“That rather sounds like what angels do . . . oh!” I said, clapping my hand to my mouth. “Are you telling me you’re an angel?”
Instead of answering he lifted the kettle from the stove and poured a stream of steaming water into a brown glazed teapot. He swirled the water around and then dumped it into a moss pocket. He measured out tea leaves into the pot and refilled it with boiling water and placed it on a silver tray next to two blue-and-white china teacups, a sugar bowl, and a creamer.
(A creamer? I wondered. Wherever did he get cream?)
“That’s your word for us,” he finally answered. I wasn’t sure anymore what I was more surprised by—that I was standing three feet away from an angel or that he had a supply of fresh cream (from a bottle labeled “Honeybrook Farms, Rhinebeck, N.Y.”) and a tin of chocolate biscuits. “Later we were called nephilim or fallen angels because our wings were black instead of the pretty gold-and-white ones in paintings. Whenever we’d show ourselves to humans they thought we were demons. Then your lot came along and decided all creatures from Faerie were demons.”
“Aren’t they?” I asked. “Those ice giants tried to kills us!”
“Yes, the Jotuns are pretty vicious, but at least they’re slow and they’re only in the woods for a few months during the winter.”
“Well, those goblins that were chasing us certainly weren’t very nice.”
He shuddered and his wings strained against his shirt. “No, goblins aren’t nice. Sadly they developed a taste for human flesh.”
“Hell’s bells!” I swore, getting to my feet. “My friends! We have to go back and save them!”
“Calm down,” he said. One wing stretched through the hole in his shirt, blocking my way. The feathers only grazed my arm but I stopped. There was something soothing in their touch, something that reminded me of my mother’s hand when she stroked my hair when I’d had a nightmare. “Once I scattered the goblins they took off for their burrows. They won’t show their rat faces for another fortnight. Your friends will be all right.”
As he talked he continued stroking my arm with his feather tips, and then gently led me to a bench beside the tea tray he’d set up. He sat down on the bench beside me and tucked in his wing. His feathers rustled as he gathered them together until the wing was tucked back between his shoulder blades and nearly invisible. Then he poured tea, as if it were the most normal thing in the world: fold wing, pour out tea, add sugar.
The homely motions along with the soothing touch of his wings and the hot, sweet tea calmed me, but then I remembered what Dame Beckwith had said about the Darklings practicing mind control.
“Why should I trust you?” I asked. “Your kind has hunted down my kind. I saw it in the candelabellum. You abducted Merope and destroyed the prince. You turn into crows and eat the souls of your victims!”
“Ah, the candelabellum,” he said, his lips twisting into a sneer. “Yes, it shows pretty pictures, but how do you know it tells the truth? I can show you a picture show as well. Finish your tea.”
“What?”
“Your tea,” he repeated slowly. “Finish it. It’s for—”
“Shock. Yes, so everyone keeps saying. I am not in shock.”
“I was going to say it’s for a story. Our side of the story.” His long fingers wrapped around the blue-and-white teacup, which suddenly looked tiny in his hand. He held up the cup and revolved it in the air, his tapered fingertips grazing the figures in the china pattern—a man and a woman in Chinese dress, a pagoda, a boat, two birds.
“I know the story of the willow-wear pattern,” I said a little smugly, taking the cup in my hand. “A girl who’s promised to another runs away with her lover and her jilted fiancé tracks them down and kills them, but they’re resurrected as birds.” I touched my fingertips to the two blue birds, their beaks locked in an everlasting kiss. Although I’d started out telling the story in a bored voice just to prove I knew as much as him, my hand trembled as I touched the birds. I was remembering my mother telling the story, and how her voice would fill with emotion whenever she got to the part about the lovers transforming into birds, how she would place the cup in my hands and say, “Nothing can keep true lovers apart.”
I felt Raven’s hand slip beneath mine, cradling my hands just as my hand cradled the teacup. Suddenly my hand felt just as fragile as the delicate china, and my body as hollow. His other hand splayed over the cup, fingertips resting lightly on its rim.
“Look into the cup,” he said, his voice a husky purr next to my ear. “This is our story.”
With a flick of his wrist, he twirled the cup. It began spinning in my hand like a top, only when it should have stopped, it spun faster, the blue-and-white pictures blurring like muffled shapes moving through a snowstorm, flakes of snow gusting past them, so hard and fast I felt its sting on my cheeks and saw the whirl of flakes all around me, so dizzying that I couldn’t tell if I were watching snow rising from the spinning cup of if I was inside the cup watching the snow falling down . . . or if I were the one falling.
I fell into the snowy woods. Only Raven’s hand still gripping mine kept me from tumbling to my knees into a waist-high drift. We were standing in a snow-filled woods. A bell was ringing—not the bass danger bell, but the sweet treble, tolling out its forlorn tune. Remember me, remember me. I squinted through the driving snow and made out the figure of a girl slumped over a large bronze bell—a girl no older than me and much thinner and slighter, and yet she rang steadily with hands that were white with frostbite and raw with blood. Around her lay her sisters, each beside a bell, too exhausted to keep ringing, and around them . . .
I flinched as a shadow slunk behind me. Raven gripped my hand tighter as I turned to look at what surrounded the grove. Shadow crows filled the trees like a second snowfall made out of ash. Long trails of soot wound around the tree trunks—shadow wolves prowling the edges of the grove, tightening the circle as Merope’s bell grew weaker. It was only a matter of time before they overcame her. Even now the shadows were creeping toward her, nosing at her flesh. A crow dislodged from a branch and landed beside her, then another and another, each one coming closer, talons scrabbling over snow, beaks darting toward soft flesh . . . I lurched toward her to stop them, my legs rubbery in the deep snow, but Raven pulled me back.
“Wait,” he whispered in my ear, his breath the only warmth in this frozen world. His arm grasped my shoulders and he pointed at the sky. “Look.”
Huge black wings spread over the grove, scattering the crows. They beat the snow into a lather of white, flecked with the torn feathers of the carrion crows and drops of blood.
The shadows . . . bleed? It was a thought so horrible I couldn’t even say it aloud, but in the teacup snow globe Raven heard me and whispered back, his voice as filled with horror as my thought.
Yes, inside every shadow creature is a bit of the animal—or person—it once was.
The huge winged creature cleaved his way through the bloody and smoldering crow carcasses to reach Merope. When he reached her she had already been pecked and torn by crows, but she was still alive. He lifted her up, blood dripping from her torn flesh and filling the hollow impression where she had lain through the night. But I saw her arms wrap around her winged savior and her eyes fasten on him. I heard the treble bell ring out, not the one on the ground, or the one in my head. I heard it ringing inside her head.
“She knew him!” I cried. “And loved him.”
Raven clamped his hand over my mouth to hush me. Why? Weren’t we just spectators here?
I heard Raven’s answer in my head, not in words but in images. Merope and Aderyn—I heard his name in Raven’s voice—loved each other, but it was forbidden. A Darkling could not love a mortal. But he could not let her die. When he rescued her and took her as his bride the Darklings were cursed. They could ferry souls to the mortal afterworld and Faerie, but they themselves could never cross
into Faerie again. As this part of the story fell into place, I felt Raven’s sorrow and his longing—but whether that longing was for the world his kind had lost or for the love that Aderyn and Merope had, I couldn’t tell. And there was no time to ask.
Aderyn rose with Merope in his arms just as a jangle of bells filled the clearing and the knights arrived, their horses steaming the air, their shouts scattering the shadow creatures. They gathered up Merope’s sisters, who cried and screamed when they saw the bloody shape in the snow, but who were too weak to do much else but cling to the backs of their rescuers as they rode out of the grove, trailed by the shadows.
Come.
Before I knew what was happening, Raven had lifted me up—as Aderyn had Merope—and we were winging through the driving snow, following the route of the knights and the rescued sisters. They were pursued by the shadow creatures on land and in the air—a thick stream of crows and wolves. At the edges of the shadow stream, though, I could make out other creatures—lampsprites and goblins and trolls—fighting back the shadow creatures.
“They were trying to help,” I said.
“Yes,” Raven replied, his voice mournful. “The creatures of Faerie are no friends to the shadows. They’ve battled them for eons. Wherever the shadows are, the fairies try to fight them. Sometimes they lose and the shadows take over their forms.”
I saw a goblin fall under a cloak of shadow crows that pecked holes in his tough hide. He screamed out to his companions—and in the spell of the teacup what would have normally sounded like jibbering grunts turned into words.
“Kill me!” he cried. “Slay me rather than let the tenebrae eat my soul!”
I watched, horrified, as another goblin threw himself on his companion and ripped out his throat with his teeth. I looked away and heard Raven’s voice in my ear. “This is why your kind think that the fairies are aligned with the shadows. But look, even the Darkling who rescued Merope tried to save her sisters.”
I saw that another Darkling was flying beside us, the girl perched on his back calling instructions into his ear and pointing to the figures on the ground. The knights had reached the castle gate. They formed a guard around the sisters to get them through the gate while fighting off the shadows. It was the same scene I’d witnessed in the candelabellum, only now from my aerial vantage point I could see what I hadn’t before—on the edges of the battle goblins and sprites fought off the shadows and from above Aderyn staved off the attack of the crows. If not for Aderyn and the fairies, the knights and sisters would not have gotten to safety, but they were not able to save the prince. When the last of the crows landed on him I wanted to look away. I didn’t want to see him ripped apart again. But I couldn’t look away. I was drawn to the cluster of darkness that formed around him as if it were a magnet that pulled me toward it, its power growing greater as each shadow filled the hollow shape of the struggling prince.
Watching, I grew limp in Raven’s arms. He landed beside a rampart of the castle and braced me against the wall. I felt his breath in my ear, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. The toll of the bass bell was too loud in my ears. I hadn’t heard it when I watched this same scene in the candelabellum, because that had been a shadow play. This wasn’t. Whatever magic ruled the teacup, it was stronger. This wasn’t a play I was watching; it was real. The prince was being ripped to shreds in front of my eyes. The shadow crows were burrowing beneath his skin, devouring him from the inside. I could see the crows squirming and bulging beneath his skin. I moaned aloud at the horror of it.
And the shadow-thing turned toward me. Its face was a mass of roiling, raw flesh, but its eyes were already sentient and they were fastened on me. They saw me. His mouth opened and smoke curdled out as he spoke.
I screamed. Raven squeezed my hand so hard I felt my flesh rend . . . and then we were back in Raven’s nest and I was crouched on the floor, Raven’s wings mantled over me, one arm around my shoulder, the other cradling my closed fist. Blood spilled from between my clenched fingers.
“It’s all right,” he was saying, his voice audible now that the bass bell wasn’t ringing. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize your magic was so strong you could make the scene real. I had to do something to break the spell.” He was prying my fingers apart, picking shards of broken china out of my shredded flesh, murmuring over and over again that he was sorry and that it was all right until his words blurred into a cooing like the sound pigeons made on the windowsill in the city. Dimly I felt him cleaning and wrapping my hand and then he was wrapping me in a blanket because I couldn’t stop shivering and then he was laying me down on the pallet, which was surprisingly soft, like a feather bed, and he was covering me with his wings because I 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.
26
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.
The dread melted from my bones. A boy who was this gentle with birds wasn’t going to hurt me. And the visions I had seen in the teacup last night were real.
“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 ti
ps 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.