Blythewood

by kindle@abovethetreeline. com

  As I gazed at her I heard her voice inside my head. Come, chime child, she said, this is where you belong. I wanted with all my being to go with her—to belong somewhere finally—but Raven held me back until the procession had moved by us. Following the men and women on horseback were many other creatures—the tiny lampsprites, fur-covered goblins, lumbering trows. And at the end of the procession walked a slim girl dressed in a flimsy white dress with wispy blonde hair falling loose around her shoulders who looked up at me out of wide gray eyes and opened her mouth to say something . . . but then the sunbeam dissolved into mist and once again I was looking at the winter woods.

  “That girl,” I said, turning to Raven, “I think she might be Nathan’s sister. Her name was Louisa. Her brother thinks she was abducted by one of you.”

  “Nathan? Is that the frailing who tried to stab me with his little blade last night?” Raven asked, his voice thick with disdain.

  “Only because he thought you were going to hurt us,” I said, not liking to hear Nathan so summarily dismissed. “And because he thinks one of your kind took his sister. Is it true?”

  “No!” Raven got up abruptly. “A Darkling would never take a human girl against her wishes.” He brushed crumbs from his trousers and stuffed the thermos and cups into his bag and started walking briskly away. “As I will demonstrate by taking you back right now.”

  “You needn’t get all huffy,” I said, getting up. “You can’t blame Nathan for wanting to find out what happened to his sister. And after all, all our books tell us that you are dangerous—”

  “Not all your books. There’s a book called A Darkness of Angels that tells the truth about the Darklings and how our curse can be lifted. He stopped when he saw my startled look. “What?” he asked. “Have you heard of it?”

  “Yes, that was one of the books my mother used to ask for at every library we went to—and then later she would send me to the library to find—only they never had it.”

  “You see,” Raven said. “Your mother was looking for it to prove the Darklings aren’t evil. It will also tell you how a chime child can use her power to destroy the tenebrae and it might even tell you how to get your friend’s sister out of Faerie and how to lift the Darkling curse.”

  “Is that what you want?“ I asked. “To be free of your curse so you can go back to Faerie?”

  He studied my face, not answering right away. In the morning light I saw that his eyes, which had looked black last night, were really a deep midnight blue with swirls of gold inside them. Looking into them was like staring into a night sky full of stars. They made me feel a little dizzy. I’d almost forgotten my question by the time he answered.

  “I suppose it’s what the sisters of your Order would want— for us to leave this world forever. And it’s what my elders want. There is less and less room for us in this world. But for myself . . .” He faltered and looked away.

  “What?” I asked, reaching out to touch his hand. “What do you want?”

  His wings rippled beneath his shirt at my touch. We had reached the edge of the woods. He turned to answer me, but then the bells of Blythewood began to ring the matin changes—the peal to banish the shadows of the night. Raven looked toward the tower. His wings strained beneath his shirt as if he wanted to take to the sky.

  “Do the bells scare you?”

  He shook his head. “No, they merely make us sad. They remind us of all we’ve lost.” He looked down at me, his dark eyes studying me. Then he reached out his hand and ran one finger down the side of my face. “It doesn’t matter what I want, Ava. Try to find the book. Just be careful. We think that the Shadow Master has a spy at Blythewood.”

  I should have asked how the Darklings knew there was a spy, but instead I asked, “Will I see you again . . . I mean . . . in case I have news?”

  He smiled. “I’ll figure out a way.” Then his wings fanned out behind him, blue-black and iridescent as a peacock’s tail in the morning sun. The sudden rush of wind from their movement blinded me for a moment. When I opened my eyes he was gone—a flicker of darkness in the pine boughs as he soared upward. I stared into the shadows of the pinewoods for a moment longer, reluctant to turn my back on them. But then I recalled that he was somewhere in those shadows watching and felt reassured.

  I walked across the snow-covered lawn toward the castle, which glowed honey gold in the morning sun like an enchanted castle in a fairy tale. The last echo of the last bell rang through the valley, tolling not Merope’s death, if I believed what Raven had told me, but her farewell to her sisters. Although I’d spent only one night in the woods I felt as though it had been a hundred years since I’d left Blythewood. What if I had strayed into Faerie and been gone twenty years, like Rip van Winkle, And all my friends had grown up and gone away without me?

  But here were Daisy and Helen running across the lawn toward me, their faces shining with relief. I felt a corresponding leap of joy in my heart and rushed to meet them, nearly slipping in the snow.

  “Oh, thank heavens!” Daisy cried, flinging her arms around me. “We were so frightened! If you weren’t back after matins we were going to have to tell Gillie.”

  “I knew you would rescue her,” Helen said, looking over my shoulder.

  I whirled around, thinking that Raven had reappeared, but it wasn’t Raven behind me; it was Nathan. The tips of his fair hair were heavy with ice, his skin nearly the same blue as his eyes. He looked like one of the ice giants we’d run into last night, and for a moment I was afraid that he’d been turned to ice by them—that when the sun struck him he would shatter into a million pieces.

  “Ava didn’t need me to rescue her,” he said with a smile that chilled me to the bone. Had he seen me with Raven? Would he tell Helen and Daisy that I had spent the night with a Darkling? “In fact, she rescued me. We spent the night huddled in a hollow tree. See”—he held up my bandaged hand—“she scraped her hand on a thorn bush.”

  He fixed me with an icy stare that I understood completely: Go along with the story or I’ll tell them you spent the night with a Darkling. I hadn’t even thought through how much I would tell my friends, but one look at Helen and Daisy told me that they would never understand—at least not until I could prove that Darklings weren’t evil. And for that I needed to find the book— A Darkness of Angels. So I smiled back at Nathan and lied.

  “Yes, that’s what we did. We’re frozen clean through.” I shivered, not having to pretend; I did feel suddenly cold. “I’d kill for a cup of hot cocoa.”

  “Of course, let’s get you both inside.” Helen took Nathan’s arm and led the way for Daisy and me. As I watched them walking in front of us I realized that Nathan’s lie hadn’t only hidden where I had spent the night—it hid where he had as well.

  27

  THE DOVES WERE right about the winter: it was a hard one. Not just because of the bitter cold, relentless winds, driving snow, and day after day of gray skies with barely a glimpse of sun. Along with the awful weather, a pall had settled over Blythewood like an icy fog that had fallen between the rest of the world and us. The Jager twins seemed to go into a virtual hibernation, and even chipper Cam Bennett came back from vacation unusually subdued.

  “It was just so peculiar to have to keep secrets from Mater and Pater,” she told us at the welcome-back dinner.

  Even Georgiana Montmorency was too listless to think of rumors to start about me.

  The lawns were too icy for us to practice archery. Our only exercise was walking up and down the interminable stairs and bell ringing. Gone, though, were the sprightly tunes we had practiced for the Christmas concert. Instead we rang changes that sounded like funeral dirges. They were designed, Mr. Peale explained, to beat back the ice giants that inhabited the Blythe Wood at this time of year. Recalling the monsters I’d encountered in the woods the night of the solstice I couldn’t argue. The frigid wind that blew through the belfry felt as though it had

  332 Blythewood come straight from the Arctic Sea. The rim
e-covered trees at the edge of the forest looked like frozen sentinels—an army camped at our doorstep. Whenever I glanced at the woods— from the belfry tower, the landing windows, or the rooftop mews—it seemed as if the woods had moved closer to the castle, hemming us in a little more.

  I confided my impression to Gillie one day when I had volunteered to help him imp a wounded bird. I was holding a young tiercel, gentling it, as Gillie had instructed, by playing the bells in my head. The falcon had responded almost immediately by going limp in my arms so that Gillie could clip off her broken wing feathers and graft on new donor feathers. When I told Gillie I thought the woods were moving closer I expected him to laugh off the idea, but instead he glanced uneasily over his shoulder.

  “Aye, them Jotuns are wee tricky devils. They can take the shapes of trees or rocks and bide their time till some unwary traveler passes too close by. Y’see the ice on the river?” He pointed his clipper toward the Hudson, which was now entirely frozen over. Along the banks great chunks of ice had piled up. “I’ve heard tell that the ice giants can assume the shape of an iceberg and lie in wait for a ship to pass, then it seize the hull in their teeth and drag it down to the ocean floor along with all its crew and passengers.”

  The falcon stirred restlessly in my arms, shaking the bells on her jesses, and I realized I’d let the bells in my head speed up in the same jangly rhythm.

  “Aye, Jessie, you watch out for those devils now.” He released the wing he had been working on and nodded to me to let the bird go. Jessie hopped onto Gillie’s gloved hand and stretched out her repaired wing. “Good as new,” Gillie said. “You see, lass, we’re none of us doomed to be just one thing. We can change our feathers just like Jessie here.” He swung his arm forward, releasing the falcon into the sky. She soared across the lawn toward the woods. Gillie held his hand over his eyes to shade them from the glare of sun on ice. In the shadow of his hand his eyes looked mournful. “I wish all broken things were so easy to fix,” he said, leaving me to wonder what had broken in Gillie’s life.

  With the ice so impassable, the Dianas no longer patrolled the lawn. Instead they Dianas stalked the halls, restless as housecats kept indoors. One day I found Charlotte Falconrath sobbing in a broom closet. When I asked what was wrong she told me that her father had arranged a match for her and she was to be married just after graduation.

  “I only just met him at Christmas! He’s old and fat, but mother says he comes from good blood!”

  I thought of the bloodline charts in the dungeon and felt a chill go through me. But when I tried to comfort Charlotte, she snapped, “What do you know of it? With your history they’ll never make you marry!”

  Not everyone was quite as sympathetic to the Dianas’ stress. “Why do I feel as if they’re on guard to keep us in more than to keep anything out?” Helen remarked one frigid February evening in the Commons Room over an interminable game of flush and trophies.

  I glanced around the room and noticed one of the Dianas, Augusta Richmond, a statuesque brunette from Charleston, at the entrance to the Commons Room, bow drawn, eyes alert. Beyond her in the hallway, Charlotte Falconrath was standing at the foot of the stairs. Her bow was drawn as well—which was alarming considering Charlotte’s poor aim and precarious mental state lately.

  “Who would want to go out in this?” Daisy said, shivering. The wind rattled the windows of the Commons Room as if in reply.

  “They’re afraid of winter fever,” Beatrice informed us after laying down a flush of spades and calling trophy. “I read about it in Sieges and Campaigns of the Dark Ages. It’s what happens when an Order is under siege in its castle. Sometimes a girl goes crazy and runs out into the woods and throws herself right into the hands of the demons.”

  “I thought Sieges and Campaigns wasn’t assigned for another month,” Daisy said.

  “I read ahead,” Beatrice replied with a smirk. “There’s an account of a nunnery in the Pyrenees that was cut off from the outside world for three months. When the villagers reached them after the spring thaw they found them all dead except for one girl who had holed herself up in the belfry. She claimed that the nuns had gone crazy and started killing each other.”

  “Ugh! I knew it was unhealthy to wall up so many women together,” Helen said.

  “The men aren’t any better,” Beatrice said smugly. “An order of monks on an island in Scotland got it in their heads that they were being attacked by ice giants. They set fire to the monastery to melt them.”

  I recalled what Gillie had said about the frost giants disguising themselves as icebergs. Maybe the monks hadn’t been crazy. But I kept that thought to myself. We all became, I think, a little wary of expressing ourselves too freely in case a careless word or snappish response would be seen as a symptom of winter fever.

  The one person I could have talked to, Raven, was as unreachable as the Pyrenees. The frozen woods were off limits. He’d said he would find a way to see me, but weeks went by without any sign from him. During the day I paced the quiet halls of Blythewood, staring out the windows for a trace of him in the winter sky. At night I tossed and turned, worrying that he had frozen to death in his treetop nest—or that he had better things to do than come looking for me. He was an otherworldly being entrusted with the ferrying of souls and I . . . I was an ex–factory worker and schoolgirl. So maybe I was also a chime child who was supposed to be able to defeat the shadow master, but I couldn’t even do that unless I found A Darkness of Angels, and so far I’d had no luck.

  I spent as much time as I could in the library, seeking an opportunity to sneak into the Special Collections, but with no one going out it was hard to do. Worse, our little group in the library had grown irritable. Since break there seemed to be some unspoken tension among our teachers. Miss Sharp still stoked the fire, set out biscuits, and poured tea, but she moved around the room like a trapped bird in a cage, trying to divide herself evenly between Miss Corey and Mr. Bellows. She would pour half a cup for Mr. Bellows, then catch a glance from Miss Corey and jerk the teapot toward her already-full cup, splashing tea across the stacks of ancient books, setting Miss Corey fluttering over the books like a mother hen gathering her chicks under her wing.

  Only Nathan was quicker to protect the books. He had taken himself off to a window seat overlooking the river and made a nest of books like a peregrine on a cliff. Since coming out of the woods on the solstice he had been devoted to reading. I tried to ask him where he had spent the night in the woods, but he had brushed off my question.

  “I could ask you the same thing, Ava.”

  Before the night in the woods I might have confided in Nathan. The boy who laughed about opium dens and teased me about how many books I read might have understood that the Darkling boy Raven wasn’t evil. But not the Nathan who had come out of the woods. He no longer laughed or teased or played pranks. He was like the boy in the fairy tale who gets a splinter of the goblin’s evil mirror in his eye and whose heart turns to ice. All he did was hole himself up in his window seat and read. I was afraid that if I told him that I’d seen Louisa in Faerie he would go running off into the frozen woods to save her. Without knowing how to get her out, he could get himself killed by the Jotuns or wind up trapped in Faerie himself.

  I thought of talking to Miss Sharp or Mr. Bellows about Nathan but they were both so distracted I hated to bother them. Helen insisted that Nathan was just in one of his usual funks. Daisy asked if anything had happened the night we spent in the woods to change him, but without confessing that I hadn’t been with Nathan that night I couldn’t answer the question truthfully.

  My friends, as if knowing I was keeping a secret from them, became secretive themselves. Helen received long letters from her parents every post, which she read with unusual concentration and covered up whenever Daisy or I walked near her. She hid them in a locked trunk, an uncharacteristic worried look settled over her brow, and she nearly bit Daisy’s head off when Daisy accidentally spilled a bottle of ink on her shirt cu
ff.

  “D’you think I’m made of money?” she cried in an aggrieved voice that sounded as if it belonged to someone else.

  Daisy began making herself scarce from our room. She said she was doing work for Miss Frost, but when I looked for her once in Miss Frost’s specimen room she wasn’t there.

  “That flibbertigibbet!” Miss Frost exclaimed. “She’s always late and she lost one of my best specimens. I ought to fire her.”

  “I could help Ava look for her friend,” said Sarah, who was standing on a stepladder dusting the floor-to-ceiling glass case of pinned sprites. “I’ve finished organizing the sprites by genus and phylum.”

  “I need you to pick up my physicfrom the chemists, girl.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sarah replied. When Miss Frost turned her back, though, Sarah splayed herself against the glass, spreading her arms wide, dropping her head and letting her tongue loll out, mimicking the pose of the pinned sprites. I suppressed a giggle, the first bit of merriment I’d felt in a while.

  Sarah had been helping with my homework since Helen and Daisy were both acting so strange. I’d also seen her tutoring Nathan, which made me a little jealous, but I tried not to mind because I enjoyed her company. She was the only girl I could talk to about my days in the city, the only one who knew the vaudeville theaters and the sweatshops and the food carts like I did—and the longer I was at Blythewood, the more I found I missed them. I also learned that her own mother had died a few years ago—of a dysentery outbreak in Five Points.

  “I remember that,” I told her. “My mother brought food and fresh water to the sick.”

  “What a valiant woman your mother must have been!” Sarah said, and then when she saw the tears in my eyes, she asked what she’d said wrong.

  “She was valiant, but then she changed.” I told her about my mother’s strange obsessions and drinking laudanum, but I couldn’t confide to her that I’d spent a night with a Darkling—not until I found the book that proved that the Darklings weren’t evil.