As soon as I was through I turned over and faced Raven. On this side of the door his back was covered with the green dust of pine pollen. He might have been a tree stump, the remnant of a once great oak slowly disintegrating back into the forest floor. I wrapped my arms around his back and pressed my face against his neck, my lips to his ear.
“You can let go,” I said. “I’m here now.”
He shuddered, a convulsion so violent I thought he might break apart as he fell backward into my arms. I held on to him as tightly as I could, unfurling my wings and wrapping them around him, repeating over and over again, “I’m here now, I’m here now,” as he shook and shook. Helen sat nearby, her arms wrapped around her knees.
“Run to Blythewood and get help. Tell them to send to Ravencliffe for Wren.” If anyone could heal Raven it would be his mother, Wren, who had tended to his wounds after he’d been tortured by van Drood.
Helen looked at me so wide-eyed I thought she’d lost her senses traveling back through time, but then she asked, “Are you sure we’re back in our own time? Why does Raven look like he’s been holding the door for a hundred years?”
I looked around the woods, which were green and full of birdsong. “I think we’ve come back to a time before the airships destroyed the woods—”
Before I could finish we heard bells ringing—the bells of Blythewood—all six of them! Helen’s face brightened. “I’ll go get help!” she said, getting shakily to her feet, but then her voice changed. “Um . . . Ava, I think we’d better take Raven with us and get out of here as fast as we can.”
“Why?” I looked up and saw that she was looking up at the treetops, which were bristling with spiky black shapes. Shadow crows perched on every branch, their hard bright eyes fixed on us.
“I . . . think . . . Helen’s . . . right.” Raven bit out each word as if his throat had turned to stone. He was struggling to his feet, his arm clamped around my waist. I tightened my grip on him and rose slowly. The crows cocked their heads in the identical angle, but they made no move to fly at us. Helen came to Raven’s other side and slid her arm around his waist, taking on his weight even though I could tell by her limp that her leg must be bothering her. Together we began walking toward the sound of the bells. Above us the crows fluttered from branch to branch, keeping up with our slow progress but not attacking us.
“Watching,” Raven said to my unvoiced question. “Since you went . . . always . . . watching.”
“For the way into the vessel,” Helen whispered. The crows cawed as if they had heard and understood her.
“I think we’d better wait until we’re inside before we talk about that,” I said.
We’d come to the edge of the woods. The lawn was green as the day we left, the flowers as bright, and the castle of Blythewood standing whole and golden in the afternoon light. Helen sighed at the sight. I, too, felt relieved, but as we crossed the lawn I felt that something was different. Now that the bells had ceased the school was eerily silent. No girls played hockey in the fields or sat on the lawn gossiping. The glass doors to the library, which Miss Corey always threw open on fine days like today, were closed and shuttered. In fact, all the windows were shuttered.
When we were halfway across the lawn, the front door burst open and something pink hurtled out like a flying shuttlecock. A shuttlecock whooping like a banshee. It flew at us so fast I was afraid Raven would be knocked down, but Helen got in between and met the flying ball of pink with equal force.
“Daisy!”
“You’re back you’re back you’re back!” Daisy sang, spinning Helen around in a circle. “I knew you’d come back. I knew Raven would get you back!” She aimed herself at Raven but Helen held on to her.
“Yes, he did, and it’s half killed him. Someone needs to send to Ravencliffe for his mother to tend to him—and someone needs to do something about these crows. They’ve followed us from the woods.”
“They’re always around now,” Daisy said with a baleful look at the dozen crows perched on the garden hedge. “But all they do is watch. We have to keep the doors and windows shut or they get in and peck at our hair and make a foul mess. They started the day you left. Maybe now they’ll go. Where did you go?”
“We fell into a hole and met—”
“Many interesting people,” I cut in, “but we really shouldn’t talk about it here.” We were only a few yards from the door now. Beatrice and Dolores were standing on either side of it, their bows drawn and their eyes on the crows. Miss Sharp appeared in the doorway with her nurse’s bag. At the sight of it I remembered the photograph of her standing in front of her ambulance surrounded by soldiers. And then I thought of her being burnt in the airstrike. But her face was unmarked—and here was Mr. Bellows, whole and sound, waving his dagger in the air to chase off the crows, only I was picturing him charging with a bayonet into no-man’s-land to save one of the boys from Hawthorn Hall. I looked into Daisy’s face and I saw her being tortured to give up her cohorts’ names, her mouth clamped in silence. None of those things have happened, I told myself, but still I could see those fates overlaid on their features like shadows cast through time and I knew that I would see them until I changed that future.
“We must talk to Dame Beckwith right away,” I told Miss Sharp as she helped me bring Raven up the stairs. “I know what van Drood is trying to do and we must stop him before it’s too late.”
“There’s time enough for you to tell us when you’ve rested and healed,” she said. “You’ve been gone so long—”
“How long?” Helen demanded, looking from Daisy to Miss Sharp and around the circle of friends who had closed around us to usher us safely into Blythewood. And then she looked to Raven. “Didn’t you bring us back to the same time we left?”
“Helen!” I admonished. “Raven saved us!”
“I couldn’t,” Raven said. “I could only bring you back to my present. It took me a while to think of it—and then to figure out how to do it—and then to make the watch . . .”
“How long?” Helen asked again.
“Not so very long,” Daisy said. “Let’s see, you left in September . . .” She began counting on the fingers of one hand and then the other.
“Just over nine months,” Miss Sharp said. “The term ended last week—only your friends didn’t want to leave in case you came back. Today is June eleventh.”
We’d missed our senior year—all the classes and exams and cocoa parties and midnight feasts and dances and hockey games and even our own graduation. I thought Helen would throw a fit, but instead she looked at me, her eyes icy. “Good. We’re not too late. We’ve got seventeen days before they kill the archduke.”
8
ONCE WE WERE inside and the door was closed, Miss Sharp gave out the orders. “Bea and Dolores, take the boat to Ravencliffe to get Wren. Rupert, help me get that boy to the infirmary. Lil, take the girls into the library.”
I could see her on the battlefield, barking out orders to her nurses. When Mr. Bellows picked up Raven in his arms I could see him carrying the wounded back from no-man’s-land. I blinked away the images and protested. “I want to go with Raven.”
“Raven will be tended to.” It was Dame Beckwith, hurrying toward us through the Great Hall, sunlight pouring through the stained-glass windows bathing her in crimson. I saw her standing in the ruined school holding a dead girl in her arms, her face and arms streaked with blood. “We need you and Helen in the library now! Raven told me earlier today what to do if you came back . . .” Her face softened as she watched Mr. Bellows carrying Raven upstairs. “So you see, it’s his orders I’m following. Won’t you do as I ask?”
I nodded and let myself be led through the Great Hall and into the classroom hallway. I glanced at the intact trophy cases as we went—there was Daisy’s plaque for the Latin prize and Dolores’s for best essay. I looked at Helen and she nodded. She was thinking the same
thing—we hadn’t imagined the nightmare future. What we’d seen was real. And we had to stop it.
As we passed Mr. Bellows’s room I heard a fluttering sound, as if a bird were trapped inside. I glanced in and saw the big wall map slapping against the wall in the breeze—only there wasn’t any wind because all the windows were shuttered.
“We’ll need that map,” I told Dame Beckwith.
She jerked her chin at Miss Corey, who went to take the map off the wall. We waited for her at the door to the library while she took a key from her pocket to unlock the door.
“Since when do you lock the library?” Helen asked.
“Since the tenebrae started trying to get in,” Miss Corey replied.
As she unlocked the door I heard her muttering something under her breath. Latin words. Venite, amici. As I stepped over the threshold I felt a jolt of energy. I was so relieved to see the library looking the same that I didn’t mind. A fire crackled cheerfully in the fireplace; a china teapot and mismatched cups gleamed on the table, piles of books stacked haphazardly beside them. Helen sighed and sank down in the rocking chair by the fire. Daisy put the kettle on the hearth and spooned tea into the pot and then went to look for a tin of biscuits. Miss Corey moved stacks of books and laid the map out on the table. As I looked down at it certain names leapt up at me as if they’d been branded in fire—Verdun, Ypres, Amiens, Paris. I looked away—into Dame Beckwith’s face.
“Something terrible is coming, isn’t it?”
“How do you know?” I asked, playing for time. I hadn’t realized how hard it would be to tell our friends what the future held.
“Emmaline Sharp has been having premonitions, only they’re very scattered.”
Poor Miss Emmy. Miss Sharp’s aunt was a chime child like me, only she was able to tell the future. I hated to think of that sweet old woman visited by portents of death and destruction—her own home firebombed, her niece burned and scarred. I started to speak, but Dame Beckwith raised her hand.
“Drink your tea first. Collect yourself. Raven said you’d be worn out from the journey.”
I took the cup from Daisy and sipped the hot sweet tea. She’d put in sugar, as we’d been taught to do to counteract shock. I thought I’d need all the sugar in the West Indies to get over the shock of traveling to the future and back. After a few sips, though, I did feel better. Not quite well enough to tell our story yet, though. I had a few questions first.
“You say that Raven spoke to you this morning?”
“To Gillie and me, yes . . . ah, here’s Gillie now.”
I turned to see Gillie standing in the doorway, turning his soft hat in his hands, his green eyes simmering. “Aye, the lad said he’d have you back. He gave me something . . .”
“A red box with a watch inside.” I felt a prickling at the back of my neck and had the strangest feeling that I was watching myself from the future. “Leave that box where it is, Gillie. You already gave it to me.”
Gillie nodded. “Aye, the lad said that even if he were back today it would be longer that he—and you two—were gone. That he was going to a place where time stood still.”
“So even though Raven opened the door for us today he’d really been holding it the whole ten years we were gone?” Helen’s eyes were wide with amazement—and pity.
“Or longer.” It was Miss Sharp, who’d come in with Mr. Bellows behind Gillie. She held up a hand as I started from my chair. “It’s all right, Ava. Wren and Marlin are with him. They say he’s suffering from Time Freeze. It’s what happens when a Darkling tries to hold open the door to Faerie for too long. He enters into a realm of ‘timelessness that contains all time.’” Miss Sharp wrinkled her forehead, her blue eyes clouding. “There’s no way to measure how long Raven was holding the door because he was outside of time, but they say it’s as though he’d been holding the door for eternity—”
“Eternity!” I cried, appalled. “Are you saying he suffered an eternity to get Helen and me back?”
Miss Sharp smiled. “Yes, it’s quite romantic—”
“It’s not romantic,” Miss Corey broke in. “It’s heroic! Raven didn’t just save Helen and Ava, he’s saved all of us. He’s given us a chance to avert the terrible future that Emmaline has been warning us about.”
“But can that be done?” Mr. Bellows asked. “Can we change the future? Can any of us change our fate?”
I looked up at Mr. Bellows. He was standing close to the fire, the reflection of the flames dancing on his face, but what I saw were rocket bursts lighting up his face as he crawled through the mud across the battlefield. I didn’t know how to answer him. But Helen did.
“Of course we can. We’re not pawns or van Drood’s shadow puppets. We can change our fates, or why else were Ava and I able to come back?” She looked around the table where our teachers, Dame Beckwith, Gillie, and Daisy had all come to sit. It wasn’t the glare of rockets that lit their faces, but the glow of fellowship. I had an image of the first knights of the Order, men and women who had joined together to rid the world of evil. A great and deadly power was arising in our world—I could feel its presence looming outside the castle walls—but we had come together to defeat it.
“Helen’s right,” I said. “We can change the future. We have to.”
Helen and I told our story, taking turns, from the moment we encountered the shadow-ridden trow, through our meeting with Aelfweard, to finding the ruins of Blythewood. It was hard to tell them about the blasted school. I saw Dame Beckwith’s jaw clench, and Gillie swore in Scots under his breath.
“How could we have let it happen?” Mr. Bellows cried, slamming his fist on the table.
“You were off fighting in France,” Helen said. Intercepting a look from me, she added, “Before Mr. Bellows left he kept the clippings from the war on his corkboard . . .” She told our friends of their exploits without, I noticed, any mention of the brutal fates they had met. Why tell them? I knew she was thinking, and I agreed. Instead we shared what we’d gathered about the causes of the war.
“An assassination in the Balkans?” Mr. Bellows mused, stroking his chin. “Professor Jager has reported from Vienna that the Austro-Serbian conflicts have been fueled by shadow- ridden players, but how on earth could that have started such a huge war?”
We explained to them how it progressed across Europe and then the Atlantic.
“I can see the Germans moving across France,” Mr. Bellows remarked, studying the map. “Our intelligence agents report that Germany has been devising a military plan along those lines for decades, something called the Schlieffen Plan, but I’m surprised the French and the Brits weren’t able to stop them. It’s as if . . .”
“They had help,” Miss Sharp said, stabbing the map with one of her hairpins.
“Gillie—future Gillie,” Helen explained, “told us that you all believed that van Drood had found and opened the third vessel. He released the shadows and turned the tide of the war.”
“But how did he find the third vessel?” Mr. Bellows asked.
“I think I know,” Miss Corey answered. “I’ve been working with Mr. Farnsworth and Master Quill on transcribing A Darkness of Angels. We’ve been trying to figure out what was on the missing page—and we think it might have been the story of the original vessels, which Dame Alcyone heard from one of the vessel guardians. We don’t think she would have given away the location of the vessels but we found a reference elsewhere that the vessels were hidden near the doors to Faerie. We think van Drood figured out from the story that there was a vessel in the Blythe Wood. Mr. Farnsworth thought that one of the vessels was at Hawthorn so he went there to warn them.”
“He was right,” I said. “The drawing Aelfweard showed us looked like Hawthorn Hall. Did Mr. Farnsworth find the vessel there?”
Dame Beckwith and Miss Sharp exchanged glances. “We don’t know,” Dame Beckwith answered. ??
?We haven’t had any word from Hawthorn since Mr. Farnsworth and Nathan arrived there in January.”
“Nathan?” I could tell Helen was trying to keep her voice steady. Only a Darkling’s ears would pick up on the tremor in it. “He’s at Hawthorn Hall now?”
“Yes,” Dame Beckwith answered, her clenched jaw betraying her own struggle to appear calm. “After you girls went missing he exhausted himself looking for you in the woods. I was afraid he would suffer a nervous collapse. I even thought of sending him to the hospital in Vienna where Louisa is, but then at Christmas he suddenly came up with the idea of finishing the year at Hawthorn. I was surprised, since he’d hated the place when I sent him there three years ago.”
“Complained that they made him run bare-chested over the moors and fed him gruel,” Mr. Bellows said with a fond smile on his face. “They do, you know! Makes a man of you!”
Daisy blushed as if the image of Mr. Bellows running bare-chested over the moors was too much for her. “Nathan told me that it was time to live up to his heritage.”
“I wonder what he meant by that?” Helen said, furrowing her brow.
“He meant that it was high time he began acting like a knight of the Order,” Miss Corey said, slapping her hand on the table. The teacups chimed in their saucers like miniature bells. “It’s time we all started acting like knights and ladies of the Order. We’ll go to Hawthorn Hall and find the vessel. Either it’s whole and we’ll defend it against van Drood or if it’s broken it will lead us to the unbroken vessel and we’ll defend that.”
“That’s all very well and good, Lillian,” Miss Sharp said, laying her hand on her friend’s arm. “But if we all go tearing off to Scotland we’ll lead van Drood straight to the vessel. Why else does he have his crows watching us? He’s waiting for us to lead him to the vessel.”