“I would like to know how they keep such an ungainly thing in the air.”
I released his hand and watched him join Nathan and the engineer.
“If you don’t watch out, those two will run off and join the British air force just so they can fly about in those dreadful machines.” It was Helen. I turned around to find her in a wheelchair pushed by Daisy.
“Nathan’s not going anywhere without you,” Daisy said. “I saw the way he carried you up those stairs.”
Helen smiled. “He has gotten quite remarkably strong carrying me about. I’m going to let him do it for a few more months while we visit Louisa in Vienna and I take a water cure.”
“Let him?” Daisy and I asked together.
Helen peeked around us to make sure no one was watching, but everyone was gathered at the dirigible. Then she stood up.
“Helen!” Daisy cried. “You can—”
Helen clamped a hand over Daisy’s mouth and then sat down, adjusting her skirt daintily over her boots.
“But why?” Daisy asked.
“To give Nathan a mission,” I said. “One he can win. To keep the shadows at bay.”
“Or maybe I just like being carried about,” Helen replied airily. “But it does seem to be keeping Nathan’s mind off his awful father, and when I make a miraculous recovery at Baden-Baden he’ll think he saved me. Gus is coming, too, to try a cure on Louisa—oh, look! They’re boarding. Daisy, do go ask Nathan to carry me aboard. I want to get a good seat.”
Daisy ran toward Nathan, clutching her hat so it wouldn’t get swept off in the wind. I turned back to Helen.
“What about Marlin?” I asked.
“What about him?” Helen asked, blinking her pretty blue eyes up at me.
“You love him, not Nathan.”
“Do I?” Helen asked, tilting her head. “I suppose I do, but Nathan’s my friend and he needs me. And besides—” She looked back toward the railing where Nathan and Raven had been joined by Buzz and Marlin and Cam and two more men in uniform. They were all laughing and smiling, but standing beneath the dirigible cast their faces in shadow. “I have a feeling that soon it’s not going to matter much what we want for ourselves.”
Helen’s words struck a chill in my heart and seemed to echo in my head. I heard the words of the prophesy that Miss Corey had read—Out of the shards of the broken vessel—and I heard van Drood’s last words to me: I have what I need to destroy everything. Was he talking about the Woolworth Building—or something even bigger? Did he mean the third vessel holding the last of the tenebrae? But how could van Drood know where it was?
Then I remembered flying with my father away from the Titanic . . . a crow tearing a page from the book. Could that page have told van Drood where to find the third vessel? And if it did, and van Drood was searching for it now . . .
Below us I could feel the gears of the tower clock revolving, moving us all toward the inevitable future in which we would all be tested.
But then Daisy turned and waved to us, her yellow ribbons streaming in the wind like medieval banners, and I felt my heart lift. Whatever was in store, I’d face it with my friends.
Hawthorn
A Blythewood Novel
1
“HAVE YOU EVER wished you had a spell to stop time?”
I turned to my friend and roommate Helen van Beek. We had come to the edge of the Blythe Wood and she had turned to look back over the playing fields and gardens to the great stone castle of our school, Blythewood, glowing golden in the late afternoon sun. Four more girls and one boy were walking toward us. If the moment had been arrested it would have made a fine medieval tapestry, the lawns an emerald carpet stitched with a thousand bright flowers, the stones of the castle and the sleek heads of the girls picked out in gold thread, the boy’s in silver marking him as a nobleman or fairy prince. The Falconers, it might have been called, since they each carried a falcon on their gauntleted hands.
The viewers of that tapestry might imagine the girls and the boy were discussing the fine points of falconry or courtly love, but they weren’t.
“A Morane-Saulnier monoplane with a Gnome Omega 7 cylinder engine!” Cam’s excited voice rose into the air, her little kestrel squawking as it attempted to keep its balance on her gesticulating hand. “That’s what I’m going to fly when I get out of here next summer.”
“You should see the hydro-aeroplanes they’ve got over in England now,” Nathan remarked, excitement breaking through the pose of boredom he’d maintained since returning from Europe. “They can take off from ships now. I’m going to join the Royal Navy as soon as I graduate.”
“No more chattering, Dianas,” I called to the others, “we’re on patrol.”
“I thought I made it clear that I was not to be referred to as a Diana,” Nathan drawled. “The male equivalent is Apollo.”
“Diana or Apollo, we’re all here to patrol the woods. Gillie found trow tracks at the edge of the Blythe Wood this morning. We need to scout the perimeter to make sure it hasn’t gotten out.”
“And what are we supposed to do if we find the trow?” Daisy asked.
“Kill it, of course,” Cam said, patting her quiver of arrows.
Before Daisy could object—I knew she had a soft spot for all creatures of Faerie—I said, “Actually, Gillie says we should try to capture it. There’s been an increase in fey activity in the woods lately—creatures straying out of the woods, ransacking local farmyards and orchards, even wandering into town. Gillie thinks something must be scaring them out of the woods.”
“What’s big enough to scare a trow?” Beatrice asked, raising an eyebrow.
“That’s what we need to find out,” I said. “Nathan and Cam, head toward the river. Bea, Dolores, Daisy, you take the eastern perimeter. Helen and I are going to go into the woods. If anyone finds any sign of the trow, whistle three times. Send your falcon if you need backup. Everybody clear?”
They all nodded, looking a little scared. Of the trow, I wondered, or me? Had I spoken too sharply to them? Well, I didn’t have time to coddle them. We had a trow to find.
I turned to enter the woods with Helen close at my heels. As we passed from the bright sunshine of the lawn into the cool green shadows under the pines, I felt Eirwyn tense on my hand, her talons gripping so tightly I was afraid they’d pierce the thick leather of my glove.
Helen’s peregrine squawked and darted from her glove.
“Frederica!” Helen cried as she watched the falcon rise into the trees. “Where do you think you’re going?”
To a place where no one calls her by that ridiculous name, I began to say, but then my gyr launched herself from my hand and followed, uttering a high-pitched whistle.
“That’s her hunting call,” I told Helen. “Come on, they’re tracking something.”
I plunged into the woods. My wings itched to unfurl and follow Eirwyn and Frederica in the air, but I didn’t want to leave Helen alone on the ground. Besides, it wasn’t easy flying through the woods with a six-foot wing span, and the falcons were leading us into a denser part of the forest, where the trees grew so close together their branches interlaced overhead in a thick canopy that blocked out the sun. I couldn’t see Eirwyn or Frederica ahead of us, but with my Darkling hearing I could hear Eirwyn’s shrill hunting cry. I followed it into a copse of thorny shrubs that caught at my shirt sleeve and tugged at my skirt.
“Is it my imagination,” Helen asked in a hushed whisper, “or do the trees seem to be moving closer together?”
I halted, my gloved hand raised to push aside a thorny branch, and turned back to look at Helen.
“The last time the woods acted to protect us, so we should be all right.” I turned back and pulled the thorny branch away . . .
Uncovering the snarling face of a trow.
I screamed and let go of the branch, which slapped the
trow across its thick overhanging brow. That only made it angrier. The creature opened its blue-lipped mouth and roared. Hot, rank breath blew into my face—it smelled like rotting meat and ashes.
Trows are naturally vegetarians in their indigenous habitat. The line from Miles Malmsbury’s Field Guide to the Lychnobious Peoples wafted into my head. I’d have to tell him he was wrong—if I lived. I reached for the dagger strapped at my waist as the trow launched itself at me, but before I could unsheathe it I was slammed to the ground by what felt like the proverbial ton of bricks. Only bricks wouldn’t have such bad breath, I thought staring up into two glazed eyes that appeared to be covered in some kind of film behind which dark shapes moved like fish swimming under ice.
I’d seen something like that before—
Then the ice shattered.
Black ooze poured out of its right eye and then the creature’s weight collapsed on top of me. “Mnnn,” it said, then mercifully rolled off me.
“Ava!” Helen was shouting into my face and shaking my arms. She was still grasping her bow with one hand. I turned my head and stared at the trow. One of Helen’s arrows—all of hers were fletched with snow-white dove feathers which she deemed “smarter” than the dull brown ones the rest of us used—had gone straight through the back of its head and pierced its right eye. Black bile was oozing down its cheek.
“Y-you . . . you shot it.”
“Don’t start with Gillie’s orders,” Helen cried, her voice edging into hysteria. “That thing was going to eat you!”
“They’re s-supposed to be veg . . . vegetarians,” I stammered, struggling to my knees and kneeling over the trow.
Helen made a choking sound. “Well, this one’s gone off his diet. He looks like he just finished a six course steak dinner at Delmonico’s. Why, his fur . . . whatsit . . .” Helen gestured at the shaggy fur tunic the trow wore. “. . . doesn’t fit him properly.”
The trow’s belly was indeed bulging out of his tunic and over his leather pants. It was disturbing to look at those clothes. This wasn’t an animal—it was a person of sorts, one of the fey that had wandered out of Faerie into the Blythe Wood. Perhaps it had gotten lost and been scared. Its intact eye looked dazed.
No, not dazed—glazed. As if covered with ice. I leaned over to look more closely and saw something move beneath the opaque surface of the intact eye.
“Helen,” I said, starting to get to my feet, “I think we’d better—”
Before I could finish the trow’s left eye split open, releasing a spray of black ooze. Helen screamed and covered her face, shielding herself from the geyser that spewed out of the trow’s eye—a geyser with feathers.
“Shadow crows!” I screamed, yanking Helen to her feet. “Run!”
I pushed Helen through a narrow opening in the brush into a clearing—a perfect circle surrounded by bushes covered in white flowers. I dimly had the thought that the woods had been leading us here all along, mocking our desire to stop time. There was no way to stop time. If you didn’t take the future in hand it took you and yanked you where it wanted you to go. Then Helen and I were falling down a long dark tunnel into the vast unknown.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my intrepid band of early readers—Sarah Alpert, Gary Feinberg, Wendy Gold, Juliet Harrison, Alisa Kwitney, Scott Silverman, Nora Slonimsky, and Ethel Wesdorp. Thanks to my daughter, Maggie, whose webcomic PennyDreadful (Pennydreadfulcomics.com) has been a continual inspiration in the creation of the Blythewood books.
There were a number of excellent books I relied on for source material: Triangle by David von Drehle, A Fierce Discontent by Michael McGerr, The Lost Sisterhood by Ruth Rosen, and especially Good Old Coney Island by Edo McCullough, for which I am indebted for some of the original language of the Coney Island spielers.
I am most grateful to the Hawthornden Castle Retreat for Writers, where much of this book was written, for granting me a perfect month of quiet and inspiration.
Thanks to my wonderful editor, Kendra Levin, for her Darkling editorial ear and for shepherding the Blythewood books into creation, and to Ken Wright, Vanessa Han, Nancy Brennan, and Janet Pascal at Penguin. Thanks to my agent, Robin Rue, and her assistant Beth Miller, at Writers House for believing in these books.
And, as always, I couldn’t do any of this without the faith and love of my husband, Lee. You are my knight in shining armor.
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