The
Treachery
of Beautiful Things
RUTH FRANCES LONG
The
Treachery
of Beautiful Things
Dial Books
an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
DIAL BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Group (USA)
Published by The Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2012 by Ruth Frances Long
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Designed by Nancy R. Leo-Kelly
Text set in Hoefler Text
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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Long, Ruth Frances,
The treachery of beautiful things / by Ruth Frances Long.
p. cm.
Summary: Seven years after the forest seemingly swallowed her brother whole,
seventeen-year-old Jenny, whose story about Tom’s disappearance has never been believed, sets out to finally say goodbye, but instead she is pulled into a mysterious world of faeries and other creatures where nothing is what it seems.
ISBN: 978-1-101-57556-7
[1. Fantasy. 2. Fairies—Fiction. 3. Kings, queens, rulers, etc.—Fiction.
4. Forests and forestry—Fiction. 5. Love—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.L8578Tr 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011027165
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For Pat, still my hero, always will be
prologue
The streetlights flickered on outside the window and Jenny looked up from her book. The artificial orange glow etched the silhouettes of leaves and branches against the glass.
In the other room, Tom’s flute sang out, trilling through an arpeggio before breaking into “Haste to the Wedding.” She heard Mrs. Whitlow laugh. Tom’s music could bring delight to anyone, even the vinegar-faced music teacher who had, after two long years of lessons, declared Jenny unteachable. Mother wouldn’t hear of that, naturally, so now Tom got a double lesson, and Jenny? More time to read. And their mother was none the wiser.
Jenny absently slid her locket across its chain and turned back to her novel. She liked it better lost in between the words, with Tom’s melody filling her head like a musical score.
“All right, shrimp?” Tom was smiling down at her. It was already fully dark outside. She hadn’t noticed the time pass. “Ready to go home?”
She looked up at her big brother, taking in his light, slightly rumpled hair, the smile that turned up one cheek, his eyes crinkled at the corners despite their grim, gray cast, and closed her book. Jenny didn’t bother with a bookmark. She read like Tom played. Constantly. Hungrily. Her brother already had his backpack slung over his shoulder, the flute sticking carelessly out of it.
“Sure,” she said, pretending not to notice his forced cheer. She slid her book into her schoolbag and followed him into the chilly evening. “We’re going to be late for tea.”
“We’ll take the shortcut,” he said, hopping down the steps two at a time.
Jenny opened her mouth to argue, but Tom crossed the road before she could say a word. In sunlight, she wouldn’t think twice about taking the route past Branley Copse. It cut the trip home in half. But now, with the sun gone down behind the distant hills—
“Oh, come on, Jenny.” Lately his laugh had developed a sharp, staccato edge. “Stop being so scared.”
Jenny shifted her bag from one shoulder to the other. She couldn’t hold it against him. No one could hold anything against Tom. His smile alone, the jokes that hung around his eyes, would soon persuade them to his side.
Tom strode ahead and Jenny ran to catch up before his long strides left her behind. At fourteen, he was already almost as tall as Dad. No wonder he called her shrimp.
“What did she say about the audition?” Jenny finally asked, careful to keep her eyes straight ahead.
Tom shrugged. “It’ll be fine. Listen.” He reached back and pulled out the flute like a musketeer drawing his sword. The notes floated out through the twilight, haunting and beautiful. For a moment the music beguiled even her. But not entirely. There was something about the stiffness of her brother’s shoulders…She peered up at him in concern. Tom had a wildness about him tonight, something just a bit desperate, as if his music scared him and yet he needed it. His eyes slid closed, and for a moment she felt like she lost him, or maybe on hearing his music, lost a little part of herself.
They reached the tree line and turned to walk along its edge, leaving the streetlights behind them.
To her left, the ground rose to a mound where the trunks took root, forming a lattice of increasing darkness the deeper she stared into the woods. She and Tom were only cutting along the edge, Jenny reassured herself, not actually going through the trees. And Tom was there beside her, playing his music, just because he could.
Jenny paused, breathing deep for a moment, the notes clear and crisp as the air itself. They floated around her, soared and trilled, setting the hairs on the back of her neck shivering. They reverberated through her body, harmonizing with the rush of blood through her veins. The wind picked up, the trees moving almost in time to the music, the patch of woodland swelling in the darkness to embody something old and vast, the ancient forests that had once covered all the Weald. And all because of Tom’s music, she thought distantly. Music that was more than half magic.
Tom broke off abruptly, sighing. The forest seemed to subside, his pied piper trick over. Jenny shook her head. Her imagination. That was all. Dad always said so.
She slid her locket back and forth along its chain nervously.
“You’ll twist that right off one of these days,” Tom teased. “Then where will you keep your secrets?”
Jenny let go of the empty locket and it fell back against her chest. “I don’t have any secrets.”
He tilted his head to one side. “Not yet. But you’ll need somewhere to keep them when you do, won’t you?”
Jenny shrugged. The silence stretched until she remembered her question. “Don’t you want to do it?” she asked. “The audition?”
Tom glanced at her with a wry smile. “Mother wants me to do it.” He picked up speed, the flute still clutched in his fist. “So that’s that. You know what, thou
gh?” He only paused for a second, not giving her enough time to answer. “She hasn’t thought it through. I mean, she’ll have to back off a bit, won’t she?”
“Well, maybe.” But doubtful. Jenny didn’t say that bit. His mood was fragile enough. Gifted, they called him, and Tom was, in so many ways. But while the world saw his musical abilities, Jenny saw only her brother. He loved his music, but not the pressure that came with it. From their parents most of all.
There was a sudden rustle of leaves beside her legs and Jenny jumped in alarm. “Did you hear that?” she asked.
“Hear what?” Tom walked on, but Jenny stopped, staring into the dark woods. No light reached inside. The streetlights were too far away, barely illuminating the edge. And the lights of the football field on the other side were still distant. She leaned forward.
There.
Something moved amid the trees, floating like a dream. Something made of leaves and bark, root and branch, but not.
“Tom?” she whispered.
At the sound of her voice it turned, twisting around on itself, quicker than a cat, to peer at her with berry-bright eyes. Leaves and thorns tangled where hair should have been. Bark and moss made up the body. Every part of it was composed of living things, of elements of the forest and the trees. It lurched forward, heading straight for the tree line, for her.
Jenny gasped and fell backward, the world tilting. Tom yelled her name and sprinted toward her. The trees surged after him. Vines lashed out, whispering, snapping, tangling around his arms. Roots burst from the ground to trip him. Tom fell with a crash, the air knocked out of him, his eyes wide. The ground heaved beneath them and the roots broke free of the earth, cracking, twining around him, reaching for Jenny.
“Run,” her brother shouted, digging his fingers into the earth, trying to gain purchase. He tore up the grass and the dark earth beneath. “Jenny, run!”
With a sound like a million scratching leaves, the trees pulled him away from her and swallowed him in their embrace.
Jenny scrambled back as the ground beneath her began to buck and rupture. Before she could get her footing, they were on her again. Pulling, grabbing, tightening around her. Roots, vines, thorns tearing into her skin. She screamed. Something stepped right up to the edge of the trees then, gnarled and twisted as ancient bog oak, and everything fell still.
Jenny lifted her head. “Tom?” she whispered uselessly, too quiet to be heard. This was not Tom.
The ageless gaze trailed over her face, assessing, measuring. Then it turned away and was gone, back into the silent woods.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Acknowledgments
chapter one
The trees had swallowed Tom whole.
How often had she worried at those words, turning them over and over in her mind until they shone like river-polished stones?
Jenny hesitated at the corner of the street, feeling the familiar lure of the trees. She could hear laughter. The sound of children playing in the distance maybe. Or perhaps it was in her head. She wasn’t sure. She was never sure. And it never mattered where the trees were. They always called to her, whispered to her to find him. But here…here where it had happened…She couldn’t believe how powerful the pull was here.
Tom had laughed as he strode ahead of her. Oh, come on, Jenny. Stop being so scared.
And the trees had swallowed him whole.
Her throat closed up as she remembered the frantic search, the disorienting horror of the woods at night. She’d only been ten, blind with tears and panic, tearing her way through undergrowth and brambles. Hours later when it seemed no time had passed at all, they’d found her with torn clothes, her skin scratched and bleeding, still calling his name. And no Tom.
Nightmares, endless psychiatrists, counselors, hypnotherapy, regression therapy, that face of leaves and wood in her head, and Tom’s last, desperate order still ringing out. Run, Jenny, run.
For seven years.
Well, she was finished running.
Jenny drew in a breath and the world fell to silence as she stepped onto the grass of the football field. The traffic on Guildford Road and sounds of the village faded to vague echoes. She twisted the cuff of her cotton shirt around her fingers, pulling the fabric tight.
The trees whispered to her, murmuring. She found it easier than she had imagined to cross the playing field and walk up the slope, certainly easier than it had been in all her many nightmares. She was like an ordinary girl walking up an ordinary hill. Nothing unusual here, nothing to see.
She and Tom had come from the other direction that night, but she couldn’t possibly have walked back down that path. Just the thought of approaching the trees that way made her stomach twist. And never in the dark. It had to be daytime, in sunlight. As she got close, a familiar ache bloomed in her chest, and cold broke over her body. She stopped. The world lurched around her, as if she were dragged in an instant to the top of a cliff and tumbled over the edge, plummeting.
Jenny focused on her breath, on calming its ragged edges.
They’re only trees, she told herself, a well-worn mantra. This is just in my mind. They’re only trees, only trees. Who’s afraid of—
She’d tried this, any number of times, in a dozen or more places. And she’d always failed. The school trip to Sherwood Forest, the first time she actually made it beneath the canopy of leaves, had sent her into dizzy panic. Both breath and heartbeat spiraled rapidly out of control. She thought she’d seen it, just for a moment—that twisted face amid the trees. Just a brief moment and she’d screamed with all the air in her lungs. Loud enough that everyone came running. Loud enough that she’d never been allowed to forget it. How they’d laughed all the way home, a busload of mirth and mockery. And Jenny, sitting straight-backed and alone beside one of the scowling teachers, forcing herself to ignore them all.
They’re only trees. Only trees.
Who’s afraid of lonely trees?
She took comfort in the silly rhyme, running it through her head in a loop. It had started as a survival mechanism, a way of reminding herself that her fears couldn’t be real. The frustrating thing was, it never quite worked.
But she was here now. If she didn’t do this, she never would.
At the tree line, Jenny swung her bag around and took out the flowers. They were a bit crushed. She smoothed them out with shaking fingers.
On this, the seventh anniversary of her brother’s disappearance, she had come home from the boarding school to which her parents had banished her and gone straight to Branley Copse to say good-bye at last.
Putting it behind her meant moving on. Moving on meant she wasn’t going to be marked by something that couldn’t have been real, not according to the rest of the world.
But she knew what she had seen.
She knew, didn’t she?
Yes. Yes, she had to believe that, or she was indeed crazy.
She’d thought she would cry. Or at least feel something. Staring into the trees through the slanted sunlight, she felt nothing of the hoped-for release. Facing her nightmare, waiting for it to begin anew…
But nothing moved.
“Tom?”
she whispered, her voice thin. “Can you hear me?”
Nothing, not even a rustle. Not even birdsong. The trees were silent.
“I wanted…” The words stuck in her throat. What did she want? To say good-bye and move on? It sounded so simple. “I finished my exams,” she said instead. “And I’m done with that school. Thank God. I’m going away to university…to Scotland. Special scholarship. They don’t want me to, Dad especially. But I can’t stay here.” With them. With their grief. With the constant, unspoken reminder that she had come home, and Tom had not. Wasn’t it meant to get easier in time? But this last year had been worse than ever. The worst of seven terrible years. “Tom?” she whispered.
No answer. And there was never going to be. Tom was gone. Though photos still littered her parents’ house, though everyone said she looked like him, Jenny could hardly remember his face sometimes. His real face, not the still image in picture frames. She could remember his laughter that last day, though. She could remember the tune he’d played as they walked here, the tune that had stirred up the trees. Jenny shook her head and was about to turn away when her eyes caught something glinting in the grass.
She spread back the long blades, parting them with fingers that had started to shake again, not from grief this time. Her hand flew to the heart-shaped locket around her neck, the one Tom had given her for her birthday only a couple of months before he’d vanished. He’d told her to put a picture inside, but she’d never been able to do that. Not after.
The breeze rustled the leaves over her head now, and she heard the sound of a flute, only faintly, a tentative invitation. But she couldn’t tear her eyes off the thing in the grass—a gold locket, identical to her own.