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 w
ife. 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.
I stood up, fully restored now, and Falco let his wings fall away from me. I turned to face the three Elders. Wren’s face was soft with compassion, but Gos looked like he wanted to spring across the table and throttle Falco and me. Merlinus’s face was stony and impassive. “How could you send him away from my mother when his only crime was loving her?” I cried.
I heard a rustle above me and saw Raven inch closer to me so that I was between him and Falco. I had a feeling that this was not the way one was supposed to address the Elders, but I didn’t care. They had deprived my mother of the man she loved. They had deprived me of my father throughout my childhood.
“You’re just a bunch of dried-up old crows,” I fumed, “jealous of other people’s happiness.”
“He broke the law,” Gos spat at me.
“It’s a stupid law!” I cried. Someone hissed above me. Gos braced his arms on the tabletop, his tendons straining, his wings flexing behind him. “Why shouldn’t a Darkling and a human love one another? Merope and Aderyn did—”
“And cursed us to an eternity of banishment,” Gos hissed. “We can never return to Faerie. Do you know what it’s like to ferry the souls of humans to their afterworld and the souls of the fay to theirs, but never have our own rest? When we die we dissolve into dust. And all because a Darkling loved a human.” He spit the word out of his mouth as if it tasted bad.
“No,” I said, recalling what had bothered me before about the story of Merope and Aderyn. “You weren’t cursed because they loved each other; it was because a shadow crow pierced Aderyn’s chest. A bit of shadow entered his soul.”
“The darkness that entered his soul was his love for a human woman!” Gos snapped back at me.
“Why do you hate humans so much?” I asked.
“We don’t hate them,” Merlinus said with a stony glare at Gos. “We are charged with their care. If we allow ourselves to fall in love with them, we risk infecting them with our curse. Your mother, for instance, would not have been allowed into the mortal’s afterworld because of her love for a Darkling. Falco broke the laws to bring her to Faerie. And you, fledgling—” He gave me a sad look. “You are now subject to the Darklings’ curse. You won’t be allowed in your own afterworld or Faerie.”
“I’ve already been to Faerie, thank you very much,” I snipped back at him.
I hadn’t thought those marmoreal features could register surprise, but they did now. “You have?” he said. “How did you get in and come back in your own time without a Darkling to hold the door for you?”
Too late I realized my temper had implicated Raven. Before I could think how to answer, Wren spoke.
“What’s important is that she was able to pass through the door at all. It might mean a weakening of the curse.”
“She hadn’t fledged yet,” Gos said. “And even if she can cross over, it only means a half-bloodling can. What good does that do the rest of us?”
A chorus of hoots, accompanied by rustling, came from the upper tiers. Apparently Gos had his following. Encouraged by this response, Gos went on. “And why should we expect any help from her? She’s part of the accursed Order that lives to exterminate us. How do we know that her being here now isn’t part of a plot to infiltrate our ranks and then lead their Hunt to us? They might be on their way now.”
The rustling above our heads grew to a roar, the hooting low and ominous. At the same time Raven and Falco extended their wings over my head as if they expected an attack from above. For the first time I felt frightened. Not just of what might happen to me, but of what might happen to Raven for bringing me here. I realized now what he had risked by being with me. But when he spoke he did not seem frightened; he sounded angry.
“How dare you suspect wrong of Ava? She has risked her life—her very soul—to find the book that will end our curse.”
“Then where is it?” Gos demanded, getting to his feet and flexing his wings behind him. “All this talk of a precious book, but I personally searched the prisoner when he was taken and he had no book on him.”
I glanced at Falco. Had he lost the book? Perhaps he had only hidden it somewhere. His lips curled back slowly, more a snarl than a smile.
“I was prepared for a search more thorough than any you would perform,” he said coldly. “And so I hid the book here.”
He flexed his wings to their widest span—nearly fifteen feet across, wider than I knew wings could stretch. At first I thought he was threatening Gos, but then I looked closer and saw what F
alco meant. Stitched to his wings, in between each feather, were pages. Each page was covered with a tiny runic script and beautiful gem-colored illuminations that gave Falco’s wings the gloss of a peacock’s tail. A Darkness of Angels—the book my mother had spent her life looking for—was stitched into my father’s wings.
24
A CLUSTER OF Darklings flocked around Falco, edging me away and hiding him from my sight. I could see why a flock of Darklings was called a darkness. Together they formed a clot of darkness that hid everything else from sight. After what seemed like a long time, the darkness thinned, leaving one gray-haired old Darkling examining Falco’s wings with a magnifying glass.
“What do you think, Master Quill?” Merlinus asked the gray-haired Darkling.
As Master Quill raised his head I saw that his long gray hair and beard were braided with feathers. He plucked out a long goose feather that had been sharpened into a quill and used it to point to the pages stitched into Falco’s wings.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” he said. “He hasn’t just attached the pages to his wings, he’s stitched in every word and picture. His own feathers have bonded to the pages. I don’t believe we could separate the pages from his feathers without severely damaging his wings.”
“That’s his own damned fault,” Gos sneered. “I say we lop off his wings right now and take the book.”
“You can’t do that!” I cried, trying to push through the crowd surrounding my father.
“The girl’s right,” Master Quill said, his eyes glittering. “It would be a terrible shame to ruin such a masterpiece. The book has become a living thing. I believe it was meant to bond with a Darkling’s wings in just this way. It says so here.” He touched his quill to one of Falco’s feather and read aloud from it: “And so shall the page become the wing, and it shall lead us home.”