneath us. We flew north over the Blythe Wood. Looking down, I was shocked at the damage the ice storm had caused in the wood. The weight of ice had felled hundreds of branches and even whole trees. The entire forest looked like some enormous beast had ravaged through it.

At the northern edge of the forest I saw the little village of Tivoli, looking with its glaze of ice like a diorama of a Christmas village in a store window. Just before the village on the edge of the woods stood a stone castle with a tall octagonal tower facing the river. Raven lit on the frozen lawn beside a statue of a winged angel.

“W-what is this place?” I asked, teeth chattering the moment I wasn’t in his arms anymore.

“Ravencliffe,” he said. “This is where the Elders live.”

I stared at the massive stone castle. It was almost as big as Blythewood but, I saw when the moon struck the stone façade, not as well maintained. Some of the windows were boarded up, and many more were broken. Chunks of the stone cornices were missing from the roof. A double flight of once grand stairs had crumbled to the ground. With its layer of ice, the house looked like it could be a fancy ice cream cake that had begun to melt.

“It looks abandoned,” I whispered.

Raven replied with a rueful smile, “I’m afraid we Darklings don’t have the Blythewood endowment to maintain the property. Most of us fledglings prefer to live in the forest and think Ravencliffe should be sold, but the Elders want to hold on to it. They’re rather old-fashioned.”

Raven took my hand and led me under a crumbling porte cochere and through a door into a dark room. He lit a match and touched it to an oil lamp standing in a recessed niche. When he held up the lamp I saw we were in a high-ceilinged oval room paved from floor to ceiling in an elaborate mosaic, pieces of which had fallen off and littered the floor, making it difficult to see the pattern in the dim lamplight. When the moon appeared in the skylight, though, I saw that the design was of hundreds of birds of every sort imaginable, from tiny hummingbirds to great eagles, brightly hued parrots, flamingoes and dark-winged ravens. As I turned around in a circle I had the impression of them flying—and I heard a flutter of wings and realized that some of them were. The broken skylight had let in real birds that roosted in niches throughout the dome.

“This is called the Aviary,” Raven told me in a hushed voice. “The Elders believe that we are kin to the birds and should revere them as our ancestors, but,” he added in a less respectful tone, “it’s a bear to keep clean. Come on. They’re waiting for us in the library.”

We passed through a dark corridor lined with glass cases holding stuffed birds, their glass eyes shining in the light of Raven’s lamp.

“If you revere the birds, then why—”

“It’s considered a way of honoring our brethren after they’re dead. Personally I think it’s creepy. I’m always afraid that I’m going to come across a stuffed Darkling somewhere in this mausoleum.” He shuddered and laughed when he saw me staring at him. “Only Darklings dissolve when we die.”

“Oh,” I said, hardly reassured. “Is that what will happen to me?”

We’d reached a pair of large sliding doors, their dark wood inlaid with a wing pattern on each side, meeting in the middle. Raven stopped and turned to me.

“No one really knows what will happen to you,” he said, holding my gaze. “There hasn’t been a mixed bloodling since the daughter of Merope and Aderyn.”

“Oh,” I said, not sure I liked being called a
mixed bloodling
. “And what happened to her?”

He gave me a reassuring smile. “She lived to a ripe old age of two hundred ninety-six. We Darklings are quite long-lived. But”—the smile faded from his face—“the Elders believe that it was Merope’s blood that banished us from Faerie. So they outlawed marriage between Darklings and humans on pain of exile. That’s why your father had to leave after you were born. He was exiled from the flock.”

“I suppose he had no real choice then,” I said, although the sly insidious voice of my nightmares was back asking why he couldn’t have found a way to at least get a message to me. Something else bothered me about Raven’s story . . . something about Merope and Aderyn . . . something van Drood had shown me in the Hall of Mirrors . . .

“No, no real choice,” Raven said with a grimace. “The punishment for returning from exile is death.”

Raven slid open both doors at the same moment, separating the two inlaid wings with a
whoosh
that sounded as if they had taken flight. The sound was repeated in the high-vaulted tower room we entered, a sound of many wings rising to the high-domed ceiling above us. This was the tower I’d seen from the front of the house, only I hadn’t imagined it would contain only one room. Looking up, I saw there were ledges around the top where huge birds roosted—only they weren’t birds, I realized as my eyes adjusted to the light. They were Darklings—dozens of them. I saw Marlin among the flock and he gave me a tentative smile.

I looked away quickly lest I get him in trouble—and was sorry I had. There were no smiles for me on the ground floor. The three figures that sat on the far side of a long table in the center of the room might have been statues carved of ivory and ebony for all the expression on their rigid faces. Only the stir of their wing feathers in the draft that came through the open skylight told me they weren’t statues.

As I walked toward them I was reminded of my admission interview for Blythewood, presided over by three crow-like old women. This triad, though, was made up of one woman and two men. The man who sat in the center of the table had long white hair and a deeply lined face the color of old ivory. As I got closer I realized that some of the lines were scars, including one dreadful one that ran across a sightless, milk-white eye. His other eye was riveted on me. To his left sat the woman. Her hair was gray and also long, but piled high on her head in an elaborate braid. I thought I saw a flicker of sympathy in her large hazel eyes, but that might have been a trick of the lamplight. There was certainly no sympathy in the jet-black eyes of the small-boned, hawk-nosed Darkling sitting on the right side of the table. He reminded me of the kestrels in the Blythewood mews, his bright eyes tracking my movements as if he might spring on me at any moment.

Only when I was directly in front of the table did I see the fourth figure. He was kneeling on the floor in front of the table, his wings mantled over his head. I’d taken him for a statue, he was so still, but as I drew level to him he lifted his head and gazed at me from under his long dark hair and I recognized the Darkling from my
Titanic
vision. It was my father.

I gasped and drew closer to him, but a rustle of wings from above—and Raven’s hand on my arm—stopped me.

“You will not approach the prisoner,” the white-haired Darkling barked in a voice that echoed in the high tower.

“Prisoner?” I looked again and saw that heavy chains weighted his hands and feet. Worse, his wings had been nailed to the floor.

“Why is he chained like this?” I cried. “What has he done?”

“Falco knew the punishment for breaking his exile,” the white-haired Darkling answered.

“But he’s only come to help me—”

“His reasons for breaking the law are not our concern,” he began, but when the gray-haired woman lightly touched his hand he turned to her.

“Merlinus,” she said in a soft, musical voice, “if Falco has come to save his daughter, perhaps we should show leniency.”

“You are too forgiving, Wren,” the short hawk-nosed man said in a high, grating voice. “If we show leniency to one exile, how will we maintain our authority?”

“Authority is not won by fear and intimidation, Gos,” the gray-haired woman named Wren responded. “It may be earned by mercy as well.”

“But he broke one of the cardinal rules—fraternizing with a mortal woman. He even produced a half-bloodling.” The man named Gos pointed a sharp-nailed finger at me. Next to me, Falco’s pinned wings rustled against their bonds.

“He fell in love,” Wren said gently, with a look at Merlinus, who had remained silent and stone-faced throughout the argument between Gos and Wren. At her look something softened in his face that made me suspect they were husband and wife. He didn’t put a stop to the argument, though. Wren and Gos went back and forth debating between mercy and punishment until I grew dizzy swiveling my neck back and forth between the two of them and I began to teeter on my feet and lose my balance.

As I fell I heard something tear—and then I was caught by strong arms and surrounded by a flurry of feathers. I looked up into storm-gray eyes. Falco had caught me, tearing his own wings as he leapt for me. His loose feathers fell around us like a gentle snowfall. One touched my face, and I felt a melting warmth spread through my chill limbs. Dimly I heard a voice—Gos’s—barking, “Restrain him!” but another voice, gentler but no less commanding, ordered, “Let them be. He is restoring her. Whatever we choose to do with him, the fledgling need not suffer while her bondling is here to heal her.”

“Bondling?” I repeated weakly. “Does that mean father?”

Falco smiled at me sadly. “No, dearling, bondling is what we call a Darkling who saves a soul from dying but keeps a bit of that soul enmeshed with his. I did not know that I had kept that bit of soul when I saved you. Now I can give it back to you.”

He spread his wings around me until I was cradled in their warmth, a warmth that seeped down into my bones. The chill I’d felt these last few weeks was finally banished, the piece that had been missing finally restored. I looked up at him and saw that his face was etched with pain.

“Does it hurt you?” I asked, alarmed that he was injuring himself to heal me.

He smiled again, but his eyes remained sad. “No, dearling, to restore your soul gives me great joy. I only wish I could restore the time we’ve lost in the same way. I had no idea when I left that your mother was—that you were—I didn’t know about you. I only agreed to leave without Evangeline because I thought it would be safer for her. I thought she would go back to her own kind. If I had known that she was going to have a child, I would never have left, no matter what the Elders threatened to do to me.”

I felt tears sting my eyes. How many times had I wondered why my father had abandoned me? It was a grief so deep I had long ago closed it up, like a door to an unused room. Now that door opened and I felt the sadness in his eyes fill it. “When did you find out about me?” I asked.

“When your mother died. I felt her passing, all the way in the frozen North, and came to carry her to Faerie. She told me about you then. I wanted to come to you, but she told me I needed to find the book
A Darkness of Angels
, first. She said that you would never be safe without it. I traced it to the place where it all started—to Hawthorn in Scotland—and saw that Mr. Farnsworth was bringing it to you. I followed him to make sure it made it to you safely, but of course it didn’t. Farnsworth gave it to me when I saved him, but van Drood set his
tenebrae
on my trail. I’ve been running from them ever since, afraid to lead them back to you, but then a few weeks ago I had a dream that you were on the
Titanic
, too. I thought it was only a dream until Raven found me and told me you were soul-sick. I came right away—”

“Even if it meant they might kill you for returning,” I finished for him.

“What would that matter if you died?” he asked simply. “I would do anything to make up for the time I’ve missed with you.”

I wanted to tell him that he had, but I knew that nothing would ever make up for my not having grown up with my father—for either of us. But at least I knew now that it wasn’t his fault. It was the Elders’ fault.