by Libba Bray
At last, I see it: Rising above the trees is the silhouette of Spence with its ornate, twisted spires. There’s something odd about it. I can’t say what. All I can do is run. Strong moonlight pushes the clouds apart.
The roof is empty. The gargoyles are gone. They are gone, and I feel the earth slipping from beneath me. Ithal is coming faster, closing the gap between us, and I stumble on. My lungs feel as if they will explode.
Something lands behind me, as hard as stone striking the earth. Every part of me goes cold with fear. I should turn to look, but I can’t. Can’t breathe. Scratching sounds. Like claws on stone. A low growl comes from whatever is behind me. Don’t turn, Gemma. It isn’t real if you don’t turn. Close your eyes. Count to ten. One. Two. Three. The moon is full. A shadow rises tall, much taller than my own on the path. And then the enormous wings unfold.
My head is as light as a balloon. A faint threatens. “Lass…in, in…L-L-Lincolnshire…mussels…a p-pail…”
A loud screech pierces the night. The gargoyle takes flight and lands before me on the path with a tremendous thud, cutting off any hope of escape. I sink to my knees at the sight of the enormous stone bird-beast towering above me. Its face is a hideous living mask, the mouth stretched into a gruesome smile, the fangs as long as my leg. Its claws are terrifyingly sharp. A scream dies in my throat. The beast screeches as its claws come around me, closing firmly about my waist. Blackness steals over me.
“Hold fast,” the gargoyle commands in a gravelly voice, snapping me back to fear. He tucks me in close to his body, and we take flight. I hold tightly to those frightening claws. It takes me a moment to fully realize what is happening. The gargoyle doesn’t wish me harm. He means to protect me. The sky is alive with winged beasts. They screech and growl. The sounds reverberate in my ears but I don’t dare let go to cover them. The rush of air is cool against my sodden gown and wet skin. I shiver as we pass over the tops of trees and land gently on Spence’s roof.
“Do not look,” he advises.
But I cannot look away. Below, the other gargoyles have cornered Ithal. They reach down and pluck him from the ground, flying toward the lake.
“What will they do?” I ask.
“What they must.” He does not elaborate, and I dare not question him further.
“Wh-who are you?”
“I am one of the guardians of the night,” he says, and I am reminded of Wilhelmina’s drawing. “We protected your kind for centuries when the veil between worlds had no seal. Now the seal is broken. The land is enchanted again. But I fear we cannot keep you safe from what has begun.”
The sky blackens with wings. Overhead, the gargoyles circle, casting me in shadows. They swoop low and land as lightly as angels upon the roof. A gargoyle with the nose of a dragon approaches.
“It is done,” he growls. “He has been returned to the dead.”
The gargoyle who saved me nods. “This is not the last we shall see of them. They will come again and stronger.”
A ribbon of pink shows in the eastern sky. The other gargoyles take their familiar perches on the edge of the roof. As I watch, they return to stone.
“I am dreaming,” I whisper. “This is all a dream.”
The head gargoyle spreads his wings till all his darkness surrounds me. His voice is as deep as time. “Yes, you have been sleeping. But now is the time to wake.”
I open my eyes. My ceiling takes shape. I can hear Ann’s gentle snoring. I’m in my room, as I should be. It is past dawn but barely so. I sit up, and my body aches with the effort. A great clamor rises in the woods. Hardly dressed, girls push out of their doors to see what has happened. In the early morning mist, the Gypsies gather at the lake with their lanterns. A cry of grief rises from them.
Now I see. Ithal lies in the water facedown, drowned. That was why Freya stopped beside the lake, why she seemed so upset. She knew that her master was dead, and the thing on her back was undead, a hellish messenger from the Winterlands sent to take me to them.
No. No, that did not happen. I imagined it all. Or dreamed it. A dead man did not come to spirit me away. I did not fly in a gargoyle’s grip.
I look up for confirmation. The gargoyles sit on the roof ’s edge, silent and unseeing. I turn my head this way and that, but they do not change. Of course not. They are stone, silly girl. I chuckle. This gets the attention of the crowd, for I am laughing while they pull a dead man from the lake.
Kartik is there, right as rain, not a mark on him. He looks at me with concern.
The men cover Ithal with a jacket.
“You must build the fire,” Mother Elena says. “Burn him. Burn everything.”
* * *
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
* * *
IT IS ASTONISHING THAT WITH A MAN DROWNED IN THE woods, my behavior at the ball should become the talk of Spence, but it has. At breakfast, girls hush as I walk past; they track me with their eyes, like vultures waiting for carrion. I sit with the older girls, and they fall silent. It’s as if I were Death himself, scythe at the ready.
I hear the girls whispering to each other. “Ask her.”
“No, you!”
Cecily clears her throat. “How are you feeling, Gemma?” she asks with pretend sympathy. “I heard you had a terrible fever.”
I spoon porridge into my mouth.
“Is that true?” Martha presses.
“No,” I say. “I was overcome by too much magic. And by the lies and secrets that make up this place as surely as the stones and mortar.”
Their mouths open in shock, and uncomfortable giggling follows. Fee and Ann look on with alarm. I’m no longer hungry. I push away from the table and walk out of the dining room. Mrs. Nightwing glances up, but she doesn’t try to stop me. It’s as if she knows I’m a lost cause.
Felicity and Ann come to visit in the afternoon. Their curiosity about my madness has won out over their anger. Felicity pulls a sack of toffees from her pocket.
“Here. I thought you might need these.”
I let them sit on the bed, untouched. “You went into the realms last night, didn’t you?”
Ann’s eyes widen. It is a wonder that she could make so fine an actress yet be so terrible a liar.
“Yes,” Felicity says, and I’m grateful for her honesty. “We danced and Ann sang and it was such a merry time that I didn’t care if we never came back. It is like paradise there.”
“You can’t live in paradise all the time,” I say.
Felicity pockets the toffees. “You can’t keep us from the realms,” she says, rising.
“Things have changed. Circe has the dagger,” I say, and I tell them everything I remember from last night. “I can’t hold the magic by myself anymore. We need to make the alliance and go after Circe.”
Felicity’s face clouds. “You promised we wouldn’t give the magic back until after our debuts. You promised to help me.”
“You might come away with enough magic of your own—”
“And I might not! I’ll be trapped! Please, Gemma,” Felicity begs.
“I’m sorry,” I say, swallowing hard. “It can’t be helped.”
Felicity’s passion cools, and I find her calm much more frightening than her anger. “You don’t hold all the magic anymore, Gemma,” she reminds me. “Pip has power, too, and it’s growing stronger. And if you won’t help me, I know she will.”
“Fee…,” I croak, but she won’t listen. She’s already out the door, Ann at her heels.
The afternoon is a suddenly chilly one, as if winter has one last gasp before summer takes hold. Inspector Kent has come to see about Ithal’s death. His men comb the woods for evidence of foul play, though they find none. Phantoms leave no trail. Mr. Miller is taken from a pub and brought round for an inquiry, though he protests his innocence, insisting there are ghosts in the woods of Spence.
Kartik has left his calling card—the red cloth—nestled in the ivy outside my window along with a note: Meet me in the chapel.
I
slip inside the empty chapel and stare at the angel with the gorgon’s head. “I’m not afraid of you anymore. I understand you meant to protect me.”
A deep voice answers. “Go forth and conquer.”
I jump. Kartik shows himself from behind the pulpit. “Forgive me,” he says with a sheepish smile. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
He looks as if he hasn’t slept in days. We’re quite the pair with our long faces and shadowed eyes. He runs a finger across the back of a pew. “Do you remember the first time I surprised you here?”
“Indeed. You frightened me, telling me to close my mind to the visions. I should have listened. I was the wrong girl for all of this.”
He leans against the end of the pew, his arms folded across his chest. “No, you’re not.”
“You don’t know what I’ve done, else you wouldn’t say that.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
It seems to take forever for the words to travel through the wreckage inside me. But they do come, and I don’t spare myself. I tell him everything, and he listens. I’m afraid he’ll hate me for it, but when I’ve finished he only nods.
“Say something,” I whisper. “Please.”
“The warning was for the birth of May. Now we know what it meant, I suppose,” he says, thinking already, and I smile a little because I know this means he’s heard, and we have moved on. “We’ll go after her.”
“Yes, but if I so much as dip a toe into the magic, I fear I’ll be joined to Circe, to the Winterlands. That I’ll go mad as I felt last night.”
“All the more reason to stop her. Perhaps she hasn’t bound Eugenia’s power to the tree just yet. We might still save the realms,” he says.
“We?”
“I’m not running away again. That is not my destiny.”
He slips his hand under my chin and tilts it up, and I kiss him first.
“I thought you stopped believing in destiny,” I remind him.
“I haven’t stopped believing in you.”
I smile in spite of everything. I need his belief just now. “Do you think…” I stop.
“What?” he murmurs into my hair. His lips are warm.
“Do you think, if we were to stay in the realms, that we could be together?”
“This is the world we live in, Gemma, for better or for worse. Make of it what you can,” he says, and I pull him to me.
After the weeks of excited preparation for the masked ball, Spence is rather like a balloon that has lost all its air. Down come the decorations. Costumes are packed away in tissue and camphor, though some of the younger girls refuse to give theirs up just yet. They want to be princesses and fairies for as long as they can.
Others, ready for the next party, badger Mademoiselle LeFarge for details of her upcoming wedding.
“Will you wear diamonds?” Elizabeth asks.
Mademoiselle LeFarge blushes. “Oh, dear me, no. Too precious. Though I was given a most beautiful pearl necklace to wear.”
“Will you honeymoon in Italy? Or Spain?” Martha asks.
“We will take a modest trip to Brighton,” Mademoiselle LeFarge says, and the girls are deeply disappointed.
Brigid taps my shoulder. “Missus Nightwing is calling for you, miss,” she says sympathetically, and I am afraid to ask what has provoked her kindness.
“Yes, thank you,” I say, following her beyond the baize door to our headmistress’s solid, staid sanctuary. The only spot of color is on a corner table, where wildflowers spill over the boundaries of a vase, dropping petals without care.
Mrs. Nightwing motions to a chair. “How are you feeling today, Miss Doyle?”
“More myself,” I say.
She rearranges the letter opener and the inkwell, and my heart picks up speed. “What is it? What has happened?”
“You’ve a cable from your brother,” she says, handing it to me.
FATHER VERY ILL STOP WILL MEET YOUR TRAIN AT VICTORIA STOP TOM
I blink back tears. I shouldn’t have pushed as I did at the masked ball. He wasn’t ready for truth, and I forced it on him, and now I fear I have delivered an injury from which he cannot fully recover.
“It’s my fault,” I say, dropping the note on her desk.
“Poppycock!” Nightwing barks, and it is what I needed—a bracing wind at my back. “I shall have Brigid help you with your things. Mr. Gus will drive you to the train station first thing in the morning.”
“Thank you,” I murmur.
“My thoughts are with you, Miss Doyle.” And I think she means it.
On the long walk to my room, Ann runs up to me, out of breath.
“What is it?” I can see the alarm on her face.
“It’s Felicity,” she gasps. “I tried to reason with her. She wouldn’t listen.”
“What do you mean?”
“She went into the realms. She’s gone to be with Pip,” she says, wide-eyed. “Forever.”
* * *
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
* * *
WE STAND BESIDE THE HALF-FORMED EAST WING. FIRE-FLIES blink in the trees, and I have to look twice to be certain they are only those harmless insects. The passageway into the realms feels colder to me, and I hurry my steps. The moment we step through the door in the hill, I can feel that something’s not right. Everything’s a bit gray, as if the London fog has rolled in.
“What is that smell?” Ann asks.
“Smoke,” I answer.
In the distance, a large black plume of smoke scars the sky. It is rising from the mountain that houses the Temple and the Caves of Sighs, where the Hajin live.
“Gemma?” Ann says, her eyes wide.
“Come on!” I shout.
We race to the poppy fields. Ash rains down, coating our skin in a fine layer of silver-gray soot. Coughing, we fight our way up the mountain. The path bleeds with crushed poppies. Ann nearly stumbles over the body of an Untouchable. There are more. Their charred corpses line the path to the smoldering Temple. Asha stumbles from the smoking wreckage.
“Lady Hope…”
She sags against me, and I rush her to a rock where the air is not so heavy with ash.
“Asha! Asha, who has done this?” I sputter.
She collapses, coughing. Her scorched orange sari settles around her like the singed plumage of a magnificent bird.
“Asha!” I shout. “Tell me.”
She looks into my eyes. Her face is streaked with black. “It…it was the forest folk.”
Gorgon calls from the river below. Ann and I take Asha to the ship and bring her water, which she drinks like a woman whose thirst will never be slaked. I shake with anger. I cannot believe that Philon and the forest folk would do such a thing. I thought them to be peaceful. Perhaps the Order was right after all and the magic cannot be shared.
“Tell me what happened,” I say.
“They came as we slept. They swarmed the mountain. There was no way out. One of them held a torch to the Temple. ‘This is for Creostus,’ it said. And the Temple burned.”
“This was retaliation?”
She nods, wiping her face with the moistened edge of her sari. “I told them we had no part in the slaughter of the centaur. But they did not believe me. The decision was in their eyes already. They came for war, and they would not be stopped.”
She puts her trembling fingers to her lips as the Temple burns. Where the flames fall on the poppy fields, beautiful curls of red smoke rise. “We have never questioned. It is not our way.”
I put my arm around her shoulders. “Your way needs to change, Asha. It is time to question everything.”
We form several lines with the Hajin, passing buckets of water till we douse what we can of the flames.
“Why do you not cure this malady with magic?” a Hajin boy asks.
“It isn’t a good course just now, I’m afraid,” I say, looking at the ruined, smoldering Temple.
“But the magic will fix everything, won’t it?” He presses, and I can see ho
w desperately he wants to believe, how much he wants me to sweep my hand over his broken home and make it whole. I wish I could.
I shake my head and pass the water down the line. “It can only do so much. The rest is up to us.”
Gorgon ferries us through the golden veil to the island home of the forest folk. They flank the shore in an ominous line, their newly fashioned spears and crossbows at the ready. Gorgon keeps us a safe distance from the shore—close enough that I can be heard but far enough that we can retreat. Philon glides to the water’s edge. The creature’s leaf coat has taken on tinges of orange, gold, and red. The high collar blazes about Philon’s slender neck.
“You are not welcome here, Priestess,” Philon shouts.
“I have just come from the Temple. You burned it!”
Philon stands imperiously. “So it is.”
“Why?” I ask, because I can think of no truer question.
“They took one of our own! Would you deny us justice?”
“And so you took twenty of theirs? How is this justice?”
Asha stands feebly. She clutches the ship’s railing. “We did not kill the centaur.”
“So you say,” Philon thunders. “Then who did?”
“Look within for the answer,” Asha replies cryptically.
Neela throws a rock at us. It lands in the water, spraying the side of the ship. “We’ll have no more of your lies! Be gone!”
She throws another and it narrowly misses me, landing on the deck. On impulse, I grab the rock, feeling its weight in my hand.
Asha stays my arm. “Retaliation is a dog chasing its tail.”
There is wisdom in what she says, but I want to throw the rock, and it takes every bit of strength to hold it firmly in my palm.
“Philon, did you stop to consider this: How will we join hands in an alliance now that you have burned the Temple?”