I grabbed her arm to make her stop. She halted, but remained facing away from me. Her whole body was trembling. I had to forcibly turn her to me. In the gathering dusk, I could just make out that her face was wet with tears.
“It’s what everyone thinks of me, isn’t it? It’s certainly what Nathan thinks. The irony is that I’d give anything to be that girl again—that silly, selfish girl with a head full of dresses and social engagements instead of bills and debts and marriage settlements. This is what my life is now!” She held her hands up, palms out, pressing against the thick vegetation on either side of us. “An ever-narrowing path leading to one destination—a loveless marriage to settle my mother’s debts. So don’t think I don’t understand the desire to run off with some wildly inappropriate lover and live in a treetop—I do! It’s just not an option for some of us.”
I stared at Helen, realizing finally why she so hated the idea of me being with Raven: She was jealous of my freedom. It almost made me laugh. Helen felt hemmed in by her choices, but I was the one who had to lace in my wings every morning before she and Daisy woke. My own body was a cage narrower than the path we were on.
I looked over Helen’s shoulder and then wheeled around to look behind me.
“What’s the matter?” Helen asked.
I was so horrified I couldn’t answer. Instead I turned her around to face the direction we had been moving in. Instead of a path there was a wall of thicket. The forest had swallowed up the path and our friends, trapping us in a leafy tomb.
18
I LET HELEN thrash at the thicket until I saw that she was hurting herself.
“Stop that,” I said, grabbing her scratched and bleeding hands. “We’re not getting out that way.”
“And just which way are we getting out?” she demanded.
“I would suggest up.”
The voice came from above us. I looked up and saw Raven perched on a branch just over our heads. Marlin was sitting next to him, his wings mantled over his head.
“There are two of them,” Helen hissed, clutching my arm.
“It’s okay, that’s Marlin,” I explained. “He’s a friend.”
Even in the diminishing light I could see the whites of Helen’s eyes. “You’ve been consorting with more than one of them?”
“Now is not the time, Helen.”
“I would have to agree,” Raven said, dropping down to a lower branch. “Though I would like to discuss later just why you think I’m a wildly inappropriate lover.”
“That was a private conversation,” Helen snipped. “It is not polite to eavesdrop.”
Raven laughed. “The whole forest could hear your private conversation. And I’m afraid it’s drawn more than Marlin and me. Listen.”
I’d been so busy arguing with Helen I hadn’t been using my Darkling ears. Now that I did I could hear branches creaking, the soft thud of stealthy feet . . . and my bass bell ringing a danger signal. “Raven’s right,” I told Helen, pushing her toward a tree trunk. “We have to climb.”
“It’s a trick to make us go with them,” Helen objected. “I don’t hear—”
A long high-pitched squeal silenced her.
“What was that?” she whispered.
“Goblin, I think,” Marlin said, cocking his head to one side.
“Sounded too warbly for a goblin,” Raven said. “Sounds more like a flesh-eating ghoul to me.”
Helen fitted her boot into a notch in the tree, grabbed an overhanging branch, and hauled herself several feet up into the tree. Raven gave her a helpful push toward Marlin and reached for me just as the shrubbery behind me exploded.
The thing on the ground might once have been a goblin, but now rotting flesh hung in shreds off its bony skull and clawed hands. Yellow teeth snapped at the hem of my dress as Raven hoisted me up to a higher branch. The thing—the ghoul—let out an ear-splitting screech and scratched at the base of the tree.
“Climb!” Raven yelled at me.
I tore my eyes away from the creature and pushed at Helen, but she was frozen on the branch above me, looking down at the ghoul in horror.
“We never studied that in Miss Frost’s class,” Helen whispered as I climbed up next to her.
“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” Marlin said as he dropped below us.
“Did he just quote Shakespeare?” Helen asked.
“They’re not illiterate, Helen, they’re just . . .” I looked below us to see Marlin leap onto the back of the ghoul.
“Brave,” Helen finished for me, her voice tinged with surprise and admiration.
“Yes,” I said, watching Raven worriedly as he attacked the ghoul. “Let’s hope not foolishly so.” My wings itched to break free and fly to Raven’s aid, but I knew I had to get Helen away from danger.
“We have to climb.” I put my hand on Helen’s back to urge her, but as soon as I felt how rigid her muscles were I remembered her fear of heights.
“I c-can’t . . .” she stammered.
“You managed on the Steeplechase,” I said. “And your life didn’t depend on it then.”
She shook her head. “I only managed because Nathan was there. He took my mind off it.” Her eyes were riveted to the ground where Raven and Marlin were battling the ghoul. They were using their wings like toreadors used their red capes, to bate the creature, wearing it down. But I had no idea if they’d be able to kill it—it already seemed dead.
“You have to get higher,” Raven yelled as he feinted around the ghoul’s charge. “We can only wear it out and then fly higher than it can climb.”
“I can’t get Helen to move,” I called. “She’s afraid of heights.”
Raven and Marlin spared a moment to look at each other in blank surprise. I don’t suppose they could imagine such a thing.
“You take care of her,” Raven snapped at Marlin as the ghoul charged again. “I’ll take care of this one.”
Marlin looked like he wanted to argue, but Raven barked at him to go, and Marlin instantly sprung off the ground into the air. He landed on the branch next to Helen, grabbed her around the waist, and launched them both upward. I looked back down at Raven. The ghoul looked less weary than angry. Drool was dripping from its mouth, its eyes glowing red in the dark. It made a leap for Raven’s throat, which he deflected with his wing, but the ghoul took a clawful of feathers with him.
“Follow them!” Raven shouted at me.
Instead I jumped down to the ground between Raven and the ghoul. Its red eyes fastened on me, glowing with a dead malice that chilled me to the bone. I saw it tensing to leap, but before it could I depressed the stem of the repeater, which I’d taken out of my pocket, releasing a tinkling melody.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Raven whispered in my ear.
“Not really,” I admitted, “but it seems to have distracted it. I’m not sure for how long—”
Before I could finish my sentence the ghoul leapt for us. Raven grabbed me around the waist and sprang up, carrying us out of reach of the ghoul’s snapping jaws. But it was clambering up the tree, following us, and Raven, exhausted by distracting it, was barely able to fly fast enough to evade it.
“Let me go!” I cried. “I’ll fly on my own.”
“No,” he said, holding me tighter. “You don’t know how to navigate through the trees.”
I certainly hadn’t ever flown as Raven was flying, dodging over and under tree limbs, zigzagging through the woods to evade the ghoul until we finally burst through the canopy into open air. The ghoul made one last desperate leap for us. I felt its claws clamp onto my ankle. Raven lashed at it with his wing and it fell, jaws snapping, into the forest below us. We heard it crashing through the trees, shrieking with pain and frustration as we landed on top of a pine tree where Marlin and Helen waited for us.
??
?Good show!” Helen cried when we landed. “You trounced that boorish creature with great élan!”
I stared at Helen, not sure what to be more surprised at—that she was paying Raven a compliment, or that she was sitting on a tree branch a hundred feet above the ground seemingly unperturbed by the height. Then I noticed Marlin’s wing over her shoulder and remembered the soothing effects of a Darkling’s feathers. Perhaps they had provided a cure for her acrophobia.
“Yes,” I said, smiling at Raven. “Good trouncing! But what about Nathan, Daisy, and Mr. Bellows? They’re wandering through the woods unprotected—and Etta’s still out here somewhere.”
“Actually, the rest of your expedition was led out of the forest,” Raven said, sitting down on a limb across from Marlin and Helen. “The Blythe Wood channeled you all into a narrow path to keep you from the ghouls, but when you and Helen got separated, the rest of your party was ejected and a ghoul managed to slip through a crack in the forest’s defenses.”
“The trees were protecting us?” Helen asked incredulously.
“The forest is alive. It possesses a guiding spirit—a genius loci—that protects its own creatures.”
“But we’re not its creatures,” Helen said.
“Every innocent life belongs to the woods,” Marlin told her. “We all come from the Great Forest originally.”
I saw Helen blinking at him. I expected her to tell him that the van Beeks hailed from Washington Square and Hyde Park, not a forest, thank you very much, but she only smiled and said, “Why how very kind of the forest!”
“But what about Etta?” I asked. “She’s still in the woods.”
“Etta is in the Rowan Circle with the changelings,” Raven replied. “She’s in no danger. If you like, we can take you there.”
“Would we have to fly again?” Helen asked.
“It would be quickest,” Marlin told her.
“Then by all means, let’s,” Helen said, tucking one of Marlin’s feathers behind her ear and holding out her arms to him. “I think I’m getting over my fear of heights.”
Helen may have conquered her fear of heights, but there were many things to be frightened of in the Blythe Wood that night. As we flew over the treetops, we could see by the light of the newly risen moon all sorts of creatures wandering through the woods—the horrible ghouls, goblins, trows, and some sort of long serpent that wound its way through the tree roots. There were less horrible creatures, too: lampsprites hanging amidst the pine boughs like paper lanterns; diminutive green boggles that squatted frog-like on tree branches, emitting a clear, sweet piping; and diaphanous floating fogs that Raven told me were the souls of departed humans.
“It’s not just the door to Faerie that opens on All Hallows’ Eve,” he explained. “The threshold to the human afterworld is thin tonight as well.”
We flew through one of the clouds of mist. It felt cool and tingly on my face and summoned images in my mind—an old woman’s face, sere brown fields, a child rolling an old- fashioned hoop down a small-town street—memories from someone else’s life. When we flew out of the cloud my face was wet, but whether from the mist or tears I wasn’t sure.
Finally we came to the Rowan Circle—a wide-open glade bordered by rowan trees. Earlier in the year, the trees had been full of white flowers and red berries, but now the branches were nearly bare and bone-like in the moonlight, a white thicket barrier against the creatures roaming though the woods. The Order used the Rowan Circle for its initiation because it could be held against the fairies unless they were invited in. Etta stood at the center of the circle now. She appeared to be alone.
“What is she doing?” Helen asked as Marlin let her down on a branch. “Did she come all the way out here to stand alone in a circle?”
“She’s not alone,” Raven said, alighting on a branch above the circle. “Look carefully.”
I lay down on the branch and studied the circle. The moon was directly above us now, filling the whole glade with shadowless light. There was no place for anyone to hide—and yet Etta seemed to be talking to a large group, turning to address one and then another invisible presence, her face registering interest, sadness, even amusement as she listened to each one. I heard a low murmur filling the circle as though it contained a multitude. But I couldn’t see anyone but Etta. I turned to tell Raven that, but as I moved my head I caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye.
I looked back—sideways—at the edge of the circle and noticed that the air in front of the rowan trees rippled like water, as if there was a waterfall rimming the circle that reflected back the moonlit trees. And in that waterfall were shapes—roughly human, but ever shifting.
“It’s how the changelings appear when they’re unhosted,” Raven whispered in my ear. “They exist in a separate dimension, reflecting their surroundings as camouflage.”
“So you’re saying that Etta is surrounded by changelings?” Helen asked, squinting at the circle. “What if one tries to assume her identity?”
“They’re not going to hurt her,” Raven said. “She’s called them together to help. No one’s ever done that before. Listen.”
Etta was talking now, addressing all of the changelings. “Thank you all for coming and for all your kind words. It’s not me you should be praising, though, but your brave comrade, Rue, who has so unselfishly sacrificed herself on behalf of my sister and myself by taking my sister’s place at the Hellgate Club.”
A ripple moved around the circle—a wave stirring the shimmering surface and an echo of the words unselfishly sacrificed, which the changelings seemed to savor like a fine wine.
“I am afraid, though, that she has put herself in great danger. She and all the girls at the Hellgate Club have vanished. My friends are doing what they can to find and help her, but I have come to ask you to help, too.”
The watery shapes shimmied and bobbed like buoys in a rough sea. “What can what can we we we do?” They spoke in an echoing chorus. “We are noth-noth-nothing on our own own.”
“But you’re not nothing,” Etta said, smiling. “Rue has shown me that. She’s a person in her own right. We must find her—and no one is better able to find her than you, her sisters. You can move through the city crowds unseen and unheard, you can hear every whisper and read every thought. Somewhere in those multitudes someone will know where the girls from the Hellgate Club have been moved.”
The changelings were bubbling now with excitement. One surged forward from the mass and assumed a roughly human shape. “We can do that,” it said. “But once we find our sister and the others, what will we do?”
“All you have to do is send a message. The lampsprites have volunteered to be our messengers.”
She held out her hand, and a light drifted down from one of the trees and alit on her open palm. The light resolved into a tiny winged figure that I recognized as Featherbell, the lampsprite Daisy had befriended last year. She brushed her wings against Etta’s face, dusting her cheeks with iridescent powder. That was how they communicated with humans.
“Featherbell says that she and her friends will accompany you to the city to look for Rue and the other girls. They will carry any message you have for us and let us know if you are in any danger.”
“The light-things have never helped us before,” the changeling said. “And we don’t know how to speak to them.”
Featherbell chatted animatedly to Etta. Since I hadn’t been touched by her wings I couldn’t understand her, nor could the changelings. They shifted restlessly around the circle, splashing and sloshing, their forms merging with each other.
“Their types of magic are opposite,” Raven whispered in my ear. “That’s why they’ve never had anything to do with each other before. I’m not sure Etta’s plan will work.”
But even as he spoke a dozen lights were drifting down from the trees. A conflagration of lampsprites fluttered around
the glade, each one brushing past Etta, touching their wings to her face and then looping around the circle, swooping and gliding like mad barn swallows, each one leaving a trail of bright streamers, like kite tails, which braided together into a multicolored skein. It made me dizzy to watch. I blinked . . . and saw that the changelings were moving, too, their watery shapes dancing around the circle like girls around a maypole—girls in bright dresses. The changelings were no longer made of colorless water; the lampsprites had imbued them with their own colors.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Raven whispered. “Changelings always take the features and memories of their hosts. I’ve never seen any creatures freely give of themselves to the changelings before.”
I thought of what Omar had said about alliances being formed and felt a defiant thrill. Van Drood might be amassing the shadows, but if we could harness light and water together like this, we could stand against him. And if the changelings and lampsprites could form such an unlikely bond, why not the Darklings and the Order?
Perhaps Raven was thinking the same thing. He squeezed my hand, his dark eyes shining in the reflected glow of the fiery dance below us. The changelings and lampsprites had come to a standstill. Each changeling had assumed a shape and color now. One pirouetted, its amorphous shape gaining definition, as a blob of clay becomes a pot when it’s turned on a wheel. The shape was now distinctly female.
“Let us do what Etta has asked,” the female changeling said.
“Let let let us us us!” the multitude excitedly echoed back. But they were no longer a faceless multitude. The circle was now ringed with a dozen Ettas.
“No one has ever entrusted the changelings with a mission before,” Raven said. “Etta is their new hero.”
“That’s all very well and good,” Helen said, raising her voice so Etta could hear her. “But she’ll also be in trouble if she doesn’t get back to the dorm now!”
A dozen Ettas lifted their heads to look at Helen. When the real Etta laughed the laugh rippled through the circle, the lampsprites flocking around Etta like a rainbow cloak. I had a feeling that neither the changelings nor the lampsprites would ever let Etta fall into any trouble.