Now that she mentioned it, I could taste the soot in my mouth as well. It tasted like ash and rotten meat—the way the trow’s breath had smelled. Bile rose up in my throat and I doubled over, retching the foul black gunk onto the ground. I heard Helen choking beside me, then I felt her hands smoothing my hair away from my face and patting my back.
“Ugh, what do you think it is?” she asked when we both could breathe again.
“I don’t know—some kind of residue from the tenebrae, I think. Maybe it’s another way that the shadows have of getting inside us. We have to get into Faerie before it infects us, but I don’t know how to find it.”
I turned around in a circle. The bare trees loomed out of the smoke like gaunt skeletons. One of the photographs from Mr. Bellows’ corkboard flashed in my mind—a terrain of ruined trees rising out of the smoke, bodies twisted in the mud, gunfire lighting up the sky in lurid blasts . . .
As if the image had summoned them, the sky opened up above us. Sulfurous yellow light scythed through the skeletal trees, and the ground shook under our feet.
“The zeppelin!” Helen hissed, grabbing my hand. “It’s come back!”
We ran from the searchlights strafing the ground, but there was no place to hide. All the underbrush had been burned away. The blasted trees offered no shelter. I could hear the zeppelin right behind us, the hum of its engines rattling my teeth, scraping inside my brain. The searchlights skittered beside us. I felt one touch my brow and for a terrible second my mind went completely blank. It was as if I had been erased. Then Helen pulled me out of its path and my mind stuttered back up like a rusty machine just in time for me to see that the light was stretching toward Helen.
I grabbed Helen and unfurled my wings, mantling them over us just as the light reached us. I had no idea if my wings would protect us from the scouring light. I could feel the heat and smell my feathers singeing, but we were still alive. But for how long? How long would my wings keep out the burning rays? How long would our minds be our own? If we were going to be turned into mindless drones I’d rather be dead.
Then suddenly the heat was gone. I felt cool air on the outside of my wings.
“I think it’s gone,” Helen whispered.
“It could be a trap,” I said, parting my wings a fraction and peering through the gap between singed feathers. A Darkling was standing over us, his wings mantled over his head. He was backlit against the glare of the retreating ship, so I couldn’t make out his face—but Helen recognized him right away.
“Marlin?” she said, getting slowly to her feet. “Is that you?”
He lowered his wings and stepped forward. His face was older, lined and scarred, a white streak in his reddish-brown hair, but when he smiled he looked like the same boy who would do somersaults off the Shawangunk ridge. “Helen! Ava! I thought it must be you when I saw the color of those feathers. But I hardly dared hope—it’s been over ten years!”
“We went through Faerie!” Helen cried, and then in a rush, “Oh Marlin, I’m so sorry. If I’d known I wouldn’t see you for so long I’d have never been so awful to you!”
I stared at Helen. So I hadn’t been the only one to fight with her boyfriend that week.
“You weren’t awful, just truthful. I only took it so badly because my feelings were hurt. I felt terrible when you went missing. We all did.” He turned to me. “I thought Raven would go out of his mind. He blamed himself.”
“But it wasn’t his fault!”
“You couldn’t tell him that. He said that if you hadn’t argued he would have been with you the day you went missing. It was my fault, too. If I hadn’t been sulking I’d have been keeping an eye on you. We knew something was going on in the woods. The tenebrae had been gathering for weeks, taking over whatever creatures they could—trows, boggles, even lampsprites—searching the woods for something.”
“For the broken vessel,” Helen whispered. “We found it that day.” Quickly, Helen told Marlin what we had learned from Mr. Ward. He listened intently, his face grave. Watching him, I could see all the pain he had witnessed over these last ten years reflected in the heavy stance of his body, the lines etched in his face, and the gravity in his eyes. Although I’d caught a glimpse of the carefree boy he’d once been, that boy was gone. When Helen was done he nodded gravely.
“We suspected that the shadows found the third vessel in the summer of fourteen. We’d seen human wars before, but never one like this one. Humans burrowed into the ground killing each other in the mud and blood. I ferried souls from the trenches and touched the memories of those young men—so much fear and sickness and the everlasting waste of life.” He shuddered. “I couldn’t stand by and just watch. Many of us fought beside the men in the trenches, many Darklings died. Gus . . .”
“Pythagoras?” I asked, remembering the shy bookish Darkling. “He fought in the war?”
Marlin chuckled. “Gus became quite the explosives expert. He and your friend Dolores blew up many a bridge and munitions factory. They were both killed in the battle of New York. So were Buzz and Heron and Sirena.”
“And Raven?” I asked.
Marlin shook his head. “Raven vanished before the war. He said he knew where you had gone and that he thought he had a way to get you back. But to tell the truth, he’d gone a bit crazy after you disappeared. He spent hours at Violet House talking to Uncle Taddie, tinkering with clocks. When he disappeared—well, I was afraid he might have taken his own life.”
“Raven would never do that!” I said. “He left this for me.” I took the watch out of my pocket and showed it to Marlin. “He left a note saying that if I went back to Faerie it could bring me back to our time.”
Marlin looked at the watch skeptically at first and then with a creeping flash of hope. “And if you did get back—”
“We’d set everything to rights,” Helen said. “We’d find the unbroken vessel before van Drood and stop the war.”
Marlin smiled at Helen. He lifted his hand and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. “I hate to let you go again, but if you could do that . . . well, it would be worth even that sacrifice. I would do anything to change these last ten years. When I think of what a witless fool I was . . .” He made a disgusted sound and shook himself. “Well, there’s no hope for that. I’d better get you two to Faerie and be quick about it. The door’s been getting smaller and harder to find, choked up with this infernal soot. Master Quill thinks it will soon close for good. Let’s hope it hasn’t yet.”
We walked the rest of the way in silence, Marlin leading the way, alert for trouble. Helen kept her head down, her face closed and thoughtful. I would have liked to ask what had happened between them, but I couldn’t very well with him right there. I could guess, though, that it had something to do with what had happened with Nathan in Europe. Had she come back sure that she loved Nathan not Marlin? But then why had she been sniping at Nathan every chance she got and acting so miserable?
Then again, I was in love and I hadn’t been acting so happy either. Maybe love didn’t lead to all that much happiness in the end.
I’d arrived at this gloomy thought just as we reached an obstacle—a thorny tangle that blocked the path. “We’ll have to go over,” I said to Marlin. “We can fly and one of us can carry Helen—or we can all climb,” I amended at a sharp look from Helen.
“We won’t be going over. This is it—this is the door to Faerie.”
“This?” Helen asked, peering into the thicket. “But there’s no door here, just thorn bushes.”
“I told you it was grown over,” Marlin replied. “If you crouch down you can see a glimmer of fairy dust through the hawthorns.”
I crouched down and peered into the thicket. There was a small opening near the ground but it looked more like a rabbit burrow than a door to a magical realm.
“We can’t possibly crawl through there,” Helen said, bending over
me. “We’ll ruin our clothes.”
Marlin laughed. “Have you seen yourself in a mirror lately? You look like something a boggle dragged through the marsh. But I can make the opening a bit bigger for you.”
I heard a flutter of wings and the thorn thicket began to glow. The tangled branches crept back, making a hole just big enough to crawl through. “I think we can get through, Helen,” I said, turning to look over my shoulder.
Helen was standing looking up at Marlin, her face bathed in the glow of his wings, her eyes shining. “I’m sorry . . .” she began, but he placed a finger on her lips.
“You can make it up to me,” he said, “if you send a message back to my fool younger self. Tell him not to be an idiot. Tell him not to give you up without a fight.”
Helen opened her mouth to say something but Marlin silenced her with a kiss. I turned away to give them privacy, my own eyes stinging as though the thorns had pierced them as I crawled blindly through the hole in the thicket.
7
WHEN I’D BEEN to Faerie before it had been a beautiful place of green lawns, wildflowers, and lavender skies. The place I found myself in now didn’t look anything like that. I emerged from the thicket onto a bare, windswept rocky plain under a bruise-colored sky. A darkling plain, I thought, remembering Miss Sharp’s poem, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.
This plain was swept with grit and the keening cry of the wind whistling through scorched trees and rocky outcrops that looked like they’d been built as forts to withstand an invasion—and failed.
“What happened here?” Helen asked, coming to stand beside me.
“It looks like it was sacked. I didn’t think Faerie could be invaded. Shadow creatures can’t get in here.”
“Something got in here and wrecked the place. Do you think anyone’s still here?”
I looked doubtfully at the barren heaps of rocks. “I don’t know. We should look for survivors.” I was thinking of my mother and our teachers Miles Malmsbury and Euphorbia Frost.
“What if whatever destroyed this place is still here?” Helen asked. “Maybe we should just use Raven’s watch to go back. If we can stop van Drood from finding the third vessel maybe this won’t happen.”
What Helen said made sense—and it was what I wanted to do. Raven had written that he was waiting for me. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant—how could you wait in a moment in time? Where exactly was he waiting?—but I knew that every fiber of my being ached to go to him. But as I lifted up his watch I heard a wail coming from the stand of burnt trees at the edge of the plain. I took a step in that direction but Helen put a hand on my arm to restrain me. “We don’t know what it is, Ava. I think we should leave—”
Another wail came from the woods—a long drawn-out cry that reminded me of the sounds that the old Italian and Greek women on the Lower East Side would make at funerals and wakes. Only I recognized this voice. I shook off Helen’s arm and strode over the rocks to the woods. As I came closer I made out figures among the trees: willowy white women, their arms raised and swaying like windswept branches, their long loose hair floating like leaves tossed in a gale. One of the women had long red hair and green eyes.
“Mother!” I cried, running now. Her head snapped around at the sound of my voice. It was my mother. She had survived, even if she looked thinner than when I’d seen her last and her clothes were torn and covered with soot. Her green eyes were huge in her starved face—and frightened. Could she be frightened of me?
But she was running toward me, not away. She met me on the edge of the woods and grabbed me by both arms and held me at arm’s length although I struggled to embrace her. “Avie, dearling, you mustn’t come closer!”
“But why, Mother, aren’t you glad to see me?”
Her eyes widened and filled with tears, but her grip didn’t waver. “I’ve hoped and prayed that you survived the Great War, but you won’t survive long here, dearling. There’s a contagion that is taking us all.” She looked back over her shoulder at the swaying women. One at the center was moving less and less. She was covered with soot from head to foot; even her hair and skin were the color of ash.
“What happened here?” I asked. “I thought the shadows couldn’t cross over into Faerie.”
“So did we. But once van Drood opened the third vessel, the hope-eaters pressed in on us here in Faerie. The darkness spread like a mold or a virus, killing the grass and the flowers, the trees . . . and then the fay. First the smaller delicate ones—the lampsprites and boggles—but then even the trows and goblins. They all fell to the contagion. Only those of us who were human were immune—and the changelings—but now even the changelings have succumbed.”
She turned her head back to look over her shoulder. The woman in the center had stopped swaying. She was arrested in a posture of supplication, her soot-covered arms raised to the sky, darkening and hardening as I watched until she was indistinguishable from the trees surrounding her—
Which weren’t trees.
They were changelings frozen into the stunted, twisted shapes of blasted trees. I looked back at my mother and saw with horror that the same soot streaked her arms and stained the hollows beneath her eyes. “Come with me,” I said. “I have a watch that will take us back to a time before all this happened. Come with me.”
She shook her head. “Even if I could pass back into your world I wouldn’t take the chance of spreading this contagion. But if you can go back . . .” She smiled, the movement spreading fine cracks in her brittle skin. “Perhaps you can change the course of events and keep the creeping shadow out of Faerie. He’s waiting for you there, isn’t he?”
“Yes, Raven is waiting for me. He left me the watch.”
“Then you’ll be all right. Go back to him now, dearling, before it’s too late.”
“We’ll make this right, Mother, I promise.”
She lifted her hand to stroke my face. “I know that if anyone can it will be you—and your friends.” She looked over my shoulder to where Helen had come to stand behind me. “But promise me one thing, dearling.”
“Anything, Mother,” I cried, my tears blurring her face.
“Don’t make the mistake I made. Hold on to the ones you love. If you can’t change our fates—take the ones you love and run as far as you can.”
Helen led me away from my mother, my eyes so blurred with tears I stumbled over the rough ground. I remembered how hard it had been to leave her once before in Faerie but it was a hundred times worse leaving her in this desolate place.
“We will make this right,” Helen said firmly. “We will stop van Drood before he can spread his foulness everywhere.”
I nodded, too overcome to talk, and took the watch out of my pocket. It was ticking faster, as if it were an animal whose heart was racing in this awful place—or as if it were running down. What if the foul soot was clogging the mechanism? Even a magic watch might not run forever. What if we were too late?
My hand trembling, I held up the watch and depressed the stem.
The ticking stopped. My heart stopped with it. Everything stopped. The keening wind, Helen’s breath, time itself. Raven had found what Helen had asked for: a spell to stop time. But what if it kept us here—and now—for all eternity, trapped in this ruined place?
Then the watch began to move. The gold wings spun clockwise, then counterclockwise, then lifted up from the watch face. Gears and cogs whirled inside, reshaping the watch into something else. I watched in amazement as before my eyes the watch changed into a mechanical bird with gold wings that rose into the brightening air. I heard Helen gasp. The drear gray air of ruined Faerie had turned into a shimmering iridescent rainbow, like the skin of a soap bubble expanding in the sun and then—
Bursting!
The shock of the explosion knocked us off our feet. I barely had time to grab Helen’s hand and then we were flying backward, s
peeding through time as if we’d been shot out of a cannon. Surely no one could survive this. Poor Raven. He had tried his best. I hoped he never knew that he’d blown us to bits.
We hit the ground so hard my teeth clicked together and I bit my tongue. I could feel my bones rattling—but at least I still had bones. I opened my eyes and saw Helen’s face, her blonde hair wild, her blue eyes wide as saucers—but alive! And she was pointing to something, her mouth working to form a word.
I snapped my head in the direction she pointed. A marble statue stood on the top of a hill above us. It looked like a statue of Atlas holding up the world, arms straining against a terrible weight, neck tendons standing out, legs braced. Only this Atlas had wings stretched out holding back invisible walls. Had Raven left this statue here to hold the door for us? I struggled to my feet, my legs weak as a newly hatched chick’s, pulling Helen up with me, without taking my eyes off the statue. Blue veins stood out in the marble just as if they carried blood. The face was carved so finely I could make out the shadow of eyelashes on downturned eyes and the tracks of tears on the face and beads of sweat standing out on the forehead. The marble was so smooth I couldn’t help but reach my hand out and lay it on the bare straining chest . . .
Where a heart beat.
“Raven!”
The eyelids flickered, scattering the white dust that held them down, lips parted, cracking the silt of time that lay over him, trying to form a word.
“Guh.”
“He telling us to go through,” Helen said. “He can’t let the door close until we’re on the other side. We can squeeze through under his wings.”
Just barely. When Raven had held the door for me once before, he had been standing. He may have started out standing this time but the pressure of holding open the door had brought him down to his knees. It was crushing him. How long had he been here? Hadn’t he brought us back to the moment when he opened the door? I didn’t have time to figure it all out. Only when we were through the door would he be able to let go. I pushed Helen through the gap under his left wing—the right one was nearly crushed to the ground—and then crawled through after her, wriggling flat on my belly.