She led us into the Great Hall, which was crowded with old friends—human, Darkling, and other. Omar and Kid Marvel were there with a crowd of madges, Sam and Agnes, Vionetta and Lillian chatting with our old teachers, Miles Malmsbury and Euphorbia Frost, Beatrice and Cam laughing with Marlin and Louisa. I saw my father and rushed forward to embrace him. He was standing with Master Quill, Merlinus and Wren, Gos, and a crowd of unfamiliar-looking Darklings. They were all sipping tea and eating sandwiches and scones and Victoria sponge cake cheerfully doled out by Harriet and Emmaline Sharp. When Merlinus turned to ask my father a question I excused myself to walk over with Raven to talk to Marlin and Louisa.
We hadn’t seen much of Marlin since the Armistice. He and Louisa had been posted to Munich, ostensibly as attachés to the British embassy, but I suspected that they were still working as spies. I saw him pull Raven aside to talk to him about something called the German Workers’ Party.
“We’ve seen shadows lurking at their meetings in the beer halls,” I heard him tell Raven. I shivered and turned to talk to Louisa, but she was pulled away by Professor Jager.
Poor Professor Jager. I remembered what an intimidating presence he’d been in the classroom, but now he was frail, like one of the old cypress trees I’d seen on the Côte d’Azur, bent and twisted by the wind. In his case he’d been worn down by the merciless winds of war and Dolores’s death. Left on my own I looked around the room. Nathan was surrounded by a gaggle of Blythewood schoolgirls, who were supposed to be serving tea, asking him to sign his first novel. I saw Helen besieged by the Montmorency set and heard Myrtilene drawl, “How clever of you to run your own little dress shop. I’ll be sure to drop in.”
I excused myself from two old women who wanted to know when Raven and I planned to get married and rescued Helen by saying we wanted to see our old classrooms.
“Thank the Bells! You saved me from swatting Myrtilene’s hat off her head. Doesn’t she know that wearing dead birds is so pre-war—oh, look, Ava, Miss Frost’s old room. D’you remember when Daisy had a fit about dissecting lampsprites? And here’s a picture of us playing field hockey—can you believe they made us wear those dreadful bloomers? And here—”
Helen’s voice cut off abruptly. We’d come to Mr. Bellows’s old classroom. A plaque had been erected on the door. “Rupert Bellows 1890–1918: Their shoulders held the sky suspended; they stood, and earth’s foundations stay.”
Helen took out her handkerchief and handed it to me. “Why, he was hardly older than we are now.” She sniffed. “Ava, there’s something I’ve always wanted to ask. When Mr. Bellows . . . when he . . . did you . . . ?”
“Was I the one who carried his soul off the battlefield?” Helen nodded. “Yes. Raven offered, but I wanted to. He’d done so much for us all, I wanted it to be one of his students. He—he told me he was glad it was one of ‘his girls’ and that he was so proud of us all . . . then he asked if I would help him remember something . . .”
Helen waited until I’d wiped my eyes and then asked, “What was it?”
“It was just an ordinary day, us having tea at Violet House, a few of his favorite students, Mr. Bellows balancing a teacup on his knee and making a silly joke that made Vionetta Sharp laugh. That was the last moment he remembered before he flew free. I think a part of him is always there. I think a part of you and me—and Vi—are always there with him.”
“Oh,” Helen said, “oh. What a lovely place to be. I wouldn’t mind if that were my last dying thought.”
I squeezed Helen’s hand and looked meaningfully down at her still-flat belly. “I think you might have some moments coming up that will contend, but yes, I wouldn’t mind if it were my last . . .” Only I wouldn’t dwell in my last moment forever. Because I was a Darkling and there was no forever for my kind.
Voices broke the moment. Daisy came into the hallway, a mischievous smile on her face.
“You look like the cat that swallowed the canary,” Helen said.
“Oh! I do have some wonderful news but I’m going to leave it for Dame Beckwith to announce.” Then she linked her arms in ours and pulled us through the library and out onto the lawn toward the gardens. They were overgrown, I saw, with hawthorn bushes in full bloom. The bushes formed a wide circle, inside of which had been set folding chairs. Some of the guests had found a chair; some were lounging on the grass, sipping tea or lemonade, brushing scone crumbs from their shirtfronts, chatting amiably. A stirring from the hawthorn bushes alerted me to the presence of more Darklings, roosting in the bushes and the woods, whispering nervously amongst themselves. But they all grew quiet when Dame Beckwith stepped into the center of the circle.
“Before we begin with the main business of the day I have a bit of good news. Our friends in Washington, D.C., have telegrammed to say that the Nineteenth Amendment has been ratified. Women have the vote!”
“Huzzah!” cried Cam.
“About time!” Miss Harriet Sharp muttered, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.
“Well,” said Helen, “I might consider moving back to this country after all.”
“I’m glad to begin with some good news,” Dame Beckwith said when the excitement had died down. “As I’m afraid that there’s graver news to report. For some years now we here at Blythewood and our friends at Ravencliffe have noticed that the door to Faerie has been growing smaller and harder to find.”
There was a murmur of concerned voices and one old woman croaked loudly, “In my day we’d have welcomed an end to fairies!”
“Those old days are long gone, Lucretia,” Dame Beckwith said, bending the undimmed force of her eyes on Lucretia Fisk. “The fairies and Darklings are our friends now and we mourn their passing—”
“Their passing?” It was Raven, gotten to his feet. “Is it as bad as all that?”
“Close to, son,” Merlinus said. “When was the last time you ushered a fairy-soul to Faerie?”
“I was rather busy in the war with human souls,” Raven answered angrily. I reached up and squeezed his hand. When he spoke again his voice was more tempered. “And afterward the woods of the Ardennes were destroyed. It’s true I haven’t seen a fairy there since the war. But why would they be dying out here?” He spread his arms to take in the peaceful summer afternoon. “There was no battle here.”
“But there is one now,” Gillie said. “The very woods have been at war. You see, this place—the Blythe Wood—is connected to the woods of Hawthorn and the Arden Forest through Faerie. When the terrible battles stained the ground with blood in the Ardennes most of the fairies retreated back to Faerie and closed off their door—all their doors. They’re afraid there is no longer a place for them in this world, and I canna say I blame them.”
The air turned chillier with Gillie’s words, and I shivered, recalling what Marlin had said about shadows lurking in the beer halls of Munich.
“But if the door to Faerie closes,” Raven asked, “what will happen to the fairies left here when they die? We won’t be able to carry their souls to Faerie.”
“The fairies who have chosen to stay here will go to the human afterworld when they fade away,” Gillie said. “It’s a terrible sacrifice they’re making, but a few have become so attached to humans they have decided to stay here.”
“Good for them,” Gos said with a sneer. “But I don’t see how this concerns us Darklings. Faerie’s been closed to us since the curse anyway.”
“Not anymore,” Master Quill said. “We’ve found a cure for the curse.”
He got shakily to his feet, a heavy scroll in his hand. My father put a steadying hand on his arm. Miles Malmsbury stood on the other side of him.
“Well, that’s bloody awful timing,” a British Darkling swore.
“Yes,” Gos agreed, glaring at Master Quill. “I said that book would be useless. Are you telling us you found a way to get us into Faerie just when the door is closing???
?
“Better late than never,” Master Quill snapped. “The problem was that the wording was very tricky because the knowledge was passed from the Guardian Lady Aethelena to Dame Alcyone. She told her that when Aderyn was wounded by the shadow crows he asked her to cast a spell to keep the Darklings out of Faerie lest they contaminate Faerie with the tenebrae. Lady Aethelena agreed, but reluctantly. She said”—Master Quill unfurled a scroll and read aloud—“‘The Darklings shall be barred from Faerie until a phoenix arises from the ashes who will burn away their shadows.’”
“Ava’s a phoenix,” Helen said. “Does that mean she can dispel the curse?”
Everyone turned to look at me. I felt my face redden and my wings prickle. “If I knew how, I certainly would have already. I can’t even burn away my own darkness . . .” I bit my lip, recalling how I’d let that darkness uncoil only one time—with van Drood in Bouillon—and how I’d been tempted by it to let the shadows out of the last vessel. Out of the shards of the broken vessel a new light will shine.
“Perhaps if I had broken the vessel I could have dispelled the curse,” I said. “But I couldn’t do that. I don’t know how else to do it.” The truth was I didn’t want to confront that darkness inside me again.
“You won’t have to,” a thin reedy voice said.
We all looked to where the voice had come from. It appeared to have issued from a hawthorn bush. The bush rustled and out of it emerged two twiggy arms and two long spindly legs.
“Mr. Ward!” Helen cried, jumping to her feet and extending a hand to help the guardian rise from the tangled bushes. He looked down at us all, blinking his pale green eyes in the bright sunlight.
“Forgive me for not making myself known earlier but I’m unused to the daylight.”
“We would have visited, but we thought you were still guarding the shadow crows trapped inside your vessel. Has it been very awful?” Helen asked.
Mr. Ward waved a twiggy hand. “It is my duty to guard the shadows, and I was not alone. Master Quill and his apprentices have come every day to visit me, and they came up with a way for me to get out of the vessel without letting the crows out so that I could come and bring this to the phoenix.”
He plucked at his robe and withdrew something from its pocket. It looked like a bit of broken crockery.
“A shard of the broken vessel,” Master Quill said. “It’s really very simple. All Ava has to do is heat the shard with the fire in her wings and she can use it to destroy the shadow inside any Darkling. That Darkling can then return to Faerie.”
“Really?” Helen asked, looking from the shard to me. “Is that all?”
“How do we know it’s safe for Ava?” Raven asked, coming to stand beside me.
“The phoenix burns with a fire that will keep her safe,” Aelfweard said. “I would not suggest anything that would harm her.”
“I’m sure he’s right,” I told Raven. “And besides, if I can free the Darklings to return to Faerie it’s worth the risk. When should I, er, begin?”
“Tonight when the moon rises,” Master Quill said. “We haven’t much time. According to my esteemed colleague . . .” He turned to Professor Malmsbury.
“Er, yes, I’ve done the calculations. From what I observed during my sojourn in Faerie and the, er, rate of growth of indigenous flora divided by the diminishment of aboriginal peoples and charting the position of the planets and the lunar cycle—”
“What he means to say,” Euphorbia Frost interrupted, looking fondly but a little impatiently at her husband, “is that this growth of hawthorn is a sign that the door is about to close and it’s going to happen tonight. So if you want to go to Faerie, you’d best pack your bags now.”
There was a moment of shocked silence, like a baby drawing in breath before letting out a long drawn-out wail, but before the crowd could break into chaos a calm voice asked, “And what if we don’t want to go to Faerie? If the curse is lifted, but we don’t have Faerie to go to, what happens to us when we die?”
“The same that happens to humans,” Falco said. “We go to the human afterlife.”
“But who will carry us?” another voice demanded.
“No one,” Falco answered. “We won’t need anyone to carry us—nor will the humans need us anymore. The era of fairies and Darklings is over.”
Now the crowd did burst into a thousand opposing voices. As I listened to them all I realized that there were far more Darklings here than I had at first noticed. The woods were full of them—and they all had questions.
“What about our wings?”
“We keep them but our children might be born without them.”
“What about the shadows?”
“We’ll always fight them, as will our human friends.”
“Can we ever come back?”
“I don’t know,” Falco admitted. “Probably not.”
“Why weren’t we told sooner?”
“We only figured it out for sure a few weeks ago,” Dame Beckwith answered. “We sent out word right away to bring you here. The Elders of Ravencliffe have sent delegations around the world to gather all of you. We’re sorry you have so little time to choose, but at least you do have a choice.”
The weight of her words finally sank in and silenced the crowd. It was noon. We all had twelve hours to decide where to spend our eternities. I turned to Raven—but he was gone.
“I saw him heading into the woods,” Daisy told me.
I thanked her and slipped out of the circle. It was easy to follow Raven’s path. He’d crashed through the hawthorn brambles leaving a broken trail of black feathers. I followed him, thorns snagging on my skirt. The woods were choked with the thorny bushes, the air so sweet with their scent I felt dizzy. Where had Raven gone? Was he already heading for the door to Faerie? Would he want to go there? I thought he’d settled into a human life in our little garret in Paris, but sometimes at night I awoke to an empty bed and I found him perched on the roof, brooding over the city like a gargoyle, his wings bristling in the night air. There was something wild in him that ached for the open skies and deep woods. Would he be satisfied living a fully human life? Would I?
In the end I didn’t need a trail to find him. I knew where he’d gone. The ladder to his tree house was rotting and broken, the floorboards furred with moss, the walls plaited with vines. His lair had become a true nest, a little pocket in the trees. I squeezed in next to him. He was holding a broken willow- pattern teacup, cracked in half between two blue birds fluttering beak to beak.
“I’ll go wherever you want,” I told him. “To Faerie if that’s your choice or here if that’s what you want. I don’t care where we are as long as we’re together. You’re my eternity.”
He turned to me, his dark eyes green with reflected leaf light. It was like looking into my own eyes. There was hardly any space between us at all, only those breathless few inches that quivered between Cupid’s and Psyche’s lips in that statue in the Louvre. I felt in that space our whole future together—the kiss about to happen, the children we would have, the tears we would shed—our lives, fleeting and shining as a butterfly’s wings.
That night I stood in the hawthorn grove with the broken shard in my hand. As each Darkling who wanted the curse lifted approached me I flared my wings out to heat the shard and then I touched it to their foreheads, as Master Quill and Aelfweard had shown me. For a moment I would feel the darkness inside them calling to the darkness inside me, but then when the heated shard burnt away their darkness I’d feel an ease in my own. Perhaps it was just the relief of seeing that we all carried a bit of darkness inside of us that made it easier to bear my own. Even Wren harbored the grief—and not a little anger toward me—she’d felt when Raven risked his life holding the door to Faerie for me. I didn’t blame her a bit.
The last Darkling to approach me was my father.
“I wish . . .” I
began, but he silenced me by touching his hand to my lips.
“You’ve made the right decision, Ava. Not because of which world you’ve chosen to be in, but because you’ve chosen love.”
He wrapped his hand around my right hand and placed the shard against his forehead. I felt all the guilt and sadness he’d felt at leaving my mother and all the self-hatred for not being with me as I grew up. And then I felt it all burn away. What was left was love. For me, for my mother, for the world he was leaving. I felt the darkness in me melt until there was only a drop left.
He kissed me on the forehead and turned to go.
Helen and Daisy were waiting for me at the edge of the circle. “Raven’s gone on with his parents,” Helen told me. “And Nathan’s walking with Uncle Taddie.”
As we walked along the hawthorn path to the door, we met other humans who had chosen to go to Faerie.
“This world is getting too modern for relics like us,” Miles Malmsbury said, looking wistfully at Euphorbia. “And I have so much more to learn about the lychnobious people.”
Omar, who had decided to go, walked with Kid Marvel, who had decided to stay.
As we walked, a conflagration of lampsprites flitted around us, sprinkling us with pixie dust. Remember us, they sang. Remember us.
Another sound joined their song—the bells of Blythewood tolling the Darklings and fairies home. As I listened I heard seven bells. The lost bell, the one under the river, was tolling for all those who had died before they could go home.
Daisy wiped damp pixie dust from her face. Helen put her arm around her and I twined my arm around her on the other side. “Buck up, Daze,” Helen said hoarsely, “I thought I was the one who hated change.”
“It’s just . . . there won’t be any magic left after they’re all gone!”
“Don’t be silly,” Helen said. “Not all the fairies are going. There’s plenty of magic left in the world—and if there isn’t, well, we’ll just have to make our own.”