“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.
I walked across the snow-covered lawn toward the castle, which glowed honey gold in the morning sun like an enchanted castle in a fairy tale. The last echo of the last bell rang through the valley, tolling not Merope’s death, if I believed what Raven had told me, but her farewell to her sisters. Although I’d spent only one night in the woods I felt as though it had been a hundred years since I’d left Blythewood. What if I had strayed into Faerie and been gone twenty years, like Rip van Winkle, And all my friends had grown up and gone away without me?
But here were Daisy and Helen running across the lawn toward me, their faces shining with relief. I felt a corresponding leap of joy in my heart and rushed to meet them, nearly slipping in the snow.
“Oh, thank heavens!” Daisy cried, flinging her arms around me. “We were so frightened! If you weren’t back after matins we were going to have to tell Gillie.”
“I knew you would rescue her,” Helen said, looking over my shoulder.
I whirled around, thinking that Raven had reappeared, but it wasn’t Raven behind me; it was Nathan. The tips of his fair hair were heavy with ice, his skin nearly the same blue as his eyes. He looked like one of the ice giants we’d run into last night, and for a moment I was afraid that he’d been turned to ice by them—that when the sun struck him he would shatter into a million pieces.
“Ava didn’t need me to rescue her,” he said with a smile that chilled me to the bone. Had he seen me with Raven? Would he tell Helen and Daisy that I had spent the night with a Darkling? “In fact, she rescued me. We spent the night huddled in a hollow tree. See”—he held up my bandaged hand—“she scraped her hand on a thorn bush.”
He fixed me with an icy stare that I understood completely: Go along with the story or I’ll tell them you spent the night with a Darkling. I hadn’t even thought through how much I would tell my friends, but one look at Helen and Daisy told me that they would never understand—at least not until I could prove that Darklings weren’t evil. And for that I needed to find the book—A Darkness of Angels. So I smiled back at Nathan and lied.
“Yes, that’s what we did. We’re frozen clean through.” I shivered, not having to pretend; I did feel suddenly cold. “I’d kill for a cup of hot cocoa.”
“Of course, let’s get you both inside.” Helen took Nathan’s arm and led the way for Daisy and me. As I watched them walking in front of us I realized that Nathan’s lie hadn’t only hidden where I had spent the night—it hid where he had as well.
27
THE DOVES WERE right about the winter: it was a hard one. Not just because of the bitter cold, relentless winds, driving snow, and day after day of gray skies with barely a glimpse of sun. Along with the awful weather, a pall had settled over Blythewood like an icy fog that had fallen between the rest of the world and us. The Jager twins seemed to go into a virtual hibernation, and even chipper Cam Bennett came back from vacation unusually subdued.
“It was just so peculiar to have to keep secrets from Mater and Pater,” she told us at the welcome-back dinner.
Even Georgiana Montmorency was too listless to think of rumors to start about me.
The lawns were too icy for us to practice archery. Our only exercise was walking up and down the interminable stairs and bell ringing. Gone, though, were the sprightly tunes we had practiced for the Christmas concert. Instead we rang changes that sounded like funeral dirges. They were designed, Mr. Peale explained, to beat back the ice giants that inhabited the Blythe Wood at this time of year. Recalling the monsters I’d encountered in the woods the night of the solstice I couldn’t argue. The frigid wind that blew through the belfry felt as though it had come straight from the Arctic Sea. The rime-covered trees at the edge of the forest looked like frozen sentinels—an army camped at our doorstep. Whenever I glanced at the woods—from the belfry tower, the landing windows, or the rooftop mews—it seemed as if the woods had moved closer to the castle, hemming us in a little more.
I confided my impression to Gillie one day when I had volunteered to help him imp a wounded bird. I was holding a young tiercel, gentling it, as Gillie had instructed, by playing the bells in my head. The falcon had responded almost immediately by going limp in my arms so that Gillie could clip off her broken wing feathers and graft on new donor feathers. When I told Gillie I thought the woods were moving closer I expected him to laugh off the idea, but instead he glanced uneasily over his shoulder.
“Aye, them Jotuns are wee tricky devils. They can take the shapes of trees or rocks and bide their time till some unwary traveler passes too close by. Y’see the ice on the river?” He pointed his clipper toward the Hudson, which was now entirely frozen over. Along the banks great chunks of ice had piled up. “I’ve heard tell that an ice giant can assume the shape of an iceberg and lie in wait for a ship to pass, then it seizes the hull in its teeth and drags it down to the ocean floor along with all its crew and passengers.”
The falcon stirred restlessly in my arms, shaking the bells on her jesses, and I realized I’d let the bells in my head speed up in the same jangly rhythm.
“Aye, Jessie, you watch out for those devils now.” He released the wing he had been working on and nodded to me to let the bird go. Jessie hopped onto Gillie’s gloved hand and stretched out her repaired wing. “Good as new,” Gillie said. “You see, lass, we’re none of us doomed to be just one thing. We can change our feathers just like Jessie here.” He swung his arm forward, releasing the falcon into the sky. She soared across the lawn toward the woods. Gillie held his hand over his eyes to shade them from the glare of sun on ice. In the shadow of his hand his eyes looked mournful. “I wish all broken things were so easy to fix,” he said, leaving me to wonder what had broken in Gillie’s life.
With the ice so impassable, the Dianas no longer patrolled the lawn. Instead they stalked the halls, restless as housecats kept indoors. One day I found Charlotte Falconrath sobbing in a broom closet. When I asked what was wrong she told me that her father had arranged a match for her and she wa
s to be married just after graduation.
“I only just met him at Christmas! He’s old and fat, but Mother says he comes from good blood!”
I thought of the bloodline charts in the dungeon and felt a chill go through me. But when I tried to comfort Charlotte, she snapped, “What do you know of it? With your history they’ll never make you marry!”
Not everyone was quite as sympathetic to the Dianas’ stress. “Why do I feel as if they’re on guard to keep us in more than to keep anything out?” Helen remarked one frigid February evening in the Commons Room over an interminable game of flush and trophies.
I glanced around the room and noticed one of the Dianas, Augusta Richmond, a statuesque brunette from Charleston, at the entrance to the Commons Room, bow drawn, eyes alert. Beyond her in the hallway, Charlotte Falconrath was standing at the foot of the stairs. Her bow was drawn as well—which was alarming considering Charlotte’s poor aim and precarious mental state lately.
“Who would want to go out in this?” Daisy said, shivering. The wind rattled the windows of the Commons Room as if in reply.
“They’re afraid of winter fever,” Beatrice informed us after laying down a flush of spades and calling trophy. “I read about it in Sieges and Campaigns of the Dark Ages. It’s what happens when an Order is under siege in its castle. Sometimes a girl goes crazy and runs out into the woods and throws herself right into the hands of the demons.”