My head was so full of the sound of wings I couldn’t hear anything else, but then I heard it: the bells of Blythewood tolling a peal.
“It’s the Hunting Peal. Can’t you see how dark it’s gotten? Night is falling. We’ve been in Faerie all day. They’ve called out the Hunt to find us. If we don’t stop them they’ll ravage these woods. In his weakened state Raven won’t be able to escape. He’ll die and his flock will die trying to protect him.”
I knew she was right, because along with the toll of the Blythewood bells I heard my own bass bell tolling an alarm inside my head. Still, I couldn’t bear to leave Raven. “You can stop them while I warn the Darklings.”
“They won’t stop the Hunt if any one of us is still in the woods. You have to come with me.”
I took one look back, but already the woods were too dark to make out the Darklings. Joined with the bells now came the sound of hunting horns. Their blare sent chills rushing down my spine. I wanted to flee from them, but I made myself run toward them with Miss Sharp and Sir Malmsbury. Louisa and Nathan had gone on ahead. “What about Helen and Mr. Bellows?” I cried.
Miss Sharp turned her head, her eyes flashing in the dark likwe an owl’s. “Perhaps they’re already out . . . look! They are, they’re with the Hunt. Come on, there’s not much time.”
We’d reached the edge of the woods, where Nathan and Louisa stood. Louisa was pulling on Nathan’s hand, crying and begging to be let go. She was trying to run back into the woods. When I looked out at the lawn I didn’t blame her.
A wave of fire was rolling across the lawn toward the woods, dark at its base and crested with flame. An unbroken line of black-cloaked figures holding torches strode forward, their steps synchronized to the toll of the bells. With them came a crunching sound, like the surf churning through shells. I recalled a poem we’d read in Miss Sharp’s class that described the surf’s
melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Only this surf was made up of bows and arrows and swords rustling beneath cloaks. This wave would roll through the woods devouring everything in its path—or it would be destroyed itself. With the hunting lust upon them, the Order of Blythewood would fight to their deaths. I could see now why Dame Beckwith had not ordered a Hunt before this. She knew that she would lose her own teachers and students in the fight.
“Oh dear,” Sir Malmsbury said, “and I’m covered in lampsprite feathers! Your Dianas and their hawks will tear me limb from limb. Perhaps I should have stayed in Faerie.”
“Too late for that,” Miss Sharp snapped, pushing Sir Malmsbury forward. “You’ll have to explain what happened. Dame Beckwith will listen to you.”
“Actually,” Sir Malmsbury replied, hanging back, “India and I never quite saw eye to eye. I’m not sure I’m the best man for the job.”
Impatient with their argument, I stepped out of the woods and in front of the hunt, my arms spread wide. For a moment I thought they would roll right over me. The faces I saw beneath their hoods were stony, eyes glazed. But then one of the figures cried out.
“Look, it’s Ava!” The voice was Helen’s. Mr. Bellows was right beside her.
The line came to a halt and the figure at the center stepped forward holding a torch high in the air. She lowered her hood and I saw that it was Dame Beckwith.
“You can call off the Hunt!” I cried. “We’re all safe—Miss Sharp and Nathan, and look . . .” I stood aside so Dame Beckwith could see Louisa. “We found Louisa. She was never taken by the Darklings. She had strayed into Faerie, but Nathan found her.” I urged Nathan forward but he was too busy struggling with Louisa to keep her from running back into the woods. Dame Beckwith was staring at Louisa as if unable to believe that it was her daughter. “And we found him,” I continued, “and a Darkling held the door open for us so we wouldn’t get stuck there—”
I realized my mistake right away. As soon as I mentioned a Darkling another figure stepped forward. I was shocked to see Miss Frost out of bed and seemingly recovered, her only sign of weakness that she was leaning heavily on Sarah Lehman’s arm. “A Darkling helped you?” she shrieked. “That’s impossible! You must have been seduced by the creature.”
“Euphorbia? Is that Euphorbia Frost’s voice I hear?” Sir Malmsbury stepped out of the shelter of the woods. “My dear, how you’ve . . . er . . . grown up. Do you remember your old teacher?”
Miss Frost gasped and staggered. Sarah struggled to keep her upright. “Sir Malmsbury? Is it really you?”
“Yes, dear Euphorbia, it is. I’ve come back from my expedition. And wait until you hear all I’ve learned in the field! I’m afraid my original notions were quite wrong.”
“You are covered in feathers!” Miss Frost cried, her eyes wide. “It’s just as I suspected—you were taken by lampsprites!”
“No!” Miss Sharp said, stepping in between Miss Frost and Sir Malmsbury. “Can’t you all see, we were wrong about the fairies. I saw a Darkling hold the door open so we could get out, and the lampsprites gave Sir Malmsbury their feathers to protect him.”
Dame Beckwith’s eyes flashed over our little group—Nathan still struggling with Louisa, who showed no signs of recognizing her mother; Sir Malmsbury in his feathery attire; Miss Sharp defending the Darklings and the fairies. When her eyes came back to me she nodded, her decision made.
“Seize them!” she shouted. “They’re not in their right minds.”
Robed figures on either side of her stepped forward, two for each of us. Euphorbia Frost dug sharp nails into my arm, her breath reeking of ashes. I flinched away but other hands were waiting for me.
“Take them back to the castle,” Dame Beckwith ordered our guards when we had been corralled. “We will sweep the woods. No matter what the cost, it’s time we destroyed the Darklings once and for all.”
Miss Frost pushed me forward, her fingernails digging deep into my arm. Sarah’s arm was gentler on my other side, a light weight. I could easily wrench my arm away . . . but then do what? If I could get away, I could run into the forest to warn the Darklings that the Hunt was coming, but how far would I get? The Dianas were arrayed in front of me, bows drawn, arrows nocked, their faces stony, their eyes yellow in the flickering torchlight. I recalled Miss Swift saying that when the Hunt was called the Dianas entered a sort of trance. Their eyes, I saw now, weren’t just yellow from the torchlight; they had become the yellow of their falcons’ eyes—and just as inhuman. If I made a break for the woods I didn’t doubt that they would shoot me. Right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if they flew at me and tore me limb from limb as I’d seen the falcons do to their prey.
I felt anger bubbling up inside me—for what Dame Beckwith was planning to do to the Darklings, but also for what she’d done to these girls, turning them into hunters and robbing them of their youth and innocence. The anger tingled on my skin, from the nape of my neck, down my shoulder blades, to the tips of my fingers, which were still lightly coated with sprite dust. What had my mother just said to me? Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to remain yourself. My mother had been a Diana. Is that why she had fled Blythewood—because she didn’t want to become a mindless hunter like these girls? The hunter must become the thing she hunts. From the time she fled Blythewood until her death, my mother had been hunted until she was finally caught and killed. Leaving one thing behind.
My hand stole into my pocket, unhampered by Sarah’s light touch on my elbow. As soon as I touched the black feather I felt a spark, as if it had come alive.
I dug my heels in so abruptly that Miss Frost stumbled. At the same time I whipped the feather out of my pocket and brandished it in front of Dame Beckwith and the Dianas. Sparks flew into the air, erupting into firecrackers from sprite dust clinging to the feather, the edges of which began t
o glow as Raven’s feathers had glowed when he held the door of Faerie open.
Thinking about Raven—what he had sacrificed to help me and how he was threatened now—fueled my anger . . . and apparently my magic. The feather glowed like a firebrand. In its light I saw Dame Beckwith’s eyes flare.
“Ava, you don’t know what you’re doing!” she said.
“I know I can’t let you destroy the Darklings,” I said. “They’re not our enemies—the tenebrae are.” As I said the word I felt a prickling at the nape of my neck. The Dianas, entranced as they were, took a step backward. Dame Beckwith looked suddenly terrified.
“It’s the Darkling feather,” she said, her voice low and urgent. “It’s summoned them.”
Them? I turned slowly, still holding the blazing feather in front of me. Its glare blinded me at first. The line of trees loomed black against the purple sky, their shadows distorted by the light of the blazing feather and the torches behind me. But then I realized that the shadows were not distorted. They were alive.
They were taller than the tallest tree in the forest and bristled like pines, but unlike the trees they could move. They lumbered out of the forest now, each step shaking the ground beneath my feet.
How could shadows shake the ground?
Because these are shadows made of flesh, a voice inside my head answered. It was a familiar voice. I had heard it before, after the crow attack when I had fallen into the dark well, on the streets of Rhinebeck when its owner had held me captive, and in the dungeon when the tenebrae had swarmed around me. The voice belonged to Judicus van Drood, the Shadow Master. Only the creature in front of me wasn’t a man.I It was an amalgam of oozing shadow that was capped by a belled shape—like a short cape topping a long coat. It was the man in the Inverness cape made huge. I lifted the blazing feather higher in a shaking hand to unmask his face . . . only there was no face, only shadows roiling in the dark. This creature was a projection of the Shadow Master’s mind.
I wouldn’t underestimate that, Ava dearling, the voice said inside my head. How had it gotten there?
You let me in.
I could feel the voice, like a snake slithering through my brain, nosing at my thoughts, memories, feelings. . . .
“No!” I screamed aloud.
Yessss, it hissed, the shadows writhing with the pulse of his voice. You watched the shadows tell my story. I felt you watching. It felt so good to have someone see how she led me on and then turned her back on me.
“That’s not what I saw,” I cried, but I could feel him inside my brain, prying at the memory of what I had seen inside the candelabellum room, releasing the images from the recesses of my brain as a beater flushes game from the brush. The shadow pictures flew upward and then began to spin inside my brain as though my head was the candelabellum chamber. I saw my mother as a young woman at Blythewood, running up the steps, laughing with her friends, ringing the bells, her face rosy with the exercise—yes, I could see the peaches-and-cream color of her skin, the bright red of her hair, the flash of her green eyes. The shadow pictures had taken on hue and flesh in my head as I watched them. I was hungry for them, for memories of my mother before she had grown thin and wasted, haunted . . .
Haunted by what she had done to me.
I saw her with a young man, a familiar-looking young man, sitting together in the library, their heads bent low over a book. She was reading aloud, something in Latin, and he was nodding along to the rhythm of the poem, holding up a finger now and then to correct her.
“You were her teacher.”
Yes, but hardly older than her. I’d just finished my training at Hawthorn.
Images of a young man fencing and running through a rugged landscape flashed through my brain and I recalled Nathan’s disparaging comments about Hawthorn’s rigorous regimen.
Yes, it’s quite brutal. By the time I arrived at Blythewood imagine how grateful I was for feminine companionship—and how susceptible! Evangeline was everything I could want in a wife and helpmate, but I was circumspect. I followed the protocol as established by the Order, inquiring with the proper authorities into the suitability of a match.
I saw the young van Drood speaking to a young—and quite beautiful—Dame Beckwith, the two of them consulting the ledgers. She, I realized now, was the other woman I’d been shown by the candelabellum, the one who had tried to draw van Drood away from the shadows—but had failed.
“But that’s awful!” I objected. “Arranging a marriage as though mating animals!”
Yes, I couldn’t agree with you more, dear Ava. If I had spoken of my feelings directly to Evangeline . . . if I had spoken sooner, things might have been quite different. But by the time the Order approved the match, your mother had fallen in love with someone else.
I saw van Drood and my mother standing in the garden, beneath a rose arbor, silhouetted against a sunset sky like two figures in an engraving. He held a small jewel box in his hand and she was shaking her head. He reached for her. She withdrew. They looked like the automaton figures on the repeater performing a dance. But then the picture flew apart into black shards spinning through the sky like a startled flock of crows. My mother ran toward the woods. Van Drood followed her, but before he could reach her he was set upon by the black crows. They swarmed over him, as they had the prince in the Merope story, devouring him.
And why not? van Drood whispered, his voice almost gentle inside my head. What did I have left? Why stay with the Order when I had lost the one thing that made being a part of them worthwhile? When their rules and regulations—their damned old ways!—had cost me the love of my life? I left. I learned the truth behind the Order. And learned how to destroy them. They’re such fools that they don’t understand that the things they hunt are what keep the world free of the shadows. Without the Darklings, the balance between shadow and light will be destroyed. The shadows will rule. I will rule! They’ve already made themselves into vessels with all their training. Look at them! They’re no better than puppets!
I heard a gasp from behind me and turned to see the Dianas’ bows trained on Dame Beckwith.
Fools! They don’t realize that their training makes it easier for me to get inside their heads. They’ve made it very easy over the years for me to turn them into slaves, just as I’ve made this one my servant.
Someone behind me stepped forward and grabbed my arm, trying to wrest the feather away from me.
I spun around to face Euphorbia Frost—because who else could he have meant by my servant—and came face to face with Sarah Lehman instead. She smiled at me . . . and black smoke poured out of her mouth.
“Sarah!” I cried. “Why . . . ?”
“Why should I be loyal to these people who treat me like a slave?” she asked. “Why should you? These are the women who drove your mother away because she’d polluted herself by contact with the Darklings.”
“I gave her a choice,” Dame Beckwith said, her voice firm but her eyes riveted to the bows of the Dianas. “Stay and renounce the Darklings or go. She chose to go.”
“She gave Louisa the same choice the day she ran into the woods,” Sarah said. “She’d fallen in love with a Darkling, too. It was easy to lead her into the woods promising to take her to the Darklings—easy to lead her into Faerie instead.”
“You led her into Faerie?” Dame Beckwith roared.
“Yes, me!” Sarah turned on Dame Beckwith, smoke now billowing out of her mouth and eyes and fingertips. The smoke filled and surrounded her, the shadows cloaking her like a cape. She was the one who had called the tenebrae into Blythewood and she was their beacon now. Van Drood wasn’t here in the flesh; he was acting through his servant, Sarah Lehman, and through the tenebrae she had summoned.
“She said she was my friend, but she was happy to leave me for her Darkling lover. She left me all alone with you.” She swept her finger in a wide arc at the crowd of teachers and stude
nts, smoke gushing from her mouth, fire sparking off her fingertips. Her gaze fell on Dame Beckwith and her voice suddenly changed. “I was your slave!” she cried in a voice that made Dame Beckwith cry out like a wounded bird. It wasn’t Sarah’s voice any longer. It was Judicus van Drood’s.
He was inside her as he’d been inside me a moment ago. I’d let that voice inside me because I’d let a bit of darkness inside me as I watched the candelabellum and doubted my mother—or maybe that bit of darkness had first gotten inside me the day she died, when I first thought that if she had really loved me she wouldn’t have killed herself. That darkness had been growing since that day, feeding on every bad and ungenerous thought—my jealousy of the girls who had more than me, my fears of being despised, of going mad. I’d let the shadows inside me, just as Sarah had. If I didn’t expel them now they would devour me, just as they had devoured Sarah and threatened now to destroy everyone at Blythewood.
A wall of smoke billowed over Sarah’s head, heading for the front line, for Miss Frost and Mr. Bellows, Miss Sharp, Miss Corey and my friends—Helen and Daisy, Beatrice and Dolores, Cam . . . everyone at Blythewood. Looking at them now, torchlight flickering on their faces, shadows looming around them, I saw a mottled ground of light and dark, like the dappled things in Miss Sharp’s poem—light and shadow, a dazzle dim. I saw Helen’s vanity but also her loyalty, the Jagers’ gloom but also their stalwart hearts, Miss Frost’s cruelty but also her love for her old teacher. Even Daisy, who shone like a beacon in the shadows, had a flicker of darkness inside her, a doubt that she still loved Mr. Appleby after all she’d seen and learned at Blythewood. And even Sarah, so consumed by darkness, still had a spark of light within her: the love she’d had for Louisa.
I turned then and looked at the woods. The light of the blazing feather in my hand burned through the wall of shadows. I could see past the line of Darklings to the lampsprites and goblins and all the other creatures of Faerie, strange and horrible and sometimes beautiful. They, too, dwelled in shadow and light, neither wholly good nor wholly bad.